“This is how election results are disputed in a banana republic”. This declaration followed the January 6 invasion of the Capitol by several hundred Donald Trump partisans, who had come to interrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. You might think that such a severe judgement of the political situation in the US might come from someone who is viscerally hostile to America, or from an American “leftist”. Not at all: this was from ex-president George W Bush, a member of the same party as Trump. This tells us a lot about the gravity of what happened in Washington that day. A few hours earlier, in front of the White House, the defeated president, like a third world demagogue, had been warming up his supporters “We will never give up. We will never concede…you’ll never take back our country with weakness ...I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”. 

Following this thinly veiled call to riot, the vengeful crowd, led by semi-fascist Trumpist gangs like the Proud Boys, only had to walk down the National Mall towards the Capitol and attack the building, watched by a totally overwhelmed security force. How come the cordons of cops whose job was to guard access to the Capitol allowed the attackers to go past them when the impressive force put in front of the same building during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations were able to prevent any loss of control? Such striking images can only feed the theory that the assault on this emblem of American democracy was a “political September 11”.

Faced with this chaos, the authorities were however deployed rather quickly: anti-riot troops and the National Guard were sent in, one demonstrator was shot and three others died, a curfew was installed while the army patrolled the streets of Washington. These stunning images did indeed resemble post-election nights in the “banana republics” of the third world, torn apart by bloody rivalries between mafia cliques. But these events. which made headlines across the world, were not down to some megalomaniac army general. They took place in the most powerful country on the planet, in the “world’s greatest democracy”.

The world’s leading power at the centre of growing chaos

The “desecration of the temple of American democracy” by a crowd made up of white supremacists armed with selfie sticks, by fanatical armed militias, by a conspiracy theorist wearing a horned fur helmet, is a flagrant expression of the growing violence and irrationality infecting US society. The fractures in its political apparatus, the explosion of populism since the election of Trump, are an eloquent illustration of the fact that capitalist society is rotting on its feet. In fact, as we have argued since the end of the 1980s[1], the capitalist system, which entered into its period of decadence with the First World War, has over the past few decades been sinking into the final phase of this decadence, the phase of decomposition. The most spectacular demonstration of this situation was the collapse of the eastern bloc three decades ago. This major event was not simply an indication of the fragility of the regimes which ran the countries of this bloc. It expressed a historical process affecting the entire global capitalist system and which has got worse ever since. Up till now the most obvious signs of this decomposition have been seen  in the already very weak countries of the “periphery”: angry crowds acting as cannon fodder for the interests of this or that bourgeois clique, extreme violence on a daily basis, the blackest poverty visible at every street corner, the destabilisation of states and whole regions …all this seemed to be what happened only in the “banana republics”.

But for a number of years, this general tendency has more and more been explicitly hitting the “central” countries. Of course, not all states have been affected in the same way, but it is clear that decomposition is now striking at the most powerful countries: the multiplication of terrorist attacks in Europe, surprise victories by irresponsible individuals like Trump or Boris Johnson, the explosion of irrational ideologies and, above all, the disastrous response to the Coronavirus pandemic which in itself expresses an unprecedented acceleration of decomposition. The whole capitalist world, including its most “civilised” parts, is evolving inexorably towards barbarism and increasingly acute convulsions.

If today, among the most developed countries, the US is most affected by this putrefaction, it also represents one of the major factors of instability. The incapacity of the American bourgeoisie to prevent a billionaire clown nurtured in Reality TV from gaining access to the Presidency already showed the growing chaos in the US political apparatus. During his mandate, Trump has not ceased aggravating the divisions in American society, notably racial divisions, and fuelling chaos all over the planet, through all kinds of biting declarations and hazy deals proudly presented as the subtle manoeuvres of a skilled businessman. We can recall his run-in with the American military command which stopped him, at the last minute, from bombing Iran, or his “historic meeting” with Kim Jong-un who only a few weeks before he had nicknamed “Rocket Man”.

After the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, after decades of running down health systems, all states displayed a criminal negligence. But here again the American state led by Donald Trump was in the forefront of the disaster, both at the national level, with a record number of deaths[2], as on the international level, through destabilising an institution of world cooperation like the World Health Organisation.

The assault on the Capitol by fanatical Trumpist bands is fully part of this explosion of chaos at all levels of society. This was an expression of the growth of totally irrational and violent conflicts between different parts of the population (white against black, people versus elites, men against women, gays against straights etc) – the caricature of which is represented by the heavily armed racist militias and delirious conspiracy theorists.

But these “fractures” are above all a reflection of open confrontations between cliques of the American bourgeoisie: the populists around Trump on the one hand, those with a greater concern for the long-term interests of the national capital on the other. Within the Democratic Party along with elements of the Republican Party, in the cogs of the state and the army, in the big news media or at the lectern of Hollywood ceremonies, the campaigns of opposition against the gesticulations of the populist President have been constant and sometimes very virulent.

These clashes between different sectors of the bourgeoisie are not new. But in a “democracy” like the US, and in contrast to what goes in in the countries of the third world, they normally take place in the framework of the institutions, with a certain “respect for order”. The fact that they are now taking this violent form in a “model democracy” testifies to a spectacular aggravation of chaos within the political apparatus of the ruling class, and this marks a significant step in capitalism’s slide into decomposition.

By whipping up his fan base, Trump has crossed a new line in his “scorched earth” policy following his defeat at the Presidential election, which he still refuses to recognise. His strike against the Capitol, the legislative symbol of American democracy, has opened up a gulf within the Republican Party, with its most “moderate” wing having no choice but to denounce this “coup d’État” against democracy, and to distance itself from Trump in order to save the party of Abraham Lincoln. As for the Democrats, they have raised the stakes by making a big hue and cry against the criminal behaviour of Trump.

To try to restore the image of America in front of an appalled world bourgeoisie, to contain the explosion of chaos in the “Land of Liberty”, Joe Biden and his clique have immediately thrown themselves in a fight to the death against Trump, denouncing Trump’s irresponsible actions, calling for his removal from power even in the short period prior to the inauguration of new President.

The succession of resignations by Republican ministers, the appeals for the resignation or impeachment of Trump, as well as the calls for the Pentagon to closely survey the President and ensure he doesn’t press the nuclear button, are witness to a will to eliminate him from the political game. The day after the attack on the Capitol, the political crisis took the form of one half of Trump’s electoral base disavowing him, the other half continuing to support and justify the attack. Trump’s political career seems to be seriously compromised. In particular, measures are being taken to ensure that he will no longer be eligible for election in 2024. Today, the defeated President only has one objective: to save his skin faced with the threat of judicial prosecution for instigating insurrection. On the same evening as the attack on the Capitol, Trump, while refusing to condemn their actions, called on his troops to “go home”. Two days later he ate the rest of his hat by describing this attack as “heinous” and said he was “outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem”. And, keeping a low profile, he quietly recognised his electoral defeat and declared that he would vacate the throne for Biden, while still insisting that he would not be present at the inauguration on 20 January.

It's possible that Trump will be eliminated from the political game once and for all, but this isn’t the case with populism! This reactionary and obscurantist ideology is a ground-swell which can only keep on coming with the aggravation of social decomposition, of which the USA today is the epicentre. American society is more than ever divided and torn. Violence will continue to rise with the permanent danger of confrontations (including armed clashes) within the population. Biden’s rhetoric of “reconciliation” for the American people shows an understanding of the gravity of the situation, but whatever partial or temporary success this may have, it can’t halt the underlying tendency towards social dislocation in the world’s leading power.

The greatest danger for the proletariat in the USA would be to be dragged into this confrontation between different factions of the bourgeoisie. A large part of Trump’s electorate is made up of workers who reject the “elites” and are searching for a “man of destiny”. Trump’s promises to re-launch industry had allowed him to rally many unemployed proletarians from the “rust belt”. There is a risk of confrontations between pro-Trump and pro-Biden workers. What’s more, the decent into decomposition also threatens to sharpen the racial divide which is endemic in the USA, feeding identity ideologies and setting black against white.

The gigantic democratic campaign is a trap for the working class!

The tendency towards the loss of control of its political game by the bourgeoisie, as we saw with Trump’s accession to the Presidency, does not mean that the working class can take advantage of the decomposition of capitalism. On the contrary, the ruling class doesn’t stop turning the effects of decomposition against the working class. Already in 1989, when the collapse of the eastern bloc was a glaring expression of the decomposition of capitalism, the bourgeoisie in the main countries used this event to unleash a gigantic democratic campaign aimed at drawing an equals sign between the barbarity of the Stalinist regimes and authentic communist society. The lying talk of the “death of the revolutionary perspective” and the “disappearance of the working class” disoriented the proletariat, resulting in a profound reflux in its consciousness and combativity, Today the bourgeoisie is instrumentalising the events at the Capitol to launch a new international campaign for the glory of bourgeois democracy.

When the “insurgents” were still occupying the Capitol, Biden immediately declared “Like so many other Americans, I am genuinely shocked and saddened that our nation, so long the beacon of light and hope for democracy has come to such a dark moment…The work of the moment and the work of the next four years must be the restoration of democracy”. This was followed by a cascade of declarations going in the same direction, including from within the Republican Party. The same overseas, particularly from the leaders of the main western European countries. “These images have angered and saddened me. But I am sure that American democracy will prove itself to be stronger than the aggressors and rioters”, declared Angel Merkel. “We will not give in to the violence of those who want to put democracy into question” offered Emmanuel Macron. And Boris Johnson added: “All my life America has stood for some very important things. An idea of freedom, an idea of democracy”.

After the mobilisations around the Presidential elections, which saw record participation, and the Black Lives Matter movement demanding a more “just” and “clean” police, large sectors of the world bourgeoisie are trying to mobilise the proletariat behind the defence of the democratic state against populism. The proletariat is being called on to line up behind the “Democratic” faction against the “Dictator” Trump. This false choice is a pure mystification, a trap for the working class!

In the wake of the international chaos that Trump has fed, will the Democrat Biden establish a more just world order? Certainly not! The Nobel peace Prize winner Barack Obama, and his Vice President Joe Biden, went through 8 years of uninterrupted war. Tensions with China, Russia, Iran and all the other imperialist sharks will not miraculously disappear.

Will Biden offer a more human future for migrants? We only have to look at how cruelly all his predecessors, like all the “great democracies”, have treated these “undesirables”. We only have to recall that during the eight years of the Obama presidency, with Biden as Vice President, there were more deportations of immigrants than during the eight years under George W Bush. The Obama administration’s measures against immigrants merely opened the door to the anti-immigration escalation under Trump.

Will economic attacks against the working class come to an end under the “return to democracy”? Certainly not! The world economy’s dive into a crisis without any solution, further aggravated by the Covid-19 pandemic, will bring an explosion of unemployment, of poverty, of attacks against the living and working conditions of the exploited in all the central countries led by “democratic” governments. And if Joe Biden manages to “clean up” the police, the democratic state’s repressive forces, in the US as in all countries, will still be unleashed against any movement of the working class, against all its efforts to fight for the defence of its living conditions and its most basic needs.

There is nothing to hope for in the “return to democracy” in America. The working class must not let itself be lulled and trapped by the siren songs of the democratic factions of the bourgeois state. It must not forget that it was in the name of the defence of democracy against fascism that the ruling class succeeded in mobilising tens of millions of proletarians into the Second World war, to a large extent under the leadership of the left and the popular fronts. Bourgeois democracy is just the hidden, hypocritical face of the dictatorship of capital!

The attack on the Capitol is a new symptom of a dying system which is dragging humanity along with it in a gradual descent into hell. Faced with the reality of a bourgeois society rotting on its feet, only the world working class, by developing the struggle on its own class terrain against the effects of the economic crisis, can overthrow capitalism and end the threat of the destruction of the planet and the human species.

ICC 10.1.21

We are publishing this article written by a close sympathiser, of the ICC in the US, which defends our general analysis of the significance of the events of January 6 in Washington, and points out the role of those ardent apologists of bourgeois democracy – the Trotskyists, “Democratic Socialists” etc - in helping to strengthen the repressive apparatus of the state.   ICC

The March to Save America

The results of the 2020 election have been a point of contention due to widespread conspiracy theories among a sector of American voters and deep mistrust in both of the two major parties to adhere to a “fair” election. The prevailing sentiment amongst supporters of the Democratic Party was that the campaign for Donald Trump had colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 election. The full truth to this story demonstrates the bourgeoisie’s corruption and disregard for the democratic rights which they had established in their own revolutions centuries ago. The sentiment amongst supporters of the Republican Party now, in the wake of Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in November of 2020, is that the Democrats have rigged voting machines, thrown out mail-in ballots (the use of which increased this election cycle due to the Covid-19 pandemic), and schemed in other various ways to ensure their victory. While the underhanded tactics of the ruling class are certainly well-documented, the proof of widespread election fraud remains lacking, culminating in the President himself promoting news stories with sources that trace back to unconfirmed, unhinged conspiracies on message boards. In lieu of this belief that the election results were illegitimate, conservative mouthpieces sprang up and spoke out against the election of Biden. These rightist figures, groups, organizations, etc. began to organize the March to Save America on January 6th in Washington, D.C. with no clear goals but to demonstrate against the election results, “stop the steal” of the election, and prevent the ruin of the United States by the supposedly communist boogeyman, the “Chinese puppet” Joe Biden constructed by the most conspiratorial of the right. January 6th would be the day that patriots would stop the certification of the election results and the confirmation of the election of Joe Biden.

The “Insurrection”

The speeches at the official March to Save America rally were dangerously provocative and included vague calls to action, calls for “trial by combat”, and calls to march down to the Capitol building and show the strength of the protesters coming from President Trump and members of his inner circle. The way this march ended was not the peaceful fizzle expected, nor was it the clashing of rightists and police officers with antifascist demonstrators common to these sorts of rallies. It ended with an unprecedented action unseen in the history of the United States: a great mass of protesters storming the Capitol building and forcing their ways into the halls of Congress. The response of the police was lackluster at first as a rowdy crowd became rowdier, pushing forward against an underprepared police presence. Rather than immediate confrontation, the police attempted to verbally de-escalate before more physical tactics were used to attempt to hold demonstrators back. These tactics proved ineffective, and demonstrators soon stormed the Capitol steps and forced their way into the building; soon there were people flooding into the halls of Congress and the offices of legislators, some stealing objects and vandalizing the walls while others simply stood around and took photos of themselves in defiance. As the perimeter was breached, Representatives and other Capitol staffers were evacuated through tunnels under the building. Some, like Democratic Representative of New York’s 14th District Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, were forced to hide in their office bathrooms. Some of the invaders were armed and some had zip-ties, implying intention to take hostages to stop the certification of the election. In the chaos, some were trampled, one woman was shot, and the body count was confirmed, after the dust had settled, to be five people killed.

The Aftermath

In the aftermath of this scuffle, it may be possible to see some of what the Biden administration has in store for the next four years: the strengthening of the security and law enforcement apparatuses of the state under the pretense of crushing the dangerous Trump cult. Populism has been forced out of the White House, but remains in the streets and in many of the Representatives elected to Congress back in November. The Democratic majority in government now must fight against the receding tide of populism, while piggybacking off of the disastrous past four years. While Hillary Clinton promised a continuation of the Obama legacy, Biden does not signal a return to the “normalcy” of Obama’s presidency. Biden’s foreign policy, for example, will not be a reversal of Trump’s, but will build itself off of the blunders and carelessness of the past four years; one needs only to look toward his provocation of China on the military front, guaranteeing military protection of the disputed Senkaku Islands under Article 5 of the US-Japan security treaty. When it comes to social unrest, it appears that the ferocity of the state will be in continuity with the Trump presidency as well.

Leftists have been open in their support for the arrest and prosecution of those who stormed the Capitol, acting in unofficial cooperation with federal agencies to identify those who participated. These same leftists have spent the previous summer marching out in the streets for Black Lives Matter, defending riots as legitimate expressions of popular anger, and are now happy to expose their political opponents to the same agents who arrested, beat, shot at, and gassed them in droves. The left has been more than happy to become the cops they themselves have been speaking out against. However, it’s not enough that the leftists should engage in police-like behavior; this behavior is in direct support of the defense of democracy and support for incoming president Joe Biden. This demonstrates the trap of democratic and anti-fascist ideology as espoused and spread by the left: since capitalism always creates anti-democratic and fascist tendencies which will always threaten those nominal liberties which democracy grants to the national population, when does the defense of democracy give way to class struggle? At what point does the working class which is dissolved into movements for the defense of democracy immediately reconstitute itself on its own ground against fascism and democracy and for communism?

The communist left clearly knows that the answer is never, which is why we always resolutely stand against any movement which harms the development of the proletariat as an independent political force of its own. The same leftists who have spent so much time and energy setting themselves up to be the allies of the workers in the public eye have proven themselves once again to be false friends: mobilization behind the leftist political project has proven itself to be a mobilization for the preservation of bourgeois society as it has countless times in the past. The left’s own demands which have been used to gain popular support have been cast aside as the political project of the Democratic Party’s almost unrivaled administration begins. Their cries to defund the police, which have made their way into the halls of Congress, have swiftly been replaced by calls for a harder stance on the same actions which they take when confronted with the injustices of the capitalist system. The left has paraded workers into the streets under various banners through the Trump presidency, not one of these banners being the self-activity of the workers, and now it must march these workers off the streets and back into passivity; this final demobilization will go hand-in-hand with future mobilizations of Trump supporters to discredit street mobilization of any political faction. The left has served its true purpose openly: the deception of the workers with the intent to keep their feet firmly planted on the bourgeoisie’s ground. 

So it is in this light that we can plainly set out what must be done by militants and sympathizers of the proletarian milieu: the fight against the all illusions and mystification of the real situation must go on. It must be affirmed that the events of demonstrations like this are a symptom of a decadent society that is decomposing and rotting on its own feet, that the opposition of the left to the right seeks to crush the workers just like the opposition of the right to the left, and that the only solution to the issues of crumbling capitalist society is proletarian revolution.

Noah Lennox, February 2nd, 2021

In the last year, the world has been shaken by two unprecedented events of extreme importance in the life of capitalism: the Covid-19 pandemic and, most recently, the assault on the Capitol in Washington after the American elections that sanctioned the defeat of Donald Trump. These two events are neither insignificant nor separate from each other. They can only be understood in a historical framework that we will present in this introduction.

The health crisis we are experiencing today is the most serious event since the collapse of the Eastern bloc.

This pandemic has spread like wildfire from an outbreak in China last winter. The virus has crossed every border and every continent. It has already claimed more than 2 million victims. Everywhere, in every country, there is a state of health emergency, a race against time to vaccinate the population in order to avoid a planetary hecatomb.

What is the origin of this pandemic? It seems that this fearsome virus was transmitted to us by animal species introduced into the human environment (the pangolin and the bat). Contrary to past epidemics of animal origin (such as the plague introduced in the Middle Ages by rats) today, this pandemic is essentially due to the spiralling devastation of the natural environment. Global warming, deforestation, the destruction of the natural territories of wild animals, as well as the proliferation of slums in underdeveloped countries, have encouraged the development of all kinds of new viruses and contagious diseases.

The Covid-19 pandemic is therefore not an unpredictable disaster resulting from the laws of chance and nature! Capitalism itself is responsible for this planetary catastrophe, for these millions of deaths. A system based not on the satisfaction of human needs, but on the search for profit, for profitability through the ferocious exploitation of the working class. A system based on unbridled competition between companies and between states. A competition that prevents any international coordination and cooperation to eradicate this pandemic. This is what we see today with the "war of vaccines", after the "war of masks" at the beginning of the pandemic.

Until now, it was the poorest and most underdeveloped countries that were regularly hit by epidemics. Now it is the more developed countries that are being shaken by the Covid-19 pandemic. It is the very heart of the capitalist system that is under attack, especially the world's leading power.

In the United States, there are now at least 25 million people infected and more than 410,000 dead. There have been more Covid deaths than American soldiers killed in the Second World War! Last April, the number of dead had already exceeded the number of those killed during the Vietnam War.

The spread of the pandemic has become even worse with the mutation of the virus. In the large metropolis of Los Angeles, 1 out of 10 inhabitants is contaminated. In California, the hospitals are full to bursting point. At the beginning of the health crisis, the entire American population was shocked by the huge trenches where "unclaimed" deaths were piled up in the state of New York, on Hart Island.

With Trump's irresponsible policy, the calamitous management of this pandemic was even worse than in other countries. The former President had bet on herd immunity, without wearing a mask, without social distancing. Trump even went so far as to peddle the completely delusional idea of injecting bleach into your veins to kill the virus.

In the most developed country in the world, at the forefront of science, all sorts of conspiracy theories have flourished. While the pandemic had already begun to sweep across the American continent, a large part of the population in the United States imagined that Covid-19 did not exist and that it was a plot to torpedo Trump's re-election!

Today, with several vaccines available, each American state is following its own policies in the most disorganised and total mess. In Europe, faced with the resurgence of the epidemic and the variants of the virus, Great Britain is topping the death rate. Everywhere, the ruling class vaccinates at full speed and must now manage the shortage, while waiting for the laboratories to speed up the production of vaccines. 

The explosion of this global pandemic has revealed:

- a loss of control by the ruling class over its own system.

- an unprecedented worsening of the "every man for himself" situation with unbridled competition between laboratories to be the first to find a vaccine and sell it on the world market. In this race for vaccines, Russian Sputnik has been overtaken by those in the United States who came out on top with Pzifer-BionTech and Moderna. And if the State of Israel was able to obtain so many doses and vaccinate the majority of its population, it was because it bought the Pfizer vaccine at a price 43% higher than the one negotiated by the European Union.

It is clear that the main concern of the bourgeoisie of every country is above all to save the national capital from its competitors.

If all states are struggling so hard to produce vaccines, it is certainly not out of concern for human life. The only thing that interests the ruling class is to preserve the labour power of those it exploits to prolong the agony of the capitalist system even further.

This pandemic, and the inability of the ruling class to contain it, is first and foremost the most obvious manifestation of the total bankruptcy of capitalism. In the face of the worsening economic crisis, in all countries, governments on both the right and the left have for decades been constantly cutting social, health and research budgets. As the health system is not profitable, they have cut the numbers of beds, closed down hospital services, eliminated doctors' posts and worsened the working conditions of carers. In France, the Sanofi laboratory (linked to the Pasteur Institute) has cut 500 research posts since 2007. All the cutting-edge scientific and technological research in the United States has been devoted essentially to the military sector, including research into bacteriological weapons. For its part, China sells its own vaccines to the Maghreb and East African countries. The Chinese vaccine market is therefore following the Silk Road. A hypothesis is even being put forward today: Covid-19 might be a virus that escaped from a laboratory. The World Health Organisation has therefore set up a team to carry out an investigation in China to find out the origin of this virus.

This uncontrollable global pandemic confirms that capitalism has become, since the cataclysm of the First World War, a decadent system that is putting the survival of humanity at stake.

After a century of sinking into decadence, this system has entered the ultimate phase of this decadence: that of decomposition.

Why capitalism has entered its phase of decomposition and what are its main manifestations 

In 1989, after 20 years of global economic crisis, a major event, the most important since the Second World War, shook the world: the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the Stalinist regimes. It was the most spectacular manifestation of the decomposition of capitalism. This situation also caused a dislocation of the Western bloc with a tendency towards the development of every man for himself.

This decomposition of capitalism was due to the fact that neither the bourgeoisie nor the proletariat could bring its own answer to the economic crisis: either a new world war (as was the case with the crisis of the 1930s) or proletarian revolution. The bourgeoisie has not succeeded in recruiting the proletariat behind the national flags and sending it to be massacred on the battlefields. But the proletariat, for its part, has not been able to develop revolutionary struggles to overthrow capitalism. It is this lack of perspective that has caused capitalist society to rot on its feet since the late 1980s.

For 30 years, this decomposition has manifested itself in all kinds of murderous calamities: the multiplication of massacres, including in Europe with the war in the former Yugoslavia, the development of terrorist attacks also in Europe, the waves of refugees (men, women and children) desperately seeking asylum in the countries of the Schengen area, repeated so-called natural disasters, nuclear “accidents” like Chernobyl in 1986 in Russia and Fukushima in 2011 in Japan. And more recently, the disaster that completely destroyed the port of Beirut in Lebanon on 4 August 2020. And the list goes on and on.

Now we have a global health catastrophe that spares no country, no continent, piling up corpses at a staggering rate. Faced with the saturation of mortuaries during the first wave of the pandemic, some European states, such as Spain, even had to pile up corpses in ice rinks!

The bourgeoisie everywhere has had to impose medieval measures with confinements, curfews, social distancing. In some countries, compulsory face masks with police checks at every street corner. Borders are locked, all public and cultural places are closed in most European countries. Never since the Second World War has humanity experienced such an ordeal. The Covid-19 pandemic is therefore the main manifestation today of the accelerated decomposition of capitalism.

It is still this decomposition that explains the rise of the most irrational, reactionary and obscurantist ideologies. The rise of religious fanaticism provoked the creation of the Islamist state with more and more young suicide bombers enlisted in the "Holy War" in the name of Allah. The barbarity of terrorist attacks regularly strikes populations in Europe, and particularly in France. All these reactionary ideologies have also been the manure that has allowed the development of xenophobia and populism in the central countries, and especially in the United States.

The arrival of Trump in power, then the refusal to admit his electoral defeat in the last presidential elections, caused a frightening explosion of populism. In Washington, his shock troops, with their completely fanatical armed militias, stormed the Capitol on January 6, without the security forces, who were supposed to be protecting the building, being able to stop them. This bewildering attack on the temple of American democracy gave the whole world a disastrous image of the world's leading power. The country of Democracy and Freedom appeared as a vulgar Third World banana republic (as former President George Bush himself acknowledged) with the risk of armed clashes among the civilian population.

The rise in social violence, crime, the fragmentation of American society, racist violence against black people, all show that the United States has become a concentrate and a mirror of the decay of bourgeois society.

Even if the new President, Joe Biden, will try to contain as much as possible the gangrene of populism (with the ambition to "reconcile the American people" as he puts it), he will not be able to stop the general dynamic of decay. The new administration will do everything it can to repair the considerable damage Trump has done in the management of the health crisis. But the chaos is such that the pandemic will continue to wreak further havoc and claim many more victims. Despite the discovery of vaccines, it will not be possible today, and for many months to come, to immunise the entire population. Moreover, the WHO has announced that there will be no collective immunity in 2021.

The accumulation of all these manifestations of decomposition, on a global scale and on all levels of society, shows that capitalism has entered, over the last thirty years, a new historical period: the ultimate phase of its decadence, that of decomposition. The whole of society is tending to break up in an unprecedented outburst of violence. The capitalist system is going completely mad. Everywhere it sows death and desolation. Drawn into an infernal spiral, it exhales an increasingly unbreathable and nauseating social atmosphere.

We are facing a descent into chaos – the danger of a true apocalypse.

But is this the only possible future? Our answer is: NO!

Despite this accelerating decay, there remains a social force capable of overthrowing capitalism and building a new world, a true unified human society. This social force is the working class. It is the working class that produces the bulk of the world's wealth. But it is also the main victim of all the catastrophes caused by capitalism. It is the working class that will pay the price for the worsening of the world economic crisis.

The health crisis can only make the economic crisis even worse. And we can already see it with the bankruptcies of enterprises, the growing list of redundancies, since the beginning of this pandemic.

Faced with the aggravation of misery, the degradation of its living conditions in all countries, the working class will have no other choice but to fight against the attacks of the bourgeoisie. Even if, today, it is reeling from the shock of this pandemic, even if social decomposition makes the development of its struggles much more difficult, it will have no choice but to fight for survival. With the explosion of unemployment in the most developed countries, fight or die is the only alternative for growing masses of proletarians, and above all for the young generations of the working class!

It is by struggling on its own class terrain and in the midst of the miasmas of social decomposition, that the proletariat will have to find its way, to find and affirm its revolutionary perspective.

In spite of all the sufferings it engenders, the economic crisis remains, even today, the proletariat's best ally. We must not therefore see in misery only misery, but also the conditions for overcoming this misery. The future of humanity still belongs to the exploited class.

ICC, 23 January 2021

Marc Chirik passed away 30 years ago, in December 1990. In tribute to the precious contributions of our comrade, of this great revolutionary in the line of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, we are republishing the two articles from International Review 65 and 66 that were written just after his death. These two articles go over the broad lines of his life and summarise what he brought to the proletarian cause and the defence of marxism.

In this short introduction to these texts, we simply want to underline three essential elements which characterised his life and revolutionary activity.

First, during the course of his life as a militant for more than 70 years, he was, from his youth to his last breath, a devoted fighter, a tireless combatant for the cause of the proletariat and communism. He dedicated all his energy to the intransigent defence of internationalist principles and of marxism. He never ceased to be at the forefront of the struggle, putting to good use his political, theoretical and organisational experience. Revolutionary militancy was a constant compass in his life. Even during the terrible period of the counter-revolution, Marc never gave up the work of patiently elaborating and clarifying the positions of the communist left. During these dark years, he fought against all the betrayals of the proletarian camp but also struggled inside all the organisations in which he militated, against opportunist manoeuvres, against centrist attitudes, against both academic and activist deviations. He was able to hold out during this period and with the same determination was able to play an active part in the resurgence of the proletariat onto the historic scene in May 1968, enthusiastically involving himself in the regroupment of the revolutionary forces which were born out of that period, and which gave birth to the ICC. He brought all his militant energy, his conviction and experience to orienting and constructing this organisation, as well as to the efforts towards the coming together of the organisations of the proletarian political milieu in the 1980s, towards the mutual confrontation and clarification of their positions.

Another fundamental trait of his character was his ability to keep alive the theoretical acquisitions of the revolutionary movement, particularly those produced by the left fraction of the Communist Party of Italy. As a result, he was able to maintain a lucid and critical analysis of the evolution of the world situation. This political “flair”, founded on the global analysis of the balance of class forces, enabled him to question certain “dogmas” of the workers’ movement, not by distancing himself from the historical materialist method, but on the contrary by anchoring himself in in the dynamic evolution of historical reality. At the end of his life, he made a final theoretical contribution by being one of the first in the ICC to recognise that capitalism had entered into the terminal phase of its decline, the phase of decomposition. He also argued that the proletariat could in no way make use of capitalism’s putrefaction and that this situation raised the stakes for the proletariat and the survival of humanity.

The last element we want to emphasis is his determination to transmit the lessons of the workers’ movement and the organisational experience of revolutionaries to the new generations in order to form new militants and to allow the ICC to ensure a political continuity in the future struggles of the class. He was totally convinced of the indispensable need for the revolutionary organisation as a bridge between past, present and future, and he was conscious that he himself represented a link to the past historical experience of the class, that he was part of the living memory of the workers’ movement. While always insisting that “the proletariat gives rise to revolutionary organisations and not revolutionary individuals”, he also laid great stress on the individual responsibilities of each militant and the need for solidarity and respect between comrades.

Nothing can better express Marc’s life than Rosa Luxemburg’s simple phrase: “I was, I am, I will be”.

The articles can be found here:

Marc, Part 1: From the Revolution of October 1917 to World War II | International Communist Current (internationalism.org) [4]

Marc, Part 2: From World War II to the present day | International Communist Current (internationalism.org) [5]

After the Russian revolution in 1917, the revolution in Germany in 1918, the creation of the Communist International in 1919, we mark the hundredth anniversary of the tragic crushing of the revolt by the workers, soldiers and sailors of Kronstadt in March 1921 with a document “The lessons of Kronstadt” from International Review 3[1], in order to indeed draw the key lessons of this event for the struggles of the future.

In March 1921, the Soviet state, led by the Bolshevik party, used its military forces to put an end to the workers’ and sailors’ revolt in the Kronstadt garrison on the island of Kotlin in the gulf of Finland, 30 kilometers from Petrograd (today St Petersburg). The 15,000 insurgents were attacked by 50,000 Red Army troops on the evening of 7 march. After ten days of bitter combats, the Kronstadt uprising was suppressed. It’s not possible to get reliable figures for the number of victims, but it has been estimated that there were 3,000 killed in the fighting or executed on the side of the insurgents, and 10,000 dead on the Red Army side. According to a communique of the Cheka dating from 1 May 1921, 6,528 rebels were arrested, 2,168 executed, 1,955 sentenced to forced labour (1,486 for five years), and 1,272 freed. The families of the rebels were deported to Siberia, and 8,000 sailors, soldiers and civilians managed to escape to Finland.

Less than four years after the seizure of power by the working class in October 1917, these events were a tragic expression of the degeneration of an isolated revolution coming to the end of its tether. This was a workers’ revolt by partisans of the Soviet regime, by those who in 1905 and 1917 had been in the vanguard of the movement, and who during the October revolution had been seen as “the pride and glory of the revolution”. In 1921, the Kronstadt insurgents demanded the satisfaction of the same demands as the Petrograd workers who had been on strike since February: liberation of all imprisoned socialists, end of military rule, freedom of expression, of the press and of assembly for all those who work, equal rations for all workers… But what underlined the importance of this movement and expresses its profoundly proletarian character was not only the reaction against the restrictive measures, but above all the rection to the loss of political power by the workers’ councils to the benefit of the party and the state, which had substituted themselves for the councils and claimed to represent the aims and interests of the proletariat. This was expressed in the first point of the resolution passed by the insurgents: “In view of the fact that the present Soviets do not express the will of the workers and peasants, immediately to hold new elections by secret ballot, with freedom to carry on agitation beforehand for all workers and peasants”.

The bourgeoisie, when it talks about the suppression of the revolt by the Red Army, always tries to prove to proletarians that there is an uninterrupted chain linking Marx and Lenin to Stalin and the Gulag. The aim of the bourgeoisie is to make sure that workers turn away from the history of their class and don’t reappropriate their own experiences. The theories of the anarchists arrive at the same conclusions by starting off from the allegedly authoritarian and counter-revolutionary nature of marxism and the parties acting in its name. The anarchists have an abstractly “moral” view of these events. Beginning with the idea of the authoritarianism inherent in the Bolshevik party, they are incapable of explaining the degeneration of the revolution in general, and the Kronstadt episode in particular. This was a revolution that was becoming exhausted after seven years of world war and civil war, with an industrial infrastructure in ruins, a working class that had been decimated, starved, confronted with peasant uprisings in the provinces. A revolution that had been dramatically isolated and where an international extension had become less and less likely after the failure of the revolution in Germany. Faced with all the problems posed to the working class and the Bolshevik party, the anarchists simply close their eyes.  

Considered from the perspective of the world proletarian revolution, the fundamental historical lesson of the repression of the Kronstadt revolt concerns the question of class violence. While revolutionary violence is a weapon of the proletariat to overthrow capitalism and its class enemies, under no pretext can it be used within the working class, against other proletarians. Communism can’t be imposed on the proletariat by force and violence because these means are categorically opposed to the conscious nature its revolution, which can only advance through its own experience and the constant critical evaluation of this experience. The decision by the Bolshevik party to crush the Kronstadt uprising can only be understood in the context of the international isolation of the revolution and the terrible civil war which had swept the country. Nevertheless, such a decision remains a tragic mistake, since it was exerted against workers who had risen up to defend the main weapon in the conscious political transformation of society, the vital organ of the proletarian dictatorship: the power of the Soviets.

The article can be found here: The lessons of Kronstadt | International Communist Current (internationalism.org) [7]

ICC, March 2021

With the recent military coup in Myanmar, the army officially took back power. But had it really ever left? The Myanmar army, a central institution of the state and, historically, the gangster in chief, has been imposing its dictatorship and making the most of its position for decades. It is, in fact, the only force still able to maintain order, stability and unity in a country of more than 130 different ethnic groups, where ethnic divisions and conflicts are legion. Because of this the imperialist appetites of powers such as China, Russia, the US and India focus on the army, which only serves to intensify tensions in this highly strategic region of Asia. The Myanmar army has usually asserted its interests by force, with open support from Chinese and Russian imperialism.

Despite the 2015 election and the handover to a façade of democratic government, the first since 1961, the February 1st coup was part of the logic of permanent military domination by an all-powerful army that has never ceased to be a state within a state since independence in 1948. Burma (as the country was known until 1989) has been ruled without interruption by generals like Aung San Suu Kyi's own father who was assassinated by rivals in 1947. The icon of democracy, supposedly the face of peace, has now been overthrown by soldiers who previously arrested her, then imprisoned her for many years, finally bringing her to power in 2015. Aung San Suu Kyi was able to come to an accommodation with these same soldiers without a moment's hesitation, unscrupulously supporting the bloody repression of the Rohingyas in 2017. In fact, the Burmese armed forces have never relinquished power, granting themselves key ministries and a substantial percentage of seats in parliament. 

An expression of sinking into decomposition...

On 22 December 2020, the head of the Tatmadaw (the official name of Myanmar's armed forces) reaffirmed that the armed forces must also play a leading role in the defence of "national policies, the sasana [Buddhist religion], traditions, customs and culture". He could have added that the Burmese army's power is not only military or "cultural" (sic), it is also economic. The army has had control of the country's economy since the coup of 1962. Today, officially, it has 14% of the national budget, although in reality it's much more, when corruption and largely opaque financing are taken into account.

In addition to its involvement in jade mining, the teak wood industry, precious stones and (the icing on the cake), the highly profitable drug trade, the Myanmar military also benefits from the dividends reaped by a conglomerate it owns, the Myanmar Economic Holding Public Company Ltd (MEHL), one of the country's most powerful and corrupt organisations. MEHL has expanded its influence into virtually every economic sector, from breweries to tobacco, mining and textile manufacturing. Historically, for the capitalist state, it is often the army which, as a last resort, ensures national cohesion and the defence of bourgeois interests in situations of internal division and confrontation. Myanmar is certainly no exception, but it is a caricatural example. If the army has ensured a certain unity of the country in the face of ethnic divisions, its interests remain in "divide and rule", to guarantee its profits, to maintain the dissensions of the various bourgeois factions in order to maintain its power.

The coup led by General Ming Aung Hliang is the latest incarnation of the process of growing chaos and decomposition where it is sometimes difficult to get one's bearings in such a maelstrom of confrontations, violence, ethnic cleansing and barbarism... And all the street demonstrations of the population in defence of the bourgeois clique of Aung San Suu Kyi, this faith in democratic illusions, all this only promises ever more chaos and repression. Every crisis in Burma, as in 1988 or 2007, has, in practice, led to bloody repression with thousands of deaths each time. This is still a possibility today with live ammunition being used by the forces of repression which have already claimed their first victims. So, why a coup now?

Many bourgeois commentators consider this coup d'état to be unexpected, incomprehensible, in view of the military domination that has never wavered, including in recent years with the opening up of democracy under military control, and the coming to power of Aung San Suu Kyi in April 2016. Hypotheses are put forward in the media: the army chief, Min Aung Hlaing, soon to retire, could have been brought before the International Court of Human Rights for crimes against humanity. Another explanation: the latest crushing victory of Aung San Suu Kyi's party in the legislative elections would have been a bitter setback for the military junta, which was not able to accept it... All these elements, however plausible they may be, express above all the exacerbation of the struggles between the different factions of the bourgeoisie within the Myanmar state apparatus, all this to the detriment of the stability and rational management of the state itself.

In other words, the respective interests of each faction, whether dressed in military uniform or in the cloak of democracy, take precedence over the overall interests of the national capital, increasingly fuelling corruption at the top of the state as well as at all levels of the functioning of society. Myanmar's already precarious economic situation has worsened dramatically with the pandemic. In addition to rising unemployment, historically always high, and the impoverishment of the population, and while GDP has fallen dramatically in recent years in one of the poorest countries in the world, according to the IMF, there's a growing humanitarian and health crisis, which has already caused the emigration of hundreds of thousands of people to Bangladesh and Thailand. Ultimately, the events in Myanmar are an expression of the same decomposition that permeates every pore of bourgeois society, from the assault on the Capitol to the global health crisis...

… and the sharpening of imperialist tensions

But these disputes between factions are not enough to completely explain the situation. It is above all in imperialist rivalries and tensions that you find out what's at stake. The main western powers, starting with the US, have unanimously condemned this military operation. Immediately after the coup, the US asked the UN for a resolution to this effect and demanded sanctions against Myanmar. This resolution was not adopted because of the vetoes of Russia and China. In the context of the growing confrontation between China and the United States, Burma remains a key strategic area. At stake is the control of the South China Sea, Taiwan and the Bay of Bengal. Chinese imperialism has absolutely no interest in allowing any "stabilisation", particularly with any democratic pretensions, which would benefit the US above all. Maintaining the mire in Myanmar is a Chinese strategic choice in Asia, access to the Bay of Bengal being a major objective for China, as well as India. It is therefore in China's interest to maintain instability by, for example, supporting guerrillas in the north, for instance in Rakhine (Arakan) State, while at the same time treating the military in the right way, notably by calling the latest coup a "ministerial reshuffle"! One of Beijing's objectives is to complete the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC), which will allow access to the Indian Ocean, bypassing the Straits of Malacca, which has always been controlled by the US Navy. It is committed to maintaining stability in trade and political relations with Myanmar. Above all, it is a major strategic pawn in its "Silk Road" project, along which Beijing needs to secure points of support, notably in the form of future military bases and diplomatic alliances. Following Beijing's expression of support for Pakistan, strong support in the region for Myanmar's military regime is an opportunity to defend its interests while blocking proposals for embargoes and sanctions on the Myanmar military regime demanded by the United States.

Russian imperialism has implicitly endorsed the coup. "A week before the coup, Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoygu travelled to Myanmar to finalise an agreement on the supply of ground-to-air missile systems, surveillance drones and radar equipment, according to Nikkei Asia Magazine. Russia has also signed an agreement on flight safety with General Ming, who is said to have visited Russia six times in the last decade". India finds itself in a trickier situation: while it resolutely opposed the putsch of the Burmese military regime 30 years ago, it did not stop forging links with the Burmese regime, both with the junta and with the Aung San Suu Kyi faction. Today, Modi's government is tempted to continue the dialogue with its neighbour. But it wants at all costs to avoid giving up even an inch of ground to China.

In the trap of the defence of democracy

Faced with this third coup d'état, and in a context of crisis where 60% of people live in extreme poverty, the whole population reacted, particularly the younger generation. Numerous street demonstrations and even strikes have occurred. This movement of "civil disobedience" with acts of sabotage in transport, telecommunications and information technology, with the aim of "restoring democracy", will not put an end to this situation of chaos and violence. Even if it is clear that the army has underestimated the civil resistance by provoking an unprecedented movement of rejection, especially among young people, the social movement that is developing on the purely bourgeois terrain of democratic demands does not contain the seeds of a better future.

Young people have many illusions in the bourgeois democracy of recent years. But the defence of the democratic state, the defence of the party of Aung San Suu Kyi, an accomplice in the crimes perpetrated by the army against the Rohingya people, is a trap that can only bring them serious disappointments. Despite the poor economic record of four years in power of "State Counsellor" Aung San Suu Kyi, she remains popular with a population marked by the years of dictatorship (1962-2011). However, the democratic party and the military junta are two sides of the same coin, that of the bourgeois state. The latter is a body whose function is to maintain social order and the status quo in order to preserve the interests of the ruling class and not to improve the lot of the exploited and oppressed. As a result, the hundreds of thousands of youth and workers participating in these demonstrations are prisoners of a movement that only reinforces the capitalist order. The defence of democracy is a trap and a true dead end. Worse: fighting on this terrain can only lead to impotence and bloody sacrifices for the working class as well as for the whole population.

Stopio, 27 February 2021

150 years ago, on 18 March 1871, the proletariat mounted its first revolutionary offensive – the one that gave birth to the Paris Commune. Though the bourgeoisie declared an all-out war on it, the Commune resisted for 72 days, until 28 May 1871: the ruthless repression cost the lives of 20,000 proletarians. Since then, the Paris Commune, whose memory has been passed down from generation to generation of the working class, remains an example, a reference and a legacy for the exploited of the whole world, though not for its executioner, the bourgeoisie, which is currently holding indecent commemorations to falsify its own history and to bury the precious lessons that the workers' movement was able to draw from it.

For several weeks, historians, journalists, politicians and writers will all be serving up vile propaganda in the newspapers and on the television and radio channels on behalf of their class. From the right to the left, including the extreme left, the whole bourgeois class will churn out lies, from the most flagrant to the most subtle.

For 'the right-wing' the communards are bloodthirsty savages

If the right-wing was indignant about the timidity with which the state planned to “commemorate” the bicentenary of the death of Napoleon I, it has of course showed a total disdain for the Communards (1), these “murderers”, these “troublemakers”, these “agents of disorder” who should just stay where they are, i.e. six feet under. You have to go back to 2016 to see how Le Figaro, a well-known French right-wing newspaper, bluntly states what the “party of order” has always thought in substance, and unequivocally: “The Communards destroyed Paris, massacred honest people and even starved Paris by destroying the large warehouses that stored the grain reserves that supplied the bakers of Paris”. This shameless slander knows no bounds. This is how the insurgents, already regarded as vermin at the time, became responsible for their own famine and at the same time for starving the “honest people”. In other words, if the working class in Paris was reduced to eating rats, it was their own fault! As usual, and especially since the aftermath of the event, the right-wing, which has always felt terrorised by the “dangerous classes”, repeats over and over again a kind of hate speech, equating the Communards with bloodthirsty savages.

But this campaign of crude accusations, trampling on the truth, cruelly lacking any finesse, is very easily seen through for what it is by the working class. It therefore remains in the hands of the forces of the left of capital to carry out the real and necessary work of falsifying the meaning of the Paris Commune.

The Left lays claim to the Commune, the better to subvert it

For 72 days from 18 March, the Paris City Hall will organise no less than fifty events to supposedly celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Commune. The stage will be set on 18 March in Square Louise Michel (18th arrondissement of Paris), in the presence of the “socialist” mayor of the capital, Anne Hidalgo.

This location has not been chosen at random. Louise Michel was one of the most famous and heroic fighters of the Commune who, when she was tried, refused even to accept any pity from the executioners of the Commune, saying to their faces: “Since it seems that every heart that beats for liberty is only entitled to a bit of lead, I claim my share! If you are not cowards, kill me”. So who are these people who, today, want to stage the memory of the Commune in a totally truncated way? Who are Madame Hidalgo and her entire “socialist” city council? Nothing less than the descendants of the social-democratic traitors who irretrievably passed into the camp of the bourgeoisie at the time of the First World War.

Since then, in opposition or in government, the “socialists” have always acted against the interests of the working class. Therefore, for purely political reasons, Anne Hidalgo's Deputy Mayor cynically exploits the memory of Louise Michel in the 2021 commemorations by quoting her: “Everyone is seeking a way forward, we are too, and we think that the day when liberty and equality reign is when the human race will be happy”. For the Communards, these words meant the end of wage slavery, the end of the exploitation of man by man, the destruction of the bourgeois state. That is what the words “liberty” and “equality” meant to them. That’s why, instead of the tricolour flag of France, which flies on the roof of the Hôtel de Ville (town hall) in Paris today, the Communards erected the red flag, a symbol of the struggle of the workers of the whole world! But for this class of exploiters and mass murderers, the “reign of liberty” is nothing more than the reign of commerce and the domination and exploitation of proletarians in workshops and on production lines.

The Socialist Party have increased rallies to the glory of bourgeois democracy in the four corners of the capital and the left-wing intellectuals, writers and film-makers have released lots of films and books to dilute the revolutionary character of the Commune. Also, the bourgeois press, like the Guardian, (2) passes it off as a “people's struggle” and compares it to the interclassist movement of the “Yellow Vests” in order to deny its unquestionably proletarian character. But the Paris Commune was neither a struggle for the implementation of bourgeois values and democracy, that most sophisticated form of class domination and capital, nor a struggle of the “people of Paris”, or even of the “petty-bourgeoisie”. On the contrary, it incarnated a struggle to the death to overthrow the power of the bourgeois class, of which the Socialist Party and all the spokespeople of the “left” are the worthy representatives today.

The extreme left of capital completes the dirty work

The leftists are not to be outdone when it comes to making their own little contribution to the falsification of the experiences of the workers' movement. More often than not they provide the most insidious of distortions.  Thus, the Trotskyists of the NPA (Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste) peddle the cause of “direct democracy” to distort the meaning of the Commune. These leftists do recognise that the Communards made an attack on the state, but only so they can draw false lessons from this and draw conclusions harmless to capital which they zealously support. The NPA, for example, in the Loiret district, in a bulletin they published on 13 March, gives space in its pages to the historian Roger Martelli (3) whose prose is a real plea for bourgeois democracy: “With no fixed doctrines, not even a finished programme, the Commune did in a few weeks what the Republic would take a long time to realise. It opened the way to a conception of ‘living together’, based on equality and solidarity. Finally, it set out the possibility for a less narrow representative, more direct citizen-oriented form of control. In short, it sought to put into practice the 'government of the people by the people', which US President Lincoln had announced years earlier.”

What an utter disgrace this is! Martelli shamelessly spits on the grave of the communards! The NPA, in a totally open and “uninhibited” way, reduces the Commune to a simple democratic reform dressed up as popular participation. In the end, the future prefigured by the Commune is reduced to the bourgeois democratic ideal!

Jean Jaurès, despite his reformist prejudices, at least had the intellectual honesty, unlike the falsifiers of the NPA, to say that: “the Commune was in essence and in substance the first great pitched battle of labour against capital. And that’s precisely why it was defeated, why it was slaughtered”. (4)

For its part, Lutte Ouvrière (LO), the other main French Trotskyist party, contributes with its fake radical language to this campaign of falsification by pretending to oppose parliamentary democracy (in which LO has been participating for decades) to the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., in its eyes, a more radical form of bourgeois democracy. This is how this electoralist party explained it in 2001: “In a programme which they did not have time to develop, the Communards proposed that all the communes from the big cities to the smallest hamlets in the countryside should organise themselves according to the model of the Paris Commune and that they should constitute the basic structure of a new form of truly democratic state.” (5). That said, LO is then quick to point out: “This does not mean that revolutionary communists are indifferent to so-called democratic freedoms, quite the contrary, if only because they allow militants to defend their ideas more openly". (6)

The organisations of the left of capital play without question the most treacherous role, consisting in presenting the Commune as an experiment in “radical” democracy, which would have had no other objective than improving the functioning of the state. Nothing more! 150 years later, the Paris Commune is once again faced with the Holy Alliance of all bourgeois reactionary forces, like it did in its own day with the Holy Alliance of the Prussian state and the French Republic. The political treasures bequeathed by the Commune are what the bourgeois class seeks to hide and bury.

The Commune is a key moment of working class history

Indeed, as Marx and Engels stated loud and clear in its aftermath, the Paris Commune waged the first revolutionary assault of the proletariat by fighting for the destruction of the bourgeois state. The Commune aimed to immediately consolidate its power by abolishing the standing army and the state institutions, and by adopting the permanent revocability of the members of the Commune who were responsible to all those who had elected them.

The historical conditions were not yet ripe at this time - it was well before the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 in Russia - but the Communards did introduce plans to form workers’ councils, “the finally discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat” as Lenin put it. So it was not the construction of a “truly democratic” state that the Communards made their objective, but the rejection of the domination of the bourgeois class. The Paris Commune demonstrated that the “the working class cannot simply take control of the existing state machinery and use it for its own purposes”. (7) This is one of the essential lessons that Marx and the workers' movement drew from this tragic experience.

If the Paris Commune was a premature insurrection that ended in the massacre of the finest flower of the world proletariat, it was nevertheless a heroic struggle of the Parisian proletariat, an invaluable contribution to the historical struggle of the exploited class. For this reason, it remains fundamental that the working class of the 21st century is able to appropriate and assimilate the experience of the Commune and the invaluable lessons that revolutionaries have drawn from it.

Paul, 18 March 2021.

To deepen the lessons of the Paris Commune, we recommend reading the following articles on our website:

• Paris Commune of 1871: When the workers first took power | International Communist Current (internationalism.org) [13]
• On the 140th anniversary of the Paris Commune | International Communist Current (internationalism.org) [14]
• 1871: The first proletarian dictatorship | International Communist Current (internationalism.org) [15]

(1) In the Paris City Council, right-wing politicians opposed the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Commune, leading a deafening campaign on the legitimacy and even the national duty of celebrating the death of Napoleon Bonaparte.

(2) “Vive la Commune? The working-class insurrection that shook the world”, The Guardian (7 March 2021).

(3) Linked to the reviving current of the Stalinist party in France, the PCF, now close to the left-wing party, La France Insoumise, with a very muscular nationalist discourse.

(4) Jean Jaurès, Histoire Socialiste.

(5) “Democracy, parliamentary democracy, communal democracy”. Cercle Léon Trotski intitulé issue n° 89 (26 January 2001). In this article, which says a lot about LO’s democratic ideology, the Trotskyist party adds, without batting an eyelid: “Of all bourgeois institutions, the municipalities [i.e. the cogs of bourgeois democracy where LO has the best chance of obtaining elected representatives] are still potentially the most democratic, because they are the closest to the population and the most subject to its control”. No comment...

(6) “La Commune de Paris et ses enseignements pour aujourd’hui”, Lutte de classe, issue no.214 (March 2021).

(7) Marx et Engels, Preface to the Manifesto of the Communist Party (24 June 1872) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/pre... [16]

Below we are publishing substantial extracts from a letter from one of our readers, followed by our response. This letter criticises our "Report on the question of the historic course", adopted at the 23rd ICC Congress and published in International Review 164. The comrade also addresses another issue: that of the prospect, still possible, of a generalised nuclear war.

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My multiple readings of the report on the historic course published in the International Review number 164 have left me very perplexed and doubtful. I find it very difficult to form a precise and definitive opinion on this text. Rather than taking a position, I prefer to share with you some somewhat disjointed and disparate remarks. I hope that these remarks will help to move the debate forward, possibly in letters from the paper's readers.

The first remark is a certain astonishment at the appearance now of this questioning. Indeed, the ICC, even if it makes no claim to any 'Bordigist' invariance, has never performed a 180° about face in this way. I have no other example of such a calling into question of a 'cornerstone' position of this importance in the 45 years since the creation of the ICC. Do tell me if there have been any precedents? […]

The second concerns the moment when this historic 'revolution' has happened, that is to say 30 years after the collapse of the USSR and its imperialist bloc. What event in recent months, internal or external to the ICC, has provoked this calling into question of one of its programmatic cornerstones, 30 years after 1989? The only 'internal' event was the need to take stock of the 40 years of the ICC and to revise an analysis which was no longer appropriate. I remember many discussions in public meetings over the last 30 years where this affirmation of the historic course, against the questioning by sympathisers about the state of the working class, where this was a decisive argument in the argumentation.

Third remark: the distinction between the historic course and the balance of forces between the classes is difficult to grasp and does not convince me. A first understanding on my part of this text is the evolutionary character in one direction contained in the expression "historic course" as opposed to a perception of the balance of forces between the classes as a blocked, indecisive and ultimately random situation as to its evolution. To illustrate my position, I will use the expression of Albert Einstein in his criticism of the postulates of quantum mechanics: "God does not play dice". Finally, the notion of the historic course is more relevant to me because in the balance of force between the classes 'measured' at a given moment, there is a basic tendency, a movement (which can be reversed) which is continually at work and which will go to its conclusion. To conclude this remark, I have the impression that there has been a 'pessimistic' evolution in the ICC's appreciation of the historic course over the last 50 years. We went from a course toward 'revolution' in the 70s and 80s, then to a course toward 'class confrontations' of the 90s and 2000s to finish with the current perception of a course announcing the defeat of the proletariat.

One last remark that I will develop further, because my ideas are clearer on this, and it concerns an argument put forward by the ICC to justify its abandonment of a historic course in practice. This argument is the current non-existence of military blocs and the lack a tendency toward different countries coming together to form such blocs. Unlike the alliances preceding the First World War between France, the United Kingdom and Russia on the one hand, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey on the other, or the alliances preceding the Second between France, the United Kingdom and Poland this time and Germany, Italy and the USSR (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact!) on the other; there have been no such alliances since the collapse of the USSR. Apart from the question of long-range nuclear weapons, there is at the moment one country that does not need to have formed a united and perfectly controlled and sustained bloc in order to embark on a war which, if not global, will not be confined to a theatre of operations limited in time and space (as in the two wars against Saddam Hussein, for example). It is of course the United States that has the economic power, the military supremacy and the bases nonetheless for intervention anywhere in the world. For a war with battles in different parts of the planet, which take place simultaneously and over a fairly long period of time (several years) to occur, all that is needed is for another power, which has several vassal states through foreign trade and economic investment, to set up military bases abroad in these vassal states, start building aircraft carriers and generally an efficient and numerous navy, so that at some point the risk of widespread conflict becomes a significant probability. This country already exists, it is China which, thanks to the Covid-19 epidemic, may soon overtake the United States economically. The possibility of a 'blunder' in the coming years over the Taiwan question, degenerating into a generalised confrontation between these two countries in different places, forcing other states to position themselves and to take sides with one or the other (e.g. France, the United Kingdom and Germany for the United States within the framework of NATO, and Russia for China) is a possibility that is not at all far-fetched. Battles in countries in the East and bombings in Western Europe could result from this situation. I think that the question of war is not at all overcome by the theory of decomposition replacing the theory of the historic course.

To conclude on this last remark, by chance I recently read two articles in the press that add grist to the mill. In Obs magazine, in a brief article on the evolution of the world economy, it says that the power that was at the origin of this pandemic is the only one that will, paradoxically, see positive growth in 2020. The article ends as follows: "When the crisis is over, we will have to make a new assessment of the forces at play. But already, we can announce that China is getting dangerously close to the United States". Canard Enchaîné reports the words of US nuclear weapons chief Charles Richard: "It's time for the US to revise and update its nuclear doctrine, because the nation has not taken seriously enough, until now, the possibility of direct armed competition with nuclear-armed adversaries. For 30 years the Pentagon has considered that there were no threats. This post-Cold War rhetoric is over. We have to accept the prospect that a nuclear war could one day take place. Our adversaries have taken advantage of this period to conceal their aggressive behaviour, increase their military potential and reconsider their tactics and strategies. We cannot expect our adversaries to respect the constraints that everyone has imposed on each other until now, depending on whether the war is conventional or nuclear, who now have a different conception of deterrence from ours".

I hope that these few remarks may be useful in developing the discussion on the key issue of the ICC's abandonment of the idea of the historic course.

D

Our response

First of all, we would like to warmly commend the effort of comrade D and the reflection he has undertaken on the idea of the "historic course", which will feed and enrich the debate.

The comrade asks, first of all: how is it that the concept of the "historic course", which has always been one of the "cornerstones" of the ICC's analysis since its foundation, is today called into question and abandoned in the "Report on the question of the historic course" from our 23rd Congress? The comrade also asks us: has the ICC abandoned or rectified other positions?

To the first question, we must refer the comrade to what is stated very explicitly in the introduction to the Report in the International Review: "By making the necessary change in our analysis, we were adopting the method of Marx and the marxist movement since its inception, which consists of changing positions, analyses and even the programme as a whole as soon as it no longer corresponds to the march of history; this is fully in line with the goals of marxism as a revolutionary theory. The most celebrated example of this is the important modifications which Marx and Engels made to the Communist Manifesto itself, summarised in the later prefaces they added to this fundamental text, in the light of the historic changes that had taken place. 'Marxism is a revolutionary world outlook which must always strive for new discoveries, which completely despises rigidity in once-valid theses, and whose living force is best preserved in the intellectual clash of self-criticism and the rough and tumble of history' (Rosa Luxemburg, An Anti-critique)

Rosa’s insistence, in this period, on the necessity to reconsider prior analyses in order to remain faithful to the nature and method of marxism as a revolutionary theory was directly linked to the profound significance of the First World War. The 1914-18 war marked a turning point in capitalism as a mode of production, its passage from a period of ascent and progress to a new period of decadence and collapse which fundamentally changed the conditions and the programme of the workers’ movement. But only the left wing of the Second International began to recognise that the previous period had definitely ended and that the proletariat was now entering into the “epoch of wars and revolution”.

It is therefore by adopting the same approach as that of the workers' movement of the past that we have been led to question the concept of the "historic course". A concept which we consider outdated since the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989, opening up a new phase within the historic period of the decadence of capitalism, its ultimate phase: that of decomposition, the ultimate phase of the decadence of capitalism. Just as the entry of capitalism into its period of decadence had rendered obsolete the national liberation struggles defended by marxists in the 19th century, the analysis of the "historic course", which allowed us to understand the direction in which society was evolving, became obsolete. The historic alternative today is no longer "World war or proletarian revolution" (as it was in the past) but "Destruction of humanity in generalised chaos or proletarian revolution".

The "historic course" and the balance of forces between the classes in the 20th century

Our article in International Review 164 explains in great detail the difference between the concept of the "historic course" and that of the "balance of forces between classes". We had made the mistake of identifying these two notions in the past when they are two distinct concepts. In the 19th century, in the ascendant period of capitalism, the concept of "historic course" had not been used by revolutionaries because we had not yet entered the "era of wars and revolutions" (as the Communist International said in 1919). Neither the failure of the revolution of 1848 nor the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871 had led to an imperialist war, although the balance of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat had been reversed in favour of the ruling class.

With the entry of capitalism into its period of decadence, the idea of the "historic course" was adopted by revolutionaries in order to understand in which general direction society was going. In 1914, the ideological defeat of the proletariat (with the voting of war credits by social democracy and the betrayal of the workers' parties) had allowed the recruitment of tens of millions of proletarians in the First World War. The balance of forces between the two fundamental classes of society had swung to the bourgeoisie, which had succeeded in sending the proletariat enthusiastically to the battlefields. For the first time in history, the alternative was posed: "socialism or barbarism", "proletarian revolution or the destruction of humanity in World War I". Then in 1917, with the triumph of the Russian Revolution and its impact in other countries (notably Germany), the balance of forces between classes was reversed in favour of the proletariat, ending the World War. The "historic course" was, for the first time, a course towards the world proletarian revolution, posing the question of the overthrow of capitalism, which manifested itself in a real revolutionary wave that developed throughout the world between 1917 and 1923, and again in 1927 in China. But, with the bloody crushing of the revolution in Germany and the Stalinist counterrevolution under the guise of "socialism in one country", the bourgeoisie was able to regain the upper hand. This physical defeat of the proletariat was followed by a profound ideological defeat that led to its recruitment under the flags of antifascism and the defence of the "socialist homeland". The balance of forces between the classes having been reversed in favour of the bourgeoisie, a new historic course was affirmed in the 1930s: society was inexorably heading toward a Second World War. The ruling class had been able to subject the working class to the dead weight of a long period of counter-revolution by giving itself all the means to prevent the proletariat from repeating the revolutionary undertaking of 1917-18. This period of victorious counter-revolution had therefore not allowed the proletariat to reverse the historic course by affirming once again its revolutionary perspective. Such a situation could therefore only leave the bourgeoisie free to impose its own response to the historic crisis of its system: world war.

It was only after half a century of counter-revolution that the proletariat, by gradually rebuilding its forces, was able to raise its head again: at the end of the 1960s, with the resurgence of the economic crisis and the exhaustion of the post-war economic "boom", the proletariat reappeared on the scene of history. The wave of workers' struggles that shook the world, notably in May 1968 in France and during the "hot autumn" in Italy in 1969, showed that the proletariat was not willing to accept the deterioration of its living conditions. As we have always affirmed, a proletariat that does not accept the sacrifices imposed by the economic crisis is not ready to accept the ultimate sacrifice of its life on the battlefields. With the erosion of the bourgeois mystifications that had allowed its recruitment in World War II (that of anti-fascism and Stalinism), the working class regained the upper hand at the end of the 1960s. By obstructing the outbreak of a new world war, the international resumption of class struggle had put an end to the period of counterrevolution and opened up a new historic course: a course toward widespread class confrontations that put the perspective of proletarian revolution back on the agenda.

The history of the twentieth century has thus shown the dynamics of capitalism and the evolution of society according to the balance of forces between classes. It is this balance of force that determines the "historic course", that is to say in which direction society is heading in the face of the permanent crisis of capitalism: either towards world war or towards proletarian revolution.

Although the "historic course" ultimately depends on the balance of forces between the classes, the two concepts are not identical. For marxists, the "historic course" is not fixed. It is fundamentally determined by the response that the bourgeoisie and the proletariat give, at a given moment, to the crisis of the capitalist economy. "We have tended, on the basis of what the working class experienced during the 20th century, to identify the notion of the evolution of the balance of power between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat with the notion of a “historical course”, whereas the latter indicates a fundamental alternative outcome, the world war or revolution, a sanction of this balance of power. In a way, the current historical situation is similar to that of the 19th century: the balance of power between classes can evolve in one direction or another without decisively affecting the life of society" [1]

The incomprehension of this notion of "historic course" had, moreover, led some revolutionaries of the past to make dangerous mistakes. This was notably the case of Trotsky who, in the 1930s, when the proletariat of the central countries was being recruited under the bourgeois flags of antifascism and the defence of the "workers' gains" in the USSR, did not understand that society was heading irreversibly towards world war. Trotsky did not understand that the War in Spain was the laboratory for World War II. Seeing the uprising of the Spanish proletariat against Franco as a "revolution" following on from the October 1917 revolution in Russia, Trotsky had ended up pushing prematurely for the foundation of a Fourth International, at a time when historic conditions were marked by defeat and when the "task of the hour" was for revolutionaries to draw the balance sheet and lessons from the failure of the Russian revolution and the first revolutionary wave.

Why question the concept of the "historic course" today?

Our reader makes the following criticism: he expresses "a certain astonishment at the appearance now of this questioning […] What event in recent months, internal or external to the ICC, has provoked this calling into question of one of its programmatic cornerstones, 30 years after 1989. The only 'internal' event was the need to take stock of the 40 years of the ICC and to revise an analysis which was no longer appropriate. I remember many discussions in public meetings over the last 30 years where this affirmation of the historic course, against the questioning by sympathisers about the state of the working class, where this was a decisive argument in the argumentation."

The first question we want to answer is: was the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989 an event of such historic significance that it justifies our examining the direction in which society is heading? As we have highlighted in our press, the collapse of the Stalinist countries put a definitive end to the myth of the "socialist fatherland". An entire sector of the capitalist world fell apart, not thanks to the revolutionary action of the proletariat, but from the battering of the world economic crisis. The disappearance of the Eastern bloc put an end to the Cold War and to the bourgeois alternative of a Third World War as the only response that the ruling class could give to the crisis of its system. As a result, the Western bloc finally broke up, since the threat of the "Evil Empire" had disappeared. The prospect of a Third World War between the USSR and the US had itself disappeared, without giving way to the alternative of proletarian revolution. How did we explain this "void" left in the course of history? Our analysis was the following: neither the proletariat nor the bourgeoisie having been able to affirm their own response to the economic crisis at the end of the 1980s, the historic alternative "War or world proletarian revolution" was "blocked". If capitalism has entered its phase of decomposition, it is because the working class has not been able to go on the offensive, to politicise its struggles to raise them to the gravity of the stakes of the historic situation. The dynamics of the class struggle can no longer be analysed within the framework of the "historic course". The analysis of the "historic course" therefore had to be re-examined since the prospect of a new world war had receded, as had that of proletarian revolution.

The changing historic situation required us to critically examine the 40 years of ICC in order to determine the validity of our analyses. This is what we began to do at our 21st Congress, which was devoted exclusively to this critical examination. It was therefore on the basis of this Congress that we reflected on the historic course and updated our analysis in the light of the new world situation opened up by the collapse of the Eastern bloc. This major event, the most important since the Second World War, had provoked a decline in the consciousness and combativeness of the proletariat because of the impact of the gigantic campaign of the bourgeoisie claiming that the collapse of the Stalinist regimes meant the "collapse of communism". The bourgeoisie had been able to turn this major manifestation of the decomposition of its system against the consciousness of the working class, thus obstructing its revolutionary perspective and making its forward march towards generalised class confrontations more difficult, slower and more uneven.

Moreover, during this Congress we had affirmed that the reconstitution of new imperialist blocs (which is an indispensable objective condition for a third world war) was not on the agenda. With the end of bloc discipline, the dynamics of imperialism were now characterised by the growing tendency of "every man for himself", a tendency which did not exclude the possibility of alliances between states. But these alliances are marked by a certain instability. This "every man for himself" in the life of the bourgeoisie can only aggravate global chaos, especially in increasingly deadly localised wars. "Every man for himself" is also a manifestation of the decomposition of capitalism. It can be seen today in the calamitous management of the Covid-19 pandemic by each national bourgeoisie, as witnessed by the "war of masks" and the competitive race for vaccines.

It was therefore on the basis of the marxist method of analysing historic evolution that the ICC considered that the concept of "historic course" had become obsolete. The dynamics of class struggle and the balance of forces between the classes can no longer be posed today in the same terms as in the past. Faced with a new historic situation (and one which has not been seen since the beginning of the decadence of capitalism), it was up to us to review an analysis which had been for 40 years, as comrade D says, one of our "programmatic cornerstones". This is not quite right, by the way: the analysis of the "historic course" is not a position that is an integral part of our programmatic platform (as is the analysis of the decadence of capitalism and its implications for national liberation struggles, participation in elections, or the nature of trade unions and the former USSR).

The "theory of decomposition" does not replace "the theory of the historic course", as Comrade D asserts. A new world war is not today a necessary condition for the destruction of mankind. As we highlighted in our "Theses on Decomposition", the decomposition of capitalism can have the same effects as war: it can lead, in the long run, to the destruction of humanity and the planet if the proletariat does not succeed in overthrowing capitalism.

Self-criticism: a vital necessity for revolutionary organisations

To conclude, we must briefly answer the other question raised by Comrade D's letter, still concerning our questioning of the concept of "historic course”: "I have no other example of such a calling into question of a 'cornerstone' position of this importance in the 45 years since the creation of the ICC. Do tell me if there have been any precedents?"

There have indeed been some "precedents". The first is pointed out by the comrade himself: we had questioned the notion of a "course to revolution" to replace it with that of "course to class confrontations" in the 1980s. Indeed, the notion of a "course to revolution" was strongly marked by a certain immediacy on our part. The historic resumption of class struggle at the end of the 1960s did not mean that a new revolutionary wave was going to emerge quickly. It was the analysis of the slow rhythm of the economic crisis in the 1970s that allowed us to understand that this resumption of the class struggle could not yet immediately lead to a revolutionary uprising of the proletariat as was the case with the barbarity of the First World War.

Another example of the necessary rectification of our analyses is the question of the emergence of China as the second world power. In the past, we had indeed defended the idea that, in the period of decadence of capitalism, there was no possibility for the countries of the "Third World" (including China) to emerge from underdevelopment. It was in the light of the consequences of the collapse of the Eastern bloc with the opening up of the countries of the Soviet zone and their integration into the 'market economy' that we were led to revise this analysis, which had become obsolete. Nevertheless, this new analysis in no way called into question the historic framework of the decadence of capitalism.

Like revolutionaries in the past, the ICC has never been afraid to recognise and rectify its mistakes, nor to adapt its analyses to new realities in the world situation. If we were not able to criticise our own mistakes, we would not be an organisation faithful to the method of marxism. As Rosa Luxemburg said in September 1899, "There is probably no other party for which free and untiring criticism of its own shortcomings is as much a condition of existence as for social democracy. As we have to progress in line with social evolution, the continual modification of our methods of struggle and, consequently, the incessant criticism of our theoretical heritage, are the conditions for our growth. It goes without saying, however, that self-criticism in our Party only achieves its goal of serving progress, and we cannot be too pleased about this unless it moves in the direction of our struggle. Any criticism that contributes to making our class struggle more vigorous and conscious in achieving our final goal deserves our gratitude" ("Freedom of Criticism and Science").

It is in this sense that we must also welcome Comrade D's letter and his critical remarks. His questioning contributes to the public debate which we can only encourage. By opening the columns of our press, as we have always done, to any reader who wishes to criticise our analyses and positions, our aim is to develop the culture of debate within the working class and the proletarian political milieu.

Is the prospect of generalised nuclear war on the agenda?

The conditions for the outbreak of a generalised war

Comrade D states in his letter that "the question of war is not at all overcome by the theory of decomposition replacing the theory of the historic course."

Apart from the fact that the ruling class has not been able since 1989 to reconstitute new imperialist blocs, the comrade forgets that the second condition for the outbreak of a new world war is the ability of the bourgeoisie to recruit the proletariat behind national flags, especially in the central countries of capitalism. This is by no means the case today. As we have always affirmed, a proletariat that is not willing to accept the sacrifices imposed by the worsening economic crisis is not prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice of its life on the battlefield. After the long counter-revolutionary period where states were able to send millions of proletarians to their deaths behind the flags of fascism and anti-fascism during the Second World War, the working class returned to the stage of history at the end of the 1960s (May 68 in France, the "hot autumn" in Italy, etc.). The bourgeoisie had been prevented from unleashing a third planetary butchery during the Cold War because it was unable to recruit a proletariat which, although it was unable to develop its struggles on a revolutionary terrain, was both very combative and absolutely unwilling to be killed or to massacre its class brothers. Despite all the difficulties that the working class has faced in massively developing its struggles since 1989, the historical situation is still open. Since the proletariat has not suffered a decisive and definitive defeat, the worsening of the economic crisis can only push it to fight tooth and nail to defend its living conditions, as we have seen again recently with the movement against pension reform in France during the winter of 2019-2020. And in its capacity to resist the attacks of capital, we have also seen a tendency to seek solidarity in the struggle between all sectors and all generations. Of course, this in no way means that the bourgeoisie can never again inflict a historic and decisive defeat on the working class. But, as we affirmed in our "Theses on Decomposition" (International Review 107), social decomposition can destroy any capacity of the working class to overthrow capitalism and lead to the destruction of humanity and the planet.

Towards a reconstitution of imperialist blocs?

In support of his analysis of the current potential for a large-scale military conflict, Comrade D states: "Apart from the question of long-range nuclear weapons, there is at the moment one country that does not need to have formed a united and perfectly controlled and sustained bloc in order to embark on a war which, if not global, will not be confined to a theatre of operations limited in time and space (as in the two wars against Saddam Hussein, for example). It is of course the United States that has the economic power, the military supremacy and the bases nonetheless for intervention anywhere in the world. For a war with battles in different parts of the planet, which take place simultaneously and over a fairly long period of time (several years) to occur, all that is needed is for another power, which has several vassal states through foreign trade and economic investment, to set up military bases abroad in these vassal states, start building aircraft carriers and generally an efficient and numerous navy, so that at some point the risk of widespread conflict becomes a significant probability. This country already exists, it is China which, thanks to the Covid-19 epidemic, may soon overtake the United States economically".

It is true that it is around the conflict between these two superpowers that the strategic battle for a "new world order" is focused. China, with its vast "Silk Road" programme, aims to establish itself as a leading economic power by 2030-50 and to build up by 2050 a "world-class army capable of winning victory in any modern war". Such ambitions are causing a general destabilisation of relations between imperialist states and are pushing the United States to try since 2013 to contain and break the rise of the Chinese power that threatens it. The American response, which began with Obama (taken up and amplified by Trump), represents a turning point in American policy. The defence of its interests as a national state now embraces the "every man for himself" which dominates imperialist relations: the US is moving from the role of policeman of world order to that of principal propagator of "every man for himself" and the chaos and calling into question of the world order established in 1945 under its aegis. On the other hand, the idea inferred by what the comrade says is that there is a tendency towards bipolarisation, since on the one hand the European countries, within the framework of NATO, would take the side of the United States, while China would not only be able to rely on its vassal states but would have a major ally, Russia.

Yet the emergence of China itself is a product of the phase of decomposition, in which the tendency towards bipolarisation is being broken by "every man for himself" reigning between each imperialist power. Similarly, there is a big difference between the development of this tendency and a concrete process leading to the formation of new blocs. The increasingly aggressive attitudes of the two major powers tend to undermine rather than reinforce this process. China is deeply distrusted by all its neighbours, especially Russia, which often aligns itself with China only to defend its immediate interests (as it does in Syria), but is terrified of being subordinated to China because of the latter's economic power, and remains one of the fiercest opponents of Beijing's "Silk Road" project. America, meanwhile, has been actively engaged in dismantling virtually all the structures of the old bloc that it had previously used to preserve its "new world order" and which resisted the shift in international relations towards "every man for himself". It increasingly treats its NATO allies as enemies, and in general has become one of the main actors in aggravating the chaotic nature of current imperialist relations.

Is a nuclear war possible in the current period?

In short, by putting to one side one of the essential conditions for the outbreak of a new world war (the need for the ideological enlistment of the proletariat), comrade D puts forward another hypothesis. He refers to articles in the bourgeois press (L'Obs and Le Canard Enchaîné) to affirm that a nuclear war is quite possible, notably between the US and China (which has become an industrial and imperialist power facing the first world power).

As we have always affirmed, imperialism has its own dynamics and is an integral part of the way of life of capitalism in its period of decadence. And as Jean Jaurès said, "capitalism brings war as the cloud brings the storm". No economic power can compete with others, and assert itself as such on the world stage, without developing ever more sophisticated weapons. The trade war between states is therefore always accompanied by an exacerbation of imperialist tensions. While it is true that nuclear armament is no longer just a means of "deterrence" as it was during the "Cold War", today the arms race is a means of blackmail and bargaining between nuclear-armed states. The exacerbation of imperialist tensions does not always lead to a direct conflagration, as we saw, for example, in 2017 with the military tensions between the US and North Korea (which had moreover given rise to alarmist talk in the bourgeois press). After several months of negotiations, this conflict ended (at least momentarily) with warm embraces between Trump (president of the United States) and Kim Jong-un (president of North Korea).

The more the bourgeoisie is forced to face the bankruptcy of its system and the acceleration of the trade war, the more each power seeks to advance its pawns in the imperialist world arena for the control of strategic positions against its rivals. As capitalism sinks into social decomposition, the bourgeoisie appears more and more as a suicidal class. Uncontrolled slip-ups on the imperialist level cannot be ruled out in the future if the proletariat does not take up the challenge posed by the gravity of the historical situation. But for the moment, the perspective of a nuclear conflagration between China and the US is not on the agenda. Moreover, what interest would these two powers have to gain by massively dropping nuclear bombs on their rival? The destruction would be such that no occupying troops from the victorious country could be sent to the piles of ruins. We have always rejected the vision of the "push-button" war, where the bourgeoisie could unleash a global nuclear cataclysm at the touch of a button, without any need for the proletariat to be recruited. The ruling class is not completely stupid, even if irresponsible and completely insane heads of state can come to power at particular moments. It is not a question of underestimating the danger of imperialist tensions between the great nuclear powers like China and the US, nor of totally ruling out the prospect of a conflagration between these two powers in the future, but of measuring the catastrophic repercussions at the world level: none of the warring powers would be able to take advantage of it. Contrary to the alarmist rhetoric of certain media and the predictions of geopoliticians, we must guard against playing Nostradamus. If the dynamic of imperialism (the outcome of which we cannot predict today) leads to such a situation, its origin will be in the total loss of control by the ruling class over its decomposing system. We're not there yet and we must be careful not to "cry wolf" prematurely.

Revolutionaries must not give in to the pervasive idea of "no future". On the contrary, they must keep faith in the future, in the capacity of the proletariat and its younger generations to overthrow capitalism before it destroys the planet and humanity. By abandoning today our past analysis of the "historical course", we do not now have, as comrade D thinks, a "pessimistic" vision of the future. We still bet on the possibility of generalised class confrontations allowing the proletariat to recover and affirm its revolutionary perspective. We have never, in any of our articles, announced a "defeat" for the proletariat, as our reader's letter maintains.

Sofiane

[1] "Report on the question of the historic course", International Review 164 (first half of 2020).

In the article below we show how, faced with “an accelerated deterioration and precariousness of living conditions”, students in France demonstrated on 21 January 2021, when “hundreds of students took to the streets across France to express their anger and frustration”.

In the UK students have also fought against the same worsening of their living conditions with rent strikes that involved thousands of students at dozens of universities, lasting from October 2020 until February 2021. Besides a rent rebate, at several universities students also demanded a reduction in tuition fees

With regular government guidelines to stay at home over the past year, many students in Britain have found themselves spending less time in student accommodation. But many of them were still expected to pay the full rent on empty rooms.

In this situation students had their backs against the wall. So they decided to take action and started to collectively organise to withhold their rent from universities. After an initial rejection, the spontaneous initiatives of the first rent strikes were then ‘taken over’ by the student unions. Others seem to have been organised by self-appointed leftist committees.

The most combative example was set “by the rent strikes in Bristol and Manchester. These strikes, both large and militant in character, have shown students not only that it is possible to organise a rent strike, but that it is only through collective, militant action that students can win against the marketised university”. (Matthew, Lee Rent Strike Reflections).

The demands put forward by striking students in Manchester in October-November revealed broader concerns, as their demands were not limited to rent alone, but also included other issues such as flooding, rat infestations and lack of access to facilities due to lockdown.

And confronted with “regularly stopped face-to-face classes in universities, leaving students with no other perspective than a face-to-face meeting with a computer screen”, the Manchester students also expressed their grievances against the lack of support for students during isolation and the cancelling of the face-to-face teaching.

Unlike the protest in France, which showed tendencies to question present capitalist society, the rent strikes in the UK were limited to students' specific concerns, but were not of a lesser importance. Firmly anchored on the terrain of the defence of immediate living conditions, it shows the way to the working class as a whole.

The movement in the UK, the biggest wave of university rent strikes in four decades, revealed that the situation of students in Europe is not limited to France. Students in the UK experience the same conditions and, as we have seen in the past few months, are determined to fight for descent living conditions and “the right to study with dignity”.

WR 23/3/21

On 21 January, hundreds of students took to the streets across France to express their anger and frustration. For a year now, in an attempt to cope with the pandemic, the government has regularly stopped face-to-face classes in universities, leaving students with no other prospect than virtual meetings in front of a computer screen. President Macron may have said that a lockdown only for the old and the young was out of the question, but this is one of the main thrusts of French government policy for managing the pandemic. As a result, courses are limited to online meetings for the lucky ones or just reading pdf files for the rest. As for lecturers on sick leave, they are not replaced and students have to try on their own to find the content of their courses on the internet. In addition to this isolation, financial insecurity makes young people among the first victims of increasing poverty. In normal circumstances 40% of students work to try and pay their bills... but student jobs have all but disappeared, leaving a large number of them struggling to make ends meet. 75% of students say they have financial difficulties. Many can no longer afford to pay their rent or even to feed themselves after the middle of the month, which has led to a growing number of students being reduced to using "soup kitchens" and resorting to "food banks".

The few crumbs distributed by the Macron government to pacify people will not change anything. A health voucher to go and see a psychologist?... There's typically only 1 for every 30,000 students on campus! Two meals at a euro per day?... This has led some university restaurants to drastically reduce the portions and quality of meals!

Less money, almost no social life, no prospects, this is the fate that society is "offering" to the younger generation: "One young person in six has stopped studying, 30% has given up access to healthcare, and more than half are worried about their mental health"[1]. Psychological problems have escalated, affecting 30% of students compared to 20% four years ago.[2] The extreme isolation, linked to the pandemic and the atomisation of capitalist society, seems to be affecting a whole generation. Faced with such an unbearable situation, suicide attempts have multiplied in recent months[3], a further sign of despair and the absence of a future among an increasing minority of the population.

"Between fatigue, limbo, anger and loneliness, what do we do?"[4]

If students see themselves as "an abandoned generation", they are not ready to give up and let themselves be trampled by putrefying capitalism. "The life of a student should not end in the cemetery!”[5].

Thus, despite the health risk, the most combative have taken to the streets to denounce their living conditions but also on behalf of those who remain isolated: "that's also why we're here, to speak out for the others", said a student on a demonstration[6].

But the student malaise has existed for years, even decades. Already, in 2017, 20% of students were living below the poverty line and 46% were working for a living. These are telling statistics; students' cost of living has been rising steadily since 2009[7]. In September 2019, as a personification of this endless degradation, a student set himself on fire in front of the CROUS[8] of the University of Lyon. He accompanied his gesture with a message on Facebook in which he denounced the conditions of student life and "the policies carried out for several years" by the various fractions of the bourgeoisie in power, "Macron, Hollande, Sarkozy in particular".[9] In response, students took to the streets to demand the right to study with dignity: "Precariousness kills!" "Decent living conditions for all students"[10], you could already read in the period before Covid.

Today, if the pandemic has certainly reinforced isolation and atomisation, it has only been a catalyst for the continuous deterioration of student living conditions, not only in France but throughout the European Union and in Britain, where an accelerated deterioration and precariousness of living conditions is widespread.[11] A proportion of the new generation of proletarians is suffering. Anger is not only directed against the harmful effects of the Covid crisis such as atomisation and the lockdown imposed by the state. As we could see in the demonstrations, the concerns remained much broader: "students in revolt: against the state and precariousness", "students: isolating us is their weapon, solidarity was, is, and will be our response", "at school, at university, at the factory and everywhere, let's fight precariousness and poverty".[12] Behind these demands, there is an underlying theme: How to fight against this society? How can we imagine a different future?

The student demonstrations of this January in France are in line with the struggles of autumn 2019 and winter 2020. Although initially stunned and unable to react to the outbreak of the pandemic, the will to fight has not been totally broken, nor the ability to struggle together, to discuss and to exchange points of view, even if the path to the development of more massive struggles is still long.

These struggles have been very short-lived because of the health situation and the capacity of the bourgeoisie to defuse actions very quickly by dismissing the "fear" of a new lockdown and by the work of division of the unions. The latter did everything possible to prevent the participation of students in the interprofessional day of action of 6 February by organising alternative rallies and isolated and sterile general assemblies inside the universities themselves or by putting forward slogans such as "forgotten youth: we won't pay for the crisis"!

However, despite these attempts to portray young people as being "sacrificed for the health of the elderly", students aren't swallowing these stories. "70% of 18-30 year olds think that it is shocking to say that their generation has been sacrificed to save the elderly".[13]

No: there is no conflict of interest between generations of the same class! It is in solidarity and from the lessons of past struggles that young proletarians must draw their strength. Capitalism has nothing to offer to any proletarian generation. The slogan coined during the movement against the First Employment Contract (CPE) in 2006 remains fully relevant: "Young bacon, old croutons, all part of the same salad"[14].

Élise, 18 February 2021

We are publishing here a three-part series on the question of education that first appeared in the pages of World Revolution in 2001 (numbers 243-245). While it starts with references to the UK general election of 2001, what the series says is still relevant today. On the views developed by the workers’ movement in the 19th century, on the contradictory approach of the bourgeoise in capitalism's decadence, on the programme of the Bolsheviks when it dealt with education, or on certain traps that revolutionaries have to fight against today, all these questions have not become outdated with the passage of time.

Education remains important for the working class, and we can see how students, whether at school or university, are currently suffering with the impact of the pandemic and the lockdown – from social isolation, disruption to their educational programmes, and, in the universities, exorbitant fees and rents. The bourgeoisie has been cutting education budgets for years, but still needs skilled workers to exploit. Hypocritically it talks about the importance of education while reducing the necessary funding. It's true that education is one of the means for instilling bourgeois ideology, but it's also necessary for workers to be able function in capitalist society. This doesn’t alter the fact that, as the articles conclude, there will need to be a "fundamental reorganisation of education in the post-revolutionary period of transition to a truly human community".

WR, March 2021

Part 1: A class sunk in ignorance may revolt, but it will never make a revolution

Education has always been important to the working class. From the first days of the workers’ movement there were demands for children to attend school as well as attempts at self-education. Today, every part of the ruling class plays on this concern, just as they play on the concern for health care. In reality, the interests of the two classes remain as opposed in the realm of education as they do in every other aspect of life.

During the 1997 general election Labour promised to make education their “number one priority” with increased spending, lower class sizes and improved standards. For their part, the Tories claimed that they had already increased spending by 48% in real terms and guaranteed to set new national standards that would require schools to improve their performance. As the next election gets closer the game has been renewed, with Labour boasting that investment will grow by a third between 1998/9 and 2003/4, with an additional £2bn being spent on school buildings this year alone. The Tories have replied that schools are weighed down by bureaucracy and class sizes have actually increased. Not to be outdone, the leftists have put forward their own promises which, since they will never be put into practice, are limited only by what they think people will fall for. The SWP in its alternative budget last month promised £12bn while the Socialist Alliance went for £22bn to be funded from the sale of mobile phone licences. All of these demands and promises are just so many tricks to divert the real concern of the working class into support for the system of education set up by the ruling class to serve its own interests. They all aim to sow the illusion that, despite the economic crisis, capitalism has the means to provide an education through which the individual can realise his or her potential.

The situation of the working class

As the industrial revolution developed in Britain through the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the ruling class saw no need to educate the ‘hands’ who laboured for them. This was revealed in the various official reports compiled at the time for the government. These found children not only unable to read or write, but also unable to do the most simple maths: “A boy, seventeen years old, ‘did not know how many two and two made, nor how many farthings there were in twopence, even when the money was placed in his hand.’” Their general knowledge was found to be equally poor: “Several boys had never heard of London… Several had never heard the name of the Queen nor other names such as Nelson, Wellington, Bonaparte […] a third, seventeen years old, answered several very simple questions with the brief statement, that ‘he was ne judge o’ nothin’.” These excerpts were drawn together by Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1842-4 and led him to conclude: “The means of education in England are restricted out of all proportion to the population. The few day schools at the command of the working class are available only for the smallest minority and are bad besides. The teachers, worn out workers and other unsuitable persons who only turn to education in order to live, are usually without the indispensable elementary knowledge, without the moral discipline so needful for the teacher, and relieved of all public supervisions.” It has been estimated that, in 1839, 41.6% of the population were illiterate, with the rate being considerably higher amongst women than men. Expenditure on education was virtually non-existent: Engels gives a figure of £40,000 for 1844 out of a ministerial budget of some £55 million, mainly split between schools run by the established Anglican Church or the smaller dissenting sects, where religious prejudice was the main subject. Many Sunday Schools refused to teach writing, either because it was seen as too worldly an activity for a Sunday or because of the belief that all a working person required was the ability to read the bible. New teaching methods introduced in this period reduced education to the rote learning of chunks of ‘knowledge’ to be answered mechanically in question and answer form. Given this, the rate of literacy suggested by the figures quoted above should be treated with caution. In this period the bourgeoisie were not confident in their ability to use education to control and indoctrinate the working class and feared the spread of knowledge to a class that had already shown a tendency to question the established order in both words and deeds. Consequently, as Engels argues, the main form of education was force and what this taught was class hatred: “There is, therefore, no cause for surprise if the workers, treated as brutes, actually become such; or if they can maintain their consciousness of manhood only by cherishing the most glowing hatred, the most unbroken inward rebellion against the bourgeoisie in power. They are men only so long as they burn with wrath against the ruling class. They become brutes the moment they bend in patience under the yoke, and merely strive to make life endurable while abandoning the effort to break the yoke.”

The efforts of the working class

The working class did not sit idly by, waiting for their betters to condescend to educate them. Nor did they generally oppose education because they wanted their children to work.

During the first decades of the nineteenth century repeated demands were made to Parliament to reduce the working day. This was an essential precondition if children were to learn anything, since working weeks of up to 72 hours left them neither the time nor the energy for schooling. Between 1802 and 1833, five Labour Laws were passed, but no resources were ever made available for their implementation. It was not until the Act of 1833 established Factory Inspectors, raised the age at which children could be employed and restricted their working hours, that any progress was possible. Even then the proposals were so hedged around with exceptions that they had little real effect. This and subsequent legislation allowed children a few hours education a day.

Alongside this struggle, the working class maintained and developed a tradition of self-education. E.P. Thompson, in The Making of the English Working Class, describes some of the weaving communities where the inhabitants had some control over the pattern of work and could intersperse weaving and education both of their children and themselves: “Every weaving district had its weaver-poets, biologists, mathematicians, musicians, geologists, botanists... there are accounts of weavers in isolated villages who taught themselves geometry by chalking on their flagstones and who were eager to discuss the differential calculus.” (p.322). Where such traditional patterns of life had been destroyed by the development of the factory system, the desire for education still emerged amongst the artisans or mechanics who were the direct product of the new system. This was expressed in the building of Mechanics Institutes and Halls of Science, in the proliferation of clubs and the publication of numerous journals and pamphlets. If these partly echoed the bourgeois ideology of self-improvement, they also expressed a class attitude. This could be seen particularly in the political journals that came and went with such frequency in the early 19th century and which were a focus for the discussion of strategy, whether constitutional or revolutionary. This was particularly true of papers like the Poor Man’s Guardian and, above all, the Northern Star. It was common practice for groups of workers to take out a joint subscription and for the paper to be read aloud to the rest of the group and then discussed. Many workers later described this as the foundation of their political education. On the particular question of the education of children, the Chartists explicitly opposed its control by the middle class and attempts were made to set up their own schools.

Education and the workers’ movement

The demand for education featured in nearly every programmatic statement of the workers’ movement throughout the 19th century, from the Communist League in 1847 to the Erfurt Programme of the German Social Democratic Party in 1891. In 1845 Engels argued that the introduction of general education for children was one of the measures “which are bound to result in practical communism” (Collected Works, Vol.4, p.253) since “an educated proletariat will not be disposed to remain in the oppressed condition in which our present proletariat finds itself” (ibid. p.254). At the start of the 20th century, the Bolsheviks called for compulsory education to the age of 16. However, this demand was rarely just for a greater quantity of education, it also included a critique of the role and content of education in class society that went far beyond the demand for increased provision.

Underlying the critique is the recognition that humanity in capitalist society is alienated from itself as a result of the division of labour in which the separate interests of the individual are opposed to the common interests of humanity. “For as soon as the division of labour comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood.” (Marx & Engels The German Ideology). This is contrasted with communist society: “whereas in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming a hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” (ibid).

Consequently, education in capitalist society can never be about the full realisation of the potential of humanity, either individually or collectively, but only about training people to fulfil those tasks necessary for the continuation of capitalism. This point was made by William Morris in 1888: “People are ‘educated’ to become workmen or the employers of workmen or the hangers-on of the employers, they are not educated to become men. With this aim in view the conditions under which true education can go on are impossible. For the first and most necessary of them are leisure and deliberation; and leisure is a thing which the modern slave-holder will by no means grant to his slave as long as he grants him his rations: when the leisure begins the rations end. Constant toil is the only terms on which they are to be had.” (“Thoughts on education under capitalism”, Commonweal, Vol.4, no. 129, in Morris Political Writings p.377).

This did not mean that the struggle for education was useless since, as Engels argued, a class sunk in ignorance may revolt but will never make a revolution. For Marxists in the 19th century, education was not only a reform that could be won and which could improve the immediate situation of the working class, it was also a contribution to the revolutionary struggle against bourgeois society. The Communist League argued in 1847 in the “Principles of Communism”, that education would come with democracy and would in turn help prepare the way for communism. At the time this tended to be seen as the work of the state embodied in the democratic constitution, but later Marx and Engels developed their critique of the role of the state. In 1875, when the SPD adopted the Gotha Programme, which called for “Universal and equal public education by the state”, Marx strongly attacked the uncritical reliance on the bourgeois state: “’Equal education of the people’? What idea lies behind these words? Is it believed that in present day society… education can be equal for all classes? […] ‘Education of the people by the state’ is altogether objectionable… Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school.” (Collected Works Vol.24, p.96-7). In Britain socialists stood for election to the local boards which ran schools in order to counter the influence of church and state.

The struggle for education thus moved directly into a struggle over the form and content of education. Here Marx actually argued that the development of capitalism itself, and specifically the educational clauses of the 1864 Factory Act, were the germ of a new form of education: “an education that will, in the case of every child over a given age, combine productive labour with instruction and gymnastics, not only as one of the methods of adding to the efficiency of production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human beings.” (Capital Vol.1, p.454).

The second part of this article will examine the education system actually set up by the bourgeoisie in the 19th and 20th centuries and how the passage of capitalism into its period of decadence influenced the position of the workers’ movement on this question.

Part 2: Education in decadence: the guardian of class rule

The extension of education to the working class by the bourgeoisie was very hesitant. It was not made free and compulsory in Britain until the start of the 20th century and it was only after the First World War that consideration was given to extending secondary education to all children, and then only to the age of 14. The leaving age was raised to 15 after the Second World War and to 16 in the 1970s. It was only in the last decades of the 20th century that tertiary education for workers developed to any significant extent.

Two basic concerns have shaped the bourgeoisie’s educational policy towards the working class.

Firstly, the need to increase productivity in order to remain competitive against its economic rivals. In the first half of the 19th century Britain had no significant rivals and the productive processes were relatively simple and, consequently, there was no real need to educate the working class. However, in the second half of the century competitors began to emerge in Germany and America whose production was based on the most advanced technology. Britain could only compete by adopting the new and more complex production processes. This required a more skilled and developed workforce. “Industry needed operatives who were able to read its rules and regulations, and an increasing supply of skilled workers able to work to drawings and to write at any rate a simple sentence. Commerce needed a rapidly growing army of clerks, book-keepers, shop assistants, touts and commercial travellers. The state needed more Civil Servants and local government employees for the developing tasks of public administration.” (Cole and Postgate, The Common People, p.364).

Secondly, concerns about the ability to control the working class. In the decade following the French Revolution of 1789 the British ruling class adopted some of the most repressive measures in its history. All attempts to organise by the working class were attacked. A wide-spread system of spies and agent-provocateurs was established. Workers were executed, transported and imprisoned. Despite this the strategy failed: “The pamphleteers were gaoled, and from the goals they edited pamphlets. The trade unionists were imprisoned, and they were attended to prison by bands and union banners.” (E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p.914). The culmination was the Chartist Movement, which organised as a working class party and, at times, threatened the power of the ruling class. Yet the movement also marked a turning point in the strategy of the ruling class. Alongside direct repression ran a more subtle tactic which aimed to pacify and diffuse the working class. One result was the relative leniency shown to many Chartist activists by the courts. Throughout the remainder of the 19th century the British bourgeoisie refined the mixture of flexibility and brutality for which it became famous. It learnt how to use reforms to disarm the working class. Where the extension of the vote threatened the ruling class in 1800, by 1900 it was on the verge of becoming the bedrock of that rule. Where a popular press threatened to drown out the ideology of the ruling class it became its loudest mouthpiece. Where education threatened to be the great leveller it became the guardian of class rule.

The spread of education

Prior to 1870, various pieces of legislation had been passed which permitted the setting up of schools, and grants had been given to two voluntary bodies, one under the control of the Church of England and the other by the dissenting sects. The money granted had grown from £30,000 in 1839 to £813,000 in 1861 but was reduced to £637,000 over the following four years in response to complaints of waste. At the same time teachers’ pay was tied to ‘results’. The Education Act of 1870, which is usually presented as the turning point in the provision of education, actually made it neither compulsory nor free. It only sought to supplement the work of the voluntary bodies by allowing locally elected School Boards to set up schools were none already existed. Nonetheless, the new system advanced rapidly and by 1876 School Boards existed in areas with a total population of 12.5 million. In the same year attendance was made compulsory, although there were some exemptions. In 1891 fees for ‘elementary’ education were abolished except in schools offering ‘higher grade’ education.

The content of this education is not so well documented. Many political autobiographies of the time begin when the author left school. Tom Bell (first of the Socialist Labour Party and then of the Communist Party) went to school in Glasgow between 1889 and 1894. He left at the age of eleven and a half, recalling the difficulty his family had in finding the money each fortnight to pay for school, and the cruelty of some teachers which “led to their being mobbed by the boys after school hours” (Pioneering Days, p.17). More detail is given by Flora Thompson who went to school in rural Oxfordshire at the end of the 19th century: “Reading, writing and arithmetic were the principal subjects, with a scripture lesson every morning, and needlework every afternoon for the girls… Governess taught all the classes simultaneously, assisted only by two monitors – ex-scholars aged about twelve who were paid a shilling a week for their services… The writing lesson consisted in copying copperplate maxims… History was not taught formally; but history readers were in use containing such picturesque stories as those of King Alfred and the cakes, King Canute commanding the waves… and Raleigh spreading his cloak for Queen Elizabeth.” (Lark Rise to Candleford, p.179-80).

The education for most working class children went no further. In 1897 fewer than 7% of children at grammar school came from the working class. When the leaving age was raised to 14 in 1900, two out of 5 working class children still left before this age. The Education Act of 1902 nominally increased the opportunity for children to go on to secondary education but actually reinforced the class divisions in education: “The two systems of education catered for different classes and provided education, different in quality and content, for rulers and ruled.” (A.J.P. Taylor English History 1914-1945, p.226). “The British therefore entered the twentieth century and the age of modern science and technology as a spectacularly ill-educated people.” (E.J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, p.169).

Education in decadence

Paradoxically it is in the period of capitalism’s historic decline that the greatest development of education took place. This is explained by the fact that one of the principal characteristics of decadence is a massively increased role for the state, which more and more has to control all aspects of the nation in order to compete with its rivals. Education became an integral part of state capitalism, and education policy was determined by the economic and political needs of the ruling class. As in many areas, war provided much of the impetus, with three of the major pieces of legislation in the 20th century directly following wars (the 1902 Act after the Boer War, the 1918 Act after the First World War and the 1944 Act towards the end of the second).

The 1918 Act proposed a system of education stretching from nursery schools to adult evening classes. However most of these proposals were swept aside as the economy went into recession. Where spending had increased between 1914 and 1922 from £14.7m to £51m, it was cut by nearly £10m the following year. The attempt to extend secondary education failed with only 7.5% going on beyond Elementary School in 1923. While, by 1938 two in three children were attending ‘modern’ schools which offered a slightly extended education, only some 14% of working class children actually went from elementary to secondary education, ensuring that all of the class distinctions were maintained. At higher levels the numbers dropped away completely, with just 0.4% to 0.5% of Elementary school pupils going on to university.

The attempt to plan a more efficient education system for the needs of capitalism continued, notably with the Hadow Report commissioned by the Labour government of 1924 laying the foundations for the 1944 Act. Education thinking was strongly influenced by pseudo-scientific studies of the child mind and the supposed inherited nature of intelligence which justified the existing division of society. While all children were to go from primary to secondary education only a minority were to go to the elite grammar school with the majority going to Secondary Moderns or, in a few cases, to technical schools. All children, however, were to receive religious instruction, which was made compulsory for the first time by the 1944 Act.

The introduction of comprehensive schools in the 1960s actually made little difference, since ‘streaming’ and ‘setting’ meant that the divisions merely existed within the schools rather than between them. The period also saw a major expansion of the universities and technical colleges which, for the first time, allowed significant numbers of working class children to go on to further education. However, one of the principal aims of this expansion, to increase the number of workers with higher scientific and technical training, met with little success.

As the economic crisis began to hit home in the 1970s and ‘80s both Labour and Tory governments sought to tie the education system more closely to the economic needs of the ruling class. In the late 1970s Labour introduced a ‘core curriculum’ covering literacy and numeracy. This was developed by the Tories in the 1988 Education Act which established a National Curriculum with attainment targets for all children, who were to be tested at the ages of 7, 11, 14 and 16. Further education is also under attack with the replacement of student grants by loans, which inevitably affects working class children the most. Children now go into education under pressure to achieve spurious ‘targets’ that have nothing to do with realising their potential and leave weighed down by a debt that may take years to pay off. Many now avoid education, either by not attending at all or being disruptive when they are there. A recent report by the TUC revealed that half a million children are employed illegally, with many working unsocial hours and receiving extremely low wages. Thus, as capitalism continues to rot, even the limited reforms it once gave are now under threat, although the needs of competition and political control make it likely that the pace of attacks on education will continue to be tightly controlled.

Part 3: Defence of state education is not a workers’ demand

In WR 243 we outlined the marxist critique of education, recalling that the workers’ movement in the 19th century gave a high priority to the struggle for education and also supported self-education by the working class. In WR 244 we examined the system of education set up by the ruling class in Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries, concluding that its fundamental role is to produce workers with the necessary skills to serve the needs of the economy and to reinforce the ideology of the ruling class as a means of controlling the working class. Capitalism is unable to offer an education that meets the needs and potential of humanity. In this concluding article we show the marxist approach and look at the practical lessons from the Russian revolution, as well as the position of revolutionaries today.

The Russian Revolution

The demand for compulsory education had been part of the programme of Russian Social Democracy, as it had of all Social Democratic parties in the period before the revolution. Following the revolution some immediate steps were taken to extend education to the masses. However, the difficult situation in which the revolution developed and the rapid spread of the counter-revolution meant that these could only be first hesitant steps. But this did not prevent the Bolsheviks from setting out a long term perspective for the development of education, which was seen as central to the establishment of communism.

The priority given to education is shown in the setting up of the Commissariat of Public Education in December 1917. Immediate steps included the confiscation of private libraries for collective use, extending opening hours of libraries and the creation of a system to exchange books across the country. In August 1918 the Council of People’s Commissars called for measures to be taken to increase the availability of higher education, concluding that “Priority must certainly go to workers and poor peasants, who are to be given grants on an extensive scale” (Lenin, Collected Works, vol.28, p.48.). The Programme of the Russian Communist Party, adopted in March 1919, set out a series of measures, the majority of which were aimed at overcoming the country’s previous backwardness. It proposed free education for all children up to the age of 17, the provision of food, clothing, footwear and educational materials by the state, the creation of crèches and nurseries to reduce the workload on women and a range of measures for the education of adult workers and peasants. Lenin also argued that education was an important aspect of the struggle to increase production.

One of Lenin’s repeated concerns was to transform the educational system and, in particular, to overcome opposition from teachers and other educationalists. In 1918 Lenin talked of teachers being “slow in making up their minds to work with the Soviet Government” (ibid, vol.27, p.445). The following year he told a conference of the teachers’ union that “I think that now the vast majority of teachers will quite sincerely come over to the side of the government of working and exploited people in the struggle for the socialist revolution” (ibid, vol.28, p.407). By 1920 he spoke of solving “the cultural and educational problem” in “five to ten years” (ibid, vol.30, p.379). At the same time however, he was also warning about the slow pace of the campaign against illiteracy. As the revolutionary wave weakened the situation got worse. By 1922 Lenin was complaining that “five years after the proletariat captured political power, the young people in the proletariat’s state schools and universities are taught (or rather corrupted) by the old bourgeois scientists using the old bourgeois junk” (ibid, vol.33, p.246). As the counter-revolution gathered pace the education system increasingly reverted back to the bourgeois form.

Education and the creation of communism

Unlike the bourgeoisie, communists do not pretend that education is neutral, standing above the clash of class interests. In capitalism education defends the class interests of the exploiters. After the proletarian revolution it will defend the class interests of the exploited in the struggle for communism.

The political role of education was set out bluntly in the Programme of the Russian Communist Party. This called for the transformation of the school “so that from being an organ for maintaining the class domination of the bourgeoisie, it shall become an organ for the complete abolition of the division of society into classes, an organ for the communist regeneration of society…the school must not be merely a means for the conveyance of the principles of communism generally, but a means for the conveyance of the ideology and of the organisation and educational influence of the proletariat to the semi-proletarian strata of the working masses to the end that there shall ultimately be educated a new generation capable of establishing communism” (Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism, p.444). At the heart of the programme was the proposal for a “unified labour school…with instruction in the native tongue, co-education, absolutely secular education… an instruction in which theory shall be closely linked with socially productive labour, an instruction which shall produce a many-sided development of the members of communist society”. This echoed Marx’s ideas about education, while the commentary on the Programme contained in the ABC of Communism recalled his description of the realisation of individual potential in communist society: “Every citizen in such a society must be acquainted with the elements, at least, of all crafts. In communist society there will be no closed corporations, no stereotyped guilds, no petrified specialist groups. The most brilliant man of science must also be skilled in manual labour… play should gradually pass into work by an imperceptible transition, so that the child learns from the very outset to look upon labour, not as a disagreeable necessity or as a punishment, but as a natural and spontaneous expression of faculty.” (ibid, p.288. For a fuller discussion of the Programme of the Russian Communist Part see International Review 95).

The same understanding of the political nature of education led revolutionaries of the time, such as the Dutch International Communist Group (GIK), to see the re-introduction of authoritarian regulations in the schools as a sign of the advance of the counter-revolution (see the text of the GIK reprinted in International Review 105).

That the Russian revolution was unable to even begin to translate this aspiration into reality does not in any way lessen its validity. If the proletariat seizes power again it will also take up again the struggle to transform education courageously attempted by the Bolsheviks.

Revolutionaries and education today

If one reads the platforms and manifestos of revolutionary groups today, such as the ICC and the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP), no mention will be found of education. This is fundamentally because the demand for education is no longer a revolutionary or even a radical demand since education is essential for bourgeois society today. This applies both to the most developed countries and the least. The limitation of education in the latter stems fundamentally from their weak position within the global economy, even if the lack of education contributes to that weakness in turn.

The ABC of Communism remains a useful starting point for understanding the role of education in capitalism: “In bourgeois society the school has three principal tasks to fulfil. Firstly, it inspires the coming generation of workers with devotion and respect for the capitalist regime. Secondly, it creates from the young of the ruling classes ‘cultured’ controllers of the working population. Thirdly, it assists capitalist production in the application of sciences to technique, thus increasing capitalist profits” (op.cit., p.279). However, important developments mean that this analysis has to be brought up to date. The Bolsheviks’ programme was drawn up at the dawn of the period of revolutions and just after capitalism had entered its period of decadence. Revolutionaries had only drawn out some of the implications of state capitalism, and their analyses were marked by the positions of the previous period. In addition, the Bolsheviks were influenced by the backward nature of education in Russia, where some supporters of tsarism “considered popular ignorance to be the main prop of the autocracy” (ibid, p.280, fn). The explains the failure of the ABC to see that as well as preparing new workers ideologically, bourgeois education also aims to prepare them practically to serve the needs of capitalism and that, in order to do so it must open the doors of secondary and higher education to the working class. The point concerning the close relationship between industry and the education establishment is still true. If anything, this has become even closer, with industry funding much of the research undertaken in universities and paying for many professorial chairs. Above all, what remains valid is the recognition that bourgeois education reflects the class interests of the bourgeoisie.

This analysis does not mean revolutionaries ‘reject education’. But there are certain ideas in the field of education which have to be fought.

Firstly, we reject the call of the leftists to defend state education. It promotes the illusion that the capitalist state could be made to offer a real education to the working class. It is worth recalling the position of Marx and Engels, when they were in the Communist League, that the demand for education is a democratic, not a communist, demand. Today capitalism can give nothing because of the constant threats of a permanent economic crisis. Communists should not join the bourgeoisie in trying to fool the working class that capitalism can meet its needs.

Secondly, we oppose the rejection of education and the identification of teachers as ‘part of the bourgeoisie’. The disaffection of growing numbers of children may be an understandable response to a society that offers no future, but it is an expression of despair that offers no perspective. Ignorance is not revolutionary and history has shown that it is the ally of reaction. The idea that teachers are not part of the working class is quite widespread. For example, in the 80s the British journal Wildcat described teachers as ‘soft cops’ and opposed their strike action. More recently, the Anarchist Federation criticised striking school students in France who called for more teachers, making the same argument as Wildcat: “Did you ever hear of an action by prisoners whose aim was more wardens?” (Organise! 50, Winter ‘98-’99). The fact that teachers are part of an education system that spreads the ideology of the bourgeoisie does not exclude them from the working class. Like all workers, all they have to sell is their labour power. One of the consequences of the spread of education is that teachers are no longer part of the petty-bourgeoisie, but have become proletarians. To be consistent, ‘revolutionaries’ such as Wildcat and the AF, should also exclude workers in the media and publishing industries since they also help to spread bourgeois ideology. Equally, the fact that teachers often have illusions in bourgeois society and advance reactionary demands does not exclude them from the working class, any more than it excludes the Rover car workers who marched behind Union Jacks in Birmingham. The fact is that the working class exists in capitalism and, through its labour, reproduces it day in and day out. The working class has no choice but to live the contradictions of capitalism. To pretend that it can be exploited by capital but untainted by capitalist ideology, is to reject the basic social reality in which all workers find themselves.

Thirdly, we reject the idea of opting out of education, either to send children to ‘alternative’ schools or to indulge in ‘home-teaching’. These are not an option for the working class. They have nothing to do with the attempts by the Chartists and Owenites in the 19th century to establish their own schools, since these were part of the infancy of the workers’ movement when many such utopian ideas flourished. They were left behind as the movement developed and it was understood that capitalism had to be confronted and overthrown. Today, all such efforts are a retreat from the necessary confrontation with capitalist society rather than an honest attempt to go beyond it.

Just as the working class needs health care, so it needs education. It has no choice but to use the health care and education that it can get from the bourgeoisie. This does not require the working class to defend the NHS and the education system any more than requires workers in the car industry to defend Rover, or Ford or BMW. It is not through campaigns to ‘Save the NHS’ or ‘Defend state education’ that it will succeed but through the exercise of its collective strength against the capitalist state. A proletarian revolution will lay the basis for a communist society way beyond the limitations of the bourgeois world. This will require a fundamental reorganisation of education in the post-revolutionary period of transition to a truly human community.

North 14/5/01

The massive protests by farmers in India against the laws of the Modi government, which took place between November 2020 and February 2021, have not gone unnoticed. They have gained wide support and expressions of solidarity from all over the world. Climate activist Greta Thunberg in Sweden, singer Rihanna, actress Susan Sarandon, YouTuber and comedian Lilly Singh, American climate activist Jamie Marglin, US lawyer and activist Meena Harris (the niece of Vice President Kamala Harris) in the U.S. have backed the protesting farmers in posts on social media.

Expressions of support were not restricted to famous people. The World Federation of Trade Unions, representing more than 105 million workers who live and work in 130 countries, expressed its solidarity with the farmers’ struggle. Trade unions in the UK, Canada, Italy, South Korea, etc. announced that it stood firmly in support of the hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers. More than 50 international organisations from 25 countries have said to be in solidarity with the farmer’s movement and urged the Modi government to repeal the three farm laws.

If so many individuals and organisations around the world have expressed their solidarity with the farmers’ protests in India, the biggest protest movement since its independence in 1947, should the organisations of the Communist Left not express their solidarity too with the protests? Il Partito (India; Between Peasant Protests and Workers’ Strikes [18]) and Le Prolétaire (Pandemic, Economic Crisis and Class Struggles in India [19]), two organisations of the Communist Left, have already published an article on the movement and both have not pledged their support to the movement, and they are right. In the following article we will explain why communist organisations should not plead support for the farmers’ movement in India.

The recent farmers’ protests were a reaction to the laws, passed in September 2020 by the Modi government, aimed at the deregulation of the agricultural sector and liberalisation of the prices. These new laws target in particular the “Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee” (mandis) and the “Minimum Support Price” system (MSP), fixed by the government. They were introduced at the start of the “Green Revolution” (See also: Kirsty Hawthorn, The Green Revolution in India [20]) since the 1960s, a policy destined to promote large-scale industrial agriculture, enabling India to become a nation close to self-sufficiency in food.

Via a guaranteed procurement and government-mandated floor prices, the aim of these laws was to give the famers financial support in a few, well-endowed districts of the states Punjab, Haryana and the western part of the state Uttar Pradesh, enabling them to use high-yielding seeds and chemical fertilisers and, since the “Green Revolution” technology required lots of water, the construction and maintenance of extensive irrigation systems.

1. State protectionism against the crisis of overproduction

Since the independence of 1948 farmers have been considered to be the backbone of Indian society. The post-independence Indian policy remained attached to agrarianism and ruralism, with ceaseless eulogies to the farmer as the food provider, and was reflected in an approach that privileged the farmers over urban dwellers. Even to-day, 70 per cent of the Indian population still lives in the countryside while 58 per cent of the total workforce depends on agriculture and allied activities. The agricultural sector remained highly privileged and subsidised for tens of years. But this slowly started to change from the beginning of the 1990’s.

In 1991 India experienced a foreign exchange crisis that led to three rapid downgrades of its credit rating within the short space of a year, which made the World Bank write in its Memorandum that: “India’s creditworthiness has declined to the point where international sources of commercial credit have been cut off”. (Cited in: Modi’s Farm Produce Act Was Authored Thirty Years Ago, in Washington D.C. [21]) India had little choice but to accept the IMF-World Bank prescriptions for ‘structural adjustment’. This year marked the start of India’s neoliberal era and the creation of the conditions for foreign products and investments to penetrate its domestic market.

The neo-liberal policy, which started in the 1980s and increased considerably after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, aimed to reduce the cost of production in the central countries of capitalism by improving productivity and through outsourcing. Since the wages in countries like India were only a fraction of the wages in the central countries, whole parts of production were exported to these low pay countries. They were compelled to open up to this neoliberal expansion. Key instruments in this opening up and in the development of the international dimension of neoliberalism were institutions such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Bank and the IMF.

The end of the autarkic model of the Eastern Bloc countries cleared the way for this neo-liberal era and a new breath of economic expansion. “This expansion had a number of underlying elements: the technological developments that allowed a much faster circulation of capital and a reorganisation of global industrial networks; a more directly economic dimension, in which capital was able to penetrate new extra-capitalist areas and make use of much cheaper labour power, while at the same time making gigantic profits through the swelling of the financial sector; and also a social element, since the break-up of industrial concentrations in the “old” capitalist countries, driven by the hunt for new sources of profit, also had the effect of atomising centres of class militancy.” (Trade Wars: The obsolescence of the nation state [22])

In return for up to more than $120 billion in loans at the time, India was compelled to shift hundreds of millions of dollars out of agriculture. The structural adjustment programme, which resulted in the shift of more than 400 million dollars from the countryside into cities, led to the dismantling of its state-owned seed supply system, reduction of subsidies and the running down of public agriculture institutions, while offering incentives for the growing of cash crops.

On top of that, the Uruguay round in the 1990s, which was heavily contested by India, obliged the country to liberalise its trade regulations and to open up for foreign direct investments. While several sectors of the Indian economy were subjected to liberalisation, the deregulation of agriculture met much more resistance.

According to the Indian ruling class, the agricultural sector was not able to compete on the world market as it remained vulnerable in terms of “low level of commercialisation of agriculture, low productivity, weak market orientation, preponderance of small and marginal uneconomical operational landholdings, lack of infrastructure, dependence on monsoon, susceptibility to natural calamities, and dependence of a very large percentage of population on agriculture for their livelihood etc.” (Government of India, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, [23]Negotiations on WTO agreement on agriculture [24]; G/AG/NG/W/102; 15-01-2001)

India stubbornly refused the further opening up of agriculture. For example, in a 2003 publication, the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture stated that the Indian government was determined to continue to use tariffs and subsidies to protect its agricultural sector, which was diametrically opposed to the rules of the WTO. When Modi came into power, in 2014, this policy of state subvention of agriculture was still not drastically reduced and continued almost unabated. After world agricultural prices fell in 2017, the government even increased import duties on a wide range of agricultural goods.

Thus, after the 1990’s India continued to remain highly protective of its agricultural sector, upholding “minimum support prices for produce, the shielding off from international competition, state-regulated mechanisms for local trade in agricultural commodities and special provisions for those classified as ‘essential’ commodities.” (Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Jostein Jakobsen og Alf Nilsen, Liberalising Indian Agriculture [25]; 16-10-2020) India had been singled out by the WTO as a kind of troublemaker because of its overly protectionist policy about agricultural and food products.

2. Years of crisis in Indian agriculture: growing misery for the small and marginal farmers

Nonetheless India’s farming has been facing a crisis for the last 20 years. This crisis developed to a large extent owing to the rising cost of pesticides, fertilisers, seeds as well as wage labour because of a shift in the cropping pattern from staple crop to cash crops, necessitated by the increased liberalisation. At the same time the agricultural sector was confronted with a growing number of smallholders, who in many cases not even owned the land, but rented it from a large farmer. During the last three decades, the number of smallholder farmers increased by 77 per cent from about 66 million in 1980-1981 to 117 million in 2010-2011. They now account for about 85 per cent of all the landholdings in India, compared to 75 per cent in 1980-1981.

After 20 years and more the side-effects of industrial agriculture began to affect yields in a negative way. The “Green Revolution” brought about richer yields, but the quality of soil began to deteriorate, because of

• “overuse of fertilisers and its damage to soil health, decreasing the nutritional value of the crops;
• “the massive use of GM/GE ‘hybrid seeds’ posing a direct threat to bio-diversity [since] the soil is getting more and more polluted or even totally poisoned.” (What lies behind rise in global food prices? [26]; World Revolution no.316, July / August 2008)

In addition to the problems resulting from the massive use of chemical pesticides, high water consumption and the general impact of global warming, the high investment, required for these crops, were not offset by either the MSP, offered by the government, or prices available in the market.

As a consequence of these worsening conditions farmers’ debts to banks and private money lenders were mounting considerably. In 1991 the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) found indebtedness among 26% of farmers; in 2003 this was increased to 48.6% farmer households, while in 2012-2013 already 52% of India's agricultural households were indebted. On an average, the amount of debt per farmer household was 12,585 rupees in 2003, and increased by nearly 4 times to reach 47,000 rupees per agricultural household in 2012-2013. In 2018 it even reached an average of 74,000 rupees per household. In the regional state of Punjab the marginalised and smaller farmers have six times more debt than the big farmers.

For reasons of a dawning fiscal disaster, due to the unstoppable growth of agricultural subsidies, between 2012 and 2014 and still before Modi came into power, India effectively reduced the subsidy on agriculture and food security by $3 billion dollars.

Gradual and piecemeal opening of the agrarian economy was implemented, together with the reduction of public subsidies for agriculture. Therefore “in roughly half of India’s States and Union territories, agricultural reforms that allow private markets have already been carried out [which]reduced input subsidies, deregulated the seed sector for foreign direct investments, facilitated privatised banking interests within agriculture and, not least, shifted towards private sector research and development.” (Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Jostein Jakobsen og Alf Nilsen, Liberalising Indian Agriculture [25]; 16-10-2020)

Nonetheless Indian agriculture’s crisis continued to worsen, with the period since 2011-2012 seeing increased costs of production, depressed prices for farm produce, and a growing indebtedness. Year after year farmers faced a severe income squeeze and less and less means to make investments in agrarian infrastructure and machinery. Among farm households in 2016, 53.4 per cent were below the poverty line; only 47 per cent of their income was derived from farming; monthly median incomes were just 1,600 rupees ($25).

In1912 Rosa Luxemburg wrote that in the India of the 19th century “Every day another plot of land fell under the hammer; individual members withdrew from the family unit, and the peasants got into debt and lost their land.” As a consequence of the colonial policy carried out by the British occupation “over large areas the peasants in their masses were turned into impoverished small tenants with a short-term lease”. (The Accumulation of Capital [27]) In 2020, under the same remorseless process of capitalisation of agriculture, every year nearly a million farmers leave farming while 15,000 of them commit suicide.

The federal government could not be left behind and had to follow the overall policy of that the regional state governments had started, which was to implement agrarian “reforms” in the area of the former “Green Revolution”: Punjab, Haryana and the western part of the state Uttar Pradesh. On 18 December 2020, addressing a Kisan Sammelan (Farmer Conference) in Madhya Pradesh by video conferencing, Narendra Modi declared: “We are compelled to do things which should have been done 25-30 years ago”.

3. Modi’s laws attack the richer farmers and the middlemen

With the new farm laws of the Modi government, the limitations regarding the financial interactions between farmers and “external” buyers, outside the rural field, will be lifted. The use of the “mandis” is no longer obligatory and any buyer can purchase agricultural produce directly from the farmers. Since for trade outside the state-run markets no duties will be imposed and there will be no transport costs for the farmer, this will be an incentive to prioritise this kind of trade. Even if it is not ended formally, in practice it means the beginning of the dismantling of the system of guaranteed prices for wheat and unmilled rice (paddy).

Who benefits the most from the old system of price regulation and state run markets for government procurement? Who are the most endangered by the new laws of the Modi government? Which class of farmers has the most to lose when the new laws are implemented?

“As the government procurement is concentrated at a few centres, it requires farmers to have transport facilities to reach the procurement centres, usually located far away from villages. Therefore, [how] small it wouldn’t make sense for farmers with limited amounts of produce to take their produce to these markets. Furthermore, a high proportion of farmers are not aware of the MSP and whether it is higher/lower than the prevailing market prices. Therefore only the larger farmers are able to benefit from the MSP and government procurement.” (Dr. Richa Govil and Dr. Ashok Sircar, Explainer MSP (Minimum Support Price) and Government Procurement [28]; Azim Premji University, April 2018)

For a long time the farmers have sold their crops by means of government-regulated wholesale markets across the country. These “mandis” are run by committees made up of farmers, often large land-owners, and traders or “commission agents” who act as middlemen for brokering sales, organising storage and transport, and even financing deals. Of all the farmers only 6 per cent actually receive guaranteed price support for their crops. A survey undertaken by Punjab Agriculture University has confirmed that 94 per cent of the government subsidies are being used by big and medium farmers, leaving the smaller farmers sidelined.

On top of that these rich farmers, who have a large marketable surplus and pocket a bulk of MSP, manipulate small and marginal farmers, engaging in predatory lending practices to their poorer neighbours, further squeezing them dry. “Very often rich farmers and Kulaks take on the role of commission agents and intermediary traders; they also take on the role of usurers and moneylenders, and purchase farm produce from the lower middle and poor peasants at prices much lower than the MSP and earn profit by selling these products at remunerative prices and also through commissions.” (Abhinav, The Three Farm Ordinances, Present Farmers’ Movement and the Working Class; [29] Red Polemique; 08-01-2021)

Thus, these laws of the Modi government are actually not meant to be a frontal attack on the small farmers, but mainly to sideline the layer of larger farmers, the money lenders and middlemen, who now function as mediator between the small famers and the “mandis”. In India, the agrarian reforms of the “Green Revolution” have developed “a class of ‘kulaks', middle peasants who have grown rich and form a social buffer in the countryside between the great landlords and the smallholders”. (Notes on the peasant question [30]; International Review no. 24 - 1st quarter 1981) The agricultural laws will finish off the monopoly of this new class of farmers formed by the “Green Revolution”.

This new step in liberalisation and deregulation also permit big food corporations to penetrate the agrarian market in these northern states of the country, to deal directly with the very small farmers, of whom 85% has only two hectare land or less. In the near future these laws will not essentially change conditions for the small farmers. Today India’s poorest farmers are forced to sell their crops at discounted prices to their richer neighbours and in the future they might have to sell it at discounted prices to the corporate agrarian food business. But under the yoke of the big food corporations the process of ruination of the small farmers will probably accelerate.  

Deals with the big food companies may include contract farming, involving the corporate buyer specifying the quality required and the price, with the farmer agreeing to deliver the agreed quantity at a future date. In the logic of this evolution the perspective for the small farmers would be first to become bonded labourers of these big companies and finally to be evicted from their land.

4. The farmers are not a class and were not united in the protests

It is certain that the recent farmers’ protests were the largest and most massive in the history of India since its independence in 1947.

But who took part in these protests? Undoubtedly the biggest part of the protesters consisted of small and marginal farmers and many of them were rural wage labourers. But that doesn’t mean that it was a working class movement (in which the focus was on the demands of the agrarian wage labourers), or even an interclassist movement (in which these wage labourers put forward their own specific demands). The farmers’ protests were spearheaded by the class of richer farmers-cum-commission agents, the Indian version of Kulaks, and in the demands the entire focus was on repealing the three farm laws.

“Unlike the sociologists, who talk indiscriminately of the peasantry as a unified social class, Marxists have always demonstrated its heterogeneity. (…) The peasantry as such does not exist; there is rather, on the one hand a rural proletariat, and on the other hand, various social types of ‘farmer’, from the great landed proprietor to the jobless.” (“Notes on the peasant question [30]”, International Review no. 24 - 1st quarter 1981)

It is not true that the farmers and the agrarian wage labourers in the North-Western states of India have all the same interests, and that they were united behind the demands of the farmers’ organisations which organised the protests. Most of the farmers’ unions, brought together under the umbrella of the Samyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM), are dominated by richer farmers and their paid servants, and the objectives of the farmers’ movement were shaped above all by the interests of this group. 

Left and extreme left organisations, such as Friends of the Earth International [31], Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières [32], Communist Workers International (CWI) [33], The Fourth International [34], Socialist Worker in the UK [35], , etc., presenting the movement as a genuine famers movement, in which rural wage labourers fought shoulder to shoulder with the farmers, don’t tell the whole story. Since the farmers’ unions, who organized the protests, are led by better-off farmers there are strong connections to the political establishment. Behind the protests, and which is typical for a bourgeois movement, all kind of political, sectorial, regionalist and even religious pressure groups pulled at the strings and determined the course of the movement and the demands put forward.

The working class in India is weak and is held in a stranglehold by the unions, but there is nonetheless a great deal of anger among the workers, given the harshness of the attacks on large sections of the population. Since a big part of the (migrant) workers still has strong links with the countryside, there was broad sympathy among the Indian proletariat for the farmers’ movement and its demands. Moreover, the impoverishment affects not only the farmers, but all the non-exploiting classes. In solidarity with the farmers’ protests a “strike” was reported of 50,000 public sector employees in Punjab who participated in a ‘sick-out.’

However, for the working class these protests are not something it should welcome or even to show solidarity with. They do not contain the potential to put the capitalist mode of production into question, and thus seek a solution within the structures of the present society. But in the decadence of capitalism the problems of the farmers cannot be solved in capitalism, even not by a “farmers’ revolution”. A solution to the problems of the rural population, especially in these countries, can only brought about in the framework of a worldwide proletarian revolution.

2021-04-10, Dennis

In recent articles[1] we have argued that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests are situated on a completely bourgeois terrain, concretised in vague demands such as “equal rights” and “fair treatment”, or more specific ones like “defunding the police”. In no way was this protest able, or even aiming, to put into question capitalist relations of production, which ensure that the subordination and oppression of the “other” is one of the pillars of capitalist rule.

But does this mean that the working class can offer no alternative to the layers in capitalist society who are subjected to particularly violent forms of oppression? On the contrary, throughout its history, the working class, in the United States as well as in other parts of the world, has shown its ability to take significant steps to overcome the barrier of ethnic division on the condition that it fights on its class terrain and with its own proletarian perspectives.

One of the first moments of real workers’ solidarity with an ethnic minority took place in 1892 in New Orleans, where three unions demanded better working conditions. The “New Orleans Board of Trade” tried to divide the workers along racial lines, by inviting the two majority white workers’ unions for negotiations while dismissing the majority black workers’ union. In answer to this manoeuvre by the Board the three unions called for a joint strike that was followed unanimously.

Another important moment was the organised defence of the working class in Russia against anti-Semitic pogroms in October 1905, in the year of the first revolution in Russia. In that month the so-called Black Hundreds, organised gangs supported by the Czarist secret police, killed thousands of people and maimed as many as ten thousand in 100 towns throughout the entire country. In response to these brutal slaughters, the Soviet of Petrograd made an appeal to the workers in the country to take up arms and defend the workers’ districts from further pogromist assaults.  

Another heroic example of working class solidarity took place in February 1941 in the Netherlands, 80 years ago. The immediate cause was the kidnapping of 425 Jewish men in Amsterdam and their deportation to a concentration camp in Germany. This first raid in the Netherlands on a persecuted and terrorised part of the population provoked strong indignation among the workers in Amsterdam and in the surrounding cities. The attack on the Jews was felt as an attack on the whole proletarian population of Amsterdam. Indignation won out over fear. The response was: strike!

In the Netherlands the Jewish people were not seen as outsiders. Above all in Amsterdam, where the overwhelming majority of the Jewish people lived, they were considered as an integral part of the population. Moreover, Amsterdam had the largest Jewish proletariat on the Western European continent, only comparable to that in London after the Russian pogroms. The orientation of a significant part of this Jewish proletariat was towards the workers’ movement and around the turn of the century many of them turned to socialism. In the first half of the 20th century several of these proletarians would play an important role in the Dutch workers’ organisations.

As the article linked to below (an extract from our book The Dutch-German Communist Left[2]) shows, in the weeks before the strike, an internationalist group, the Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front (MLL Front) had already clearly expressed its position with regard to the atrocities of the fascist gangs and appealed to the workers to defend themselves. “In all working-class districts, defence troops will have to be formed. The defence against the brutal violence of the National Socialist bandits must be organised. But the workers will also have to use their economic power. The disgraceful acts of the fascists must be answered by mass strikes.” (Spartacus no. 2, mid February 1941; cited by Marx Perthus, Henk Sneevliet)

The strike that broke out on Tuesday 25 February was a unique demonstration of solidarity with the persecuted Jewish people. It was completely under control of the workers and the bourgeoisie had no chance to use it for its own warlike purposes, as it did with the railway strike in 1944. The strike was not aimed at the liberation of the Netherlands from the German occupation. The MLL Front did not hold the position that the strike was aimed at sabotaging the German war machine or aligning itself with the national Resistance. It was meant to be a statement of the working class, a demonstration of its force and therefore limited in duration. After two days the workers closed ranks and ended the strike.

In the middle of the barbarism of World War Two and in a context of historical defeat of the working class, this strike could not lead to a general mobilisation of the working class in Holland or to working class reactions in the rest of Europe, but it still had an international political significance, reaching far beyond the borders of the Netherlands. The workers’ resistance, in February 1941, against the deportation of Jews to concentration camps, shows us that the proletarian class is not in the least helpless or condemned to inaction when particular ethnic groups are scapegoated and subsequently become victims of pogroms or even genocide.

The MLL Front understood this very well. It thus wholeheartedly supported the strike as an expression of genuine proletarian indignation about the harassment of the Jewish people, men, women and children alike. For the MLL Front, the strike against anti-Jewish brutality was unconditionally linked to the general struggle against the entire capitalist system. The Dutch February strike of 1941 has shown that, in order to defend persecuted ethnics groups, the working class must remain on its own terrain and must not allow itself to be drawn onto the bourgeois terrain, as happened with the BLM protests for instance.

The working class terrain is where solidarity is not constrained by the divisions capitalism has imposed on society and where it becomes really universal. Proletarian solidarity is by definition the expression of a class whose autonomous struggle is destined to develop a fundamental alternative to capitalism. In as far as it announces the nature of the society it is fighting for, it is able to embrace and integrate the solidarity of the whole of humanity. This is what makes the proletarian solidarity and the 1941 February strike in the Netherlands so significant for us today.

The article can be found here: Dutch and German Communist Left [37], Chapter 10, 1939-1942 [38], 4 - The strike of February 1941 and its political consequences [39] (internationalism.org)

ICC, April 2021

 

The region now occupied by the modern Turkish state has always been a crossroads of the world, an area where all roads, peoples and influences collide. This has, in general, been very positive for the development of humanity. Today however many global influences and collisions are taking place in and around Turkey that are not at all positive and rather express the impasse of capitalism and the threat that it poses not just for the population of Turkey and the region but for the whole of humanity. Although the putrescence of a decomposing capitalism is today clearly visible in the major powers, it is a global phenomenon that exists within and applies to all states. In fact, it is particularly expressed in Turkey today which has now become a collision point for all the contradictions of a dying capitalism; a place where the expressions of decomposition show an innate tendency for a self-destruction which is affecting and will affect every country on earth. The general tendencies presently at work in Turkey are the same as those in every capitalist state and these can only intensify given the ineluctable development of the insoluble economic crisis of capitalism. The chaos, militarism and instability hitting Turkey are harbingers for the future of capitalism and, right now, very dangerous for the Middle Eastern cauldron that Turkey is a part of.

The Turkish economy is bankrupt and its prospects dire; it is desperate for foreign investment and, with weakened prospects of attracting it, anxious to avoid accepting it from China. The living conditions of the working class, including the health system it relies on, are being constantly attacked in an atmosphere where many expressions of unease are met with brutal force and repression. Turkey is highly militarised and its imperialist ambitions, its external military forays wider afield, have more than a touch of insanity about them, reflecting the grandiose "vision" of the Turkish ruling clique, its pretensions to being a major player on the world stage. The adventures of Turkish imperialism near and far, pining for a glorious past which never existed, can only bring more problems as Turkey makes more enemies abroad, while at home its involvement in increasingly senseless wars demand greater sacrifices from the working class. The Turkish state appears superficially strong, but its whole edifice is built on sand; undermined by its weakening economy, growing political divisions, and a certain loss of control by the previously relatively strong ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party), have forced it to rely on the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) to win the crucial 2017 election, the 2018 referendum and to keep it in power today. A further element in growing instability - a world-wide phenomenon but particularly expressed in Turkey and the Middle East - has been the dramatic rise of refugees and displaced peoples due to the spread of war and militarism in the region. But the Turkish state has instrumentalised this abject misery to its advantage by using these masses not only for cheap and precarious labour within Turkey - particularly the Syrian refugees - but also as threat against Europe in order to extort money, from Germany mainly: the threat being that it will unleash this flood of refugees on western Europe if it doesn’t get its way.

Like everywhere else the Turkish state is actively involved in the destruction of the environment, underlined by schemes to fuel growth by using up natural resources, extensive mining and de-forestation for example, or vanity/imperialist projects such as the proposal to build a canal from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara (a project first put forward 500 years ago by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent), a proposal which President Erdogan himself called "crazy" in 2011[1]. The projected cost of the canal is at least ten billion dollars, and there are also plans fora new ten billion dollar airport and cargo hub along with a new motorway. These are in part projects to celebrate the Turkish Republic's hundred-year anniversary in 2023 in a frenzy of nationalism. There's not only massive de-forestation but real threats to Turkey's water supply coming from the Istanbul canal project, as pointed out by the government's own assessors.

These are just some of the elements expressing how Turkey is an illustration of the decomposition of capitalism. For decades now Turkey has been particularly buffeted by the economic, military, political and social turbulence unleashed by the collapse of the relatively stable imperialist blocs in 1989, opening up a new and more dangerous era of capitalist dog-eat-dog; and now the latest scourge of decomposing capitalism - the Covid-19 pandemic - this way comes.

The Covid-19 pandemic

All the existing negative elements, particularly the economy, are exacerbated by this long-predicted pandemic, and many new problems and troubles have been created. The ruling class has also shown its contempt for "unprofitable" human life, particularly when it thought at first that there was a "silver-lining" to this passing "flu-like illness" in that many of the old and sick would be eliminated, freeing the state from the expensive burden of caring for those who were beyond exploitation[2]; in some of the major capitals of the world, the wealthiest countries on Earth, this tendency of getting rid of useless human liabilities was generously encouraged by states through their criminal negligence and not least through their nationally-adapted ideology of "herd immunity" long before there was any sign of a vaccine. And then, as the pandemic took its natural course, it dawned on the bourgeoisie and its states - something that had been flagged up before by various agencies, including the US intelligence services - that a pandemic of this kind not only severely disrupts the capitalist economy but can easily become an existential threat to it.

In the first months of the pandemic, it appeared that Turkey was doing quite well, closing schools, universities and the leisure industries quickly; congregational prayers were banned in mosques and its testing system seemed to be working efficiently. But much of this was carefully orchestrated propaganda by the Erdogan regime, arguing that the world was jealous of Turkey's achievements. But even in the early period of the pandemic, the New York Times was finding deaths far higher than the official figures[3]. The Wikipedia entry for "Covid-19 pandemic in Turkey" looks like it was written by a committee of AKP hacks with a gun to their heads: everything has been just great; Turkey's robust health system has coped outstandingly - much better than others - and it remains on top of the situation. Other countries (some of its closest imperialist rivals) are castigated for not acting quickly enough, unlike Turkey. The entry is dotted with examples of how Turkey is one of those countries at the leading edge of the fight against the virus. None of its figures can be believed and the entry looks like a textbook example of Stalinist propaganda.

The reality is that Turkey concealed the true extent of this crisis for months in order to protect the economy, and the blatant lies of the state (like everywhere else) encouraged the spread of the virus. The Turkish Medical Association (TTB) said, just before the year's end, that the government had in reality "lost control of the situation"[4].

Doctors in Turkey have been directly threatened by the state for disputing its virus figures and pointing out the parlous state of its hospitals and health services, along with the lack of protective equipment. Erdogan's governmental coalition partner, Devlet Bahceli, leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), called for the Turkish Medical Association to be outlawed and its leadership arrested[5]. Like everywhere else, Turkey is using the pandemic in order to strengthen the repressive apparatus of the state and bear down on the working class in particular. Contrary to the nauseating Wikipedia report, the London-based Totalanalysis has been monitoring cases of Covid-19 from many countries and published its Covid Data Transparency Index, in which Turkey is ranked 97th out of a 100, followed by Serbia, Turkmenistan and North Korea. A final obscenity relating to the pandemic (with surely many more to follow) and the weaponising of vaccinations is the way that, in common with profiting from the misery of refugees, the Turkish state looks to have laid the grounds for exchanging some of its Uighur refugees for doses of the Chinese Sinovac treatment - three million doses up front with more to follow if all goes to plan[6]. To date, daily infection rates are rising along with daily deaths and the overall death rate is currently something over 30,000.

The war economy, militarism and Turkish imperialism

Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a braggart and rabble-rouser who is well-suited to his role as leader of the Turkish state. He has been going on for years about Turkish achievements, Turkey's glorious past and its future destiny as a great power[7] and this will only intensify coming up to the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Turkish republic by Ataturk. Erdogan has posed as the defender of Muslims everywhere, playing a religious card that's a cover for Turkey's imperialist ambitions[8]. It's quite possible that with the end of the bloc system, the weakening of the US in the Middle East, and the intensified tendency towards each against all, Erdogan feels that Turkey's time has finally come. During the last couple of decades of greater chaos and instability on the world arena, Erdogan - a master of the forked-tongue - has played all sorts of games with the Americans, the EU and Russians, using his cards to optimum effect. But in the past, Erdogan has also been batted around the imperialist chessboard by the major powers: his "vision" for Turkish imperialism plays into a feeling of "Turkish resentment" and has hardened accordingly. This resentment was all the more real for the Turkish state when its leader narrowly escaped a death squad and was chased by missile-laden F-16's in the failed 2016 coup. But the imperialist grievances and appetites of the Turkish state can’t be reduced to the reactions of one man, and Erdogan's "vision" is turning into a devastating material reality of militarism and war generating militarism and war wider afield.

Turkey is a prime example of capitalist decomposition, expressing itself in particular at the imperialist level. Its old ambitions have been revived by the turn in capitalism's crisis and it has developed a policy of stretching its tentacles near and far. Underlining the problematic nature of its relationship with Russia, it has made recent agreements with Ukraine, including the sales of arms, such as the successful Bayraktar TB2 combat drone that it has used to confront Russian forces in Libya. Turkey has supported Ukraine against Russia's annexation in the Crimea[9]. Turkish-Ukrainian relations have been warming for several years but have reached a new high at a time of tensions over the Russian-Ukraine border. Erdogan has modestly put himself forward as "peacemaker" but this could lead to a major increase in tensions and militarism around the Black Sea.

Ankara at the centre of its "Afro-Eurasian" vision

Turkey has moved into Africa militarily after using its no less imperialist "soft power” in order to pave its way. It has extended its influence in the Persian Gulf with the establishment of a large military base in Qatar, while maintaining a balancing act with the other Gulf powers of Saudi and the UAE. Ankara has recently made overtures towards the latter two countries - including going into joint production of drones with the Saudi regime - as well as talking about restoring diplomatic and intelligence ties with Egypt[10]. While some warm words have also recently gone back and forth with Tel Aviv, Turkey's balancing act can only become more problematic as instability and each for themselves dominates further.

Turkey has spread and strengthened its influence to the republics of Central Asia, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, where it sees China as a direct threat and rival. And it rushed to provide arms to its ally Azerbaijan prior to its 44-day war with Armenia last year, particularly its armed drones which overwhelmed the Armenian forces and which it has itself used in military operations in Syria, Iraq and Libya. Israel was also involved in supporting Azerbaijan, which it sees as a buffer against Iran, but it was Turkish weaponry and proxy fighters, supplied to its "antagonistic" Shia partner, that routed the Armenian forces. Turkey's "Asia Anew Initiative", one of the indicators of Turkish imperialist interests, aims to reinforce relations with the Turkic states of Asia. Since 2003, Turkey has established 17 new missions, five embassies and 12 consulates in Asian countries. China, for its part, is interested in, but also wary of, Turkey and has tended to be more open to the other counties in the Middle East such as Saudi Arabia and Iran. But because of Turkey's geo-strategic position, its influence on the Turkic states and China's "Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI), Wang Yi, Chinese Foreign Minister, had warm words for Turkey on his recent early April trip around the Middle East.

Over the last decade Turkey has become much more implanted in Africa, particularly East Africa, leading it to describe itself as an "Afro-Eurasian state", completing a potential three-pronged military expansion. From 12 embassies scattered across the continent in 2009, it has risen to 42 a decade later, with more in the offing, and sub-Saharan trade increased from one billion dollars to nearly eight times that roughly over the same period[11]. Ankara's largest military base is in Somalia where its forces train local troops; other recipients of Turkey's "bilateral" assistance are Sudan, Niger, Djibouti (where China's first overseas military base was established 3 years ago), Chad and Guinea. Turkey has played up the idea that its intentions are not colonial but "brotherly" towards Africa. There has been some neo-Ottoman rhetoric to its propaganda, given the links between the old empire and East Africa, but Turkish "aid" and projects have been generally welcomed by the local bourgeoisies. Despite France’s problems in the region, and China’s efforts to take advantage, Turkey is also rivalling countries like Iran, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, as well as China, in this burgeoning imperialist arena.

Turkey’s move into Africa directly confronts the diplomatic, business and educational enterprises of US-based cleric, Fethullah Gulen, once ally and now arch-enemy of Erdogan. Gulen's Hizmet educational system is global but particularly strong in Africa where it tends to provide a cheaper alternative to French schools for the children of the elites. Turkey's "brotherly" mask has tended to give way to its rank authoritarianism when demanding that African states close down the Gulen "terrorist" network. Like military bases and "boots on the ground", the ongoing investment in the “soft power” surge of Turkey in Africa and elsewhere, involving schools, health facilities, NGO's, etc., greatly adds to the cost of an unsustainable war economy.

It's in the central Mediterranean however, NATO's southern flank, that the imperialist free-for-all, with Turkey at the centre, really hots up, posing sharper dangers from increasing tensions and conflicts, exacerbated by Ankara's push to be a greater regional power. Fighting over war-torn Libya like vultures, Turkey and Qatar backed the UN-recognised Government of National Accord (GNA) while the opposing faction, the Libyan National Army (LNA) has been militarily and financially backed by Russia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and actively supported by France. Since the shaky cease-fire October last, many thousands of foreign troops and mercenaries remain in the country including pro-Ankara Syrian forces, threatening the fragile "peace" and the UN's "transition" programme. Turkey's support for the GNA, with arms (particularly drones) and fighters, helped shift the balance in Libya and allowed the GNA to take control of key areas. Its agreement with the GNA included Turkey's access to "demarcated" waters in the Eastern Mediterranean for exploration and drilling[12] for oil and gas, but these waters are disputed by Greece, Egypt and Cyprus (in fact Crete and Cyprus sit inside Turkish-claimed waters); and the above countries, as well as Israel, have excluded Turkey from their East Mediterranean Gas Forum (EMGF). This in turn has prompted Turkey to label them - along with France - an "alliance of evil" which was damaging Libya's "hope for democracy". While these pipeline schemes are cheaper than shipping oil and gas, they look very dodgy propositions economically and are prone to the political instability that haunts the Middle East. But Turkey is fighting for the right to access what it calls its "blue homeland" in order to gain more energy autonomy, and for this reason it is in Libya for the long haul, using it as a springboard for access to the waters of the central Mediterranean and a stronger implantation in this vital area. Turkey and the head of the new interim Libyan government, Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, have just (April 13) re-affirmed the 2019 maritime agreement[13] that has angered other states, while Turkey has promised the Libyan government 150,000 Covid-19 vaccines, a Covid-19 hospital in Tripoli and Ankara's support for a reconstruction of the Libyan military.

The Russian/Turkish gas pipeline, Turkstream, was opened by presidents Putin and Erdogan in January 2020 but it relies on this heavily qualified "partnership". The project was halted by Putin following the shooting down of a Russian Su-24 fighter jet by Turkey on the Turkish-Syrian border in 2014 and reinstated after Ankara's effusive apology. The EU's reliance on Turkey regarding refugees means that its diplomatic efforts in regulating the issues over these waters, and the relationship between NATO members Turkey and Greece, look to be extremely difficult. There is a real risk here for Turkey in that in over-stretching itself it gets out of its depth and provokes more serious confrontations; being active on so many fronts and making so many enemies reveals an irrationality that is typical of capitalist decomposition.

Difficult relations with NATO and Russia bring further dangers and destabilisation

Up to 1989 Turkey, with its large and modern army, was a pillar of the Western Bloc, despite a confrontation with fellow NATO member Greece in 1974 that presaged some of the problems that emerged on a far greater scale with the implosion of the Warsaw Pact at the end of the 80's. Up until this time Turkey was a lynchpin of US Middle Eastern, Eurasian and Eastern European policies. But the opening of Pandora's Box in 1989 changed the situation dramatically for the worse for all major and secondary powers in the Middle East and beyond. The discipline that kept the Western Bloc together shattered as the cement that held the bloc together, never having a durable quality, turned to dust with the "New World Order" of the early 90's. Turkey was immediately at odds with the US over the first Gulf War, the USA's failed attempt to cohere the fragmenting ex-bloc under its auspices. The purchase by NATO member Turkey of the Russian air defence system, the S-400 in 2019, laid the rupture bare because the system cannot be integrated into NATO's military framework. In response the US forbade the transfer of its F-35 fighter jet, the details of which could be available to Turkish-based Russian trainers of the S-400 system. The situation is further complicated by the fact that 937 separate parts of the F-35 have started to be manufactured in Turkey[14] with at least one plane already delivered.

Turkey is thus riven between Russia and a crisis-ridden NATO, with a certain antagonism towards the "West" and moving onto a dangerous field of cooperation with Russia. All the old contradictions and ambitions of Turkey were re-ignited by the 89 collapse and have been flaring up ever since, posing more intractable problems in a situation of increasing centrifugal tendencies. Turkey's present relations with Russia, as some of the examples above show, are neither straightforward or definitive, but are based upon contingent common interests which are wide open to disputes and conflicts. And while Trump threatened to destroy the Turkish economy if it went "off-limits" in Syria, Putin also threatened it after its SU-24 jet was shot down over Syria in November 2015, adding that it was "a stab in the back by the accomplices of terrorists". Some of the coming problems in the relationship with Russia are mentioned above: the existing threat of closing the Bosphorus straits to the Russian navy and the potential threat of allowing US warships to use its proposed new canal which would, with a warming of relations with Ukraine, be a significant threat to Russia. In Syria, Russia has also hit Turkish-supported militias in their fight against Russian-backed Syrian forces in north-west Syria: in October 2020 a military training camp was hit by Russian forces, killing dozens of militia and wounding many. More recently Turkish-backed forces in the same area were hit by a barrage of missiles loaded with cluster bombs, reportedly fired by a Russian warship in the Black Sea. The devastation was widespread, adding to the ongoing grief of the civilian population.

The "Kurdish question"

If the whole Middle East is a can of worms, then there is another formidable can of worms inside the can:  the question of the Kurds. Apart from the half-hearted conciliatory moves of Turkey towards the Kurds last decade, the real fear of Turkey is focused on the autonomous Kurdish zones operating in Syria and Iraq. The Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK - recognised by the US as a "terrorist organisation") and its Syrian branch, the Democratic Union Party with its YPG Peoples' Protection Units, are, in part, consolidating themselves on Syrian territory. This provoked the 2019 Turkish military operation "Peace Spring" crossing into Syria with allied Syrian factions in order to push them back. The US arming of the Kurds with sophisticated and sensitive weaponry[15] in order to fight Isis went beyond the Kurdish "cannon-fodder" used by both the Iranians and the Americans against Isis. Kurdish YPG commando units (Yekineyen) were kitted out with the same high-tech equipment used by US Special Forces (the Pentagon is not allowed to transfer this equipment to any other forces, but the CIA can and did).

In mid-October 2019, Trump gave the order for US troops to stand aside, effectively allowing Turkish forces to enter north-east Syria and take on the Kurdish forces that went from prized and primed US allies to hunted "terrorists" from one day to the next in yet another Kurdish "betrayal" by the West. What's important about the original arming of the Kurds by the US is that first of all it immediately exposes the weakness and desperation of Uncle Sam, which is part of a long-term weakening of US leadership resulting from decomposition. It infuriated the Turks and compelled them to take advantage of this weakness, adding to the general tendencies of chaos, instability and war in the region. At the same time the fragmentation and re-disposition of Kurdish forces led to some of the YPG units and their Yekineyen fighters joining the Syrian army, probably complete with their "sensitive " equipment, and providing the butcher Assad with more up-to-date tools of his trade.

Turkey's war in Iraq has ramped up against the PKK in Iraqi Kurdistan in and around the Zagros mountain range, where Turkish combat drones and fighter jets have caused further devastation in relentless attacks. Kurdish nationalism has always been part of imperialism[16] and after decades of being used as cannon-fodder by both global and regional powers, and constantly "betrayed" by them, the Kurds developed a saying that "only the mountains are our friends". But here in their redoubts, along with the civilian population, the mountains have turned into their prison and tombs. The general instability provoked by the deteriorating situation has also led to inter-Kurdish fighting in northern Iraq.

When the leaders talk of peace…

Since the beginning of the year, in what seems to be a change of emphasis, Turkey has been making overtures to its rivals, with Erdogan calling himself and President Macron "peace-makers" (there's never been so much talk about "peace" amid so many wars); it has opened diplomatic talks with Egypt, had warm words for the UAE and opened up joint military developments with Saudi Arabia. It has boosted its existing military agreements with Ukraine with its "Black Sea Shield" programme which covers a broad range of operations including aerospace engines and missile technology[17]. On April 9 the Turkish Ministry of Defence posted its congratulations on NATO's 72nd anniversary saying that "we are stronger together". In January Erdogan, addressing EU ambassadors, said "we are ready to put our relations back on track"; in February, directly to the US, Erdogan emphasised "our common interests". And on March 24, he told the AKP Congress, closer to reality, "we will continue to shape our relations with every country". There can be no predictions about what this means for the future, but it is clear that Turkey is advancing on many fronts into very dangerous territories in a situation of growing imperialist tensions and instability which the actions of Turkey will only aggravate. "... it is clear that Ankara's policy is a major contributor to the spread of militarism and chaos and a major factor in extending instability and conflict to a region that stretches from the Sahel to Afghanistan. In short, the idea of stabilising the region, curbing imperialist ambitions across the board is a pure figment of the imagination and the impact of the Covid 19 pandemic, which is hitting the region hard, will only add fuel to the war, barbarism and chaos"[18].

Economic crisis, militarism and war is the only perspective for decomposing capitalism

On the economy, the main global finance bodies are united in seeing the prospects for the Turkish economy as grim and Erdogan's handling of it as "unorthodox"[19]. He has just sacked his third Central Bank governor in 2 years while trying to manipulate the dollar/lira relationship through a form of trickery. At the moment Turkey's Central Bank owes tens of billions of dollars to Turkey's banks, leaving the former with a big hole in its balance-sheet (in the recent past Turkish banks have been heavily involved in sanction-busting, particularly its Halkbank). The lira fell 15% after the third Central Bank governor was sacked and replaced with an AKP appointee, leaving Turkish companies with dollar debts struggling. Orthodox economics says that higher interest rates are needed to combat inflation, but Erdogan has set his face against this, partly because "... the Anatolian export-oriented manufacturers who are an increasingly important part of (Erdogan's) political base" (Borzou Daragahi, Independent, March 24, 1921) are adversely affected by them; so Erdogan's short-term irrationality prevails over the general health of the Turkish economy. Once again the "risk-taker" Erdogan's latest "crazy" scheme has blown up in his face, leaving his country's economy in very serious trouble. Inflation, which has risen for the sixth consecutive month and now officially stands at just under 16%, means that workers and the poor will pay more for daily, basic items, while official unemployment rose to 13.4% in January and youth unemployment (15-24) was up to nearly 27%, with both figures likely being underestimations. Turkey's foreign currency reserves are low and falling. After the misery left by the 2008 economic crisis and new economic misery from the pandemic, there is more suffering to come for the working class, particularly as the war economy, which is already draining the coffers of state, intensifies.

Desperate political manoeuvres show the weakness of the ruling clique as attacks on the working class intensify

Despite the appearance and trappings of a strong state, the ruling AKP is weakening under the pressures. Around the end of 2019 there were splits in the party as the economic miracle was fading and unpopularity was setting in even among its supporters. Former Prime Minister and AKP chairman, Ahmet Davutoglu, was a major resignation; Ali Babacan, former head of economics and credited with presiding over Turkey's unparalleled growth also left the governing body. These are small numbers but under the AKP's new system (designed to strengthen the AKP) every vote is essential. Erdogan's margin of political manoeuvre is thus becoming more limited and it is a weakness of the ruling class that it has to rely on the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) in its "popular alliance" to win elections and stay in power. Discontent with the AKP is growing generally but particularly within its voting core and support in the polls for Erdogan. is falling. The second-largest party in the country, the Republican People's Party (CHP), the main opposition since 2002, has also been losing support, not least due to its complicity with the AKP's manoeuvres and repression.

The same day in March that the AKP removed its latest Central Bank governor, the Turkish authorities began a lawsuit to disband the leftist, Kurdish-led People's Democratic Party (HDP - the third largest party), accusing it of being linked to the outlawed Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK). Just a few days later, showing the frenetic and desperate nature of the continuing campaign, Ankara announced that it would withdraw from the 2011 Istanbul Convention on violence against women, saying that the scheme looked to "normalise homosexuality" and didn't fit in with Turkey's "social and family values". It was a ploy against what was an empty declaration, a diversion to prop up the AKP's hard core, but like some eastern European and many African countries, it also shows the incitement to violence and the baseness and brutality of bourgeois thought. The withdrawal inevitably gave rise to a number of counter demonstrations which had the effect of hardening support for the AKP from the faithful and which were also a lesson in division, containing no proletarian perspective.

The deterioration of the living conditions of the working class and the necessity for its response

Suffering from the war economy, the proletariat is hit from all sides. We've seen the chasm between the state's propaganda and the reality of a health service that was already deteriorating before the appearance of the pandemic. Like many other countries, health tourism is on the up in Turkey but like many other countries this is no indication of the availability and robustness of the healthcare system; on the contrary it is a sign of its restriction, increasing privatisations and up-front payments, making it a further concern for the working class and the great majority who are denied services and sent to the back of an ever-lengthening queue. And that's those that are eligible which many are not; graduating students, for example, have no health insurance.

A further brutal and frontal attack on the workers comes with the sinister-sounding workplace Code-29. Code-29 has been used a legal get-out from the ban on dismissing workers during the pandemic. But again, these attacks on the working class predate the pandemic and the latter will be an excuse for further attacks. Code-29 has existed since 2018 and it says that a worker can be sacked for showing "behaviours that do not comply with the rules and ethics and goodwill". It has been used extensively by the bosses and the workers hit by it are not entitled to severance pay, notice and unemployment benefit; their access to healthcare could also be problematic. Women workers face added problems from Code-29, being subjected to enquiries "about what they get up to at work", while the Code talks unashamedly about "immoral conduct"; it’s a repressive and humiliating form of pressure. This particular attack on women workers again panders to the AKP's conservative base; it is a sop to it, in a similar way to the rejection on the Convention against violence against women. But nearly half-a-million workers have been sacked under Code-29 in the last three years[20] and, as the state knows, more important than the numbers is the fear factor that it spreads. Shifts have been increased from 8 to 12 hours, overtime made compulsory (if it's paid at all), while bosses have cancelled buses picking up workers, making them virtual prisoners in the factories. But fighting Code-29 alone or trying to make it more palatable is a game that the trade unions play with their campaigns fixating on particular issues.

Despite some very targeted welfare "reforms", implemented more for propaganda purposes than anything else, the working class is being attacked from all sides. Inflation and unemployment are rampant and the state has nothing but an illusory nationalism and brutal repression to offer the proletariat. Given the closeness of the official trade unions to the ruling party, it's not surprising that workers are turning towards independent unions in order to protect themselves, but this is an error as far as the needs of their struggle go. With the official unions being discredited, the function of independent unions is to contain the struggle within the union framework and then undermine it. Whether or not these unions are outlawed by the state, and whether or not elements of the state attack them, the function of these union structures remains precisely the same: to keep the union framework alive and keep the class struggle within the boundaries of the state and illusory reform[21]. In recent years we've seen the appearance of independent unions in China, Vietnam, South Africa, Egypt and Iran, and it was the independent union Solidarnosc in Poland 1981 that turned a significant struggle of the working class into a movement to restructure Polish capital.

Times were tough for the working class before the pandemic and now they are even tougher. Prior to Covid-19 the working class was tentatively beginning a response to the gathering assaults on its living conditions by capitalism, but this was halted by a pandemic that constituted a direct challenge to the health and life of the working class. Nevertheless, even in these circumstances, there have been expressions of struggles in defence of proletarian conditions across the globe. But the conditions for struggle are not propitious in the circumstances of the virus, given the needs for workers to come together and organise. What this re-emphasises is the need for divisions played up by the state, like those set up between Turkish, Kurdish and Syrian workers, to be overcome and for trade union control, "independent" or not, to be replaced by self-organisation and workers' assemblies taking control of their own struggles. The ubiquitous lock-downs of the present only add to the difficulties of the class struggle alongside the inhibiting factor of further attacks, no less in Turkey than anywhere else. But "... the capacity of the working class to respond to the crisis of the system has by no means disappeared; and this implies that sooner or later we will see significant reactions to the onslaught of capital. In the meantime, revolutionaries have a great deal of work to do in fertilising the fragile green shoots of consciousness already visible in small minorities across the world - products of a deeper undercurrent of awareness that the present system of production is profoundly and irreversibly bankrupt"[22].

 

Baboon, 18.4.21

Under the slogan “Kill the Bill”, recent weeks have seen thousands of mainly young people in various cities in England and Wales taking to the streets to protest against the implementation of the 307-page “Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill”, which will hand the police and the Home Secretary greater powers to crack down on protests. While the bill in question does not apply to Scotland or Northern Ireland, even there people gathered in public places to express their solidarity with the protests in the England and Wales. In certain places, as happened twice in Bristol, the protests led to violent confrontations with the police.

The proposed legislation intends to give the police in the U.K. more power to deal with "static protests" such as "sit-ins", to impose start and finish times on protests, as well as "maximum noise limits"; to intervene in a protest where noise is impacting those around it – all of which will make it easier to convict protestors. Under this proposed legislation a protester can face a fine of £2,500 and ten years in prison for not following police restrictions over how to conduct a protest. The rules set out in the bill can even be applied to a demonstration of just one person.

This bill is another harsh attack on the means of the non-exploiting population in Wales and England to defend their living conditions. The capitalist state is more and more reclaiming public spaces, while access to these spaces is essential for the workers to come together in order to unify their struggle with workers in other companies and plants. [1] The limitations on going out onto the street and the increased police surveillance were temporary measures introduced during the pandemic, but this bill intends to give certain of these limitations a permanent character. As we have seen before in history: temporary measures decided in face of particular circumstances are not reversed once conditions have “returned to normal”.

The trap of democratic and human rights

And now in 2021 we are witnessing a bourgeoisie that is virtually incapable of offering any viable perspective, leading to a growing gap between the bourgeois state and society, which was precisely the condition for the emergence of populism. [2] At the same time several parts of the political apparatus within the western democracies are substantially gangrened by corruption, discredited and even hated. Decades of attacks against living and working conditions have left deep traces in the working class. In the UK itself "Factional interest, short-term political and personal gain, and naked corruption are replacing the defence of the national interest.” (Johnson government: a policy of vandalism [57] ; World Revolution 387 - Autumn 2020)

The new repressive measures being prepared by the Johnson government do not exist in isolation and have not come about by chance. In reaction to the weakening of its political and ideological weapons, the new regulations of the Johnson government are part of a more general policy of the western bourgeoisie, and intend to strengthen the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state. The growing loss of ideological control forces the bourgeoisie to take refuge to a more rigid state control, and to refine its instruments of intimidation. The massive attacks on the living conditions of the working class, which undoubtedly lie ahead of us, compel the bourgeoisie to prepare for all possible reactions, especially by the working class.

Anarchists come to the aid of democracy

In contrast to the statement published (apparently without any criticism) on the website of the Anarchist Federation (AF), “#KillTheBill: Joint Statement on the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill From XR, BLM Local groups, RAAH and more” [3], the new step taken by the Johnson government in the direction of an increased state repression, does not yet make the U.K. a full-blown police state. It is one of the most experienced ruling classes in the world and very skilled in hiding its political domination behind the democratic facade with its parliamentary elections and so-called equal rights for all British citizens. And there is no reason to change this policy since the fundaments of this democracy are not being publicly challenged, either by another faction of the bourgeoisie or by the working class.

The UK is not an open dictatorship, but the British state is certainly an authoritarian and repressive state, just as any state, whether it is “more democratic” or more “totalitarian”. But in both cases, it presents itself as an instrument of protection of society, as it has done in the past year by holding back the extreme social chaos that would arise if the pandemic was allowed to go unchecked. The denunciation by the statement of “the creation of an authoritarian police state” is rather confusing, because it leaves us with various questions:

• what is the difference between an “authoritarian police state” and a “non-authoritarian police state”;
• what if the protesters do succeed in blocking the creation of a police state, is this state no longer authoritarian?

But there is more to say about the statement published by the AF. The appeal to #UniteForHumanRights and “to fight to protect the fundamental human rights”, is an open call for bourgeois demands. For human rights derives from “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, which is a bourgeois declaration approved by the United Nations in 1948, at the beginning of the Cold War. The Soviet Union abstained from voting this Human Rights Declaration, and with reason, because it was almost immediately used by the Western bloc to wage a 40 years’ Cold War against the Stalinist regimes, undeniably as inhuman as the countries of the Western Bloc.

The slogan “#SaveOurDemocracies” is another dangerous mystification, because it makes an appeal for us to identify with and defend the mystification of democratic rights. In the name of “the will of the people” it actually calls for a popular front of all democratic forces. But in the 1930’s it was the Popular Front in France that used the state machine is to smash the workers, to imprison hundreds of workers for holding meetings and strikes and to prepare for war by military and industrial conscription of millions of workers. This policy was clearly denounced at the time in the leaflet “France in Revolt [58]”, distributed by the Anarchist Federation of Britain

It may be that the AF has jettisoned any kind of class analysis, but the Anarchist Communist Group, which split from the AF in 2018, has not, and thus it writes that “we must resist this bill together, as a class”. But for the rest the article of the ACG remains rather vague about what this means in the concrete conditions of the class struggle today. After this the ACG writes “It’ll mean calling for and organising local meetings and demonstrations”. Is this an appeal to the working class to defend the democratic rights allegedly granted by the class which exploits it? And if it is an appeal for real working class struggle, where are the specific working class demands?

While claiming to defend the essential role of the working class struggle, the ACG seems to have “forgotten” the specific nature of this class, why it is the class antagonistic to capital and therefore the only force in capitalism able to lay the groundwork for an alternative society without repression and exploitation. The working class is a class of wage labourers, including those who are temporarily unemployed, which depend for their livelihood on the selling of their labour power. And its force, its organisation and consciousness, is precisely based on its position as an associated class in the production process.

The ACG wants a class struggle against the new repressive state measures, but in doing that it completely ignores what makes the working class the only force capable of “overthrowing capitalism, abolishing the State, getting rid of exploitation, hierarchies and oppressions, and halting the destruction of the environment”(What is the ACG? [59]); in other words: its class autonomy. [4] Without this class autonomy, without the struggle on a proletarian terrain for authentic class demands, the working class is no more than a sum of individual citizens, an amorphous mass of protesting people at best. Therefore any call to the workers to fight against the new repressive legislation, which is not based on clear class demands, can only serve to disarm the working class.

Within capitalism the working class has no rights

The protests against the new law, and the energetic commitment of the people fighting against its approval, show one thing in particular: the great illusions in the democracy in general and the democracy of the UK in particular. In fact, the appeal by the protesters to “our democracies”, to “the right to protest”, to “human rights”, rights that that the ruling class supposedly tries “to take away from us”, only shows that the main instrument of the bourgeoisie to rule British society is indeed the illusion of democracy, even if it needs police surveillance and state organised violence (which we saw clearly displayed at the vigil for Sarah Everard and the Bristol Kill the Bill protest) as an additional tool. But the need for the bourgeoisie to use its repressive instruments as a last resort makes the democratic mystification no less dangerous.

Democracy is a very refined instrument of social control and no less totalitarian than a full-blown dictatorship. The western democracies “maintain the whole apparatus, from the media to the police, required to impose a grip on society that hides its totalitarianism behind a veil of ‘freedom’.” (International Review no. 62 - Editorial [60]; 1990) The strength of western democracies is precisely located in their ability to hide the fact that its rule is not only as ruthless and effective as any dictatorship, but is actually better organised. In 1919 Lenin had already pointed to the great lie of democracy and showed that “in reality terror and a bourgeois dictatorship rule the most democratic republic” and that “shouting in defence of ‘democracy in general’ is actually defence of the bourgeoisie and their privileges as exploiters.” (Theses on bourgeois democracy and proletarian dictatorship [61])

There is no fundamental difference between the protests against the new bill and the protest against the lockdown: in both cases the protesters reclaim their “freedom” as citizens. In the case of the protest against the new bill they demand the “right” to protest “freely” and in the case of the protest against the lockdown they demand the “right” to move “feely”. But in both cases the demands do not put into question the capitalist system and the authority of the state. This is completely different from the struggle of the working class. And certainly since capitalism entered its period of decadence this class can no longer fight for “democratic demands”, even if certain sectors still have illusions and may get drawn into the defence of such demands. Within capitalism only the ruling class has rights and the workers have no other right than to sell their labour power and to be exploited.

The protests of the past three weeks in the U.K. will not force the bourgeoisie to back down, even if the bourgeoisie gives the impression that it is ready to listen to “the will of the people” and to make some changes in the original draft of the bill. This is a manoeuvre intended to bind the protesters even more to the authority of the state. The present bill is actually not a frontal attack on the protests groups like Extinction Rebellion, but against the future protests that may irrupt when the austerity will be imposed on the working class to claw back the huge debts incurred during the pandemic. This actual legislation is a first step in the preparation of the ruling class to confront its main enemy, the working class, in the battles that will inevitably emerge in the period ahead.

Dennis, April 202 

Notes:

[1] The strength of the working class struggle is shown when workers of all sectors and companies come together “en masse”, in places where it is possible to have debates, where it can decide on the course of the struggle and the road it has to take. But the majority of workers recognise that massive gatherings, open to everyone who wants to reinforce the struggle, are too dangerous under the circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic. “But as soon as the pandemic is behind us, we will have to occupy the streets again, occupy all public spaces to discuss the means of the struggle and resist the austerity plans that the ruling class will seek to impose on us.”(La bourgeoisie profite de la pandémie de Covid-19 pour attaquer la classe ouvrière! [62]; Révolution Internationale no. 487)

[2] Since the traditional political parties have been substantially discredited in the eyes of the working class, there is a direct link between the rise of populism and the discrediting of the party political establishment. “The roots of populism in Europe and the USA are in the first instance a result of the historical weakening of the traditional government parties, which have been discredited by decades of attacks against living and working conditions, by unbearable levels of chronic mass unemployment, by the cynicism, hypocrisy and corruption of numerous political and economic spheres, and by their incapacity to offer the masses the illusion of a better future.” (Presidential campaign in France: populism and anti-populism, two expressions of capitalism’s dead-end [63]; ICConline April 2017 [64])

[3] #Kill The Bill: Joint Statement on the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill From XR, BLM local groups, RAAH and more - Extinction Rebellion UK [65] : “This is an open statement written by a coalition of UK organisations, groups & social movements of all ethnic backgrounds, gender identities, sexualities, faiths, abilities, ages and social standings, who have united to challenge the UK government”. 

[4] The class autonomy of the proletariat means its independence from the other classes of society, its ability to give a political orientation to all the other non-exploiting strata. This class independence of the proletariat constitutes an INDISPENSIBLE CONDITION for its revolutionary action aiming, in the long run, at the overthrow of capitalism and the construction of a classless society and thus without exploitation of man by man. (Balance sheet of the public meetings on the “Yellow Vest” movement [66]; ICConline – 2020s) 

 

The article below was recently published by the ICC's French section. If the details of violence among young people relate to that country, they are not a French specificity, as is clear from many recent examples in the UK. In Reading, in January, four boys and a girl, all aged 13 or 14 were arrested for murder after a 13-year-old boy was stabbed to death. In Haringey, a student who had gone to help friends after a mobile phone was stolen was stabbed to death and 5 teenagers have been charged. In Islington, a 15-year-old who was going to a chip shop was fatally stabbed and a 17-year-old has been charged with his murder. These are all characteristic of this putrefying world. In the same way, it is on a global scale that the solution to the tragedy that capitalism is inflicting on humanity and its youth on a daily basis can be found: the overthrow of the capitalist system, which is incapable of offering any perspectives to young people except unemployment, brutal death on the street corner, under the blows of gangs or cops, or as a consequence of the anti-social and deadly behaviour of other young people, which are a pure reflection of the world in which we live.

Since February, there have been multiple violent incidents among young people. Brawls, attacks, killings... the horror hits the young generation head on.

In Paris, on 15 February, Yuriy, a 15-year-old, was beaten and his skull smashed with a hammer by eleven young people aged 15 to 18. Even when he lay motionless on the ground, they continued to hit him. In Essonne, on 22 February, a 14-year-old girl was stabbed in the stomach during a brawl between two gangs. Six juveniles aged 13 to 16 were arrested. The next day, 23 February, also in Essonne, two gangs clashed: the 'big' ones (16-17 years old) 'supervised' a fight between the 'little' ones (12-15 years old) ... until one of them was surrounded and pulled out a knife... A 14-year-old schoolboy died, another 13-year-old went to hospital in a serious condition, stabbed in the throat. In Bondy, on 26 February, a young 15-year-old boxer called Aymen was killed when he was shot. The perpetrators were two brothers, aged 17 and 27. In Argenteuil, on 8 March, a 14-year-old called Alisha was trapped by two 15-year-olds: she was beaten up and thrown into the Seine while barely conscious. The contrast between the youth of the protagonists and the barbarity of the acts is shocking.

The press and politicians have all tried to exploit these tragedies. They accuse, in no particular order, 'irresponsible families', 'brutal immigrants', 'Muslims', the 'laxness of the legal system', 'lack of police funding'... and propose as a solution to punish the parents, to deport foreigners, to increase police numbers and to toughen laws against juveniles. The government is going to play this repressive card with the reform of the justice system as it affects young people, which is going to lead to quicker verdicts and heavier sentences. In other words, they are all preparing us for an even more violent and inhumane society.

In reality, youth pay the price for the rotting of the whole social body: 'no future' is a gangrene that is gradually gaining a hold throughout society. While the bourgeoisie is no longer able to mobilise society behind any perspective, and while the proletariat is not putting forward its own revolutionary perspective, society decomposes on its feet[1] and social relations disintegrate: increased individualism, nihilism, destruction of family ties, every man for himself, fear of the other, are all proliferating; blind violence, hatred, the spirit of revenge and self-destruction become the norm (on television, in films, through music, games). This outpouring of barbarism between children for totally futile and irrational reasons is the expression of a society without a future, which is breaking down, oppressing and suffocating us. In more and more parts of the world, this violence between young people has become a daily occurrence, whether it takes the form of gang rivalries or shootings in schools.

Today, the bourgeoisie has no future to offer to humanity. Only the class struggle can put an end to this dynamic. Only class solidarity, all generations combined, can light the way towards the revolutionary perspective and put an end to inhuman and deadly capitalism.

Ginette, March 24, 2021

Poster of May 68 against state repression

In recent months, in public meetings and online forums, there have been criticisms and misinterpretations of our positions regarding the state measures in response to the Covid-19 pandemic: lockdowns, curfews, bans on gatherings on public places, and compulsory vaccination for essential professions. Some of the critics have even concluded that the ICC in fact supports these measures of the state. The aim of this article is to respond to these critiques, both by reaffirming our opposition to the current anti-lockdown protests and by explaining the difference between the so-called “protective measures” of the bourgeois state and the precautions we recommend to communist militants and the working class.

In the past year the policy of the bourgeois state, in its attempt to counter the spread of the pandemic, has given rise to different campaigns and protests. Some of these campaigns plead for the abolition of the measures altogether, others for more human measures, and others even for a tightening of the measures.[1]

The first campaign is well-known. Behind slogans such as “against the violation of our rights”; “we want our freedom back”, “tyranny versus freedom”, “down with the mask”, numerous demonstrations have taken place in the past months, in various countries, to protest against the lockdown measures. In the framework of the so-called “Worldwide Rally for Freedom” the weekend of 20-21 March 2021 saw protests in some 40 countries in Europe and beyond.[2] These rallies were often characterised by an anti-elite rage and in certain cases even led to vandalism, nihilist riots, massively violating the imposed restrictions. In Holland there were even attacks on testing stations and hospitals.

A second campaign has taken place in French Canada, where demonstrations are organised under the slogan “Ensemble pour les mesures sanitaires et solidaires – Non au couvre-feu”. In a statement, the organisers denounce the curfew of the government as “an attack on our freedom and on our relations and aspirations of solidarity”. They think that the curfew further marginalises vulnerable communities, like homeless people, sex workers, drug users, and non-status workers. The protesters, who reject a police solution to the health crisis, “refuse the dichotomy between blind obedience to the government and the silly manipulations of conspiracy theorists.”[3]

In its political combat against the policy of the state in response to the pandemic, the ICC has - in several articles - denounced the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie and its complete neglect of the health of the population. Despite the lockdown measures the bourgeoisie “continues its negligence, which it masks by trying to make us feel guilty, by making us bear the blame for the infections, for the exhaustion of the care workers who are victims of the "irresponsible behaviour" of individuals. (…) The state imposes curfews as early as 6pm or lockdowns at weekends, while proletarians are openly allowed to infect themselves in the workplace or on public transport.”[4]

One organisation of the proletarian political milieu even goes a step further and tells us that the essential motivation for the lockdown measures is to prepare for economic attacks in the future. “The proletarians are confined, not to protect their health, but to impose a discipline that will be necessary in the face of the next economic and social measures that are planned to be applied.”[5] But even if the bourgeoisie does not hesitate to make a virtue out of necessity and will not fail to use the opportunity to prepare for future confrontations with the working class, the main goal of the lockdown is not to discipline the proletariat but to block the spread of the virus, which for the moment poses a greater threat to the economy and social cohesion.

The danger of “partial” struggles

In the past year the ICC has not supported any of the protests against obligatory lockdown put into place by the state in an attempt to block the rampant spread of the Covid-19 virus. The reason for this is that these protests remain completely on the surface and do not touch the roots of the capitalist mode of production, which has brought the bourgeois state into existence with the function of defending the capitalist system. The ICC opposes the aims, methods and slogans of the current protests which, however radical they sometimes may seem, call on us to defend certain “rights” as citizens within capitalist society. Such a position is the subject of a special point in our platform.

 “It is wrong to think that it is possible to contribute to the revolution by organising specific struggles around partial problems, such as racism, the position of women, pollution, sexuality, and other aspects of daily life. The struggle against the economic foundations of the system contains within it the struggle against all the super-structural aspects of capitalist society, but this is not true the other way around.”[6] These “partial” struggles are incapable of attacking the root of the problem, i.e. exploitation of one class by another, in the form of capitalist wage slavery.[7]

The working class has nothing to gain from reclaiming “our freedom as citizens”, which has supposedly been taken away from us by the “authoritarian” restrictions of the bourgeois state. It has also nothing to gain from demands for “social justice” and for “our rights”. Such protests do not open the prospect of a solution, which can only gain momentum in and through the struggle for the proletarian perspective. On the contrary, “By their very content ‘partial’ struggles, far from reinforcing the vital autonomy of the proletariat, tend on the contrary to dilute it into a mass of confused categories (races, sexes, youth, etc.) which can only be totally impotent in the face of history”.[8]

“Partial” struggles increase the division and the confusion within the class and therefore represent a dangerous trap for its struggle. They will inevitably lead into the dead-end of calling for a more “democratic” and a more “human” society, which is and will remain a class society, based on repression and exploitation. And from experience we know that “bourgeois governments and political parties have learned to recuperate and use them to good effect in the preservation of the social order”.[9]

The most important examples in recent years of the “recuperation” of such protests by the bourgeoisie were the “Youth4Climate” and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, which pulled in many young people, often young proletarians.

The ICC has not supported the demand, put forward during the BLM protests, that the police should be “defunded”. As we already explained in a previous article, the call to defund the police or even to abolish the police altogether is, on the one hand, “completely unrealistic inside this society: it is akin to the capitalist state voluntarily dissolving itself. On the other hand, it spreads illusions in the possibility of reforming the existing state in the interest of the exploited and the oppressed – when its very function is to keep them under control in the interests of the dominant class.”[10]

The same applies to the demands to lift the lockdown measures. We agree that these measures are contradictory and doubly coercive since they confine the workers in their free time, but oblige many of them to go to work, when it is obvious that most infections occur at the workplace. Even if we don’t say that they are essentially aimed at controlling the working class, as Le Prolétaire claims, we agree that despite the measures the exploited class is the main victim of the pandemic. Nonetheless we don’t support demands to put an end to these measures. Demands to lift the lockdown cannot contribute to the development of the proletariat’s class consciousness, its combativity and its solidarity. On the contrary: they only raise obstructions against such a development and have no other perspective than reinforcing illusions in bourgeois rule, whether democratic or openly despotic.

Moreover most of the anti-lockdown protests, with their outright demand for the abolition of all the state’s measures against the pandemic, don’t offer any viable perspective other than a further spread of the virus, and thereby show the completely irrational considerations behind these protests. They frequently claim that the virus is just a hoax, something intended to deceive or defraud, but this is more and more refuted every day by the millions of people worldwide who have died and still will die from Covid-19. In a recently published article[11], we denounced the irrational theories and apocalyptic ideologies behind these protest and the danger they pose, not only for the health of the people, but also for the class consciousness of the proletariat.

The state is repressive by nature

Since Marx wrote The Civil War in France, the position of the revolutionaries about the state has been quite clear: the bourgeois state, as the expression of the dictatorship of the ruling class, has to be destroyed in the course of the proletarian revolution. For “in reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy”.[12] That’s why the ICC supports any proletarian struggle against attacks by the state, as it did for instance during the struggle in France in 2006 against the CPE (First Employment Contract - a new law designed to increase the casualisation of the workforce and especially of new employees) In this particular case, the students’ movement, by threatening to extend to the employed sectors, obliged the government to withdraw the CPE. This was an expression of proletarian resistance to a direct attack by the bourgeois state, and it did not concern itself with taking the legal or electoral path to persuade the government to change its mind.

But the current anti-lock down protests take place on a completely bourgeois terrain and in no way open the door to a movement that can really challenge the legitimacy of the bourgeois state. On the contrary, their alternative to the lockdown and similar measures is simply to call for a more liberal or “laisser faire” policy, often connected to the electoral game between different bourgeois factions.

Throughout its existence, the ICC has warned the class against the risk of being drawn onto the bourgeois terrain. The historical phase of decomposition only multiplies these risks, not least because it has been marked by a serious loss of class identity, of the proletariat’s awareness of itself as a distinct social force, making the working class more vulnerable to being dragged into all kinds of protests which take it away from the defence of its own interests and dilute it in a vague mass of citizens or a myriad of competing “identities”. Faced with the increasing dangers for the proletarian struggle, and to show the class the way to fight for its safety, the task of the hour for revolutionaries is to affirm proletarian solidarity and class autonomy.

The struggles of the past year, in particular at the beginning of the pandemic, have shown that the working class does not limit its struggle to economic demands. In the spring of 2020 workers in various countries went on strike, not demanding better payment, but better safety measures against the virus. History has also given several examples of the workers coming out on strike against the repression of the state.[13] And in contrast to the protests of the past year, these workers had no illusions in the bourgeois state and did not demand for legal changes in order to make the state less “authoritarian” and “more friendly” to its citizens. During their fights against state repression the workers relied completely on the strength of their autonomous action as a class.

The fight for our safety

As we wrote in the summer of last year “this proletarian sense of responsibility, which also prompts millions to follow the rules of self-isolation, shows that the majority of the working class accepts the reality of this disease, even in country like the US which is the ‘heartland’ of various forms of denialism about the pandemic”.[14] Since the publication of this article the class struggle has continued, although on a lower level. But in nearly all its struggles the rules of social distancing, and in the bigger mobilisations the use of protective clothing (PPE), were respected.

If the ICC doesn’t support the measures of the bourgeois state, this does not mean that it completely neglects the necessary precautions to protect its militants against the danger of the virus. It follows the example of the working class. The policy of the ICC is to listen to the science and the science tells us that, as long as there is no other solution, social distancing (including PPE) is the best protection against infection by Covid-19.

If the ICC respects this scientific advice, such advice is not swallowed blindly; on the contrary it must always be critically evaluated. As revolutionaries we are wary of any form of applied science under capitalist conditions since we know how it is utilised; the most striking example being the war industry of course. But also science used for commercial purposes is something that has to be approached with the necessary suspicion. The first and main goal of the pharmaceutical industry is to make profit, even if it is at the cost of the health of the population. But this isn’t a reason to distrust science as such.

The Covid-19 pandemic has faced revolutionaries with an extraordinary situation. The bourgeois state is an enemy of the communist movement and the virus is an enemy of human life. But if the ICC follows the advice about social distancing and the use of PPE, this doesn’t mean it is supporting the state and the ban on protests, which will inevitably be used against any attempt by workers to come together on a class basis, whether to demand adequate safety measures at work or to fight the wage reductions and lay-offs that will accompany the lockdown and its aftermath. The ICC is fully aware that the only alternative to the measures of the bourgeois state is the struggle for a fundamentally new society, the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the elimination of capitalist exploitation.

Dennis, 13 May 2021

 

In the first part of the reply to this reader's letter[1], we responded to the criticisms made by comrade D. to the "Report on the Question of the Historical Course", adopted at the 23rd ICC Congress and published in International Review 164. In this second part, we would like to deal with another question raised by the comrade in his letter: that of the possible prospect of a generalised nuclear war.

The conditions for the outbreak of a generalised war

Comrade D. states in his letter that "the question of war is not at all excluded by the theory of decomposition which replaces the theory of the historical course".

Apart from the fact that the ruling class has not been able since 1989 to reconstitute new imperialist blocs, the comrade forgets that the second condition for the outbreak of a new world war is the ability of the bourgeoisie to mobilise the proletariat behind national flags, especially in the core countries of capitalism. This is by no means the case today. As we have always said, a proletariat which is not prepared to accept the sacrifices imposed by the worsening economic crisis is not prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice of its life on the battlefields. After the long counter-revolutionary period which had notably allowed the states to send millions of proletarians to their deaths under the flags of fascism and anti-fascism during the Second World War, the working class returned to the stage of history at the end of the 1960s (May '68 in France, the hot autumn in Italy, etc.).

The bourgeoisie had been prevented from unleashing a third planetary butchery during the Cold War because it was not in a position to mobilise a proletariat which, although it was not able to develop its struggles onto a revolutionary level, was at the same time very combative and absolutely not willing to be killed or to massacre its class brothers. In spite of all the difficulties that the working class has encountered, since 1989, in developing massive struggles, the historical situation is still open. As the proletariat has not suffered a decisive and definitive defeat, the worsening of the economic crisis can only push it to fight tooth and nail to defend its living conditions, as we have seen again recently with the movement against the pension reform in France during the winter of 2019-2020. And in its capacity to resist the attacks of capital, we have also seen a tendency to seek solidarity in the struggle between all sectors and all generations. Of course, this does not mean that the bourgeoisie can never again inflict a historic and decisive defeat on the working class. But, as we stated in our "Theses on Decomposition" (International Review 107), social decomposition can destroy any capacity of the working class to overthrow capitalism and lead to the destruction of humanity and the planet.

Towards a reconstitution of the imperialist blocs?

To support his analysis of the current potential for a large-scale military conflict, Comrade D. says: "Apart from the question of long-range nuclear weapons, there is at the moment one country that does not need to have constituted a united and perfectly held and supported bloc in order to launch itself into a war which, if not global, will not be confined to a theatre of operation limited in time and space (like the two wars against Saddam Hussein). This country is of course the United States, which has the economic power, the military supremacy and the basis for intervention all over the world. For a war with battles in different parts of the world, occurring simultaneously and over a fairly long period of time (several years), it is enough for another power, which constitutes vassal states through foreign trade and economic investments, to acquire military bases abroad in these vassal states, to start building aircraft carriers and generally an efficient and numerous navy, so that at a certain point the risk of generalised conflict becomes a definite probability. That country already exists, it is China, which may soon, thanks to the Covid-19 epidemic, overtake the US in global economic terms."

It is true that the strategic battle for a "new world order" is concentrated around the opposition between these two superpowers. China, with its vast "Silk Road" programme, aims to establish itself as a leading economic power by 2030-50 and to have a "world-class army capable of winning any modern war" by 2050. Such ambitions are causing a general destabilisation of power relations and since 2013 has been prompting the US to try to contain the rise of this threatening Chinese power. The US response, which began with Obama (and has been taken up and amplified by Trump), represents a turning point in US policy. The defence of its interests as a national state is now tied up with the tendency towards every man for himself which dominates imperialist relations: the United States is moving from the role of policeman of the world order to that of the main propagator of every man for himself, challenging the very same world order established since 1945 under its aegis. On the other hand, the idea implied by what the comrade says is that there is a tendency towards bipolarisation, since on the one hand the European countries, within the framework of NATO, would take the side of the United States, while China, not only could rely on its vassal states but would have a major ally, Russia.

However, the emergence of China itself is a product of the phase of decomposition, in which the tendency towards bipolarisation is being undermined by the every man for himself attitude of each imperialist power. Similarly, there is a big difference between the development of this trend and a concrete process leading to the formation of new blocs. The increasingly aggressive attitudes of the two major poles tend to undermine rather than strengthen this process. China is deeply distrusted by all its neighbours, including Russia, which often aligns itself with China only to defend its immediate interests (as it does in Syria), but is terrified of being subordinated to China because of the latter's economic power, and remains one of the fiercest opponents of Beijing's "Silk Road" project. America, meanwhile, has been actively dismantling virtually all the old bloc structures that it had previously used to preserve its "new world order" and which helped resist the "every man for himself" shifts in international relations. It increasingly treats its NATO allies as enemies, and in general has become one of the main actors in aggravating the chaotic character of current imperialist relations.

Is a nuclear war conceivable in the present period?

Finally, by excluding one of the essential conditions for the outbreak of a new world war (the necessity of the ideological mobilisation of the proletariat), comrade D. advances another hypothesis. He refers to articles in the bourgeois press (L'Observateur and Le Canard enchaîné) to assert that a nuclear war is quite possible, especially between the United States and China (which has become an industrial and imperialist power facing the first world power).

As we have always argued, imperialism has its own dynamic and is an integral part of the way of life of capitalism in its period of decadence. And as Jaurès said, "Capitalism carries war with it like the cloud carries the storm". No economic power can compete with others, and assert itself on the world stage, without developing ever more sophisticated weapons. The trade war between states is therefore always accompanied by an exacerbation of imperialist tensions. While it is true that nuclear weapons are no longer just a means of "deterrence" as they were during the "Cold War", today the arms race is a means of blackmail and bargaining between the nuclear-armed states. The exacerbation of imperialist tensions does not always lead to a direct conflagration, as we saw, for example, in 2017 with the military tensions between the United States and North Korea (which gave rise to alarmist discourse in the bourgeois press). After several months of negotiations, this conflict ended (at least momentarily) with warm embraces between Trump and North Korean president Kim Jong-un

The more the bourgeoisie is cornered by the bankruptcy of its system and the acceleration of the trade war, the more each power seeks to advance its pawns in the global imperialist arena for the control of strategic positions against its adversaries. As capitalism sinks into social decomposition, the bourgeoisie appears more and more as a suicidal class. Uncontrolled outbreaks on the imperialist level cannot be excluded in the future, if the proletariat does not take up the challenge posed by the gravity of the historical situation. But for the moment, the prospect of a nuclear conflagration between China and the US is not on the agenda. Moreover, what would be gained by the two powers dropping massive nuclear bombs on their rival's soil? The destruction would be so great that no troops from the victorious country could be sent to occupy the ruins.

We have always rejected the vision of a "press-button" war where the bourgeoisie could unleash a global nuclear cataclysm at the push of a button, without any need for the proletariat to be enlisted. The ruling class is not completely stupid, even if irresponsible and completely insane heads of state can come to power on a short-term basis. It is not a question of underestimating the danger of imperialist tensions between the great nuclear powers like China and the United States, nor of totally ruling out the prospect of a conflagration between these two powers in the future, but of measuring the catastrophic repercussions at the world level: none of the belligerent powers could benefit from it. Contrary to the alarmist speeches of certain media and the predictions of geopoliticians, we must beware of playing Nostradamus. If the dynamics of imperialism (the outcome of which we cannot predict today) lead to such a situation, the origin will be found in the loss of total control by the ruling class over its decaying system. We are not there yet and must beware of crying "Wolf!" too quickly.

Revolutionaries must not give in to the social atmosphere of "no future". On the contrary, they must remain confident in the future, in the capacity of the proletariat and its younger generations to overthrow capitalism before it destroys the planet and humanity. By abandoning today our past analysis of the "historical course", we do not have, as comrade D. thinks, a "pessimistic" vision of the future. We still count on the possibility of generalised class confrontations that enable the proletariat to recover and affirm its revolutionary perspective. Contrary to what our reader says, we have never “announced” the defeat of the proletariat in advance.

Sofiane

“The Labour party has lost touch with the working class”. This is the lament from those on the left who are desperate for Labour to regain credibility as a party that could seriously contend for government office, following a series of humiliating electoral defeats, the latest being the by-election in Hartlepool, the first time Labour has lost this seat since it was created as a constituency in 1974.

From the right, however, this is not a lament, but a gloating proclamation of victory. The Conservative Party, we are told, is now the party of the working people of Britain. The Conservatives alone are the ones giving voice to the real concerns of the “left behind”, the “white working class”, or just “hardworking ordinary people”. The Tories’ election success in the last two years has to a large extent been based on their ability to win over large numbers of working class voters who in the past have been solidly Labour: the so-called Red Wall[1].

There’s no doubt that Labour, along with many other social democratic parties in Europe (France, Spain, Italy, etc) has been increasingly pushed to the edge of the electoral field. This has notably been the case since the rise of populism in many countries – whether organised in specifically populist parties like Rassemblement National in France, La Liga in Italy, Vox in Spain, UKIP in Britain, or through the traditional parties borrowing the slogans and attitudes of the populists, as with the Tories in Britain or the Republicans in the US. Today it’s the populists who make the loudest noise in denouncing the “established elites” in political life, combining right wing memes (immigration, crime, anti-“woke” stances on issues like race and gender) with a kind of neo-Keynesianism which is not afraid to spend big on the welfare of the “national community”. This is exemplified by the huge sums doled out by the Tory government on the furlough schemes during the lock-down and on backing research into and production of Covid-19 vaccines.

The capacity of the populists to present themselves as the true representatives of the working class is symbolic of the loss of class identity over the last few decades, a key element in the increasing difficulty of the working class to fight for its own interests in the face of a crisis-ridden system. We have written about this problem at greater length elsewhere[2], but very briefly we can say that this loss of class identity is the result both of enormous ideological campaigns (especially those around the so-called “collapse of communism” after 1989) and material changes in the organisation of global production. These elements have combined to reinforce the idea that the working class has either disappeared or is limited to those who work in traditional industries, while those who work for a wage in many of the new sectors (communication, services, etc), especially in the big cities, are labelled as essentially “middle class”. The real unity of interests between these different parts of the working class is hidden behind a smokescreen of false choices, typified by the campaigns around Brexit, which pitted the “urban elites” who tended to be pro-EU and the Red Wall voters who bought into Johnson’s slogan “get Brexit done”.

Labour’s fudge over Brexit, which Corbyn expressed in the most caricatured manner [3] expressed the inability of the party to appeal to these different sectors of the working class, in general becoming increasingly identified with the falsely named urban elite or middle class.

For opinion writers in left newspapers like The Guardian, the key question therefore is how to find policies that can attract both Labour’s new clientele and its errant former supporters. They tend to be critical of Starmer’s negative approach of harping on about Tory failures over the pandemic or about the “same old Tory sleaze” over scandals like David Cameron’s informal lobbying of government ministers, and the saga about who paid for the refurbishment of Boris Johnson’s flat in Downing Street. They want Labour to come up with positive policies that combine a green economy and job-creation without ditching “progressive” cultural and social attitudes, while recognising sadly that the Tories, for the moment, are making the running in promises about “levelling up” and overcoming the grotesque social inequalities laid bare by the pandemic and the lockdowns. 

Election defeats for the Labour Party are not defeats for the working class

Contrary to those who want to find a winning formula for Labour, whether back to Blair, back to Corbyn, or forward with some new alchemical concoction, we think that the question has to be posed in completely different terms. If being “in touch” with the working class means that you are actually one of its organised expressions, then the Labour Party “lost touch” with the working class when it transformed itself into a fully functioning cog in the machinery of capitalism.

In the second half of the 19th century, genuine socialists (we, like Marx, prefer the term communists) worked to build large workers’ parties, which, along with the trade unions, were part of the process through which the working class established itself as a distinct social force inside capitalism. A force which could fight for reforms within an expanding capitalist system, and at the same time develop the perspective of a socialist society that would begin a whole new stage in human history. But precisely because capitalism was in its period of triumphant expansion and ascent, inside the workers’ parties (such as the Social Democratic Party in Germany, and the organisations that would eventually come together in the Labour Party in the first years of the 20th century) there was a growing divide between those who understood that this new society would become not only a possibility but a vital necessity, and those who thought that capitalism could go on forever, improving the lot of the workers and perhaps even, bit by bit, transform itself into socialism. In fact, when the Labour Party was formed, there was no mention of socialism in its programme: “the movement is everything, the goal nothing”, as Eduard Bernstein, the leading spokesman for the reformists in the SPD, put it. Unlike other social democratic parties, the Labour Party never even defended the goal, the “maximum programme” of socialist revolution.

This crucial debate was settled by the events of 1914. The carnage of the imperialist war demonstrated that the choice facing humanity was not between reform or revolution, but between revolution or barbarism. Capitalism, entering its epoch of decadence, would become an increasing threat to the very survival of humanity. And the Russian revolution of 1917, followed by revolutionary movements in other countries, confirmed that the only way that capitalism’s drive towards destruction could be halted was through proletarian revolution: the destruction of the bourgeois state by the international power of the workers’ councils.

Confronted with this epochal change, the Labour Party – together with the majorities in the other social democratic parties and the trade unions – made its choice. Faced with the imperialist war, Labour capitulated to patriotism and played its role as “recruiting sergeant” for the slaughter. And faced with the threat of revolution after 1917 – which also had its echo in Britain – the watchword was: man the barricades, but on the side of the capitalist state. Faced with widespread sympathy for the Russian revolution, and some very militant workers’ struggles, such as the strike on “Red Clydeside” in 1919, the Labour Party adopted demagogic slogans which aimed to absorb or derail the revolutionary aspirations growing within the working class. The famous “Clause Four”, calling for the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy, was adopted in 1918 and was evidence of Labour’s fake conversion to socialism, in reality a commitment to state capitalism as the last rampart of capitalist social relations.

Within a few years, in 1924, the Labour Party confirmed that it had been fully integrated into the capitalist system by assuming the reins of government, as predicted in 1920 by Sylvia Pankhurst: “The British Labour Party, like the social patriotic organisations of other countries, will in the natural development of society, inevitably come into power. It is for the Communists to build up the forces that will overthrow the social patriots, and in this country we must not delay or falter in that work”[4]. And she added, reflecting her opposition to the views of Lenin and the leadership of the Communist International, “we must not dissipate our energy in adding to the strength of the Labour party; its rise to power is inevitable. We must concentrate on making a Communist movement that will vanquish it”. In sum, against the idea - still propagated by Trotskyists and other leftists today, that we can enter the Labour Party in order to transform it from the inside, or at least win over a substantial minority of it to the revolution – history has demonstrated that you cannot change the nature of a party which has gone over to the enemy class. You can only work for a class movement which will recognise the need to destroy it as an essential component of the capitalist state.

In government or in opposition, a party of capital

Subsequent events have further reinforced this conclusion. The defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 opened the door to the second world imperialist war. And again, the Labour Party displayed its recruiting sergeant’s stripes, above all with its ideology of a “people’s war against fascism” (echoed by the Stalinist “Communist” Parties and the majority of the Trotskyists). At the end of the war, in order to defuse any possibility of a revival of the proletarian discontent that had followed the 1914-18 massacre, it was the Labour Party that again came to power to implement the state capitalist measures aimed at keeping the working class on board with the existing system – above all, the introduction of the NHS in 1948.

Again, in the years after 1968, faced with a new economic crisis and a new wave of workers’ struggles, the Labour Party fitted in very nicely with the bourgeoisie’s political responses to the proletarian danger: first the strategy of offering the workers the bright prospect of returning the left to power; then, obliged to deal with workers’ anger against the attacks on their conditions launched by the governing Labour Party (as in the Winter of Discontent in 1979), in a kind of division of roles between Thatcher’s Tories – with the right in power implementing brutal attacks on jobs, and the Labour power in opposition presenting a purely bourgeois political alternative. The strategies changed, but the aim of keeping the class struggle under control remained.

Since 1989, we have been going through a long phase of retreat in the class struggle, a period of growing social fragmentation in which the divisions within the ruling class have grown increasingly brutal and chaotic. In this context, Labour’s role for the bourgeoisie has become increasingly mixed up and confused. Its primary role is no longer that of derailing rising workers’ struggles, and it has got more and more caught up in the internal divisions of the ruling class, as we can see from the scars inflicted on it by the Brexit fiasco.

It’s quite possible that in a future resurgence of the class struggle, there will be a new impetus to present Labour as a real workers’ party, as a force for socialism, but whatever policies it adopts, whether “Starmerite” respectability or “Corbynite” radicalism, it will not change the class nature of the Labour Party. The working class will have to break with the capitalist Labour Party in a fully conscious way, not on the bourgeois terrain of elections, but by fighting for its own demands and its own political perspective: the perspective of the destruction of the state and the transformation of society from the bottom to the top.

Amos 16 May 2021

 

This is not the first time that Hamas or other Islamic jihadists have rained rocket fire on civilian targets in Israeli cities, killing without discrimination: among the first victims were an Israeli Arab father and daughter in Lod, blown up in their car. Nor is the first time that Israeli armed forces have responded with devastating air raids and artillery fire, targeting Hamas leaders and weapons but also inflicting a civilian death toll in Gaza’s crowded buildings and streets dozens of times higher than anything “achieved” by Hamas rockets. Nor is it the first time that Israel has been on the verge of a military invasion of the Gaza strip, which cannot fail to result in further death, homelessness and trauma for Palestinian families. We saw all this before in 2009 and 2014.

But it is the first time that such a major military effort has been accompanied in a number of Israeli cities by a wave of violent clashes between Israeli Jews and Arabs. These are essentially pogroms: right wing gangs brandishing the Star of David and screaming “Death to the Arabs”, hunting for Arabs to beat up and murder; and at the same time attacks on Jews and synagogues set alight by crowds “inspired” by Islamism and Palestinian nationalism. Sinister and ironic memories of the Black Hundreds in Tsarist Russia or Kristallnacht in the Germany of 1938!

Provoking war and pogroms

The Israeli government under Netanyahu has to a large extent sown the seeds of this noxious development: through new laws reinforcing the definition of Israel as a Jewish state, and through the policy of annexing the whole of Jerusalem as its capital. This latter is essentially a declaration that the “Two State Solution” for the Israel/Palestine conflict is dead and buried, and that the military occupation of the West Bank is now a permanent fact of life. The immediate spark for the riots by Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem – the threat to expel Arab residents from East Jerusalem and replace them by Jewish settlers - flowed from this whole strategy of military occupation and ethnic cleansing.

The “democracies” of Europe and the US weep their usual crocodile tears at the escalation of military conflict and civil disorder (and even Netanyahu has called for an end to the street violence by Jews and Arabs alike). But the US under Trump had already sanctioned Israel’s openly annexationist policies, part of a wider imperialist project of bringing together Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states in an alliance against Iran (but also against great powers like Russia and China). And if Biden has taken some distance from Trump’s uncritical embrace of the Saudi regime, for example, his first concern in the current crisis has been to insist that “Israel has the right to defend itself”, because the Zionist state, for all its aspirations to playing its own game in the Middle East, remains a key component of US strategy in the region.  

But the Israeli state is not alone in acting as a provocateur. Hamas responded to the repression of the Jerusalem riots by launching a continuous salvo of rockets against civilian targets in Israel, knowing full well that this would bring fire from the skies on the unprotected population of Gaza. It has also been doing its utmost to encourage the ethnic violence inside Israel.

It is a characteristic of war in the epoch of capitalist decline that the first victims are the civil populations, above all the working class and the oppressed. Both Israel and Hamas are acting in the barbaric logic of imperialist war.

Faced with imperialist war, revolutionaries have always called for the international solidarity of the exploited against all capitalist states and proto-states. This remains the only possible barrier to a descent into war and barbarism.

But the ruling classes in the Middle East have, along with their more powerful imperialist backers, long stoked the flames of division and hatred. There were pogroms against Jewish settlers in Palestine in 1936, stirred up by a Palestinian political leadership that was seeking to ally itself with Nazi Germany against the dominant power in the region, Great Britain. But these were dwarfed by the massive ethnic cleansing of the Arab population that accompanied the 1948 “War of Independence”, creating the intractable Palestinian refugee problem which has been systematically instrumentalised by the Arab regimes. A succession of wars between Israel and the surrounding Arab states, Israeli incursions against Hamas and Hezbollah, the transformation Gaza into a vast prison – all this has deepened hatred between Arab and Jew to the point where it appears as nothing more than “common sense” on both sides of the divide. Against all this, examples of solidarity between Arab and Jewish workers in struggle are extremely rare, while organised political expressions of internationalism on both sides have been more or less non-existent.

The danger of an uncontrolled spiral of violence

There are further contingent elements in the provocative actions of the Israeli state. Netanyahu, the acting Prime Minister, has been unable to form a government after a series of inconclusive general elections, and still faces a number of corruption charges. He could certainly benefit from playing the strong man in this new national crisis. But there are deeper tendencies at work which could escape the control of those trying to benefit from the current mess.

The big Arab-Israeli wars of the 60s and 70s were fought in the context of the two imperialist blocs that dominated the planet: Israel backed by the USA, the Arab states supported by the USSR. But since the break-up of the bloc system at the end of the 80s, the innate drive towards imperialist war in decadent capitalism has taken a much more chaotic and potentially uncontrolled form. The Middle East in particular has become the stamping ground of a number of regional powers whose interests do not necessarily coincide with the schemes of the world powers: Israel, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia…These powers are already heavily involved in the bloody conflicts ravaging the region: Iran uses its pawn Hizbollah in the multi-sided conflict in Syria, and Saudi Arabia has been deeply enmeshed in the war in Yemen against Iran’s Houthi allies. Turkey has carried its war against the Kurdish peshmergas into Syria and Iraq (while also sustaining a military intervention in war-torn Libya) As well as reducing whole countries to ruin and starvation, these wars contain a real risk of spiralling out of control and spreading the destruction across the Middle East.

This mounting chaos at the military level is one expression of the global decomposition of the capitalist system. Another and closely related element is played out at the social and political level, through the intensification of confrontations between bourgeois political factions, of tensions between ethnic and religious groups, of pogroms against minorities. This is a global trend, typified, for example, in the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the persecution of Muslims in Myanmar and China, the sharpening of the racial divide in the USA. As we have seen, the ethnic divisions in Israel/Palestine have a long history, but they are being aggravated by the whole atmosphere of despair and hopelessness generated by the seemingly irresolvable “Palestinian problem”.  And while pogroms are often unleashed as instruments of state policy, in today’s conditions they can escalate beyond the aims of state agencies and accelerate a general slide into social breakdown. The fact that this is beginning to happen in a highly militarised state like Israel is a sign that the attempts of totalitarian state capitalism to hold back the process of social disintegration can end up aggravating it even more.

Wars and pogroms are the future that capitalism offers us everywhere if the international working class does not rediscover its own interests and its own future, which is the communist revolution. If the proletarians of the Middle East are, for now, too overwhelmed by massacres and ethnic divisions, it is up to the central fractions of the world proletariat to return to the path of struggle, the only path that leads out of the nightmare of this putrefying social order.

Amos, May 14, 2021

We are publishing below two letters from ICC sympathisers aimed at continuing the reflection that arose in a meeting in France on 15 May 2020 on the subject of the nature and composition of the working class. During this discussion some participants questioned what affect “uberisation” of work had on the composition of the working class. In other words, do the “uberised” employees belong to the working class? We welcome the comrades’ efforts of reflection and their willingness to express their concerns. The letters from the comrades make two contributions to this debate which will be continued at other ICC meetings. The ICC is committed to developing its position on this subject and we will publish further material in our press dealing with it.

Contribution to the reflection on: “what is the working class? who is part of the working class?” (L.)

Generally speaking, the conditions of production of wealth have not changed since the 19th century, when capitalism appeared in the Western countries (for Great Britain, in the 18th century). The working class is still the class that produces all the wealth and will continue to exist as long as surplus value is produced. Marx's definition specifies that the working class does not own the means of production, it only has its labour power to produce surplus value, in an associated manner, in exchange for a wage. However, in the 19th century, the proletariat was mainly concentrated in the primary (extraction and exploitation of natural resources) and secondary (transformation of basic materials into goods) sectors. Workers worked alongside each other and they could easily interact and organise themselves.

Following the ascendance of capitalism, the composition of the proletariat has changed linked to the development of other sectors. The tertiary sector, which included public servants (in French “fonctionnaires”) in charge of administering and organising the life of society, now includes many more workers, who participate in the valorisation of commodities, are paid a minimum wage and no longer have any hope of easily climbing the social ladder; this is the case in the Post Office sector (which includes fewer and fewer workers with public servant status), in Education, in Health Care, in Public Transport (where the status of public servant is also disappearing).

The bourgeoisie is always looking for “undercover” ways to further squeeze the working class: Britain has introduced a policy of “fire and re-hire”, which allows employers to terminate existing contracts of employment and replace them with much less “beneficial” contracts for the workers. An article on the situation in the UK [1] mentions this new devious practice, used by Tesco, British Telecom, British Gas and bus companies. It was also in Britain that the status of the self-employed “worker” was first introduced, in working for Uber, Deliveroo and other mail delivery companies, parcel delivery companies, etc.

At the last meeting, it was quite right to defend the working class affiliation of these “independent” workers. Even if they don't work in an associated way, they participate in the valorisation of the commodity labour power, by delivering meals to workers, transporting parcels, cleaning offices, etc.

Struggles have also taken place in Britain, in different sectors, involving temporary agency workers: “In March 2021, 150 porters, cleaners, switchboard operators and catering staff employed at Cumberland County Hospital by the equipment company Mitie, led a first day of action through the union, Unison, over a failure to pay them overtime...”

Today, there are fewer and fewer industrial workers, machinery having replaced them, but the technicians who operate and maintain the machines are workers, since they also participate in the production of value.

As capitalism has spread throughout the world, there are fewer and fewer small farms and now they are amalgamated into large agricultural companies managed on an industrial basis; these (farm) workers are part of the working class.

The working class has always been heterogeneous but the workers in peripheral countries do not have the historical experience of workers in central countries and are more likely to be influenced by the democratic sirens that divert their struggle into the trade union or into participation in elections.

So, the struggles of the workers in the central countries will be decisive in giving a lead to the workers from around the world in the development of a pre-revolutionary situation.

People from other classes can join the working class struggle by supporting revolutionary groups and by being convinced that only communist revolution can bring a viable future for humanity.

Experience has shown that occupying factories is no longer an effective means of struggle and that there is no power in being confined to the factory. On the contrary, the extension of the struggle and communications with other sectors is what empowers the struggle. The last movement against pension reform in France, for example, saw a wide range of sectors converge in the streets, including the public and private sectors, temporary workers, those on fixed-term contracts, lawyers and the unemployed. Even if some workers do not work in an associated manner inside the big companies, the attack on the pension system was (and can be in future) a powerful unifying factor.

In conclusion, today, in the epoch of the decomposition of capitalism, all the workers traditionally associated producers of surplus value, in the factories but also the temporary workers, workers in primary and secondary education, basic administrative staff, those in precarious jobs: self-employed workers who work in isolation but can be drawn into large (class) movements, all those who participate in the valorisation of the commodity to one degree or another, are part of the working class. The bourgeoisie does everything it can to prevent the workers from being "together" and tries to divide them, but the common interest of the workers, the struggle to defend wages, pensions, sick pay, working hours, holidays, resisting lay-offs, in short opposing the increase in exploitation, inexorably unites them.

L, 19/05/2021

Reader's letter from comrade Patche

At the last ICC meeting (Saturday 15 May), some comrades raised the question of the nature of the working class in a society where a phenomenon described as “uberisation” (named after the company Uber, a pioneer of this sector) in what is called “the gig economy” has taken root over the last decade or so. It is important to ask whether these new workers belong to the proletariat or whether they come from classes outside the proletariat that belong to the petty bourgeoisie, because the answer to this question has important consequences, particularly political ones. It determines whether or not we should defend these workers based on whether they are on a working class terrain or on a terrain outside the working class.

According to the ICC, in its Resolution on the Balance of Forces between the Classes (2019), “The increase in unemployment and precariousness has also highlighted the phenomenon of the "Uberisation" of work. By using an internet platform to find a job, Uberisation disguises the sale of labour power to a boss as a form of ‘individual enterprise’, while reinforcing the impoverishment and precariousness of these ‘entrepreneurs’. The ‘Uberisation’ of individual work is a key factor in enforcing atomisation, and increasing the difficulty of going on strike, because the self-exploitation of these workers considerably hinders their ability to fight collectively and develop solidarity against capitalist exploitation.”

Several points are important in this resolution. First of all, it states that Uberisation “disguises the sale of labour power to a boss”. According to the ICC, this form of self-employment is just a legal artifice. Moreover, in Great Britain, the Supreme Court has decided to reclassify Uber drivers as employees, thus showing that even the legal organs of the bourgeois state are not fooled by such a charade. If Uber workers are not considered as self-employed and, on the other hand, they sell their labour power to a boss, can't they be considered as belonging to the working class? The rest of the resolution is less clear on this question.

It argues that “the ‘Uberisation’ of individual work is a key factor in enforcing atomisation and increasing the difficulty of going on strike” and it “considerably hinders their ability to fight collectively” against capitalist exploitation. It is undeniable that the nature of the task carried out, which differs according to the service provided, though the main ones are delivering meals or working as a driver- as well as the mystified belief that Uber workers are their own bosses and answerable to no one but themselves - play a role in atomising the class and breaking the necessary solidarity between workers. Let's remember that for Marx capitalism, through the concentration and centralisation of capital, results in associated labour which, in the end, reinforces the class consciousness of workers who are collectively confronted with the same reality of savage exploitation. This is fundamentally what distinguishes the proletariat from the small peasantry, which is also exploited, but dispersed across the land, preventing it from forming bonds of solidarity.

But if Uber workers are atomised and dispersed and if it is extremely difficult for them to form solidarity links and lead collective struggles or strikes, are they not still a part of the working class, the proletariat? The fact that they are in the rearguard of the working class because of their precarious working conditions, does not mean that we should then deny these workers their status as exploited proletarians, separated from the means of production and condemned to sell their labour power to subsist, which is the definition of the proletarian according to Marx. The modalities of their exploitation could moreover be compared to that of piecework wages analysed by Marx in Book 1 of Capital (in chapter 21), the profitability of their task being calculated not in hours of work but in the number of tasks carried out, further increasing the competition between workers, each one seeking to accomplish as many tasks as possible in the course of the day.

Just before concluding, it is important to look at the real combativeness or otherwise of the Uberised workers. As we have said, their atomisation, the competition in this modern form of piecework, is constantly undermining solidarity between these workers. Yet in several places around the world we have seen spontaneous forms of struggle emerge without the creation or participation of any unions, the instruments of collaboration with the bourgeois state and defence of the capitalist mode of production. In Los Angeles, Uber workers spontaneously went on strike to fight against their working conditions. This is also the case in other countries and with other (gig economy) companies, in Italy, the UK, etc. It is true that these workers sometimes form unions or seek support from existing unions. Communist must reject these dead ends, arguing instead for the specific instruments of the class struggle, notably the wildcat strike, that rejects any union involvement. But such mistakes do not warrant placing the “uberised workers” outside the proletariat, and locating them with the petty-bourgeoisie.

In recent years, the quantity of precarious jobs has increased and the working class is the victim of this process, and the “Uberisation” of the workers is one of the expressions. To say that the Uberised workers do not belong to the proletariat because of their atomisation, their difficulties in placing themselves on the terrain of the working class, necessitates a deep and serious discussion based on a Marxist analysis. It is only through pursuing a polemical but fraternal debate that the working class is able to avoid the traps set by the bourgeoisie and its ideologues and to advance the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism and the emancipation of the proletariat.

Fraternal greetings, Patche

We are publishing below an article by the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, celebrating the 65th anniversary of the Paris Commune. The interest of this article, written in the midst of the counter-revolution and the march towards the Second World War, is that it highlights the historical continuity between the Commune of 1871 and the October Revolution of 1917. The article illustrates both the proletarian character of these two revolutionary experiences, their international scope and the tragedy of their defeat. Above all, it highlights, in the face of false friends and the chauvinist politics of the "popular fronts", that the proletariat must learn from its experiences, knowing, as Rosa Luxemburg underlined, that it is from "defeat to defeat" that the struggle of the proletariat progresses in order to assert and develop its revolutionary consciousness.

Between the Paris of the glorious Commune of 1871 and the Paris of the Popular Front there is an abyss that no phraseology can hide. The one embraced the workers of the whole world, the other saw the French proletariat dragged through the mud of treason. We want, to use the profound words of Karl Marx, "the Paris of the workers in 1871, the Paris of the Commune" to be "celebrated as the harbinger of a new society" and not as a simple 'national' episode, a moment in the defence of the fatherland, of the struggle against the 'Prussian' as the lackeys of the Popular Front will inevitably want to present it.

Certainly, the historical circumstances in which it arose could make such ideas possible. After all Marx did write: "Any attempt at upsetting the new government in the present crisis, when the enemy is almost knocking at the doors of Paris, would be a desperate folly. The French workers must perform their duties as citizens". But when, in March 1871, the Commune appeared, it was Marx who first brought out its profound internationalist character by writing: "If the Commune was thus the true representative of all the healthy elements of French society, and therefore the truly national government, it was, at the same time, as a workers' government, as the bold champion of the emancipation of labour, emphatically international.” 

The importance of the Commune lies in the fact that it was able to overcome the prejudices of the time, inevitable in the phase of the formation of capitalist states, in order to assert itself, not as the representative of the "Nation" or that of the democratic republic ("in reality," wrote Engels in his 1891 preface to Marx’s The Civil War in France, "the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, … in a democratic republic no less than in a monarchy"), but that of the world proletariat. Marx rightly wrote: " Its true secret was this: It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing class against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour”.

It is this historical significance of the Parisian workers' insurrection, brilliantly drawn out by Marx in the heat of the events themselves, which has remained, and which gave it the colossal importance it had for the development of the workers' movement. It was the appearance of "the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour". It's not surprising that, until 1914, the international movement lived on the heroic memory of the Commune, fed on it, but also came to blur its real meaning with the triumph of opportunism.

The French bourgeoisie, aided by Bismarck, was to crush the Commune with iron and fire. In the conditions of economic and social development of the time the Commune could have had no prospects. It was only after many years that the bourgeoisie, aided by opportunism, succeeded in blurring the immense significance of this event for the working class. In 1917, it appeared that only the Russian Bolsheviks had learned from the school of the Commune, that only they had understood its significance and through its critique had enabled them to deal with the problems of insurrection. Without the Commune, the October 1917 revolution would not have been possible. Here, it was one of those historical moments when "a desperate struggle of the masses, even for a hopeless cause, is essential for the further schooling of these masses and their training for future struggles" (Lenin), a first fruit of a bloody experience, a concrete step towards the world revolution.

The Commune was great and will remain so because the Parisian workers allowed themselves to be buried under its rubble rather than capitulate. No threat from Thiers, no violence could overcome their heroism. It took the massacres of May 1871 of Père-Lachaise to restore order and the triumph of the bourgeoisie. And even the opportunists of the Second International, who deliberately rejected the lessons of the Commune, had to bow to its heroism. Before the war, the Socialist parties had to glorify the Commune in order to better dismiss its historical lessons. But this attitude entailed a fundamental contradiction in that it made the Paris insurgents a permanent focus of international revolutionary struggle where genuine Marxists came to learn.

The Russian Commune of 1917 did not have this glorious fate. Its transformation into a centre of counter-revolution, its disintegration under the weight of world capitalism, has made it an element of repulsion whose lessons are very difficult to draw out. The Soviets for the worker no longer mean a step forward in relation to the Commune, but a step backwards. Instead of perishing under its own rubble, facing the bourgeoisie, the Soviets crushed the proletariat. Today its flag is that of imperialist war. But in the same way as there would have been no October 1917 without the Commune of 1871, there is no possibility of a triumphant revolution without the tragic end of the Russian revolution.

What does it matter, after all, if the Commune serves the chauvinistic hype of the Popular Front, if Russia has become a powerful instrument for the preparation of imperialist war? It is the destiny of the great events of history to be used in the interests of the perpetuation of capitalism, as soon as they have ceased to be a threat to its domination. The only thing that nobody in the world can erase from the Commune is its character as a forerunner in the liberation of the working class. The only thing that remains of the Russian Soviets is the gigantic experience of running a proletarian state[1] in the name and on behalf of the world proletariat.

The revival of revolutionary struggles must recall the political bases of these events. The historical forms do not matter: Commune or Soviet (rather Commune than Soviet[2]), the world proletariat will not be able to repeat the historical errors of either one, because, as Marx put it so well, it has "no ideals to realise, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant". We do not have to oppose a utopian and abstract ideal to these two historical experiences, to get lost in an empty enthusiasm or a sentimental repulsion, but to draw "the elements of the new society" from the historical phase in which the Russian revolution fell, as Lenin did with the Commune. As the Hungarian Commune of 1919 clearly shows, among other things, you inevitably see the repetition of errors, of failures, which, because of the existence of a previous experience, undermine the struggle of the proletariat for many years.

The workers cannot "repeat" in the course of their emancipatory struggle, but must innovate, precisely because they are the revolutionary class in present-day society. The inevitable defeats that occur along the way are then only stimulants, valuable experiences that determine, later on, the victorious development of the struggle. On the other hand, if we were to repeat tomorrow even one of the errors of the Russian revolution, we would jeopardise, for a long time, the destiny of the proletariat, which would become convinced that it has nothing more to try.

Let us therefore, while the proletariat is being beaten in all countries, allow the traitors to falsify the scope of the Commune. Let Russia follow its course. But let us take care to preserve the lessons of these two experiences, to prepare the new weapons for tomorrow's revolution, to solve what the Russian revolution failed to do, because if "The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence" (Marx, The Civil War in France), the merit of the Russian revolution was to have tackled the problems of the management of a proletarian economy in conjunction with the workers' movement of all countries and on the front of the world revolution. The "great act" of the Commune ended in massacres, the management of the Russian state ended with "socialism in one country". We know today that it is better that the next revolutions end like the Paris Commune than in the shame of betrayal. But we are working, not with the prospect of defeat, but with the will to prepare the conditions for victory.

There have been two Communes. Long live the Communes of the world proletariat.

Bilan no 29 (March-April 1936)

In the space of a few weeks, all over the planet, climate catastrophes have followed each other at an alarming rate. In the USA, in Pakistan, in Spain or in Canada, temperatures have neared 50 degrees centigrade. In northern India, unbearable heat has caused thousands of deaths. 800,000 hectares of forest in Siberia, one of the coldest regions in the world, have already gone up in smoke. In North America, the now traditional season of huge forest fires has already begun: more than 150,000 hectares have been on fire in British Columbia alone. In the south of Madagascar, an unprecedented drought has plunged 1.5 million people into famine. Hundreds of thousands of children are dying because there is nothing to eat, nothing to drink, while the world looks on in almost unanimous indifference. Kenya and several other African countries are going through the same dramatic situation.

But while part of the world is suffocating, deluges of rain are hitting Japan, China and Europe, provoking unprecedented floods and deadly mud slides. At the centre of Europe, particularly in Germany and Belgium, these floods have, at the time of writing, led to over 200 deaths and thousands injured. Thousands of houses, streets, entire villages and conglomerations have been carried away by the floods. In the west of Germany, roads, electricity and gas networks, railways and communications have been devastated. A number of road and railway bridges have collapsed. Never before has this region been hit by flooding on such a scale.

In China, in the town of Zhenzhou, capital of the central province of Henan and inhabited by 10 million people, in three days there was the equivalent of a whole year’s rainfall. Streets turned into rushing torrents, with frightening scenes of destruction and chaos: road surfaces breaking up, vehicles submerged…thousands of metro passengers were trapped in stations or tunnels, often with water up to their necks. 33 deaths and many injured; 200,000 evacuated. Supplies of water, electricity and food have been brutally interrupted. Damage to crops has cost millions. In the south of Henan, the dam containing the Guojiaju reservoir gave way and two others are threatened with collapse at any moment.

The conclusions of the draft report of the International Panel on Climate Change which was “leaked” to the press are chilling: “Life on Earth could recover from major climate change by evolving towards new species and creating new ecosystems. Humanity cannot”. For decades, scientists have been warning of the dangers of climate disturbances. We are right there now! It’s not just a matter of some species disappearing or of localised disasters. Cataclysm has now become permanent, and there is worse to come.

The negligence of the bourgeoisie faced with catastrophes

For a number of years now, heatwaves, fires, hurricanes and other forms of destruction have been multiplying. But while the inefficiency and incompetence of the poorest states in managing such disasters unfortunately come as no surprise, the growing inability of the big powers to deal with the situation is particularly revealing of the level of crisis into which capitalism is sinking. Not only are climatic phenomena becoming more and more devastating, numerous and uncontrollable, but the states and emergency services, after decades of budget cuts, are shown to be more and more disorganised and failing in their role.

The situation in Germany is a very clear expression of this tendency. Even though the European flood-warning system (EFAS) anticipated the floods of 14 and 15 July, “the warnings were not taken seriously and the preparations were insufficient”, as the hydrologist Hannah Cloke put it[1]. The central state basically got rid of warning systems by offloading them to the federal states, or even to local councils, without any standardised procedures or the means to work effectively. Result: while the electronic and telephone networks collapsed, making it impossible to warn the population and proceed with evacuations, the emergency services were reduced to switching on their sirens – that is when they were still working. Before reunification, West and East Germany had about 80,000 sirens; now there are only 15,000 in working order[2]. Lacking means of communication and coordination, the operations of the emergency services took place in the greatest disorder. In other words, austerity and bureaucratic incompetence made a large contribution to the fiasco!

But the responsibility of the bourgeoisie isn’t limited to failures in the emergency services. In these densely populated urban regions, the permeability of the soil has been considerably reduced, increasing the risks of flooding. For decades, in order to concentrate labour power and get a quick return on investment, the authorities have not hesitated to build numerous homes in flood-risk areas.

The bourgeoisie is powerless in the face of the climate disaster

A large section of the bourgeoisie cannot avoid admitting the link between global heating and the multiplication of catastrophes. In the midst of the ruins, the German chancellor solemnly declared “we must hurry. We are going to go much faster in the fight against climate change”[3]. Utter bullshit! Since the 1970s, international summits and conferences have been held nearly every year, with their lists of promises, objectives, commitments. Each time these “historic agreements” have proven to be pious wishes, while greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase year on year.

In the past, the bourgeoisie has been able to mobilise around immediate problems that have impacted on its economy. For example, it was able to drastically reduce the CFC gases responsible for the hole in the ozone layer. These gases were used in air conditioning systems, fridges and aerosols. This was indeed an important effort faced with the threat posed by the degradation of the ozone layer, but it never required a dramatic transformation of the apparatus of capitalist production. Carbon dioxide emissions pose an altogether different kind of problem.

Greenhouse gases are used to transport workers and commodities, to power factories. They are also made up of the methane produced by intensive farming, which also involves the widescale destruction of forests. In short, carbon dioxide emissions are at the heart of capitalist production: the concentration of labour power in immense cities, the anarchy of production, the exchange of commodities on a planetary scale, heavy industry…these are the reasons why the bourgeoisie is incapable of finding real solutions to the climate crisis. The search for profit, the massive overproduction of commodities, the pillage of natural resources – these are not an “option” for capitalism: they are the sine qua non of its existence. The bourgeoisie can only promote the growth of production with the aim of increasing the accumulation of capital, otherwise it would endanger its own interests and its profits faced with the exacerbation of globalised competition. The basis of this logic is “after me, the deluge!”. Extreme climate phenomena are no longer just impacting the populations of the poorest countries. They are now directly disrupting the apparatus of industrial and agricultural production in the central countries. The bourgeoisie is caught in the grip of insoluble contradictions.

No state is capable of radically transforming its apparatus of production without being driven back by competition from other countries. Chancellor Merkel may claim that it’s time to “hurry up”, but in truth the German government has never wanted to impose the strict environmental rules that get in the way of protecting strategic sectors like steel, chemicals or automobiles. Merkel has also succeeded in delaying the abandonment of coal production: the open cast exploitation of coal in the Rhineland and east Germany remains one of the biggest sources of pollution in Europe. In other words, the price for the strong competitive edge of the German economy is the unlimited destruction of the environment! The same implacable logic applies all over the planet: giving up carbon dioxide emissions or destroying its forests would be, for China or for any of the industrialised countries, shooting itself in the foot.

The “green economy” is an ideological mystification

Faced with this crying expression of the impasse of capitalism, the bourgeoisie is instrumentalising catastrophes the better to defend its system. In Germany, where the electoral campaign for the federal elections in September is at its height, the candidates vie with each other with proposals for fighting against climate disturbances. But all this is an attempt to pull the wool over our eyes! The “green economy”, which is supposed to create millions of jobs and allow for a “green growth”, in no way represents a way out for capital, either on the economic or the ecological level. For the bourgeoisie, the “green economy” above all has an ideological value, by spreading the idea that capitalism can be reformed. If new “ecological” sectors are emerging, such as solar panels, biofuels or electric vehicles, not only can they not serve as a locomotive for the whole economy given the limits on solvent markets, but their disastrous impact on the environment has already been shown: massive destruction of forests to extract rare minerals, deplorable state of recycling of batteries, intensive agriculture in the production of rapeseed, etc.

The “green economy” is also a favourite weapon against the working class, justifying lay-offs and the closure of factories, as we can see from the declaration of the green candidate Baerbock in the German elections: “We can only progressively eliminate fossil fuels (and the workers who go with them) if we have at our disposal one hundred percent renewable energy”[4]. It should be said that when it comes to lay-offs and the exploitation of labour power, the Greens already have plenty of experience, since for seven years they played an active part in the ignoble reforms of the Schröder government

The impotence of the bourgeoisie faced with the increasingly devastating impact of global heating at the human, social and economic level should not however lead us to fatalism. Certainly, caught in the contradictions of its own system, the bourgeoisie can only lead humanity to disaster. But the working class, through its struggle against exploitation and for the overthrow of capitalism, holds the solution to this obvious contradiction between, on the one hand the obsolescence of capitalist methods of production, the complete anarchy of the system resulting in generalised overproduction and the insane pillage of natural resources; and, on the other hand, the need for a rational method of production based on the needs of humanity and not the needs of the market. By freeing humanity from capitalist exploitation and the demands of profit, the proletariat will have the material possibility of carrying out a radical programme for the protection of the environment. The road is a very long one, but communism is more than ever a necessity!

EG, 23.7.21

The Biden administration, overturning the policy of Trump to some extent, has acted quickly but cautiously over the rapidly deteriorating internal war in Ethiopia, and more largely around the Horn of Africa, by appointing a retired diplomat, Jeffrey Feltman, as Special Envoy for the Horn of Africa. Feltman has been clear about the possible impact of problems facing the country and the region when he said: "Syria will look like child's play in comparison"[1]. Feltman has already toured the region and spoken to the regimes of Eritrea, Sudan, Egypt as well as the Ethiopian government. The Horn of Africa, a critical crossroads between Africa, Europe and Asia, is a vital, strategic area for imperialism and has attracted those such as France, Britain, Turkey (which has stated that it sees Ethiopia as its "open door" to Africa", FT, 17.1.2021, pay wall), the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the EU, China and the US. The region has ports, raw materials and oil wells but it is largely rural and its main attraction for imperialism is its geographical and thus its strategic position on the imperialist chessboard. Though China follows, in a fashion, its policy of "non-interference", there is the danger that this region, with the interference of powers large and small, will descend into a greater free-for-all but, with military bases of US, France, Japan, China and others, close by in Djibouti, the situation contains the danger of larger-scale clashes.

Both the US and the EU saw the Ethiopian federal government of Abiy Ahmed as a regional policeman and strongman able to keep this fragmented country of over a hundred million people together and pacify the surrounding ones. The EU and the west couldn't find words warm enough to describe their confidence in the Ethiopian economy describing it as an "economic miracle" (BBC, 13.8.2015) along with their total support for Ahmed, awarding him a Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. The words of European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, are instructive of the gap between delusion and reality when she said: “Ethiopia has given hope to a whole continent and beyond, showing that peace with one's neighbours, for the good of the people, is possible, when there is courage and vision. I am here today to show the European Union's full commitment to supporting Ethiopia and its people on their future path" (EU press release, 7.12.2019). The EU alone has directed nearly a $1 billion dollars of "development cooperation" towards Ethiopia in the last few years and the west has "invested" $9 billion overall with the IMF alone, making a massive $2 billion available. But because of its involvement in the mass killings and ethnic cleansing in the region of Tigray, the US and the G-7 began in April to impose punitive measures against the Ethiopian regime, using sanctions, pausing or stopping tranches of "aid"[2] with the risk of driving it closer to China or even turning to Russia. China already had a head start here with its "health diplomacy" (its vaccine programme - or "vaccine war" - has been integrated into this) on the continent, but particularly in Ethiopia which it sees as a hub for its "Belt and Road" soft power drive. On a much larger scale than that undertaken by "socialist" Cuba during the Cold War, China has successfully used health diplomacy as an adjunct to its imperialist drive in Africa (and elsewhere). In this respect it has stolen a march on the "old" western governments active in Africa, being particularly quick off the mark from the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

China has described its policy towards Ethiopia as an example of its "stronger community of Sino-African destiny". For a number of years now it has been funding civilian and military projects in Ethiopia, the former including industrial parks (in which Britain amongst other was interested in becoming involved), hydro-powered dams, highways, railways (connected to the town and port of Djibouti - important for this land-locked country), metro system, skyscrapers, sports stadia, etc., while the latter has seen officers in the Ethiopian army being trained in China. China has also funded half of Ethiopia's debt and is underwriting the $4 billion for the construction of the "Grand Renaissance Ethiopian Dam" (GRED) on the Blue Nile, forty-five kilometres east of the border with Sudan. The dam, whose construction started in 2011 and is now starting to be filled, has raised tensions with Sudan but also with Egypt, with the US backing both countries, but the latter in particular. The US has been very vocal in supporting the Egyptians over this issue, with a regional commander of US forces going onto Egyptian television recently (reported on Channel 4 News, June 25) stating his total support - and thus the US administration's - for Egyptian moves to stop the project, even suggesting that the Egyptians were not acting aggressively enough in this respect. But the Ethiopian regime is resisting US pressure, and this is an expression of the historical weakening of US hegemony and the growth of the tendency of every man for himself in international relations.

All countries have their specificities but Ethiopia particularly stands out in Africa as being a country that has never been colonised, fighting toe-to-toe against attempts to do so. It has its own written history but, never having been through a classic bourgeois revolution, is less a unified nation state than a patchwork of clans, ethnic and religious groups - a real anomaly. But even as such it was an expression of a nascent form of African imperialism developing at the same time as it was throughout the industrialised world. This was expressed in Ethiopia under the reign of Menelik II, 1844-1913. Menelik set up a more co-ordinated and centralised state structure, using appointments rather than hereditary privilege. It had an efficient, well-trained and well-armed army strong enough to take and beat any would-be colonisers, particularly the Italians. Menelik's state oversaw the building of modern roads, bridges and set up a postal and telegraph system. It ruthlessly suppressed the slave trade and gave Ethiopia a sense of national identity, establishing a modern state in 1898. The Menelik Empire collapsed under the weight of global imperialist war. It was invaded and occupied by Mussolini's Italy in 1936 and then by Britain in 1941, with Emperor Haile Selassie compelled to turn to the RAF for support.

During the Cold War, with "national liberation" firmly on the imperialism's agenda and supported by leftism around the world, Russia threw the leftists into a spin by abruptly changing its support from Somalia to that of its adversary, Ethiopia in 1977. More disconcerting for the leftists was that the US did exactly the opposite, forcing them to switch sides as well. The "socialist" leader in place, Mengistu Haile Mariam, became Moscow's placeman and ruled with terror. There's never been much of a working class in Ethiopia and this is reflected in the weight of Mao-like Stalinism in the country with its emphasis on the peasantry. There was some working class, student and popular protests in the 1970's, though largely controlled and manipulated by the various leftist factions. Even so, the regime cracked down hard with its form of Stalinist terror and a whole range of Eastern Bloc troops from Bulgaria to Cuba were barracked on Ethiopian soil. But by the mid-1980's the reach of Russian imperialism was faltering badly under the blows of the economic crisis; military and economic support from Moscow to Addis Ababa was being severely curtailed as the Soviet Empire stumbled towards its collapse. In 1989, as an example of not very good timing, Mengistu declared Ethiopia a "Workers' State". Two years later he and his regime were gone, beaten by history and an alliance of 21 factions fighting together under the auspices of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP), which included a significant force of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) a "Marxist-Leninist" organisation whose pro-Albanian "national liberation struggle" was supported by many on the left wing of capital around the world. Both the Abiy Ahmed[3] faction and the TPLF ruled Ethiopia from 1991 to 2018, during which time they fought a bitter war with the Maoist Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF). Eritrea achieved "self- determination" in 1993 and is today ruled by the same dictator, His Excellency Isaias Afwerki, who according to Human Rights Watch presides over one of the most repressive regimes in the world.[4]

Imperialist turn-around in Tigray

The Tigray region is one of ten in Ethiopia based on ethnic divisions and, from a "national liberation" perspective, so popular with the left of capital to this day, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) has provided important support to the state of Ethiopia, running its regional government for decades and beefing up its internal security forces which is a known strength of all these Stalinist gangs[5]. When he was part of the Ethiopian government, the leader of the TPLF, Debretsion Gebremichael, was very close to China, while there were also moves from the US and the west to curry favour with the TPLF.

As so often in the history of this region, with its jig-saw of ethnic and religious conflicts, adapted and inflamed by the needs of different imperialist powers, there has been a major turnaround in the forces involved. The reckoning between the Abiy and TPLF factions broke out into open warfare last November, when after months of feuding Abiy sent his army into northern Tigray in a major escalation of the conflict. The Ethiopian government turned for help towards its previous adversary, Afwerki's Eritrea, which sent its largely press-ganged and undetermined conscripted and half-starved army into Tigray to wreak havoc along with the warlords and militias of the Amhara Region Special Forces responsible for the ethnic cleansing and massacres in Tigray, November 2020. Despite the internet lock-down, many stories of massacres and atrocities by the Eritrean and other forces emerged. This had the effect attracting thousands to sign up on the Tigrayan side but this repressive "national liberation" regime itself has perpetrated its own massacres and atrocities throughout its own history up to and including the war today.   

The war is unfolding as the media talk up the Ethiopian election, an obscene side-show at the best of times. Ahmed denies anyone is hungry[6]: "There is no hunger in Tigray" despite UN reports and a document from the US Agency for International Development saying that 900,000 people face immediate famine[7] with millions more in danger; this forced starvation by the government along with rape are deliberate weapons of war. The upshot today is a devastating and brutal war of each against all with an unknown number of deaths; fuelling famine and the flight of uncounted numbers of refugees, not least through the deliberate whipping-up of ethnic tensions and with a breakdown of the whole region into utter chaos and warlordism now on the cards.

Latest developments have seen a strong counter-offensive of Tigrayan forces which have regrouped under the umbrella of the Tigray Defence Forces, a composite of factions under the wing of the TPLF which themselves have opposing factions, warlords and interests. These "rebel" (BBC) forces have considerable heavy weaponry and fighting experience, shooting down an Ethiopian military C-130 transporter and retaking the regional capital of Mekelle[8]. Eritrean forces have mostly left the country having committed atrocity after atrocity with the Tigrayan forces now threatening to follow them into Eritrea, while Sudan, unnerved by neighbourhood events, has militarised part of its border with Ethiopia. The major powers are virtually helpless here and all NATO can do is mouth meaningless platitudes while setting up a liaison office with the African Union whose African base is in Addis Ababa. Both NATO, which has a number of troops on the ground, and the AU, do not possess the forces or the wherewithal to confront or control the growing destabilisation.

China's presence has for the moment met a set-back in this part of Africa[9]. It has invested heavily in Ethiopia and particularly in the Tigray region which it figured could be part of a hub for its Belt and (Silk) Road initiatives, but now it's a much riskier business for Chinese investment as the country and the region begins a descent into chaos and, possibly, wider military confrontations. All across Africa economic crisis and capitalist decomposition are advancing and extending and nowhere is this more the case than in the current war in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa.

Boxer, 9.7.21

We publish here a letter from a close sympathiser expressing solidarity with the ICC’s struggle against parasitism and adventurism and for the defence of the Communist Left. The most important thing about this letter is that it points to the historical materialist method for approaching questions of behaviour, of slanders and maneuvres, which do such damage to the proletarian political milieu. 

By drawing lessons from the history of the struggle of the workers’ movement, the ICC has been able to systematise how to distinguish between the real Communist Left and the fake 'communist left', which is basically composed of parasitic groups and adventurist elements.

Unlike other questions, this is not something that can be solved by intuition, common sense or as a private affair, or from innocently inhaling the ambient bourgeois ideology. The Communist Left must recover, maintain and develop the historical continuity and experience of coherent communist behaviour, of communist coherence in relations between militants and with the organisation as a whole. This is so that it can arm itself to combat the dangers of duplicity, and of the more indirect and less apparent dangers to the organisation of the political vanguard of the working class. Dangers which, with the advance of the decomposition of capitalism, become more and more acute.

A principle of the method of thinking at the core of the marxist method is that, to quote Marx: “one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself."[1] “While in everyday life every shopkeeper can distinguish very well between what someone claims to be and what he really is, our historiography has not yet achieved this trivial insight. It accepts without question what each epoch says and imagines about itself.”[2] That is, we cannot trust someone, or a group, simply because of what they claim to be (i.e., part of the Communist Left). Marxists cannot rely on this method, typical of the bourgeoisie, which expects the working class to believe word for word the promises and appearances which it is presented with, hijacking it with the games of idealism.

For marxists, on the contrary, “this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.”[3] In other words, only a method of historical and materialist thinking can confront this game of appearances.

We must therefore ask the following questions: where does the practice of a group or individual come from? What is the origin and development of this behaviour in history? Under the influence of which social tendency and from which class has it historically originated? We must discuss the lessons and past experiences of the workers’ movement in such situations, when we see behaviour such as, accusations of power struggles, denigrations, ambiguities, seeking alliances, cries for help, claiming to be the victim of abuse, etc. If we stay on the surface of a situation where the International Group of the Communist Left accuses the ICC of employing Stalinist methods, and the ICC denounces a destructive tendency towards the Communist Left on the part of the IGCL (and the IGCL also denounces something similar!) ... if we look at it on the face of it, the question looks like a puzzle worthy of a bourgeois court. This only benefits the parasites, the adventurers and the whole milieu of the false 'communist left' which reproduces the bourgeois ideology of appearances!

To prevent the devious imagination from dominating reality we must proceed:

• By appropriating the experience of the working class in similar historical situations. For example, in the fight of the First International against the so-called “International Alliance of Socialist Democracy” (Bakunin's Alliance), or in the fight against the figures of Lassalle or Schweitzer, to understand the behaviour of these groups and elements and what they correspond to.
• To proceed with a profound investigation to unravel the facts of the past and to establish the truth of the facts in the Communist Left, on the basis of the lessons that each revolutionary organisation in the milieu can draw from them. That the whole Communist Left fights for this is the strength that keeps the truth of the facts from being lost like Trotsky disappearing from the proletarian revolution in Stalinist historiography.
• To analyse the historical practice of those who claim to be part of the Communist Left, its reputation and its origins, not looking at every little dispute in an immediatist way, where the texts that are produced are analysed in the abstract, as testimonies where the important thing is that a culprit is finally found for every little battle.

The greatest difficulty in unmasking parasitism is that some of its most powerful actions are:

• To attack and accuse in the spirit of its own logic. For example, when Bakunin’s Alliance failed in its struggle for power in the First International, it projected its own logic onto a supposedly authoritarian and dictatorial International. Thus, the IGCL parasites also say, despite rejecting the theory of parasitism as a supposed “poison for the communist left” that “the ICC is now launching a genuine parasitic attack – to use its own words – on these forces, particularly the Gulf Coast Communist Fraction, trying to convince them to discuss parasitism as a priority”. Moreover, the ICC would have a so-called “satellite in parasitism, Internationalist Voice”. And, to cap it all “if the notion of parasitism had any political value, then the ICC of the 21st Century, and particularly of today, would be its most dangerous expression and incarnation.”[4] In short, for the IGCL the notion of parasitism has no political value and is only poison for the Communist Left, but at the same time the ICC is presented as the most dangerous parasite.
• The camouflage in ambiguity, confusion, where all the actors seem to be shooting the same movie.
• Awakening the ghosts of the past: miserably exploiting the traumas of the Stalinist counter-revolution in a sentimentalist way.

The history of the IGCL, and the same goes for Nuevo Curso and the adventurer Gaizka, is tucked away in a place that “nobody needs to know” and “is not overly important”, it does not need to be clarified or debated. We should blindly trust what they say they are. The case of the Nuevo Curso blog, which takes the form of a bourgeois newspaper, is particularly illustrative: it has had so many changes of image that were it not for the ICC following its development its real murky history would seem inaccessible (we are not talking here about the history that was created after the event). What to say about the adventurer Gaizka, who returned to a public ICC meeting in Madrid as if his adventurist relations and behaviour had not been discovered in the past by the ICC. Gaizka really knows his past, he has not forgotten it, and he has no interest in airing it: he cannot clean it up, because the same methods serve him in the present.

The IGCL is fleeing at all costs from the “fundamental divergences” that made them set up as a false fraction (we are not talking here either about the “divergences” that they realised they had after the event).

Consistent with what was said above about the historical method, we must arm ourselves with the need for proletarian ethical principles and organisational principles, which go beyond abstract political principles that can easily become mere appearances. We need to find these ethics in the history of our class and appropriate them in order to fight against ambiguity and duplicity. We must fight against the obvious situation, the obvious and undeniable fact that new elements approaching the Communist Left do not distinguish between different groups very well and may perceive the same rotten smell of bourgeois politics (which happened in the demoralisation of the Nucleo Comunista Internacional members in 2005, for example). The function for capitalism of the fake 'communist left' is that here too there is no clear distinction between the good, the bad and the ugly.

In relation to the proletarian ethic, we also have a series of facts which, in the whole of its history, characterise the IGCL as a group totally alien to the working class. Some of these behaviours, which are facts:

• When they were an “organisation within the organisation”:

• The refusal to pay dues
• Refusal to defend their behaviour when it was criticised
• The holding of secret meetings

Before and after their exclusion they behaved like snitches:

• Inside, they circulated rumours that a comrade was a police agent
• After their exclusion, they indirectly implied that there was a mole in the ICC, as internal ICC information magically reached them (they have never said how), which they made public, including family relations between militants and the real initials of some militants.
• Making the date of an ICC conference in Mexico public

• Spreading irrelevant information such as “the ICC is renting a luxury room” which can only have the purpose of attacking the ICC by saying “look, the ICC is rich and wasteful”.
• Theft of material
• Talking about Marc Chirik as if he had been a guru, or a king with heirs
• Announcing that a particular individual is running the ICC
• Saying that the Communist Left's tradition of seeking the truth of the facts is “spreading mistrust”.
• Attitude of the seller and intimidation: To insist on sending your bulletin despite protests, both to ICC militants and to the contacts whose addresses you stole. What would it be for? Among other things, to make the contacts flee from this intimidating atmosphere.
• Ridiculous lies, for example, that the ICC “hides its internal problems”. When it is clear that it is the only organisation currently openly drawing lessons from such problems.

The solution to the serious problems facing the Communist Left, aggravated by the lack of clarity in the face of parasitism and adventurism, cannot be to hide the dirty laundry under the bed, to dig a grave for the past, but to understand why it was dirty and to air it with debate on proletarian ethical principles, to clean up the truth. Not by forgetting, but by developing clear lessons for the struggle. The falsifications and ambiguity about history begin with a first step of hiding the dirty laundry as if it were something to be ashamed of (the other side of the logic of shame would be to present the mistakes as if they were an embarrassment...and thus enter the circle of shame, envy and revenge).

This opportunist attitude has been shown by the ICT[5], an organisation of the real Communist Left, which is in danger of gradually leading the Communist Left onto a terrain where it is difficult to distinguish real confusion and errors from deliberate acts of confusionism in which elements and groups with interests alien to the working class proliferate. For example, if the ICT does not fight clearly for the truth of the facts, elements outside the class can disguise themselves in an unclear terrain where there is no need to clarify such things.

With this letter I want to express my solidarity with the struggle of the ICC, and its struggle for the truth of the facts, the clarity of the tradition of the communist left, and proletarian ethics. I do so in response to the last two texts that you have sent me for discussion.

Fraternally,

Teivos, 10-4-2021

We've commemorated this year as the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune. We must also celebrate the book of Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. The first edition of this book appeared in London on February 23, 1871, a few days before the working population of Paris transported to the heights of Montmartre, Buttes-Chartre and Belleville the cannons that Adolphe Thiers wanted to confiscate from them.

Scientific revolution and proletarian revolution

The proximity of these two events is much more political than chronological. In the second half of the nineteenth century, capitalism was in full expansion and revolutionising society on all levels, industrial, technology, social and scientific. Its work of progress was quite real but it was neither linear nor harmonious. Capitalism paved the way for gas and electricity, but it condemned the proletariat to atrocious suffering, carried out endless massacres in the colonies and pushed the separation of humanity from its being to the limits. Capitalism remained a society of want based entirely on the exploitation of man by man, but it allowed a gigantic development of the productive forces. In such a society, at least at its beginnings, science took massive steps. It contributed to the accumulation of knowledge and to the development of human culture; but also, very often, it made science the impotent hostage to the bourgeoisie which captures its discoveries and directs them not towards the satisfaction of human needs but towards profit and war, destruction and death. This is something that is evident today since the majority of scientific progress (the conquest of space, the internet, artificial intelligence for example) have only been possible through the imperatives of militarism and imperialism. As capitalism has gradually reached the end of its historic mission, the proletariat has become the guardian of the cultural and scientific heritage accumulated by the human species. Rosa Luxemburg wrote in this regard: "Socialism, which links the interests of the workers as a class to the development and to the future of humanity as a great, cultural fraternity, produces a particular affinity between proletarian struggle and the interests of culture as a whole, engendering the apparent contradictory and paradoxical phenomenon which makes the conscious proletariat today in all countries the most ardent, the most idealistic advocates of knowledge and art of this same bourgeois culture of which it is today the disinherited bastard"[1].

Certainly, marxism is not a science, but it is a scientific and militant theory which contributes to the development of materialism and progressively integrates scientific advances from its different domains. The reason is simple: having no property, no estate within capitalist society (contrary to that of the bourgeoisie within feudalism), the proletariat is obliged to develop its consciousness and its theory to the highest point. It is solely because it is potentially armed with its consciousness, its revolutionary theory (marxism), its unity, its own organisation and world revolutionary party that it can emancipate itself and, at the same time, deliver humanity from the prison of class society.

That is why the discoveries of Darwin, and science in general, are so important. In taking on the question of The Descent of Man, February 4, 1868,[2] Darwin passed to the second episode of the new Copernican revolution that was about to be realised. The first had begun at the return of his voyage around the world on H.M.S Beagle (1831-1836), when he wrote his first words in his Notebooks on the Transmutation of Species (1837). This intense work of reflection, the cataloguing of all the observations made during the course of the voyage and the reading of reference works, resulted in the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859.

Assisted by a rigorously scientific approach, he demonstrated in this work that a genealogy of the living world existed, throughout which the generations of organisms followed one another by diversification. He thus discovered "descent with modification" and its motor-force, "natural selection". All organisms presented totally random variations. When it was necessary to displace and change from the milieu or when the milieu itself changed, advantageous variations were selected, leading to more numerous descendants for some individuals and a progressive elimination of others. In time this process resulted in the emergence of a new species which corresponded to a new stage of relative stability.

The theory of natural selection gave a boost to transformative ideas, which since Lamarck had been stuck in the impasse represented by the theory of the transmission of acquired characteristics. It was now possible to understand how each species, through the analysis of its history (its phylogeny), was the product of a previous species. It was possible to reach back, by rediscovering the common ancestors of several species, to the origins of life on Earth.

The step had thus been to lay a solid, scientific basis for transformation. But the second episode of this Copernican revolution was more important still. Since The Origin of Species, transformation generally became admissible and it was roughly understood that "man descended from apes" (or, more accurately, homo and the great apes came from a common ancestor). With The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin brought forward two major new scientific advances:

 - The species homo belonged to a series of animals certainly, but its emergence was made without rupture. There was only a difference of degree and not of nature. There was no sudden "upsurge" but a process of emergence.

- With the emergence of humanity, the selection of the most able and the elimination of the least apt tended to trail off to the benefit of the weakest and the worst off. The fight for existence was replaced by the progressive development of sympathy and the mutual recognition of the other. Natural selection produced civilisation which merges with the emergence of the human species. It is characterised by the development of links of solidarity, of communal rationality and moral sentiments[3]. This evolution unified affectionate feelings and rationality, resulting in the growing institutionalisation of altruism, a significant mark of the progress of civilisation.

The reverse effect of evolution

These two inseparable results are explained by the fact that, as biological variations, social instincts, behaviours and rational capacities are also transmitted by descent. For Darwin, we are witnessing a passage of nature to civilisation, but without a rupture since natural selection, characterised by the elimination of the weakest, favours the social instincts which lead to the protection of the less able. There is the elimination of elimination. In order to account for this overthrow without rupture, Patrick Tort talks of a "reverse effect of evolution"[4]. Effectively, it allowed the understanding that the suppression of elimination is very much a consequence of natural selection itself: civilisation was selected as advantageous through an eliminatory selection[5].

When The Origin of Species appeared, protests from the dominant class, its religious and scientific luminaries, were of course extremely violent. However, the time was open to an acceptance of the theory of evolution. There had been the examples of artificial selection from farmers, growers and breeders and it seemed evident that there was a resemblance between some species, just as between parents and children coming from the parent, even if the action of natural selection and its consequences were not really immediately understood.

Marx and Engels enthusiastically welcomed the new theory. On December 19, 1860, Marx wrote to Engels: "It is in this book that the historical-natural basis of our conception is found". Once again, the proletariat finds an ally in the natural sciences in its fight to go beyond empirical, mechanical materialism. After the publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848, The Origin of Species in 1859 again showed that modern materialism was up to the task of profoundly explaining the transformation process both in life and in society.

But for Marx and Engels however this favourable welcome gave way to a certain scepticism and then outright rejection. In June 18, 1862, Marx wrote to Engels: "It is remarkable to see how Darwin recognises among the animals and plants his own English society, with its division of labour, competition, its opening of new markets, its inventions and its Malthusian struggle for existence". This quid pro quo, this missed rendezvous between Marx and Darwin would have negative consequences for the theoretical development of marxism. Look at this example of the prolonged blindness of Plekhanov, written in 1907: "Many confuse the dialectic with the doctrine of evolution. The dialectic is, in fact, a doctrine of evolution. But it differs essentially from the vulgar 'theory of evolution', which mainly rests on the principle that neither nature, nor history makes leaps forward and that all the changes in the world only happen gradually. Hegel has already demonstrated that, understood as such, the doctrine of evolution is inconsistent and ridiculous"[6]. The consequences of this poor interpretation of Darwin are expressed by a rejection of continuity and a speculative conception of the "qualitative leap".

Marxism and Darwinism

The main cause of this blunder was the rapid growth, from 1859, of Social Darwinism in Britain, Germany and the world. Darwin waited ten years before publishing The Descent of Man in which he finally applied to man his theory of evolution. He was well aware that the publication of his anthropology would have an explosive effect, and he spent a lot of time replying to criticisms, refuting arguments; he oversaw the many re-editions, reviewed and completed The Origin of Species. Herbert Spencer profited by creating a synthetic philosophy of evolution, a new system inspired by liberalism which applied to man the principle of the fight for existence, the elimination of the weak, a principle that Darwin had clearly limited to the world of Flora and Fauna. Darwin was forced to delineate himself from Spencer and Malthus, but it was too late, and the fraudulent theory of "Social Darwinism" imposed itself everywhere. One of its most ardent defenders was Carl Vogt, an agent of Napoleon III who had slandered Marx and who took charge of the French translation of The Descent of Man[7].

Progressively, throughout the 1980's, then in 2009 on the occasion of the bi-centenary of Darwin's birth, we saw a (re) discovery of his real anthropology. The precariousness of the most disadvantaged layers within capitalism, competition and war, the growth of predatory male behaviour, could lead us to think that the selection of advantageous variations, the elimination of the less able and the fight for existence were still the dominant factors in human society. This is the basis of the success of a Social Darwinism that invites us to accept capitalism as a natural and beneficial fatality: by leaving the strong to progress to the detriment of the weak, the people and the nation can progress and impose itself and, in the last analysis, vanquish military and economic competition and increase the rate of exploitation of the proletariat.

Socialism or barbarism

But in reality things are quite different. Civilisation develops through a reversal. As we see with the explanation of the reverse effect of evolution, there is both continuity and discontinuity. If one describes the process which goes from eliminatory natural selection up to the anti-eliminatory tendency of affective and social solidarity that's supposed to prevail in any "civilised" society, then we must conclude, as Patrick Tort explains it, that the break is the product of humanity rather than the break producing humanity. For the first time a species is not forced to adapt itself to its surroundings (selection of the most able) but is capable of adapting its surroundings, of transformation by producing its means of existence.

Contrary to the stupidities repeated by the ecologists, it is not the human species itself which is destroying nature; its ‘domination’ of nature simply means that it doesn't find what to eat directly in nature, but that it produces its means of existence. It is not the human species that destroys nature but a specific method of production, capitalism, which attacks biodiversity and breaks the organic equilibrium between humanity and nature.

Marxists were misguided in thinking that the making of tools was a distinctive criterion for the species homo. But scientific research shows that most animal species (vertebrates, invertebrates, mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, etc.) are perfectly capable of making or using tools and that the fundamental change with the appearance of the genus homo is the production of all life’s necessities.

The reconciliation between Darwin and Marx had finally become possible and the latter's first response was the right one. The idea discovered by the former was contained in the heart of the works of Marx. In The German Ideology for example, drawn up by Marx and Engels in 1846, a passage takes up the same description of the process as Darwin: "One can distinguish men from animals by consciousness, religion or by whatever else you want. They distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they start to produce their means of existence: they make a step here which is dictated by their physical existence. By producing their means of existence men indirectly produce their material life themselves".

Continuity in particular is recognised perfectly through the formula that "they make a step here which is dictated by their physical existence". Through the concept of the reversive effect, evolutionary continuity and the "qualitative leap" are also materialistically and dialectically reunified.

In creating civilisation, the human species doesn't rid itself of nature and biology. It is certain that, in phases of intense regression, barbarity and the elimination of the weakest distinctly reappears. But that is not the basis of human history. Civilisation has taken the form of a succession of modes of production finally resulting in capitalism in which the loss of mastery of the social forces created by man appears in all its dramatic breadth by turning them against humanity and against its biological and natural roots. In such conditions only the proletarian revolution can re-establish humanity’s mastery of its own becoming by overthrowing the power of the bourgeoisie and through creating a society which will be able to confront new biological, epidemiological and ecological problems that humanity will inevitably meet in the course of its voyage aboard its space-ship, planet Earth. 

Theory versus nihilism

Darwinian anthropology, in which we have seen the unbroken link with the theory of modified descent by the means of natural selection, has been falsified, ignored and attacked from all sides, in particular by those who could not accept that man could lose his transcendental nature. And it continues to be attacked today, not only by the Creationists and religious fundamentalists but also by all the idealists who decree a separation between The Origin of Species, the scientific value of which they concede, and The Descent of Man which they present as a philosophical work, thus creating a so-called disconnection of Darwin between science and ideology.

In the present situation where the proletariat (and its revolutionary perspective) is momentarily absent from the social scene, the way is opened up for the rejection of science and all scientific theory.

In the seventeenth century, James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh in Ireland, decreed that creation took place at the beginning of the night proceeding October 23 in the year 4004 B.C. There was even an intense debate about whether time began on the Saturday night or the Sunday morning. In the nineteenth century a majority of scientists were still defending the biblical legend that on the sixth day, man and domestic animals were created "according to its kind".

Today, conspiracy theories, absurd beliefs and scepticism towards science reflect the absence of perspective offered by existing society and appears as a return to obscure times. The fight of the working class against exploitation and the progressive affirmation of its revolutionary perspective will on the contrary be accompanied by a liberating development of consciousness and of the rational, coherent and scientific approach.

A. Elberg, June 20, 2021

There is an immortal line from the 1965 film Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, whose scenario is an international flying tournament in the year 1910. Robert Morley, playing the pompous newspaper magnate Lord Rawnsley, tells us that “the problem with these international affairs is that they attract foreigners”. As communists, who reject any idea of loyalty to the nation, we would express it differently: the problem with international competitions is that they promote patriotism.

In the current spectacle of the European football championship, every game is preceded by fervent singing of the national anthem of the contending countries, while English nationalism goes one step further by roundly booing the German national anthem. Hardly surprising that, in the post-Brexit atmosphere of nostalgia for Empire, the successes of the England team are being treated in the media as a beacon of hope and national reconciliation, in contrast to the divisions sown by Brexit, and above all as consolation for the humiliations Britain is currently experiencing at the hands of the EU over Brexit regulations, the US over Northern Ireland, and Russia in the Black Sea.

None of this is new. In 1980, World Revolution number 32 contained an article on the Olympics of that year, which were blatantly being used as a vehicle for western bloc propaganda against its Russian imperialist rival following the latter’s invasion of Afghanistan. It reminded us, against the idea that “you should keep politics out of sport”, that “The rise of big international sporting competitions corresponded exactly with the development of that other form of international competition: imperialism. The modern Olympics began in the 1890s when world capitalism was beginning the long trek towards the first imperialist war. Ever since, these ‘highlights of the sporting calendar’ have provided the opportunity for real orgies of nationalism. Beneath all the talk of international cooperation through sport, the real face of capitalism has never been very far from the surface on these occasions. In 1936 the Olympics were a blatant advertisement for Nazism (and thus for its bourgeois mirror image, anti-fascism). In 1956, the Melbourne Olympics helped drown the noise of the western imperialists’ adventure at Suez and Russia’ brutal liquidation of the Hungarian workers’ uprising. In 1968, the Mexico Olympics were preceded by a mass slaughter of student protestors. In 1972, the Munich Olympics became part of the inter-imperialist struggle in the Middle East and of the European anti-terrorist campaign, following the blood-soaked Palestinian commando raid. The 1978 World Cup helped to bring respectability and fat profits to Argentina’s vicious military junta”.

What is a bit more up to date is the way that the opening ceremonies in the Euros also ask us to take sides in the battle between Woke and anti-Woke: should our players “Take the Knee” to demonstrate against racism in sport, or would we prefer them to “take a stand” against political correctness gone mad? Either way, like the flag waving and the national anthems, all this serves to deluge us with the dominant ideology. Both sides of this “culture war” - multiculturalism and diversity on the one hand, “free speech” and “saying what we all really think” on the other – have their corporate and state backing while presenting themselves as expressions of rebellion against oppression.

It’s a central feature of capitalism that all the collective efforts and skills of the producers are appropriated by the ruling class and become a force standing above and against them. The same can be said for the skills and collectivity that can make sport played well such an exhilarating activity to watch and take part in. In this society of alienation, the best of human potential and achievements are seized on by the reigning power to reinforce the grip of its pernicious ideology, to peddle its fake versions of community, and to justify the savage competition between nation states.  

Amos, 4.7.21

For a more in-depth treatment of the issue of sport under capitalism, read the following articles: 

The History of Sport Under Capitalism (Part I) - Sport in the ascendant phase of capitalism (1750-1914) [103]

The History of Sport Under Capitalism (Part II) - Sport in decadent capitalism (from 1914 to today) [104]

The History of Sport Under Capitalism (Part III) - Sport, nationalism and imperialism [105]

 

During our last two meetings in France, on 27 March and 12 June, one of the central themes was the revolutionary nature of the proletariat. In addition to the article which gave an account of these debates[1], we endeavoured to consider a more specific line of questions raised by the participants as well as in written contributions[2]. 

The article below takes up and extends a whole on-going reflection by integrating a good number of elements brought up by the discussion on the phenomenon of "uberisation". In addition to the insights provided, based in part on the contributions from the debates, the article below endeavours to place the issues in a historical framework by drawing on the foundations of marxism and the experience of the workers' movement. From our point of view, this effort should help to provide a political framework for further reflection and clarification. As such, the article is in our view more a contribution than a definitive answer to the questions raised.

In the 2000s, a new form of business emerged in the United States, driven in particular by the car and driver booking platform Uber. Other companies were quickly born or transformed on the basis of this model, a phenomenon that would soon be called "uberisation". Some see in this the capacity of capitalism to evolve in order to adapt to new technologies and make the most of them, while others are alarmed at the destruction that the model is wreaking on the contractual employment relationship, in other words, on wage employment.

For the ICC, there is no doubt that this model is an attempt to generate new and profitable activities by making good use of the means provided by the Internet and using it to achieve flexibility of work and the lowest possible costs. Today, we see these "new" workers every day, bicycle delivery drivers, cab drivers, etc.

However, these workers are not, strictly speaking, employees. They own at least part of their tool of the job (their bike, their car, etc.); they are not bound to their platform by an employment contract but sell it as a service. They generally have the official status of "independent entrepreneur". This raises fundamental questions: are these workers, whatever their economic condition, part of the working class? Can their struggles contribute to the effort of the working class to resist exploitation?

Uberised workers are part of the working class

At first glance, the proletarian character of these workers is fluid. On the one hand, young bicycle delivery drivers often only have this activity to survive. On the other hand, some cab drivers proudly display their big cars and openly dream of being "their own boss". The fact is that we are not faced with a "homogeneous" sector, as might be the case for railway workers, teachers, textile workers, etc. Beyond this real heterogeneity, we know that "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being; it is their social being that determines their consciousness"[3]. The fact that a cab driver dreams of being a boss does not make him bourgeois or petty-bourgeois. He may be bourgeois or petty-bourgeois by virtue of his material conditions.

So are the self-employed workers on platforms materially bosses? To answer this question, we could base ourselves on the legal relationships that bind them to their platform. As we have explained, these workers are not employees, they sell a service as any craftsman does to his customers. The only difference here is that this sale is part of a triangular relationship between a service provider, a seller and a buyer, a relationship that can also be found in the transport sector (travel agencies), brokerage, etc. The worker therefore has no legal obligation to pay for the service.

The worker is therefore not legally dependent on the platform. He is legally free. However, legal relationships are not sufficient to analyse this type of relationship. In his examination of the birth and development of capitalism, Marx stresses the need to take into account the relations of production in the relationship between capital and labour. Within this framework, he identifies two historical phases: the formal domination of capital, and its real domination[4]. 

In the formal domination, we find the first capitalist concentrations, the manufactories, which precede the industrial era, particularly in the textile field. In this first evolution of the relations of production of capitalism, the workers remain more or less dependent on capital. Many of them still keep their tools and, from the raw material supplied by the capitalist, produce a product which they sell to the same capitalist. The best-known case concerns the textile sector, such as the Silesian weavers mentioned by Marx in 1844, or the first silk workers in Lyon. The latter owned their own loom and produced silk pieces for a manufacturer. They therefore worked "by the piece" or "to order".

This 'pre-capitalist' labour relationship is similar today, by analogy, to the relationship between the self-employed worker and his or her commissioning platform: the worker is not legally dependent on the capitalist but remains dependent on him or her economically. Marx outlines two characteristics of this relationship: "1. an economic relationship of domination and subordination, because the capitalist now consumes labour power, and thus supervises and directs it; 2. a great continuity and increased intensity of labour"[5]. 

In this context, too, the early textile workers were forced to work long hours to compete with other exploited workers in greater concentrations. How can we fail to see some of these characteristics in the Uber driver or delivery person or whatever? They have no other way of working than to wait for orders from their platform. There is no other way to increase their income than to increase their working time (for example, for a pizza delivery driver by multiplying his daily runs). The platform is therefore the sole authoriser, unlike a craftsman or a transport company, which can generate business outside the agencies or brokers. What is more, the economic dependence is total when we know that the platform bases its orders on algorithms that favour the most available and fastest workers and can "deactivate" a worker who does not give satisfaction. This is done by pushing competition to the extreme, with no regard for workers' health. Finally, it is the platform that takes most of the surplus value generated by the activity. The worker receives a fixed payment for each order.

We can therefore see that although the worker's submission to the platform is not based on a tangible legal link, this submission nevertheless takes all the forms of the platform in economic terms. It is therefore not disputable that these workers are part of the working class, although their exploitation is not enshrined in a wage contract.

Are uber-workers the new spearheads of the working class struggle?

The status of these workers also makes them very precarious and subjects them to super-exploitation. Along with the unemployed, they are undoubtedly among the proletarians most affected by the effects of the crisis of capitalism. It would therefore be tempting to think that this situation inflicted by capital is likely to develop in them a greater combativeness than in other fractions of the proletariat whose status would be more "protected". Moreover, this brutal confrontation with the effects of the economic crisis could lead them to understand more quickly than other sectors of the proletariat that capitalism has no way out for humanity. After all, didn't their predecessors, the silk workers or the Silesian weavers, lead what are considered the first "anti-capitalist" struggles in history?

However, while there is much that brings today's self-employed workers closer to those of the 19th century, there is also much that separates them. In the 19th century, this form of relationship between capital and labour prefigured the relationship that was to dominate capitalist production, i.e. the wage-earning system brought about by the development of mechanisation and industry. Today, uberisation is the result of the impasse of the economic crisis and the need to find 'new' forms of labour exploitation. In the 19th century, the silk workers, for example, were among the most skilled and therefore best paid workers in factories. Today, digital platform workers are among the most precarious of proletarians.

Furthermore, the development of the capitalist mode of production has led to an extreme division of labour within factories, made both possible and necessary by the development of machinery and technology. This division of labour causes a "mass socialisation of labour by capitalism". As Marx puts it, "the co-operative character of the labour process now becomes a technical necessity dictated by the nature of the means of labour itself"[6].

Thus, for two centuries capitalism has not ceased to develop a production based on associated labour, progressively destroying the relations of production based on the formal domination of capital over labour. Uberisation operates a reverse dynamic, atomising workers in relation to each other, putting them in brutal competition for the sale of a service.

Yet the associated character of labour in capitalism is a fundamental element of the identity of the working class, a character that allows proletarians to become aware that they suffer the same conditions of exploitation and therefore have the same interest in fighting it. In other words, associated labour is an essential determinant of the development of class consciousness and this determinant is sorely lacking among the self-employed.

The bourgeoisie tries to valorise this model by presenting the status of "self-employed" as a much "freer" status compared to wage labour and offering much more perspectives to develop one's own "business". This flexibility has, in fact, allowed the model to develop well in the United States, as it allowed the many workers who needed a second job to support themselves to synchronise more “freely” their main job with this side activity. The illusions of being able to get by on one's own has led to the petty-bourgeois individualist ideology taking root among these proletarians. This ideology is also expressed in the attempts to create self-managed delivery companies such as Coopcycle, which aim to be an "anarcho-communist" alternative to the market domination of large groups such as Deliveroo, Uber Eats and others.

Such great precariousness has never been a factor favourable to the development of workers' combativeness and consciousness. This precariousness is accompanied by extreme insecurity and an exacerbation of competition between workers.

Moreover, because of the atomisation in which these workers find themselves within the sphere of production and their inexperience of the class struggle, their struggles remain very isolated. This also constitutes a serious handicap for linking up with the struggles of other sectors and building on the historical gains of the working class struggle.

The ICC has always defended that the vanguard of the proletariat is located in the countries where it has experienced the greatest development, acquired experience of associated labour, of struggles and their collective organisation, of its defeats and of the lessons that can be drawn from them. In this respect, this sector of "uber-workers" cannot play a leading role in the general struggle of the working class against the capitalist system. For all that, these workers are by no means lost to the class struggle. However, this role can only take place in a movement initiated by the most advanced and experienced fractions of the proletariat who, through the development of their conscious struggle, will succeed in rallying the whole class to their fight, even its weakest parts.

It is important that revolutionaries have a lucid analysis of the state of the working class and do not seek to console themselves with the present weaknesses of the proletariat through the hope that the proletariat will quickly overcome the difficulties that weigh on its combativity and consciousness. The decomposition of the capitalist system only accentuates the difficulties of the working class to reconquer its identity and to reconnect with its historical project. The whole working class is under the weight of the decomposition, but it is clear that its weakest parts remain much more vulnerable.

If the most precarious and isolated fractions of the proletariat can show a great combativity, they do not present, by themselves, a real threat to capital. Nothing in the current situation favours any change in this reality, on the contrary. It is clearly in these fractions that we must today classify the workers of digital transport or delivery platforms. The emergence of this fraction of the proletariat cannot displace the historical responsibility that continues to be entrusted to the most experienced fractions of the world proletariat.

Révolution Internationale, 29.6.21

For British populists and Brexiteers, the nostalgic dreams of an Empire that covered a quarter of the land surface of the globe and where the sun never set, are turning into nightmares. The campaign for “Global Britain” will not be able to prevent this.

In 2021 the geopolitical landscape for the UK has fundamentally changed. Britain has lost much of its power. Its relations with the Continent, its position in NATO and its links with the Commonwealth, are all being challenged.

The relationship with the US at least gave the UK an influential role as an intermediary between Washington and Brussels. In cutting itself off from Europe the UK has shot itself in the foot. “We are no longer an irreplaceable bridge between Europe and America. We are now less relevant to them both.” (John Major)

In the Brexit negotiations the UK acted on the assumption that it shared an equal place on the world stage with other international powers. But Brexit has confirmed that the British bourgeoisie is deluded. With the conclusion of the negotiations with the EU it is now operating in a world dominated by the US, China and the EU, where it has isolated itself.

Under the present changed geopolitical conditions the UK will have to re-establish its political relations with the key countries in the world. It will have to fight its way to the diplomatic table, especially now the US administration is starting to re-energise its relationship with NATO, the UN and other multilateral organisations.

In March the British government initiated its strategy for “Global Britain in a Competitive Age”. This project sets out British ambitions for new commercial opportunities and pathways to global influence. But this refurbished version of the “Integrated Review of Security, Defence and Foreign Policy” from 2015 is not going to solve the UK's fundamental problems after leaving the EU.

Internal tensions and fractures in the U.K.

The decline of its position on the international arena has also led to growing conflicts within the UK itself, for instance with the devolved governments of Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The Brexit referendum of 2016 “gave a huge impulse to Scottish nationalism.” ("Populism leads to growing instability and fragmentation" [109]). Since then the calls for Scottish independence have become stronger by the year. At the beginning of 2021, 54 per cent of Scots supported an independent Scotland, which was 8 per cent more than in 2014. Recent opinion polls in key EU member states show that support is increasing for an independent Scotland becoming a member state of the EU.

Over the last decade the forces in Northern Ireland looking to break away from the UK have become stronger. The Northern Ireland Protocol only added fuel to the fire, by further isolating Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK. The growing tensions in the Six Counties are actually “pulling at the integrity of the British State itself” (ibid) and threaten to make the national fragmentation a reality. In the meantime, the US administration has warned Johnson not to violate the Protocol and to respect the Good Friday Agreement: the open border between the North and the South has to be protected.

In the political establishment in London tensions are also rising to the extent that competing ministers, political advisers and even family members are engaged in a sordid turf war. In the last two months, in an atmosphere of doubt, jealousy and suspicion, accusations between Johnson, Hancock and Cummings have flown back and forth. The last expression was “the heavy artillery against the government” brought about by Dominic Cummings in “a massive campaign on social media”. ("Bourgeois vendettas and the distortion of science" [110])

Class against class

These growing tensions and fractures within the UK and the ensuing struggles between bourgeois factions present great dangers for the working class. It presents “workers with a disorientating perspective” ("Populism leads to growing instability and fragmentation", ibid). But they must resist the pressure to support any of the bourgeois cliques. The ability of workers to resist these pressures can only be realised when they fight “as a class antagonistic to capital” (ibid). The only prospect is to struggle on a class terrain.

In the past months, workers in the UK and elsewhere have demonstrated that they still possess this ability, as was shown for instance by a recent wildcat strike by 30-40 workers at the Gateshead Amazon warehouse construction site. Workers there protested for two days against their sudden dismissal. Persistence and working class solidarity bore fruit, as all sacked workers were reinstated on the third day of the strike.

The same capacity was shown on 3 July when dozens of marches took place across Britain in protest against the government’s proposed 1% pay rise for NHS workers, which has been widely condemned by health workers.

Such small struggles may not be spectacular, but they are the seeds for the future autonomy of the working class against capital.

 

WR 4/7/21

Throughout 2021 banks and big businesses have announced massive layoffs that will make the already difficult living conditions of the working class even harder, aggravated by the massive loss of human lives caused by the pandemic. At the time this article was written another deadly milestone was passed when the global figure of 4 MILLION deaths from the pandemic was exceeded, and in Spain another wave of infections was taking off.

This avalanche of lay-offs is nothing new. In 1983-88, under the first 'socialist' government, ONE MILLION JOBS were destroyed, when Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez had promised to create 800,000 jobs! In 1992-93, under the same government, there was a further wave of lay-offs. From then on, the lay-offs became permanent, implemented by the government hand in hand with the unions, the employers and the labour courts. With the crisis of 2008-2011, there were again massive lay-offs as part of cuts that eliminated numerous jobs in health and education.

For more than 40 years, the fear of losing one's job and job instability - aggravated by increasingly widespread precariousness - have been a torture that every worker has to live with, forever demolishing the myth of 'social' capitalism of a 'job for life'. All this confirms what Engels pointed out more than 170 years ago in The Principles of Communism: “The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labour and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labour – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition. The proletariat, or the class of proletarians, is, in a word, the working class of the 19th century”[1]

The coalition government of the Socialists (PSOE) and Podemos had promised to guarantee jobs with the ERTE[2]. THIS HAS BEEN A VILE DECEPTION: the "most progressive government in history" in combination with the employers and the trade unions is unleashing a tidal wave of job cuts by making 'temporary' lay-offs (ERTE) permanent (ERE).

The lay-offs in figures

Since 2008, 120,000 jobs have been lost in the banking sector and 2021 will mean 35000 lay-offs: 2935 in BBVA, 7400 in Caixa Bank, Bankia (still to be accounted for); 3572 in Banco Santander (the third wave of lay-offs in four years); 2717 in Banco Sabadell, 1500 in Unicaja, 750 in Ibercaja, etc.

For its part, El Corte Inglés is going to lay off 3000 workers: hard cuts for the first time in its history, as these are lay-offs without early retirement or any other attempt to soften the blow.

Ford got rid of 630 workers by, in practice, eliminating the night shift. The repercussions of these dismissals on subcontractors have not been calculated, but we can easily see the disappearance of 3000 jobs.

And that's not the end of it. The economics blog Business Insider states: “The storm of mass redundancies will go far beyond banking in 2021: the EREs of large companies in the middle of the pandemic already total more than 30,000 affected”, specifying that “since the beginning of 2021, 32 large companies have initiated ERE procedures to reduce their workforces, which will affect 30,000 workers”. Among the companies that have carried out ERE are “NH, El Corte Inglés, Adolfo Domínguez, Endesa and H&M, have announced the presentation of EREs at the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021 despite having benefited from the ERTE regime during the previous year"[3].

Endesa, the electricity company that benefits from the excessive new electricity tariffs approved by the left-wing government, intends to lay off 1200 workers. The clothing retailer H&M plans to lay off 1100 workers, while Naturgy, an energy company that is said to be “successful” is sacking 1000 workers. Perfumery chain Douglas throws 492 into unemployment. Eurest 411, Logitravel 400, Coca Cola 360, Bosch 336, Adolfo Domínguez 300, Heineken 228, Tubacex 129, Avon cosmetics another 129 and a long etcetera.

In the case of SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises), the effects on employment have been devastating: “small companies, those with fewer than fifty employees, ended September with almost 240,000 fewer employees than in February and with a fall of more than 260,000 in twelve months, a fall of 118,000 and 130,000 respectively in medium-sized companies, those with between 50 and 250 employees” 4

Lay-offs are not limited to Spain. They are happening all over the world. The Financial Times wrote about 30 million workers being laid off in the 25 OECD countries during the pandemic either blatantly or indirectly. This would be in addition to the 25 million jobs officially wiped out in the Eurozone and the USA during the pandemic. According to the FT, “hidden unemployment could persist, hampering economic recovery and dragging down wages and private consumption levels". It added "In the case of the eurozone, which went from an unemployment rate of 6.5% in February to 8.1% in August, ABN Amro economist Aline Schuiling says its real unemployment is at least 4 to 4.5 percentage points higher, with 1 in 5 short-time workers expected to be laid off, including those working in sectors that have fully recovered”.

ERTE and similar measures in other countries are hiding the true extent of unemployment. “In total, according to Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, at least 33 million workers have been hit directly, by a misclassification of their labour status, or have dropped out of the labour market or seen their working hours and wages reduced during the pandemic”. In the US, official unemployment is 7.9% but in reality, according to a former Obama advisor, it is 9.6%.

Lay-offs aren't the only attack

The working class is attacked on all fronts; the lay-offs don’t come on their own:

• Wage cuts continue. "In 2019 the median annual salary in Spain was 18,489.7 euros, a figure that is only 20.81 euros, 0.1% up on 2018, according to the 'Wage Structure Survey' of the National Statistics Institute (INE), with data for 2019. In 2019 almost one in five workers (18.2%) earned the minimum interprofessional wage (SMI) or less, which was 12,600 euros per year, while 46.4% received a remuneration of between 12,600 and 25,200 euros. Thus, almost two out of three wage earners earned less than 25,200 euros per year in 2019, i.e. less than twice the SMI"[5].
• Escalating poverty. “This crisis would increase the severe poverty rate (people with incomes below 40% of the median income, i.e. with less than 5,826 euros per year or 16 euros per day) from 9.2% pre-Covid to 10.86% of the population, with almost 790,000 additional people now living below this subsistence threshold, bringing the total to 5.1 million people”. Globally, recent estimates indicate that the number of people living on less than 4.50 euros a day could have increased by between 200 million and 500 million during 2020.
• Increasingly brutal working conditions. One example is the situation of strawberry workers in Huelva, where there is a proliferation of “work and service contracts; systematic lay-offs long before the expiry of visas or what was promised; unpaid working hours; excessive charging for accommodation and basic services or the total absence of housing; lack of adequate transport between the farms and villages; lack of health care for women and men who often do not speak (good) Spanish; workplace harassment and sexual blackmail, and a long and grim et cetera."[6]
• Pension Reform. The Socialist-Podemos coalition government is introducing another pension reform aimed at making pensions smaller and smaller and covering fewer and fewer workers. This reform is in addition to those of 1985 and 2007, all of them under “socialist” governments, and that of the conservative Partido Popular (PP) government in 2013. Under the pretext that pensions “do not lose purchasing power”, a “new mechanism” has been established that in practice devalues them. All early retirement is eliminated so that redundant workers will lose the limited financial cushion that protected them from poverty. Any attempt to retire early is heavily penalised, with up to €460 lost if you retire a year early. A later retirement age is encouraged... And, after the signing of a Government - Employers - Unions agreement, Social Security Minister Escrivá added more salt to the wounds: he announced that those born between 1960 and 1975 (who are now between 60 and 45 years old) WILL HAVE TO WORK FOR MORE YEARS WITH LESS PENSION. In other words, it makes it clear what the government wants: to continue to reduce pensions and increase the number of years worked. The question is: what will happen to those born after 1975? What pensions will those born in the 21st century have? What capital and its lackeys in the Socialist-Podemos government want is to REDUCE pensions to ZERO and INCREASE WORKING TIME TO INFINITY

From ERTE to pure and simple unemployment

ERTEs[7] are not a “social shield” against unemployment but ITS ACCELERATOR. ERTEs currently affect 743,000 workers. As Business Insider Espana points out “The Government always defended to the hilt that the ERTEs were going to be a means for restraining companies so they could avoid lay-offs. But with the first stages of the pandemic over and the economy still limping along, many large companies have already announced their intentions to cut staff. El Corte Inglés, the NH Hotel Group, the clothing chain H&M, as well as Douglas and Adolfo Domínguez, are some examples.” Ford combines the ERE (630 redundancies) with the ERTE (affecting 6100 workers until October). The steel multinational, Arcelor, proposes an ERTE as a “bridge to retirement”. All these tricks expose the demagogy of the government: the ERTEs have been the launching pad for pure and simple redundancies.

The labour courts which, according to democratic ideology, protect the worker and are an effective instrument of trade union action, do not oppose dismissals, but simply describe them as “unfair”, which means that they still happen, even if they cost the companies a little more (they have to compensate workers with 33 to 45 days per year worked).

Capital is not recovering, despite the government’s euphoric proclamations on European funds: “According to the report Perspectivas España 2021, 66% of companies will not record sales similar to those of 2019 until 2022". In the same vein, the vulnerability rate of companies (the danger of falling into insolvency) has shot up: "it is close to doubling in sectors such as hotels and leisure, where it is close to 70%, exceeds 50% in the automotive sector and is around 40% in transport and logistics, as explained a few days ago by the director general of Economics and Statistics of the Bank of Spain, Óscar Arce.”[8]

We are heading towards a worsening of the crisis with a consequent increase of unemployment in a context of skyrocketing job insecurity. This, in 2018, affected 4.35 million workers in Spain, which means 26.8% of the employed population. The pandemic “has ejected almost 300,000 young people from the labour market so far this year, in a phenomenon of job destruction that coincides with an even greater increase in those under thirty who neither study nor work.”[9]

The precariousness of work has been accompanied by the development of informal work and the system of couriers who deliver food and other goods. These were considered as "false" self-employed - i.e. “self-employed entrepreneurs” who “collaborate” with a digital platform (Deliveroo, Glovo, etc.). With the law of 2021 the “progressive” government has recognised them as “workers”. This “great victory” has allowed the delivery platforms to continue their brutal exploitation by using subcontracting and other subterfuges, counting on the government to look the other way. This lets the subcontractors pay poverty wages: “Jobandtalent offers to deliver for Glovo with salaries of 640 euros gross for 20 hours a week and with the obligation for the delivery driver to provide the vehicle. A delivery driver for JTHiring, a company subcontracted by JustEat, is paid 621 euros gross for 17.5 hours a week”.

Rebirth of workers’ combativity

The lay-offs in the banking sector have met with a workers’ response: in several banks there have been strikes for the first time in 30 years. The BBVA workers “began to mobilise in the different cities of the country, in front of the main headquarters of the bank. Then they began partial stoppages, on Tuesday 25 May for one hour and on Monday 31 May for two hours. But the main event came on Wednesday 2 June, when the bank's employees went on strike, the first strike by bank staff in 30 years. According to the unions it was backed by 70%.”[10]

There were also strikes at Caixa Bank. On 3 July there were mass demonstrations in Palma de Mallorca, Toledo and Oviedo. This desire to fight has been expressed in other sectors: on 24 June, the drivers of Autobuses Castillo went on strike against “repeated delays in the monthly payment, as well as demanding the full payment of the May salary.”[11]  In Biscay, health workers at the Ortuella hospital went on strike because of the lack of staff, demonstrating throughout the town. This movement spread to the whole of the Biscay health system with rallies in front of the provincial council demanding more new hires.

More than 38,000 temporary civil servants in Aragon have gone on strike against the “regularisation” measures that in reality condemn them to "temporary" work for life. In Huesca, other workers on short-term contracts, unhappy with the union proposal, have also gone on strike. A protest has also been staged by 18,000 civil servants in the regional administration of Castilla-La Mancha. In Torrelodones, on the outskirts of Madrid, workers in parks and gardens gathered in protest at the town hall against “the lay-offs made by the company awarded the gardening contract”. In the tile industry in Castellón 15,000 workers have been called to strike against the ridiculous wage increase and the reduction of seniority bonuses.

Workers combativity sabotaged by the unions

These struggles confirm the tendencies towards militancy that we already saw last summer[12]. However, they are very dispersed and are easily controlled and sabotaged by the unions. The unions are pursuing two objectives:

1º The division and isolation of the workers: locking them in the corporate prison. The unions have pushed for a separate response from the workers of BBVA and Caixa Bank. AT NO TIME HAVE THEY CONVERGED. We denounce the fragmentation and division of the struggle organised by the unions. Nothing was done to unite a common struggle with other workers. The Caixa Bank workers affected by 7400 lay-offs (final figure) went on strike two days after the BBVA strike. DIVIDE AND RULE is the slogan of capital against the workers that the unions apply conscientiously.

2º Accepting the redundancies. In the banking sector, the unions proposed a strike based on the acceptance of the lay-offs, “complaining” about their disproportionate number: “An argument that still does not convince the unions, who believe that the number of dismissals proposed by the bank's management is disproportionate". As Economía Digital said "In recent weeks and since 10 May, the workforce has carried out several demonstrations in front of the bank's headquarters in all cities of Spain with the aim that BBVA gets the message and chooses to reduce the number of lay-offs and improve economic conditions”. This is a defeatist approach that ACCEPTS THE LOGIC OF CAPITAL: the unions reduce everything to bargaining for A FEW LESS LAY-OFFS. This means that these “official defenders of the workers” want us to accept the worst plague of capitalism: UNEMPLOYMENT. For example, in BBVA the dismissals have been “only” 2935 against the 3800 initially announced by the company, as if those almost 3000 comrades were not being subjected to a terrible blow! As if the acceptance of the company's power to dismiss "for justified causes" was not opening the door for future dismissals!

The proletarian response

The struggle of the working class against dismissals and unemployment is particularly difficult. Workers are faced with a generalised overproduction which means that if a strike is reduced only to paralysing activity or production - as the unions want - IT IS USELESS. Unemployment - or the threat of finally falling into it – “may help to reveal capitalism’s inability to secure a future for the workers,”[13]  but, at the same time, it is a powerful factor of intimidation and atomisation. Capital blackmails the workers with “accept lower wages or worse working conditions or else WE WILL THROW YOU OUT”. On the other hand, when a plan for lay-offs is announced, the unions and the company make the situation stressful for workers: rumours, individual interviews, manoeuvres, division, personalised promises... “you won't be thrown out onto the street if you behave yourself” (says the company), “we'll guarantee your job if you join the union” (say the unions). Those “under 45 will not be affected”, “those over 60 should accept voluntary lay-offs”. These insidious campaigns make the atmosphere in the implementation stage of the ERE unbearable. The fear of unemployment is accompanied by a real psychological torture.

To confront this strategy requires a great effort of solidarity, comradeship, self-organisation and consciousness. All of this is very difficult and will not be achieved in a short time, given the major difficulties that the working class is currently facing[14].

However, there is no other way than struggle. In order to be strong and effective and to be able to overcome the combined manoeuvre of business - trade unions - government

• workers need to organise themselves in general assemblies capable of electing committees recallable at any moment;
• the struggle should not be conceived as a protest against a particular company or sector, but AS A WORKING CLASS RESPONSE.

Both requirements are indispensable because the workers of BBVA, of Arcelor, of Ford, of the hospitals, ARE NOT FACING AN ISOLATED EMPLOYER but THE ENTIRE CAPITALIST STATE which is an apparatus formed by government, employers, unions, courts, police etc. And they do not have “public opinion”, local politicians or “the community” as allies. These are not allies but instruments of the capitalist state to divert workers on to the terrain of interclassism, community action, democratic protest. The proletariat must fight and organise as a CLASS and seek the solidarity of all workers.

"Today, the historical perspective remains completely open. Despite the blow that the Eastern bloc’s collapse has dealt to proletarian consciousness, the class has not suffered any major defeats on the terrain of its struggle. In this sense, its combativity remains virtually intact. Moreover, and this is the element which in the final analysis will determine the outcome of the world situation, the inexorable aggravation of the capitalist crisis constitutes the essential stimulant for the class’ struggle and development of consciousness, the precondition for its ability to resist the poison distilled by the social rot. For while there is no basis for the unification of the class in the partial struggles against the effects of decomposition, nonetheless its struggle against the direct effects of the crisis constitutes the basis for the development of its class strength and unity. (...)

Unlike social decomposition which essentially effects the superstructure, the economic crisis directly attacks the foundations on which this superstructure rests; in this sense, it lays bare all the barbarity that is battening on society, thus allowing the proletariat to become aware of the need to change the system radically, rather than trying to improve certain aspects of it.

However, the economic crisis cannot by itself resolve all the problems that the proletariat must confront now and still more in the future. The working class will only be able to answer capital’s attacks blow for blow, and finally go onto the offensive and overthrow this barbaric system thanks to:

• an awareness of what is at stake in the present historical situation, and in particular of the mortal danger that social decomposition holds over humanity;
• its determination to continue, develop and unite its class combat;
• its ability to spring the many traps that the bourgeoisie, however decomposed itself, will not fail to set in its path."[15]

C. Mir 9-7-21

On July 11 and 12 of this year, the largest street demonstrations in Cuba for 62 years took place, which the Cuban government and the entire left-wing apparatus of the bourgeoisie try to explain as the result of the so-called "economic blockade" and the manipulations of the US government against “socialism”. On the other hand, the right-wing ideological media present it as an uprising of the people against “communism”. Both positions are based on the same assumption that Cuba is a socialist or communist country. This is a lie! Cuba is nothing but a remnant of the Stalinist regimes, which are an extreme form of the universal domination of state capitalism, expressing the decadence of this moribund system that is deadly for humanity.

The left and the right hide the reality that Cuba is a country whose economy is governed by capitalist laws, in which there are opposing social classes and fierce exploitation of the workers, so that, as in any other country, there are expressions of discontent on the part of the exploited, rejecting the miserable life that this system offers. [1] However, the recognition of the existence in Cuba of social classes with opposing interests and in a permanent balance of forces (bourgeoisie and proletariat), does not mean that every manifestation of discontent or anger in the population is a sign of a conscious response by the proletariat, even if initially it shows the real needs of the exploited. The process through which the consciousness and autonomy of the proletariat’s struggle develops is neither immediate nor mechanical, especially because the workers have to continuously confront the weight of the dominant ideology and the atmosphere of confusion spread by a capitalist system in full putrefaction.

The mobilisations in Chile and Ecuador in 2019, where interclassism prevented the advance of workers’ combativity and conscious action, are an example. [2] In May 2020, in the US, demonstrations also took place to protest against the assassination of George Floyd, but here the working class was diluted and controlled by the same bourgeoisie. There was undoubtedly discontent with the criminal action of the police; many individual workers joined the demonstrations, and yet the bourgeoisie, starting with the “Black Lives Matter” movement, managed to focus the rage on the issue of “race” and sterilise it by pushing it into democratic illusions, demanding better police and a more democratic justice system, which even led to it being used in the electoral circus. [3]

In South Africa, the first few days of July were also marked by riots in which police repression resulted in over 200 deaths and hundreds of arrests. The demonstrations were undoubtedly led by the exploited and disenfranchised, and it was these same people who lost their lives, but the reasons why they were on the streets had nothing to do with defending their interests. The struggle within the ruling party, the African National Congress, which led to the imprisonment of former president Jacob Zuma (accused of corruption), was an opportunity for a faction of the bourgeoisie to launch a propaganda campaign (via social networks), inflaming the chauvinistic and racial animosity of the Zulu population, throwing the impoverished and desperate masses into a dead end with no prospects, taking advantage of the ongoing discontent that exists and which, in the context of the pandemic, is marked by powerlessness and uncertainty.

In order to understand the revolts that took place in Cuba, it is necessary to analyse their motives, their effects and, above all, whether the proletariat took an active part in them or not, taking into account the fact that these protest movements took place at a time when the decomposition of the system was accelerating, resulting in further pauperisation, in worsening the living conditions of the proletarians, due to the shortage of basic necessities, but also to the neglect of the medical care necessary to fight the pandemic. [4]

The material causes of social unrest in Cuba...

As in the rest of the world, in Cuba the economic crisis has aggravated the deterioration of the living conditions of the workers, but when it is mixed with the pandemic, the trail of death and misery that it leaves in its wake increases dramatically. The spread of the Covid-19 virus has revealed the great lie spread by the Cuban government and taken up in chorus by all the scoundrels of the left and the extreme left of capital, about the existence of an exemplary Cuban health system, which they base on the fact that there are more than 95,000 doctors, which means that there are practically 9 doctors for every 1,000 inhabitants. However, the same cases of neglect and shortage that are found throughout the world are being repeated, and here they take on an even more dramatic aspect, as confirmed by the fact that the vast majority of the population is not vaccinated (the vaccination rate is only 22%), and also by the fact that doctors do not have medicines, oxygen, antigens, gel or syringes, etc. ...

The 2008 crisis had left latent scars that the pandemic has rekindled on a greater scale. The difficulty in reactivating investment is a problem present in all countries and although the closure of a large part of production has aggravated it, the truth is that it was already apparent even before the spread of the Covid-19 virus, and in the case of Cuba, due to its chronic instability, the problems are even greater when tourist activities (from which the State derives its main benefits) are closed, reducing its GDP by 11% in 2020 and decreasing its imports by 80%.

Since the 1960s, within the framework of the “Cold War”, the island of Cuba was integrated into the imperialist bloc led by the USSR. Thus, responding to imperialist interests, the Cuban state was drawn into the confrontation with the US-led bloc, which, as part of this confrontation, imposed certain trade restrictions (described by Castro's propaganda as a complete “economic blockade”, while the US government defines it as a mere “embargo” [5]). Nevertheless, the USSR supported the island economically and politically, as it was the main buyer of its few exports, covered 70% of its imports, equipped it militarily, but also transferred a large amount of capital to it. So when the Stalinist bloc collapsed in the late 1980s, Cuba was left without a sponsor and its economy collapsed.

Between 1990 and 1993, Cuba's GDP fell by 36%, which led it to enter what has been called a “special period”, which resulted in a sharp deterioration in the living conditions of the population; and if it managed to survive, it was thanks to its rapprochement with European capital (mainly Spanish) which invested in tourism and financial projects, and later, with the support it obtained from the Venezuelan state, it managed to stem the collapse. The Chávez government, taking advantage of the high revenues received from oil, within a framework of imperialist collaboration, carried out political and commercial projects with the Cuban state; however, the monetary flows obtained from Venezuelan oil came to a halt in 2015, bankrupting the Cuban economy at the same time as the Venezuelan economy, with both economies reaching high levels of insolvency.

One of the measures implemented by Castro's government in 1994, as part of the “special period”, was the use of a dual currency: the Cuban peso (CUP), in which workers received their salaries, and the convertible peso (CUC), which was used for the tourist trade. In this way, the state controlled the management of all incoming foreign currency, both from tourists and the transfer of funds.

It is relevant to mention this project because in December 2020, the government of Díaz Canel, successor to the Castro family, decreed monetary unification, accompanying the decree with the formation of shops with exclusive payment in foreign currency, called MLC (Moneda Libremente Convertible), which concentrate the few subsistence goods and make payment in foreign currency obligatory, thus making it more difficult for workers to acquire these goods. But in addition, this “monetary adjustment” brought to light such serious levels of inflation that wages had to be increased by 450% and pensions by 500%, which did not improve the living conditions of the workers, since the prices of basic foodstuffs as well as those of electricity and public transport [6] immediately increased in the same proportions. The paralysis of the economy and the scarcity of productive activity (which is not sufficient to cover internal demand) have led to a chronic shortage of food and medicines, forcing those who can still pay to queue for an average of 6 hours a day. Fuel shortages have led to a lack of public transport but have also caused daily power cuts of up to 12 hours.

In this climate, which became even more explosive as the number of Covid-19 cases increased [7], despair and exasperation grew and encouraged protests, which initially appeared in the town of San Antonio de los Baños. A few hundred people took to the streets shouting “Freedom and food!” and “Down with the MLC!”... for almost an hour, these protests were broadcast on social networks, until the government blocked access to the internet and social networks and launched the police repression, but by then the protests had spread to 40 towns and villages and even to Havana. In all the places where the demonstrations took place, tear gas was the first weapon of the police attacks, then came the bullets of the police and the army, which left one dead (a resident of one of the poorest neighbourhoods of Havana), dozens wounded and, to top it all, massive arrests. On the first day of the demonstration, 150 people were arrested, the number increased in the following days, and to maintain the climate of fear and intimidation, the detainees were put in isolation and kept in the condition of the “disappeared”.

The Cuban proletariat in the crossfire of “socialism” and the hope for “democracy”

One of the great myths maintained by the bourgeoisie in relation to Cuba is the alleged existence of socialism. With this argument, it has not only been able to confuse and subjugate the exploited inside Cuba, but even at the world level, the left-wing apparatus of the bourgeoisie has widely exploited it to confuse the consciousness of the proletariat, identifying Stalinism with communism, when in reality Stalinism represents a total ideological falsification of marxism and communism. But all the states and their media also use this great lie, passing off the policies repeated for years in Cuba, such as rationing and tyrannical actions of the state, as the basis on which the communist project is built. These widely disseminated visions, as we said at the beginning, prevent us from understanding what is happening with the proletariat in Cuba.

According to the available information, the discontent of the vast majority of the Cuban population is due to the lack of food and medicine, the high prices of products, the constant power cuts [8] and, no doubt, the existing weariness with Stalinist tyranny. It is not at all surprising that in several cities the demonstrations were concentrated in front of the Cuban “Communist” party's offices. However, it is also very clear that, in all this revolt, the proletariat is politically diluted, confused and dominated by nationalism and the hope for democracy.

In all the demonstrations we saw national flags being waved while nationalist speeches were also used by the spokespersons of the Cuban state to justify the repression. The bourgeois and petty bourgeois forces involved in the “anti-Castro” opposition groups (who immediately took over the protest space), invoke nationalism to call for democratisation. Meanwhile, groups associated with factions of the US bourgeoisie (operating mainly from Miami) call for the military invasion of the island in order to “save” the nation. In this social chaos, the Cuban proletariat finds itself disoriented, unable to recognise its class nature and identity and therefore unable to act autonomously, allowing its discontent to be exploited by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois factions. [9]

A characteristic of Cuba has been the absence of a tradition of struggle on the part of the working class. We can recall that even during the savage conditions of exploitation in the 19th century, the working class had a very close political connection with the bourgeois liberal movement (led by Martí) which, although it may be politically explicable in this phase of capitalist development, later, during the 20th century, with the decadent character of the capitalist system already defined, the working class continued to hope in the search for the “national liberation” promised by all bourgeois parties. [10]  These difficulties for the proletariat are aggravated by the failure to assimilate the experiences and the impetus of the revolutionary wave which had as its centre the revolutions in Russia (1917) and Germany (1919). The formation of the Communist Party (CP) did not take place until 1925, at a moment when the world revolutionary wave was in decline and the Third International and with it the CPs had entered a process of degeneration, abandoning internationalist principles.

And to top it all off, the fact that the Cuban proletariat lives under a Stalinist tyranny that presents itself as communist, creates a very confusing environment for the development of its consciousness. For more than 60 years of Castro's regime, the workers have lived in isolation, deception, repression and hunger, which is not an environment that allows them to recover the experiences of the struggles of their class brothers and sisters in other regions and to be able to cultivate their strength as a class. For this reason, the political situation of Cuban workers in each revolt is often similar.

In the 1994 revolt, known as the “Maleconazo”, the trigger was also the shortage of food, medicine and electricity, and in the same way, the workers were captured in the illusion of internal democracy or the “freedom” demanded in Miami. Neither in 1994, nor today, were there any signs of mass reflection by the proletarians in the general assemblies. This lack of reflection makes them easy prey for the dominant bourgeois positions, directed from the government and the official party, or from the various “opposition groups” in Cuba and the USA. All of this combined leads expressions of discontent into the deceptive terrain of democracy or even more into the trap of imperialist disputes, placing this discontented mass as cannon fodder for bourgeois interests.

The responsibility of the proletariat of the central countries of capitalism

When we insist on the vulnerability of the workers of Cuba to nationalist and democratic poisons, it is not to minimise their discontent or to discourage the struggle for their own demands; on the contrary, the denunciation of these poisons is indispensable to arm the proletarian struggle in Cuba and in the world.

It is true that a serious error of the Communist International, which has weighed heavily on the struggles of the working class in the last century until today, especially in Latin America, was the “weak link theory”, which places the greatest possibility of proletarian revolution in the countries where capitalism is weakest. Our article, “The proletariat of Western Europe at the centre of the generalisation of the class struggle [124]” criticises this dangerously erroneous vision without concession, stressing that “social revolut­ions did not take place where the old ruling class was weakest and its structures the least developed, but, on the contrary, where its structure had reached the highest point compatible with the productive forces, and where the class bearing the new relations of production destined to replace the old ones was strong­est”. [11] While Lenin looked for and insisted on the point of greatest weakness of the bourgeoisie, Marx and Engels looked for and insisted on the points where the proletariat is the strongest, the most concentrated and the most capable of bringing about a social transformation.

Cuban workers are confronted with a brutal state, without trade union and democratic mechanisms of social mystification, resorting only to permanent and grotesque terror. In the countries of so-called “socialism” (now reduced to China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea and Venezuela), “the weight of the counter-revolution in the form of a totalitarian regime which is certainly rigid and thus fragile, but in which democratic, unionist, trade unionist and even religious mystifications are much harder to overcome by the proletariat. These countries, as has been the case up till now, will probably see more violent explosions, and each time that this proves necessary, these outbreaks will be accompanied by the appearance of forces for derailing the movement like Solidarity [12]. In general they will not be the theatre for the development of the most advanced class consciousness”.

It will be the struggle of their brothers and sisters in the central countries of capitalism that will show them that democracy, “free” trade unions, etc. are a vile deception that reinforces and makes exploitation more oppressive. It will be the struggle of these crucial sections of the proletariat that will show that the problem of humanity is not simply empty shops or queues for a kilo of rice. These are caricatured expressions of the global barbarism of decadent capitalism, but it is the generalised overproduction that causes hunger and misery with supermarkets overflowing with food and shopping malls saturated with unsaleable goods. It is this struggle that will give meaning and direction to the efforts to resist exploitation, to the attempts to develop class consciousness that will take place in these countries.

As stated in the International Review article cited above [13]: “This does not mean that the class struggle or the activity of revolutionaries has no sense in the other parts of the world. The working class is one class. The class struggle exists everywhere that labor and capital face each other. The lessons of the different manifestations of this struggle are valid for the whole class no matter where they are drawn from: in particular, the experience of the struggle in the peripheral countries will influence the struggle in the central ones. The revolution will be worldwide and will involve all countries. The revolutionary currents of the class are precious wherever the proletariat takes on the bourgeoisie, ie, all over the world.”

 

Revolucion Mundial, publication of the ICC in Mexico,  28 July 2021

 

To mark the 20th ‘anniversary’ of the September 11 attacks in New York, we draw our readers’ attention to our lead article from International Review 107, “New York and the world over: Capitalism sows death”. The article denounces the massacre of thousands of civilians, the majority of them proletarians, as an act of imperialist war, but at the same time exposes the hypocritical tears shed by the ruling class. As the article says, “The attack on New York was not an ‘attack on civilisation’, it was itself the expression of bourgeois ‘civilisation’”. The terrorist gang engaged in the destruction of the Twin Towers are petty assassins when we examine their action in the light of the gigantic death toll inflicted on the planet by all the legally recognised states over the past hundred or so years, in two world wars and countless local and regional conflicts since 1945

In this sense, 9/11 was in continuity with the bombing of Guernica, Coventry, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 30s and 40s, of Vietnam and Cambodia in the 60s and 70s. But it was also a clear sign that that decadent capitalism had entered a new and terminal phase, the true “inner disintegration” predicted by the Communist International in 1919. The opening of this new phase was marked by the collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc in 1989 and the resulting fragmentation of the US bloc, and would see capitalism’s inevitable drive towards imperialist conflict take on new and chaotic forms. This was symbolised in particular by the fact that (even if was less certain at the time the article was written) the attack was spearheaded by Al-Qaida, an Islamist faction which had been amply supported by the US in its efforts to end the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, but which had now turned round to bite the hand that fed it. The “New World Order” proclaimed by George Bush Senior after the fall the USSR rapidly proved itself to be a world of growing disorder, where former allies and subordinates of the US, from the developed states of Europe to second- and third-rate powers like Iran and Turkey, down to smaller warlords like Bin Laden, were more and more intent on pursuing their own imperialist agendas.

The article thus shows how the US was able to instrumentalise the attacks, not only to whip up nationalism at home – accompanied, as soon became evident, by a brutal reinforcement of state surveillance and repression, and embodied in the “Patriot Act” passed on 26.10.01– but also to launch its attack on Afghanistan, whose first steps were already noted at the time of writing (3.10.01). Afghanistan, of course, has long held a strategic place on the global imperialist chessboard, and the US had specific reasons for wanting to topple the Taliban regime with its close links to Al Qaida. But the overarching aim of the US invasion – followed two years later by the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein – was to move towards what the “Neo-Cons” in the government of Bush Junior referred to as “Full Spectrum Dominance”. In other word, ensuring that the US remained the only “Super Power” by calling a halt to the growing chaos in imperialist relations and preventing the rise of any serious contender at the global level. The “War on Terror” was to be the ideological pretext for this offensive.

20 years later we can see that the plan didn’t go too well. The last US troops have had to leave Afghanistan and are on their way out of Iraq. The Taliban are back in power. Far from damming the tide of imperialist chaos, the US invasions became a factor in its acceleration. In Afghanistan, the early victory against the Taliban turned sour as the Islamists regrouped and, with the aid of other imperialist states, made sure that Afghanistan remained in a permanent state of civil war, characterised by bloody atrocities on both sides. In Iraq, dismantling the Saddam regime led both to the rise of ISIS and the reinforcement of Iranian ambitions in the region, fuelling the seemingly endless wars in Syria and Yemen. And on the planetary level, the advancing decomposition provided the background for the return in force of Russian imperialism, and above all for the rise of China as the USA’s main imperialist rival. The different strategies for “making America great again”, from the Neo-Cons to Trump, have been unable to reverse the inexorable decline of US power, and Biden, despite claiming that “America is back”, has now had to preside over America’s biggest humiliation since 9/11 itself.

In analysing the manner in which the US sought to “profit from the crime” of 9/11, the article shows the similarities between 9/11 and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour, which was also utilised by the US state to mobilise the population, including reluctant sections of the ruling class, behind the USA’s entry into the Second World War. It cites well-documented evidence that the US state “allowed” the Japanese military to launch the attack, and tentatively advances the hypothesis that the US state, at some level, had the same “laissez faire” policy in the lead up to the Al-Qaida action, even if may not have been fully aware of the scale of destruction this would entail. This comparison is further elaborated in the article published in International Review 108, “Pearl Harbour 1941, Twin Towers 2001: Machiavellianism of the US bourgeoisie”. We will return to this question in another article, where we will discuss the difference between the marxist recognition of the bourgeoisie as the most Machiavellian class in history – naturally dismissed by the bourgeoisie itself as a form of “conspiracy theory” – and the current plethora of populist “conspiracy theories” which often take as an article of faith the idea that 9/11 was an “inside job”.

WR

 

Links to articles:

https://en.internationalism.org/ir/107_new_york.html [134]

https://en.internationalism.org/ir/108_machiavel.htm [135]

 

The global Covid-19 pandemic continues to wreak havoc across all continents with all states unable to make a coordinated response. Indeed, the main events of the last two months confirm the deadly dynamic into which capitalism is plunging civilisation.

Recurring climate disasters

The summer of 2021 has been the hottest ever on record and been marked by the proliferation and accumulation of catastrophes in the four corners of the planet: large scale fires across several parts of the globe, torrential rains in China and India, flooding in the north-west of Europe, mudslides in Japan, deadly hurricanes and floods, extreme heat waves and droughts in the US, and a heat dome in Canada

The scale, frequency and simultaneity of the extreme effects of global warming have reached an unprecedented scale in recent months, literally ravaging vast areas, in most cases causing hundreds of deaths (most notably in developed countries like the United States, Germany and Belgium), and the resulting devastation has left millions of people in despair. In the midst of the catastrophe, the fact that the latest report of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), published in early August 2021, is warning once again about the acceleration of climate change and the unprecedented increase in extreme weather events, is no surprise.

Although the media did widely report the IPCC's alarming conclusions, they were quick to play them down, indicating that the situation was not hopeless, since the supposed salvation of the planet lay, according to the report, in the implementation of a "green economy" and the cultivation of "eco-responsible" individual behaviour. Such lies and distortions have the goal of masking the incapacity of the bourgeoisie to cope with the situation brought about from the fact that "States and emergency services, suffering from decades of budget cuts, are disorganised and failing". (1)

But the chain of disasters of recent weeks is only a small glimpse of what awaits humanity in the years and decades ahead if the downward spiral into which capitalism in decomposition is plunging humanity is not brought to an end. This is all the more the case since other major world events are aggravating this endless chaos.

The Afghan chaos

The chaotic departure of the US army from Afghanistan after 20 years, and the return to power of the Taliban, is a further sign of the inability of the great powers to guarantee global stability, particularly in areas where tensions and rivalries between states are rampant. As we can already see, the return to power of a reactionary and delusional faction such as the Taliban in Afghanistan only adds to worldwide disorder and instability at all levels. Here again, the media has focused attention on the notorious return to power of the bloodthirsty Taliban. However, the cruelty and terror inflicted on the population by this clique, with its medieval and obscurantist ideas, hardly rivals the crimes which the "democratic" countries and their allies have been guilty of for decades, in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

There is increasing impoverishment

In addition to these two major pieces of evidence of capitalist society rotting on its feet, there is the significant and clear worsening of the economic crisis, especially since the situation has been dramatically affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. While up to now "the effects of decomposition, the increase of every man for himself and the loss of control have mainly affected the superstructure of the capitalist system, they now are tending to have a direct impact on the economic base of the system and its capacity to manage economic jolts as it sinks into its historical crisis." (2)  Behind the false declarations of a "flourishing economic recovery", there are millions of people being laid off, evicted from their homes or unable to “see out the month”. The younger members of the working class are faced with atrocious job insecurity, with many having to resort to the support of charity from food banks. And with famine on the rise across Africa particularly, we are now seeing record numbers going hungry even in the United States.

Who can offer humanity a perspective?
The barbarity of war, the ecological disaster, the epidemics and the multiple economic and social disasters are not phenomena unrelated to each other.  In their development, their simultaneity, their interaction and their scale, they combine as evidence of "a system that is drifting towards a complete impasse with no future to offer to the majority of the world's population, except that of unthinkable barbarism". (3)

While the bourgeoisie never ceases to exploit all the atrocities and abominations of this period, aiming to terrorise and paralyse the working class and undermine its confidence that an alternative future is possible, it would be wrong to assume that "the game is up". For sure, the working class has still to overcome the profound retreat in its consciousness that has lasted for nearly three decades. However, it still remains objectively the only revolutionary class within capitalist society despite this; in other words, it's the only social force capable of guiding humanity on a different path from the catastrophic future offered by capitalism. Throughout these three decades, the proletariat has repeatedly shown its capacity to confront the bourgeois state by refusing to accept the degradation of its working and living conditions. Although these struggles been limited in their development, they are nonetheless a valuable learning experience for the future. The proletarian revolution is not a beautiful idea that will fall from the sky by the grace of the Holy Spirit. On the contrary, it is a concrete, long and torturous struggle in which the working class will realise its revolutionary potential through the accumulation of experience and by learning the lessons of its defeats.

Indeed, the struggles against the attacks on working conditions form the privileged terrain on which the working class can organise itself through its own resources and thus develop the basis of its international solidarity. In a decaying capitalism, the future belongs to the working class more than ever!

Vincent, 2 September 2021

1) Capitalism is dragging humanity towards a planet-wide catastrophe | International Communist Current (internationalism.org) [139]  (July 2021)

2) Report on the pandemic and the development of decomposition | International Communist Current (internationalism.org) [140]

3) "Theses on Decomposition", International Review No. 107 [67], (4th quarter 2001).

 

Dates for online discussions:

Saturday October 16th for participants from Asia /Europe, starting at UK time 11.00am, and on Sunday October 17th for participants from Europe/USA, starting at UK time 6.00pm.

To prepare the discussion, we suggest that comrades read the resolution on the international situation from our 24th International Congress:

https://en.internationalism.org/content/17062/resolution-international-situation-adopted-24th-icc-congress [141]

We have also published a  Report on the pandemic and the development of decomposition [140]which offers additional material.

In our Report on the international class struggle to the 24th ICC Congress [142] we try to offer a detailed analysis of the present state of the class struggle.

Please write to us at [email protected] [41] to let us know if you want to attend, and which day suits you best.

While the Covid-19 crisis has persisted for almost two years with its heavy health, social, political and economic impact on most of the world's states, this has in no way moderated their imperialist appetites. The rise in tensions has been particularly marked in recent months by a clear exacerbation of the opposition between the USA and China, highlighted most recently by the so-called “Aukus” agreement between the US, Britain and Australia, and explicitly aimed at China.

Polarisation of tensions in the China Sea

The Biden administration is not only maintaining the aggressive economic measures against China implemented by Trump, but it has above all increased the pressure on the political level (defence of the rights of the Uighurs and Hong Kong, rapprochement with Taiwan with which it is currently negotiating a trade agreement, accusations of computer hacking) and also on the military level in the China Sea, and this in a rather spectacular way since the beginning of April:

- On 7 April, the US deployed an aircraft carrier group (the USS Theodore Roosevelt, accompanied by its flotilla) to the South China Sea and the missile destroyer USS John S. McCain transited the Taiwan Strait (located between China and Taiwan);

- On 11 May, American, French (the amphibious helicopter carrier Tonnerre and the frigate Surcouf), Japanese and Australian ships began joint military exercises (ARC21) in the East China Sea, the first of their kind in this strategic area, not far from the Senkaku, uninhabited islets administered by Japan in the East China Sea and claimed by Beijing, which calls them Diaoyu. Before these exercises, the French ships had taken part in the La Pérouse exercises in the Bay of Bengal with American, Australian and Japanese Indian ships. Then, the Tonnerre passed south of Taiwan to reach Japan, while the Surcouf also chose the Taiwan Strait;

- The French presence in Japan is to be followed in 2021 by that of the German frigate Hessen, with Berlin expressing in 2020 its wish to have a greater presence in the Indo-Pacific, and the archipelago will host the British naval air group Queen Elizabeth in 2022.

- In September, the US, Britain and Australia announced a new defence agreement, known as “Aukus”, centred round expanding these countries’ military presence in the seas around China. The three countries will share military intelligence and technological knowledge which will enable Australia to build nuclear power submarines. The Aukus pact constitutes a slap in the face for France, with Australia cancelling a billion-dollar contract with France to build a submarine fleet. Reacting with fury, France has withdrawn its ambassadors from the US and Australia [1]. China has denounced the pact as the start of a new Cold War, although it will no doubt be gratified by these new divisions among its western rivals.

China for its part has reacted furiously to these political and military pressures, particularly those concerning Taiwan:

- In early April, in response to the presence of the US fleet, the aircraft carrier Liaoning accompanied by 5 warships operated in the waters east of the “rebel island”. Taiwanese fighter jets had to take off in a hurry to repel the entry of fifteen Chinese planes into the identification zone of Taiwan's air defence;

- On 19 May, a Hong Kong-based think tank affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party released a study highlighting the fact that tensions in the Taiwan Strait had become so sharp that they indicate an “all-time high” risk of war between mainland China and Taiwan;

- on 15 June, in response to the NATO meeting marking some agreement between the US and the EU on the China issue, twenty-eight Chinese fighter jets entered the Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) of former Formosa, the largest incursion of People's Liberation Army (PLA) fighters and bombers ever recorded;

- in early July, the Chinese magazine Naval and Merchant Ships published a plan for a three-stage surprise attack on Taiwan, which would lead to a total defeat of the “rebel province's” armed forces. Finally, at the end of August, the annual report of the Taiwanese Ministry of Defence warned that China “can now combine digital operations of its army that would initially paralyse our air defences, sea command centres and counter-attack capabilities, posing a huge threat to us” [2]

Warnings, threats and intimidation have thus followed one another in recent months in the China Sea. They underline the growing pressure exerted by the US on China. In this context, the United States is doing everything possible to draw other Asian countries behind them, worried about Beijing's expansionist ambitions (“The ARC21 exercise is a means of dissuasion in the face of China's increasingly aggressive behaviour in the region”, says Takashi Kawakami, director of the Institute of International Studies at Takushoku University (Japan) [3]. The USA is thus trying to create a sort of Asian NATO, the QUAD, bringing together the United States, Japan, Australia and India. On the other hand, and in the same sense, Biden wants to revive NATO in order to involve European countries in his policy of pressure against China.

To complete the picture, the tensions between NATO and Russia should not be overlooked either: after the incident of the Ryanair flight hijacked and intercepted by Belarus to arrest a dissident who had taken refuge in Lithuania, there were the NATO manoeuvres in the Black Sea off the Ukraine in June, where a clash occurred between a British frigate and Russian ships, and, in September, joint manoeuvres between the Russian and Belarusian armies on the borders of Poland and the Baltic States.

These events confirm that rising imperialist tensions are generating polarisation between the US and China on the one hand and NATO and Russia on the other, which in turn is pushing China and Russia to strengthen their ties with each other in order to confront the US and NATO.

Decomposition generates instability

However, the “Kabul debacle” [4] underlines how the decomposition and persistent destabilisation accelerated by the Covid-19 crisis stimulate centrifugal forces and exacerbate the "every man for himself" attitude of the various imperialisms, thus constantly thwarting any stabilisation of alliances:

- The precipitous US withdrawal from Afghanistan, designed to concentrate military forces in the face of China, was carried out without consulting the allies, whereas Biden had promised a few months earlier at the G7 summit and at the NATO meeting that consultation and coordination would return; this withdrawal also means that the US is abandoning its allies on the ground (cf. the earlier dropping of the Kurds and the cooling of relations with Saudi Arabia) and can only reinforce the mistrust of countries such as India and South Korea towards an ally that is proving to be unreliable, as well as Europe's determination to create defence structures that are more independent of the US;

- On the other hand, the return to power of the Taliban constitutes a serious potential danger for Islamist infiltration into China (via the “Uighur problem”), especially since their allies, the Pakistani Taliban (the TTP), are engaged in a campaign of attacks against the “New Silk Road” construction sites, which has already led to the death of a dozen or so Chinese “cooperators”. This is prompting China to intensify its attempts to establish itself in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) to counter the danger. But these republics are traditionally part of the Russian sphere of influence, which increases the danger of confrontation with this 'strategic ally', with whom its long-term interests are fundamentally opposed anyway: the New Silk Road bypasses Russia and the latter is wary of China's growing economic hold on its Siberian territories;

- The chaos and the imperialist “every man for himself” in the world constantly accentuate the unpredictability of the positioning of the various states: the US is forced to keep up the pressure with regular aerial bombardments on Shiite militias harassing its forces in Iraq; the Russians have to play fireman in the armed confrontation between Armenia and Azerbaijan, instigated by Turkey's imperialist self-interest; the spread of chaos in the Horn of Africa through the civil war in Ethiopia, with Sudan and Egypt supporting the Tigray region and Eritrea supporting the central Ethiopian government, is upsetting in particular the Chinese plans to use Ethiopia as a base for their “Belt and Road” project in North East Africa, and to this end they have installed a military base in Djibouti.

- The uncontrolled expansion of the pandemic linked to the generalisation of the Delta variant requires greater attention from states to the domestic situation, which may have an unpredictable impact on their imperialist policies. For example, the stagnation of vaccination in the USA, after an initial strong start, is causing a new wave of infection in the central and southern states. This leads to new coercive measures by the Biden administration, which in turn revives the recriminations of Trump's supporters. Similarly, in Russia, the government is faced with a resurgence of the epidemic, while vaccination is stalled and the population is extremely suspicious of Russian vaccines, leading the mayor of Moscow (where 15% of the population is vaccinated) to take measures making vaccination almost compulsory.

In China, where the government is counting on herd immunity before opening up the country, the worrying health situation requires constant attention. On the one hand, until this is achieved, China imposes strict lockdowns whenever infections are identified, and this severely hampers commercial activities. For example, last May, after some dockworkers in the port of Yantian became infected, the world's third largest container port was totally isolated for a week, with workers forced to quarantine themselves on site. Now again, entire regions are confined because of the spreading Delta variant, the strongest eruption since Wuhan in December 2019. Secondly, this quest for herd immunity has prompted a number of Chinese provinces and cities to impose heavy penalties on recalcitrants. These initiatives were widely criticised on Chinese social networks and were stopped by the government because they tended to “jeopardise national cohesion”. Finally, perhaps the most serious problem is the increasingly converging evidence about the limited effectiveness of Chinese vaccines.

In such a context, the rise of warlike tensions is inevitable. On the one hand, it indicates a certain polarisation, especially between the USA and China, underlined by a growing aggressiveness of the USA, which knows that, despite China's enormous investments in the modernisation of its armed forces, these cannot yet compete with the military power of the USA, especially in the air, at sea and in terms of its nuclear arsenal.

However, the chaos and the exacerbated “each for himself” constantly make any alliance unstable, stimulate imperialist appetites in all directions and push the major powers to avoid a direct confrontation between their armies, with a massive commitment of military personnel on the ground (“boots on the ground”), as illustrated by the withdrawal of US soldiers from Afghanistan. Instead, they have recourse to private military companies (Wagner organisation by the Russians, Blackwater/Academi by the USA, etc.) or to local militias to carry out actions on the ground: use of Syrian Sunni militias by Turkey in Libya and Azerbaijan, Kurdish militias by the USA in Syria and Iraq, Hezbollah or Iraqi Shiite militias by Iran in Syria, Sudanese militias by Saudi Arabia in Yemen ....

The form that the expansion of these tensions is taking therefore heralds a multiplication of increasingly bloody and barbaric warlike confrontations in an environment marked by instability and chaos.

18.09.21/ R. Havanais

 

In the face of the looming ecological catastrophe, disquiet and indignation are immense, as shown by the “marches for the climate” in 2019, which mobilised millions of young people from many countries. New protests are now taking place in many countries. At the time, we showed that these marches were situated on a totally bourgeois terrain. This is why we invite our readers to read or re-read the international leaflet we distributed at the first marches of 2019, which remains fully valid.

For several months, we have been seeing an increase in climate disasters all over the planet: drought, gigantic fires, devastating rainfalls, mud slides, floods…While the victims of the environmental crisis can be counted in millions every year, even the most powerful states are showing themselves to be more and more powerless to prevent these catastrophes. The latest report of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change has confirmed that the disturbance of the climate is spiralling out of control.

In our press, we have regularly shown that the roots of global heating are to be sought in the very functioning of capitalism. Not only are climate catastrophes more and more numerous, destructive, and uncontrollable, but states, following years of budget cuts, are less and less able to protect the populations from their effects, as we saw recently in Germany, the US and China. The bourgeoisie can no longer deny the scale of the calamity, but it doesn’t stop explaining, above all via the ecologist parties, that governments can take vigorous measures in favour of the environment. All factions of the ruling class have their pet solutions: “green economy”, degrowth, local production etc. All these so-called solutions have a common point: capitalism can be reformed. But the hunt for profit, the pillage of natural resources, crazy overproduction of commodities are not “options” for capitalism, they are the sine qua non of its existence.

In the face of this looming catastrophe, disquiet and indignation are immense, as shown by the “marches for the climate” in 2019, which mobilised millions of young people from many countries. At the time, we nevertheless showed that these marches were situated on a totally bourgeois terrain: “citizens” were called on to put pressure on the bourgeoisie state, this monstrous machine whose reason for existing is to defend the very capitalist interests which lie at the origins of the unprecedented deterioration of the environment. In reality, the climate problem can only be resolved on a world scale; and capitalism, in which nations confront each other pitilessly on the global market, is incapable of providing a response. The grand environmental conferences in which each state cynically defends its sordid interests under the cover of defending the environment are a crying illustration of this.  The only class which can really show the meaning of internationalism and bring an end to the anarchy of production is the working class. The only solution to the environmental crisis is the society it bears within itself: communism.

After a year which has announced the catastrophes of the future, the ecological parties, Extinction Rebellion and the left wing of capital (Stalinists, Trotskyists, anarchists, social democrats etc) will try to push for all kinds of marches and protests around the question of the climate. This is a new initiative of the bourgeoisie to channel anger into the same political dead-ends: the dilution of the working class into the “people”, illusions about the ability of the “democratic state” to change things. This is why we invite our readers to read or re-read the international leaflet we distributed at the first marches of 2019, which remains fully valid.

Link to leaflet:

Capitalism threatens the planet and the survival of humanity: Only the struggle of the world proletariat can put an end to this threat | International Communist Current (internationalism.org) [146]

 

In the past months (in particular in July and August) protests have been multiplying in various parts of the world in which voices against mandatory vaccination and health passes, which are judged to be “liberticidal”, were expressed in an anarchic and contradictory way. There have been demonstrations from Australia to Spain, from Canada to Kazakhstan, and with Europe as the centre stage. In France in particular the demonstrations took on mass proportions with tens of thousands of people coming onto the street seven weekends in a row. In many cases these demonstrations were a melting pot of individuals or families indignant about this or that governmental declaration or decision, isolated proletarians and, as in France, even the participation of political parties ranging from the extreme left of capital to the extreme right, as well as demonstrators claiming to be part of the Yellow Vest movement. It's hard not to get lost in such a formless magma.

These demonstrations were in no way an expression of proletarian struggle. On the contrary, they expressed a primary impulse of nationalism, with the presence of numerous national flags (France, Latvia, Italy, Slovakia), and of Christian fundamentalism, with the presence of wooden crosses (Greece) in the ranks of the protesters, extreme confusion, admission of impotence, disarray, and the dominant irrationality in the face of a health and social crisis which affects the whole capitalist world. This crystallisation around multifaceted claims that combine distrust of science with calls for the defence of “individual liberties” is indeed the talk of the media, where contradictory, divergent and sometimes far-fetched interests are weighed against governmental measures that are falsely presented as the expression of the defence of the common good in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic and the outbreak of a fourth wave of infection. As usual, everyone is called upon to position himself as a “citizen”, to choose his side, in the face of this or that health, political and social problem, taken in isolation, thus obscuring the responsibility of the capitalist system as a whole.

Even if a minority of proletarians, sickened by the attitude and the lies of those in power, participated in these demonstrations, they expressed above all a feeling of frustration, of impotent anger proper to the petty-bourgeois strata, and an absence of any perspective. In the US, Greece and Italy the unions, these bourgeois organs for controlling workers’ struggles, supported the protests. In Italy the six largest trade unions reacted to the fact that teachers need a Green Pass to teach at schools, calling it “a unilateral choice” and a “diktat”. In Turin, 650 employees went on strike calling the need for a Green Pass for restaurants discriminatory. In France unions even seized the opportunity to launch strikes.

In particular SUD-Santé and certain CGT federations, unions that present themselves as the most “radical”, seized the opportunity to launch a series of strike notices in different cities such as Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Bastia or regions (Hauts-de-France) to call on health workers to mobilise against the compulsory vaccine and demand the repeal of the health pass. Even among firefighters, where the same restrictive measures have been decreed, the autonomous “in-house” union had followed suit. All this in the name of the defence of “freedom of choice”, i.e. on the terrain of bourgeois law, which constitutes a real poison for the working class and its revolutionary perspective.

The extreme left organisations also took advantage of this to further disorientate the working class by feeding the confusion between workers’ demands and the defence of “citizens' rights”, by falsely presenting this movement as “a springboard for future workers’ struggles”. The bourgeoisie and its various political offices, especially those of the left and the far left, know how to use all available resources to spoil the workers’ reflection about the crisis, the ambient chaos, the negligence of the previous months, making full use of the decomposition of the whole capitalist system, explaining, with false airs of respectability, how the bourgeois state should organise the management of the crisis.

In reality, the worsening of the situation is a new expression, not only of the negligence of the bourgeoisie, but above all of the generalised impotence of all states for almost two years, incapable of pooling medical advances and expertise and the means to fight the pandemic. We have witnessed the unbridled competition of laboratories owned by different companies and the use of vaccines as an imperialist weapon by all states, all under the sign of the universal law of capitalist profit.

Why is there so much distrust of vaccines?

How could a part of the population not be afraid that we could be heading for a health scandal, a new edition of the Thalidomide affair, after almost two years of daily lies from the authorities? Governments have been decorating themselves shamelessly with claims to be basing themselves on a rational and scientific vision, when they often blatantly ignored the advice of scientists in the first waves of the pandemic, while at the same time manipulating the most opportunistic of them in the media, to justify the unjustifiable regarding the shortage of masks and sanitary protection at work or in transport. All these lies, government half-truths and lame justifications have obviously created a climate of suspicion in the population. But at the same time, the pandemic has been the occasion for a profusion of wild theories and delusional claims, not only on social networks where conspiracy theorists are most active, but also from the media and politicians themselves.

While billions of people have been vaccinated since the first tests were conducted, the rare “cases” of suspected (and rarely confirmed) dramatic side-effects are being blown out of proportion by pseudo-experts, in defiance of any scientific approach, when they are not simply invented from scratch. Yet Covid-19 has killed more than 4 million people worldwide, probably more... not vaccines! Covid-19 continues to mutate, infect and kill, especially in parts of the world too poor to afford a major vaccine campaign. It also continues to infect and weaken an increasingly young, unvaccinated population in core countries. Some people, however, still doubt the efficacy of vaccines, denouncing a supposed “lack of disinterested research” in the face of “new techniques” (which in fact are not new). Doubt and scepticism are scientific virtues, not irrational mistrust!

The irrational concerns that are more or less reflected in the claims of all vaccine opponents are also not new. Superstitious reticence towards scientific research was already expressed at the end of the 18th century when the first smallpox vaccines were being developed. Pasteur himself, when he discovered the rabies vaccine in 1885, had to deal with these “anti-vax” discourses. He was accused of mistreating animals and of inventing vaccines only to line his own pockets! Nearly a century and a half later, despite unprecedented progress in science and medicine, distrust remains in the most backward sectors of the ruling class and of the population. Today, conspiratorial irrationality even goes so far as to imagine possible genetic modification by RNA technology or political and medical manipulation for state control of the population via the inoculation of microchips during vaccination.

If these various obscurantist discourses resist scientific demonstration, it is because they adapt to each era and each context. But today, the dynamics of ideological decomposition in capitalist society, the feeling of powerlessness in the face of the crisis and the mounting chaos, are impacting on a more educated population and do nothing but rot the entire capacity for logical, scientific and political reasoning in a miasma of sometimes delirious reactionary conceptions and visions.

The bourgeoisie is no stranger to this process: not only have we seen politicians from the far right and even from the ranks of the traditional right propagating totally delusional ideas, but these aberrations have manifested themselves right up to the highest levels of the state. The cases of Trump in the US and Bolsonaro in Brazil are well known, but we have also seen the “progressive” Macron and his clique in France openly denigrating scientists or distorting their words in an attempt to justify their short-sighted policies, as when the head of state claimed to have been right alone against the epidemiologists.

The only freedom under capitalism is the freedom to exploit

In the demonstrations, the less irrational participants do not question vaccination but are opposed to the health pass, imposed initially on carers on pain of dismissal, and reject the disguised obligation to show a pass in order to engage in the most classic social activities such as going to the supermarket, a bar or the cinema.

However, these two realities, anti-vaccination and anti-health pass, coexist with very porous borders in common demonstrations where the same individualistic logic of defiance prevails, with an absence of collective concern about the continuation of the pandemic, its ravages that are still present and those to come. This is done in the name of the attack on “individual liberties”, a totally bourgeois terrain. This slogan for the defence of democratic freedoms is the crudest cover for the defence of the bourgeois state, the most anti-working class ground there is. The workers’ movement has repeatedly denounced this trap and affirmed that “as long as the state exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no state”.[1]

The revolutionary perspective is the only alternative

The governments are taking advantage of the situation to turn people against each other, stirring up tensions and resentments. By multiplying propaganda campaigns, by more or less openly making all the individuals who harbour doubts and are afraid look like totally delusional “anti-vax conspirators”, the bourgeoisie has pushed a part of the vaccinated to see the opponents of vaccines as easy scapegoats who can be blamed for the new waves of contamination, clearing capitalism and the state of the utter irresponsibility which led to the dramatic situation of today. For the anti-vaxxers, their mobilisation against the “dictatorship” of governments is a pledge of responsibility to keep democracy alive and defend it, by denouncing the servile “sheeple” for putting up with the “liberticidal” laws of forced vaccination. These divisions are part of a disastrous logic of confrontation in which the real issue, the need to end capitalist chaos, disappears under a jumble of confusion and impotence.

The exasperation expressed in the “anti- compulsory vaccines” demonstrations takes the form of feelings of being subjected to the diktats of an arrogant government which has multiplied inconsistencies in the face of the pandemic, imposing repeated confinements after continually opening up too soon, boasting of a scientific approach while bourgeois negligence is uppermost. But protests of this kind can in no way lead to a development of consciousness in the proletariat of the irremediable impasse of the capitalist system.

This is essentially an impotent rage against governments that are seen to be the source of all the evils and perceived as bad, incompetent and inefficient managers of this system.

Faced with such a social and ideological quagmire, which the bourgeoisie feeds and stirs up on a daily basis, it will not be easy for the proletariat to react on its class terrain of solidarity to counter the real frontal attacks to come, attacks on its working and living conditions. Its class terrain is not that of the defence of the state, the defence of the national economy and the national flag. Its class autonomy in the struggle will have to be defended against all the forces of the state, in power or not, independently of the inter-classist movements or the false friends, generally of the left, who will try to divert its anger. The proletariat needs lucidity and confidence in its own forces to thwart all these traps.

Stopio, 13 August 2021

1 [147] Lenin, State and Revolution, 1917

 

No one doubts that the number of unemployed people in the world is increasing due to the slowdown in economic activity and the deepening of the crisis, further accelerated by Covid-19. In Mexico, according to official data, the number of unemployed increased by 117% after the pandemic, representing 2.43 million workers, of whom almost 57,000 have been out of work for more than a year. Workers have found themselves in a more fragile situation with the pandemic because of the daily danger of being exposed to the infection in transport and in the workplace, the uncertainty of losing their jobs due to the risk of bankruptcies and company closures, or the extra effort they now have to make with working from home, as it involves extra expenses to do their work.

However, in these circumstances, the current situation makes it more difficult for workers to protest for better living and working conditions. We have seen, for example, how in Mexico protests by health workers have taken place in many hospitals, but these have been very much in the minority and isolated due to the demands of the pandemic itself, which has not given nurses, doctors, auxiliaries , etc. enough rest to meet their basic requirements (they have suffered many deaths).[1] Thus, it is important to emphasise that the strike at the UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) clearly shows that the proletariat is not defeated, that it shows combativity, and that it has kept intact its capacity to fight for the defence of its living and working conditions, despite the many difficulties and obstacles in the current situation. The UNAM is the most important university in Mexico, with around 40,000 teachers at secondary, higher and postgraduate levels.

Most of them do not have a basic contract, so their contracts are renewed every year or even every semester. Since the pandemic, research activities have been reduced, but courses have not been stopped; they have been resumed online using the teachers themselves as resources, working from home, and of course with a considerable increase in workload to prepare course material and online assessment.

In addition to the increased workload due to working from home, hundreds of teachers suffered delays in receiving their salaries, being owed up to a year in arrears, so that in February 2021, teachers held meetings to discuss their situation, which led to a three-day work stoppage from 16 March onwards called by teachers from the Faculty of Science. The strike spread from 16 March to different faculties, schools and colleges at different levels of the UNAM, and during the course of the strike it took the form of an indefinite strike. By 3 May, some faculties and schools had partially resumed classes, but by 5 May at least 22 faculties were still on strike, but they were already tired, weary and despondent.

First workers’ strike using the internet

The particularity of this mobilisation is that most of the work stoppages and protests were organised through assemblies that were carried out by Zoom and gathered both students and teachers. However, the face-to-face rallies and demonstrations that took place in person had a very low turnout, such as the one on 25 March, which had around 500 demonstrators, and the one on 11 May, which had even fewer participants. This strike was initially organised outside of union control, so that teachers’ organisations began to be created, in which they defined a list of demands that expressed their needs and recognized that they were exploited:

 “We demand fair wages for teachers, a full salary, the payment of the salary that has not been paid for years, against job insecurity, the setting of a minimum wage for the teaching of various subjects, for the dignity of educational work.”

Despite the progress made in their recognition of themselves as exploited workers, it should be pointed out that these groups of teachers that have emerged have remained isolated from the start, each one confined to his or her own faculty, without establishing a relationship and connection with other faculties and schools of the UNAM itself, and even less so with other universities that have similar problems. This was the case in the “General Assembly of UNAM teachers and assistants”, held on 24 March 2021: when a teacher from another public university (UACM) reported similar problems suffered by education workers on their campus, his intervention was interrupted by the person acting as chairperson, with the argument:

“We have to limit ourselves to the problems in the UNAM, I understand that this problem seems to be quite important elsewhere, in the IPN, the UACM, the UAM, but now we have to stick to the issues related to the UNAM.”

When an assistant teacher protested against this sort of argument, the answer was once again categorically confirmed:

“Since last Saturday's assembly, we have agreed on this point [...] we cannot join the struggle at the IPN [...] Anyone who does not want to participate in the assembly under these conditions can leave now.”

The members of the various left-wing groups present, (Trotskyists, feminists...) and other supposed 'radicals', did not say a single word and calmly continued their participation in the assembly.

This is why these protests did not succeed in frightening the educational authorities, which began to pay the arrears in dribs and drabs, calculating them incorrectly and maintaining the arrears, but also ignoring other demands such as wage increases and the establishment of a basic wage, claiming that for these demands they only recognised the AAPAUNAM union (UNAM'S Autonomous Association of Academic Personnel), since it was the signatory of the collective agreement. This shows that if the three unions that were taking over the UNAM workers’ strike kept a low profile, it was because they were waiting for the most opportune moment to show themselves and justify their place in the sabotage of the strike: either as direct spokespersons for the authorities (with AAPAUNAM resuming its traditional conciliatory role), or as supposedly “critical” and “alternative” forces.

Taking advantage of the isolation in which discussions took place, the ideology of leftism[2]  also takes advantage of it to divert the discussions from the terrain of wage demands in defence of their living and working conditions by introducing the slogan of the “democratisation of the university” or to demand the dismissal of particular people at the top of the university hierarchy. Even the ideological campaign unleashed around the supposed change represented by the “4T” (4th transformation) government[3]  fulfils its objective of extending and deepening the confusion. For example, a group of teachers appealed to the state by repeatedly trying to present their demands at one of the daily "morning" press conferences of the President until, on 30 March, they succeeded in doing so, receiving the answer that it was an issue that could only be dealt with by the UNAM authorities.

Of course, this was an action that arose on the terrain of the working class. The action was triggered by direct attacks on teachers’ salaries that affected them immediately, and it is important because of the difficult situation caused by the pandemic. It is also important because it is one of the first virtual work stoppages, or perhaps one of the first in the world. The movement remained combative for a few weeks, focusing on economic demands, but gradually declined due to its isolation. This allowed the authorities to respond with a direct assault at the end of the semester, dismissing dozens of faculty and school teachers.

The weaknesses of the movement

The teachers’ strike did not overcome many of the obstacles faced by proletarian mobilisations and therefore showed many weaknesses, some arising from the particular long-standing difficulties of the proletariat in Mexico, and others caused by the situation resulting from the pandemic. The strike was very corporatist, there was no unity of the teachers, there was not enough solidarity to break down the administrative barriers that the bourgeoisie imposes on workers, to ensure the unity of the teachers regardless of their “category”. Nor was there any real unity among teachers at different levels of colleges, schools and faculties; each entity had its own assemblies and, as a result, demands and actions were dispersed and divided in countless ways.

Nor did the movement actively seek support from teachers in other schools, let alone other categories of workers. If there is no momentum towards the unity and extension of the movement, it will inevitably collapse in defeat. In addition, there was a lack of mass general assemblies and joint general assemblies to ensure control over the development of the movement. This division is also evident in the decisions about ending the strike. Every unit decided when it would do so, accelerating the dissipation of the emerging solidarity and proletarian unity that had achieved, while creating further division and resentment of some workers against others. The state and the bourgeoisie as a whole are very careful to ensure that strikes are carried out in a sectoral manner in order to avoid workers uniting, which is one of their main strengths and essential in achieving significant victories.

The prolonging of the strike, which in some schools has now lasted for three months (in these circumstances where there is a lack of unity and extension) has led to impotence and fatigue, forcing them to consider the resumption of work also in a dispersed manner, in a climate that favours the entry of the trade union structure (whether it is stamped pro-government, “critical” or “independent”) to consolidate control and confusion, opening the door to repression (with dismissals, as is already the case, as we have seen above) and to the actions of desperate minorities, consummating the defeat of the movement. Two fundamental lessons can be drawn from the great struggles of 1905 in Russia and in other countries, as well as from the whole historical experience of the workers' movement.[4]

These are: 1) The struggle must be led, organised and extended by the workers themselves, outside union control, through general assemblies and committees elected and revocable at any time. 2) The struggle is lost if it remains confined to the enterprise, the sector or the nation; on the contrary, it must be extended by breaking all the barriers that capital imposes and that bind it to capital. The path of proletarian struggle, which begins with economic demands for the ever-expanding unity of the working class, is the only one that can lead to a radical political and social transformation, to the world human community. We must continue to advance along this long and difficult path; it is the only one that can prevent the destruction of humanity, of which the Covid-19 pandemic is a warning sign.

 

Revolucion Mundial, publication of the ICC in Mexico (5 June 2021)

After 18 months of secret negotiations, Australia, Britain and the US officially announced the creation of a military pact named AUKUS, an acronym of the three countries. This will establish a strategic force in the Indo-Pacific region, enabling the US to reinforce its position towards China.

Acceleration of imperialist chaos

While American power continues to weaken on the world arena, AUKUS was conceived with the explicit goal of blocking the expansion of China in the region. In response to China’s militarisation of the islands in the South China Sea and development of its naval forces in the region, the USA has been stepping up its arms supplies to its allies and flexing its muscles with spectacular joint military exercises. At this level AUKUS is a clear confirmation that the rivalry between America and China is getting sharper and is tending to move to the forefront of the international scene, obliging the US to reorganise its forces on a global scale (as witness the retreat from Afghanistan) and re-centre their military presence in the Pacific.

With this new alliance under US tutorship and limited to three countries without any participation from continental Europe, the US has clearly decided to accentuate its demonstration of strength. Under Donald Trump, the Indo-Pacific zone officially became “the principal axis of American national strategy”. This was not of course a complete novelty since Obama had already announced the “pivot” of US military forces from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But if anyone thought that with the arrival of good old Joe Biden to the presidency, the provocative and warlike policies of Trump would come to an end in favour of a more “diplomatic” approach, they would be sorely disappointed: Biden, perhaps in a less overt manner, has backed up and even aggravated the warlike approach towards China, further destabilising the world imperialist situation.

But this can only wrack up tensions and push China to react. Since the fall of the eastern bloc, China has become the main rival to the US, even threatening its economic dominance. The “Peoples Republic” has demanded a whole series of territories, going from a few coral reefs to Taiwan, taking in its “historic claim” to the whole of the South China Sea. China wants to boot the Americans out of the region, which has seen an important US presence for some time, but particularly since the end of the Second World War. Beijing is thus seeking to weaken and undo the USA’s military alliances, putting itself forward as a reliable partner, a benevolent Asian “big brother” with very full pockets. In the Indian Ocean, China is advancing its pawns and is extending its “New Silk Road” through concessions on the use of ports, but also through new transport and telecommunication infrastructures. In the Gulf of Aden, it has profited from operations against piracy to train its still inexperienced naval forces. In 2017, it even set up a base in Djibouti.

The initiatives in the Indo-Pacific region moved even further ahead with the Covid pandemic, through the multiplication of military manoeuvres around Taiwan, between Taiwan and the Philippines, and in the Himalayas. The military confrontations in the region of Ladakh showed very concretely how these tensions could turn into armed confrontations.

With the expected arrival of American nuclear submarines, Australia will be able to have much more powerful weapons and technology at its disposal than it would have got through the French diesel submarines. With the supply of enriched military uranium, the US is potentially providing Australian with the means to produce nuclear weapons, with all the risks of proliferation in the region. India has also said it is interested in obtaining French nuclear submarines and strengthening its airforce with Dassault Rafale fighter planes.

The reconstitution of blocs is not on the agenda

Some people see the US and China moving towards the formation of new military blocs in the perspective of a Third World War. This is clearly not the case: the new strategic partnerships in the region, which could certainly lead to unforeseen violent outbreaks, is not at all the expression of a tendency towards the reconstitution of blocs.

These are essentially circumstantial links or alliances (as is the case, for example, between Japan and South Korea), ephemeral military alliances which, like AUKUS, are not heading towards a solid alliance and the setting up of new blocs, as was the case during the Cold War.

Whatever one might think of the choice of Australia, the new imperialist confrontation in the Indo-Pacific region is not limited to a confrontation between the US and China. On the contrary, the intensification of this confrontation has swelled the ranks of dissident and distrustful opponents. You can’t create blocs by excluding or humiliating potential allies, as with the economic sanctions imposed since 2017 on Germany and other European countries in response to their deal with Russia on the North Stream 2 gas pipeline linking Germany and Russia via the Baltic, or the humiliation of France in the submarines affair.

France continues to define itself as a “Pacific power”, up till now mainly via its cooperation with Australia and India. The French state has even made the sale of military equipment a pillar of its strategy in the Asian Pacific. These sales have enabled it to attain two objectives at the same time: one, obviously, enabling it to find commercial and industrial outlets; the other, having a bearing on the efforts to counter the influence of China. France is trying to perform a balancing act by adopting a more conciliatory stance towards China, while at the same time affirming its interests in the region through an economic-military alliance with Australia. But by announcing the AUKUS pact and slapping France in the face, the US and Australia have confirmed that in their eyes Paris is not a major player in the region’s security. The semi-unilateral policy of the US towards its allies in itself runs counter to the perspective of forming a bloc. At the same time, by reneging on its contract with France, Australia is paradoxically strengthening the interests of second or third rate imperialist sharks outside the US umbrella. This is particularly the case with Indonesia and, of course, for France itself which is ready to reinforce its links with India.

At the same time, in a region which gave birth to the so-called “non-alignment” principle, other regional powers maintain their own imperialist ambitions. Notably Indonesia and Malaysia greeted the AUKUS pact very coldly, since it upsets their own little apple carts. It’s the same for New Zealand, which immediately announced its refusal to allow the Australian nuclear submarines in its territorial waters.

As for the perspective of a possible imperialist bloc around China, there has been no movement towards this from any of the local powers. Even if China has many links, particularly commercial ones, with both distant and neighbouring countries, the isolation of China at this level is almost total. Even Russia understands the danger of a partnership with China, which could hamper its own return as a player on the world imperialist arena. Only North Korea looks like a potential client, and that says a lot. So there is no movement towards a “Chinese bloc”. The dynamic of centrifugal forces and every man for himself in imperialist rivalries has become an even more weighty element in the situation.

This chaotic imperialist situation, involving an increasing number of heavily armed actors, is full of danger for the future. As an illustration of these palpable dangers, under the Trump administration certain official spokesmen declared that there would be a direct confrontation between China and the USA before 2030. And even if France has lost a market with the cancelling of the Australian submarines contract, from 2013 six Corvettes will be delivered to Malaysia from 2023; Aster missiles are already going to Singapore, helicopters to numerous countries like Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, Singapore, Pakistan, New Zealand, Malaysia, Indonesia and India. Not to mention other arms supplies from America, Russia, Israel Germany, China, Sweden…and so on.

This is the reality of aa capitalist world in full putrefaction, which can only engender chaos and barbarism.

Stopio, 9.10.21

 

Whatever their specifics, wars and instability continue to rage across the Middle East firmly in the context of capitalist decomposition, of barbarism, chaos and “everyman for himself”. In the face of the weakening of the USA, which nonetheless still retains considerable forces in the region, centrifugal, unpredictable tendencies dominate to the extent that the butcher Assad and his broken, bloody regime is now being welcomed back, via Saudi Arabia and Jordan, into the regional fold, receiving emissaries from old enemies near and far.

This regional “fold”, such as it exists, is in fact a nest of the most treacherous vipers goaded or abandoned by wider forces, engaged in open military confrontations, sub-rivalries, increasing tensions of each against all. It involves the proliferation of warlordism and the increasing instability of alliances. Most of all, it contains no possible perspective for any sort of peace; only that of more warfare and instability throughout the whole Middle East. Similarly, there have been regional moves, particularly after the USA left the Kurds and then the Saudis in the lurch, to involve Iran in talks with Saudi Arabia and the UAE; two allies, incidentally, whose forces are fighting each other in southern Yemen. While a five-sided war, typical of decomposition, continues to rumble on in Eastern Syria, Hezbollah has strengthened its (and Assad’s) position in the country and opened possibilities for greater Syrian involvement in Lebanon – its old stamping ground. There are possible consequences here for Israel and its smouldering and bitter war with Hamas, which could turn into a much more serious situation given wider developments. Afghanistan, and the particular barbarity of the Taliban (and their rival butchers in Islamic State) has rightly been the focus of the global decline of US imperialism and its corresponding pivot to the east,[1] but below we want to concentrate on two geographical areas of the Middle East, Libya and Yemen, that, while they both express their own barbaric specifics, are entirely enmeshed in the fabric of decomposing capitalism.

Libya: irrational rivalries and hypocrisy over refugees

Libya is a striking example of capitalism’s shameless attitude to the question of refugees and human trafficking: the commodification of misery imposed by nationalism and imperialism are taken to new depths of inhuman horror in and around this North African country. The wars undertaken by the west in the Middle East in 1990 and early 2000 gave rise to an enormous number of displaced people with some displaced many times; what can you do in the midst of war between rival, threatening forces other than grab what you can and flee? Many of these refugees were, through their individual terrifying odysseys, trying to find their way through Libya which itself, in 2011, was visited by the "humanitarian" war of London, Paris and Washington (the latter "leading from behind") against the ruling Gaddafi faction that they had previously armed and supported as a regional policeman.

On the back of some extremely courageous but essentially directionless social revolts against the bloody Gaddafi regime, uprisings which had also affected many Arab countries including Yemen, Libya was to receive its share of capitalist barbarity meted out by the major powers and add its own particularly repulsive signature: "This unfortunate Libya, which the Franco-British war of 2011 has transformed into a paradise for the terrorists of Daesh and al-Qaida, has today inherited a civil war. The trafficking of arms, drugs and migrants proliferates and it rarely comes into conflict with the jihadists. That is to be expected; they are often business partners..."[2] The toxic legacy of this war is very much with us today as rival Russian and Turkish interests vie for power behind their various armed cliques. While there is talk about the coming elections in December, the various powers involved in the conflict cannot, or rather do not want to, deliver a permanent cease-fire or the demobilisation of their armed groups. Alongside Russia stands Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, with France, Qatar and Italy alongside Turkey. This is no bloc confrontation but rather another free-for-all, involving a bewildering series of powers and factions, some of whom are no doubt motivated by an interest in their share of Libya's "black gold". But there are also profits to be made from the abundant human commodity of displaced peoples.

The role of Russia and Turkey

Regarding the local mafias and warlords, many of whom were built up in the 1990's when Libya was an important transit zone for the drug business, Russia backs General Khalifa Haftar, the boss of the Libyan National Army (LNA) based in the east of the country, while Turkey supports the "internationally recognised government", the Government of National Accord (GNA) based in Tripoli. But the biggest powers directly involved are also providing their own forces on the ground with hundreds, if not thousands of Russian "Wagner Troops" who were active in Ukraine; this is a "private, military company" in the same way that Blackwater (now “Academi”) was to the US in Iraq, and is also deployed in Syria, Sudan, Angola, Mozambique and several other African countries. For its part, by last October, Turkey had sent nearly 20,000 Syrian fighters, including some children, which it is still refusing to demobilise. Between them, these imperialist vultures have laid out their "legitimate" claims to the body of Libya. Russia wants payment for the arms it provided to the Gaddafi regime in the past; and Turkey, which is getting more and more out of its depth here as elsewhere, wants the $25 billion worth of contracts that it made with Libya before the 2011 war. NATO is absent here as a force and its wants nothing to do with Turkey's confrontation with Russia. But France, through its secret services, has provided the Russian-backed Haftar army with missiles while the British, again through their secret services, have sent British-based Islamist Libyan fighters (in the shape of the Islamic Fighting Group, which has strong links to Al Qaida) to do their dirty work in the country (also employed by the British state to work in Afghanistan and Syria). Capitalist reconstruction of states after such wars as Libya in 2011 is now a thing of the past and the country, like many imperialist battlefields recently, will remain just that. Within capitalist decomposition states involved in wars, particularly the weaker ones, have little chance of any real recovery[3] and remain running imperialist sores ready to flare up again in the general advance of militarist barbarism which again brings more waves of displaced and refugees[4].

Refugees: oppression and slavery

No-one knows exactly how many refugee detention camps there are in Libya or how many people they contain, but the answer must be dozens, containing tens and maybe hundreds of thousands. The inmates, men, women and children, face killings and torture, including rape and other forms of sexual violence, forced labour and an endless misery. None of this is secret[5]. Amnesty International appeals to the European Union to "reconsider its co-operation with the Libyan authorities" but the EU only has the intention of supporting further the activities of these so-called "authorities". Last September's new EU "Migration Pact" was more of an expression of a free-for-all in the EU, a short-term attempt to maintain their individual borders and with no allowance made for the Covid-19 pandemic let alone the ongoing misery of the refugees. The official refugee prisons in Libya like everywhere else are bad enough but many are unofficial, run by militias where hundreds of refugees “disappear” at a time. While hypocritically criticising the conditions of China's "re-education" camps of the Muslim Uighurs, the EU is contributing to the maintenance of what can accurately be described as its own death camps closer to home.

On November 14, 2017, CNN reported the existence of a slave market in Libya where human beings were brought and sold like cattle. EU-funded armed Libyan coastguard boats plough into the ramshackle crafts of refugees (unless they are rich enough to book "first class") and shoot at others, while an unknown number are consigned to a watery grave trying to cross the Mediterranean. The barbarity of this situation is the responsibility of the major powers including the open complicity of the "enlightened" countries of the European Union. But these camps, the refugees, the walls, the barbed-wire and the strengthening of a border against the "others" is not a specific Libyan problem but a growing problem of capitalism’s advancing decay. Like Yemen, there are plenty of specifics to the Libyan nightmare but they both share one of the major characteristics of capitalist decomposition: an irrational flight into chaotic and permanent warfare.

Yemen: bombs, famine, disease

The war in Yemen is a war of misery, atrocities and constant "humanitarian" appeals. It seems to have been going on forever, an endless war, which in a sense it is. Yemen became a unified country in 1990 with the fusion of the Yemen Arab Republic and South Yemen. This was right after the dramatic opening of capitalism's descent into its phase of decomposition and it bears all the scars of it. Like the countries formed earlier in the twentieth century by way of "national liberation", these are not at all the viable, unified national entities that capitalism created in its ascendant phase which lasted up until the First World War. On the basis of European-imposed colonial divisions (mostly British, who only left Yemen in 1967), Yemen was "born" into the new era of imperialist free-for-all that aggravated long-standing territorial, "ethnic" and religious differences and created a few more besides.

Britain, Saudi, Iran and other powers fuel the slaughter

Rebel uprisings, along with social uprisings, began in 2004 in Yemen and became more widespread in 2010 and then again in 2014. More than just providing weaponry, British forces have been actively supporting Saudi Arabia since the first bombs fell on the rebels in 2015. The Houthi "rebels", despite their quite extreme and intolerant branch of Zaidi Shia, were nevertheless supported by many poor Sunnis who saw their bid for power as a way out of the hell that they were living in, and were themselves part of a wider spread of social discontent across the Arab world. The Houthis were initially separate from Iran but the latter, along with Hezbollah, has got more involved with them as the major powers have piled into and pounded the country in order to support what's laughably called "the government" or, as the BBC puts it, "the internationally-recognised government". The latter is supposed to be involved in a "stalemate" according to the BBC. In reality this is a further descent into capitalist barbarity. The Houthis control - if that's the right word - 70% of the north of the country including the capital Sana'a. The Yemeni government actively backed by Saudi Arabia, the US, Britain and others, control some areas to the south of the country where there is also the separatist Southern Transitional Council backed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE): Saudi Arabia and the UAE, two apparent allies in the war against the Houthis, are clashing with each other over the control of the strategically valuable Bab el-Mandeb strait (also sought by the Houthis) overlooking the Red Sea between south Yemen and Djibouti. Apart from other southern separatist factions that agree neither with Saudi nor the UAE, there are also in Yemen active elements of the Muslim Brotherhood (backed by Qatar), the local franchise of al-Qaida - al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP) - along with local and imported elements of Isis. There have been reports that the Saudi and coalition-backed Yemeni secret services, the PSO, have links with these terrorist organisations - and Houthi elements have also probably been "in touch". This mixture of destructive interests is entirely representative of imperialism in the phase of decomposition.

As well as famine and Covid-19, the latter another devastating factor in these war zones, cholera and diphtheria have made a come-back in Yemen where even mild cases of diarrhoea result in the deaths of children and the weak. Three-quarters of the population rely on aid and at least 3 million people have been displaced. The Houthi forces have been emboldened by how easy it is to direct fire at targets on Saudi soil[6] and, while the latter under some US pressure are looking for a way out of the war, the "rebel" forces seem intent on pursuing it into the gas and oil-rich Marib region of central Yemen[7], further deepening the war and its consequences.

The examples of Libya and Yemen above demonstrate how the unstoppable barbaric and self-destructive tendencies of capitalism are exacerbated at all levels in its stage of decomposition. The question of war and militarism will become central for the working class as more and more sacrifices are demanded from it in order to feed capitalism’s war economy. The development of imperialism and militarism today is one more major factor in the dangerous impasse to which the present system is driving the whole of humanity.

 

Boxer. 29.9.2021

Thousands of migrants trapped for several weeks at the Polish border, abandoned to their fate in wet and frozen forests, without food or water. Families wandering in the middle of nowhere, forced to drink water from the surrounding swamps, sleeping on the ground in sub-zero temperatures. Exhausted, often sick, exiles beaten up by Belarusian army troops who knowingly led them to the European Union (EU) borders. Hysterical Polish authorities who do not hesitate to send women, children, the disabled and the elderly back into the woods and to beat up those who try to cross the barbed wire fences that have been illegally deployed all along the border. This sad spectacle is unfortunately reminiscent of many others, just as revolting. But the instrumentalisation of migrants for openly imperialistic purposes adds the colour of the most shameless cynicism to this distressing picture.

Hostages of sordid imperialist rivalries

The sudden presence of migrants in this hostile region, a route rarely used by refugees, is not accidental: the Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in open conflict with the EU since his disputed re-election in August 2020, has encouraged and even organised the transport of migrants by offering them an illusory way out to Europe, and has thrown them towards the Polish border. Charters are even reportedly being chartered to Minsk to transport the would-be exiles.

For Lukashenko and his clique, migrants are merely a bargaining chip in response to Western sanctions and pressure. Moreover, as soon as the negotiations with the EU and Russia began, the Belarusian government sent a few hundred migrants back to square one, on a "voluntary" basis (what a euphemism!), as a sign of “good faith”. So much for the deaths! So much for the trauma! So much for the dashed hopes!

The use of refugees in the context of imperialist rivalries has developed spectacularly in recent years, taking advantage of a context in which the richest states have become veritable fortresses and are wallowing in the most xenophobic rhetoric every day. We have recently seen Turkey threaten to open the floodgates to emigration at the Greek border, or Morocco at the Spanish border, each time playing “migratory blackmail” in order to defend their sordid national interests. Even France, in the context of post-Brexit tensions, is suggesting, more or less subtly, that it might leave the UK to deal with Calais migrants on its own. It is also likely that behind the Belarusian refugees, Putin's Russia is advancing its pawns.

The hypocrisy and cruelty of the “democratic” states

« The Poles are doing a very important service to the whole of Europe,” said Horst Seehofer, the German Minister of the Interior. And what a service it is! Poland and its populist government did not hesitate to deploy thousands of soldiers at the border and to explicitly threaten refugees: “If you cross this border, we will use force. We will not hesitate”. 1 At least the message is clear and the intimidation has been administered with zeal: tear gas thrown at hungry and exhausted people, regular beatings, no care given to the sick...

The EU, which claims to be so intransigent about the “respect for human dignity”, also turned a blind eye when Poland arrogated to itself, on 14 October, in defiance of “international conventions”, the “right” to systematically turn back migrants to Belarus without checking whether the asylum applications were valid, even according to the narrow rules of bourgeois legality. The bourgeoisie has thus equipped itself with a regulatory and legal arsenal that is totally unfavourable to migrants and it does not hesitate to cheat its own rules when the need arises!

The same applies to the walls against migrants. When the UK wanted to re-establish a border in Northern Ireland, the bourgeoisie took offence at such “peace-threatening” boldness, “reminiscent of the worst hours of the Cold War”. When Lithuania and Poland decided to build thousands of kilometres of barbed wire fences, this was called “protecting European borders” and “doing a very important service”...

Poland's populist government, after being roundly reviled for its anti-abortion measures and Eurosceptic statements, is suddenly in the spotlight. This crisis is a real boon for Poland’s image with its “European partners”. Clearly, if the Polish state is doing such a great “service”, it is because it is doing the dirty work of the other EU states without a second thought.

Let us remember that the “great democracies” of Europe, when they do not themselves park asylum seekers in abject concentration camps, such as Moria in Greece, subcontract the “management of migratory flows” to regimes that are well known for their “respect for human dignity”: Turkey, Lebanon, Morocco or Libya, where the worst kind of slave traders still operate under the benevolent eye (and purse) of the European Union! On the other side of the Atlantic, President Biden, who was supposed to break with his predecessor's disgusting migration policy, is proving to be just as brutal: since September, his administration has been “evacuating” thousands of migrants to a Haitian hell, nearly 14,000 according to the American media.

The “democratic” states can always present themselves as the guarantors of “human dignity”, but the reality shows that they do not attach any more importance to it than the more “authoritarian” regimes. For both, only their cold interests in the imperialist arena count.

The “right of asylum”: a tool for building walls against migrants

It is up to the parties of the left of capital, from ecologists to Trotskyites, to brandish an equally hypocritical semblance of indignation. In Poland and other European countries, small demonstrations, led by leftists, have been held to demand the application of “international law” and the reception of refugees in the name of the “right of asylum”.

Yet bourgeois law, with its international conventions and “human rights”, is quite comfortable with the inhumane physical and regulatory barriers erected against migrants: the “right to asylum” is applied piecemeal according to ultra-selective criteria, and in the face of Poland’s abuses, which are indeed incompatible with the Geneva Convention, European states need only look the other way.

By “fighting for the application of refugee rights”, NGOs and leftist organisations are in fact abandoning migrants to the gallows trees of the administration, exposing them to permanent policing and the equally impassable wall of bureaucracy. There is nothing to hope for in bourgeois law, which only expresses the sinister interests of the ruling class and its barbarism. The “sorting centres”, the coast guards pushing back the fragile boats of migrants (as Frontex does), the innumerable walls, the subsidies to countries that regularly use torture, all this exists in the strict respect of “law”.

The only answer to the crimes of the bourgeoisie against migrants is the international solidarity of all proletarians. This is the method that the workers' movement has always defended: when the International Working Men's Association was founded in 1864, it already had to oppose speeches accusing immigrants of driving down wages. In the face of this nationalist reflex, it affirmed on the contrary “that the emancipation of labour is neither a local nor a national, but a social problem, embracing all countries in which modern society exists”. Then as now, it is not the migrants who are attacking our living conditions, but capital.

EG, 21 November 2021

Notes

 

1 [157]« Faute de politique d’accueil commune, l’Europe déstabilisée par la Biélorussie », Mediapart (11 novembre 2021).

 

 

The ICC has published an article on the recent signs of a renewed fighting spirit in the working class in a number of countries: Struggles in the United States, in Iran, in Italy, in Korea... Neither the pandemic nor the economic crisis have broken the combativity of the proletariat! [159] The struggles in the US are particularly important, and this contribution from a close sympathizer there aims to examine them in more detail.

Spurred on by the conditions imposed by the pandemic, the steady erosion of working class living and working standards in the United States have transformed over the last two years into an outright assault by the bourgeoisie. Whether they were tossed to the jaws of America’s dysfunctional unemployment insurance system, or forced to continue their work, risking the health of themselves and their families, as it was deemed necessary or “essential” to be carried on, workers have faced a constant onslaught since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. All of this while the capitalists attempt to force workers to march to the arrhythmic beating of their drums: some factions rallying behind conspiracy theories touted by the populist right as it devolves into fringe militias and online pseudo-communities based around the deluded lies which spread so quickly throughout social media, others taking advantage of the need for safety and caution in order to bolster the already overinflated security state. The only perspective which the bourgeoisie can put forward in this time of crisis is one tinged with a helplessness which can only be a reflection of the helplessness of the capitalist system wracked with convulsions as it writhes in the agony of its crisis of senility, the crisis of decomposition: “you, the essential workers, will keep our society afloat!” In its attempt to invigorate an already overworked and underpaid working class with a “work ethic”, i.e.mobilizing those essential sectors of the economy to produce nonstop to keep the capitalists’ heads above water, the bourgeoisie can’t hide a fundamental truth about the society it has built: the collective strength of the working class remains the power which keeps the gears turning, the water which spins the wheel, the fuel which feeds the fire. However, much to the surprise of the bourgeoisie, the working class has taken this to heart and is now showing precisely what it means to be at the center of the economy.

Carpenters confront both bosses and unions

“Striketober”, so named for the massive explosions of strikes which occurred in October, has given way to an equally combative November as workers across the country are taking action and refusing to work under degrading conditions for inhuman pay. Even before October, the latter half of this year has seen the development of strikes across the country – most notably in the plants of Frito Lay and Nabisco, while in September a strike by carpenters in Washington set the stage for the ongoing struggles which we are following closely as they continue to spring up across every sector of the economy. The Washington carpenters faced an assault on two fronts, as many workers often do – they faced an attack by both the bosses and the unions.  While the United Brotherhood of Carpenters (UBC) presented contracts to the workers with concession after concession, filling every page with the desires of the bosses’ General Contractors Association (GCA). But there was a widespread discontent within the workforce and when the carpenters were presented with a tentative agreement in which the demands of union members were not met, an overwhelming majority of UBC workers voted down the agreement and went on strike until an agreement which would be approved could be put forward. Much to the dismay of both the employers and the union leadership, the workers held the line and voted down five tentative agreements before the international leadership of the UBC involved themselves: claiming fraud and interference, the national leadership of the union took complete control of the local branch[1] which was the source of so much trouble, and the strike finally came to an end when the final agreement presented to the workers was narrowly approved.

This doesn’t mean that the workers had escaped the union prison. Much of their militancy was channelled through a rank and file trade unionist formation, the Peter J. McGuire Group, named after the UBC’s socialist founder[2]. The group was entirely committed to working inside the union framework: according to its chairman, the Peter J. McGuire group has “promoted the right kind of leadership for the Carpenters Union”[3]. It is also worth noting that the group banned from its Facebook page writers from the World Socialist Website - a leftist group which, somewhat unusually, specialises in radical sounding criticisms of the unions[4].  

In many ways, the stage was set for the experience of “Striketober” and its continuation into the present moment. Though the carpenters in Washington are back to work, the lessons of their struggle present an important perspective for the current struggles which are going on at this moment. The carpenters of the UBC faced opposition not only from the representatives of the capitalists, but from their own supposed “representatives” in the union as well! While the communist left has known of the danger presented by unions for quite some time, the lessons which formed and continue to confirm the analysis that unions are state organs which serve to restrain the workers must be generalized and emphasized in order to understand the difficulties which the “Striketober” struggles face today. This is one of the most important aspects in the ongoing wave of struggle. As an example of this, as well as to examine the second aspect which echoes in many of the present struggles, we must look to the struggles of the John Deere agricultural equipment workers in the Midwest.

John Deere: Workers oppose the divisive “Two-Tier” system

The workers of John Deere are “represented” by the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, which some may recognize from the beginning of the pandemic when it maneuvered with the bosses of car plants in Michigan to keep workers in the factories with minimal protection at best. Now, the UAW and John Deere are working together to expand the tiered system of wages and benefits which was established in 1997. It was in that year that workers of John Deere were split based on their year of hire; workers who were hired after 1997 would be part of a second tier of workers, which entailed a reduced wage compared to those hired earlier and the elimination of many benefits available to the pre-1997 workforce, such as post-retirement healthcare. This year the UAW presented its membership with a contract which would create a third tier of workers, with wages dropping even lower amongst them and with the further elimination of benefits, including their pensions. This was quickly shot down by the union membership, and the John Deere workers of roughly 11 factories and 3 distribution centers, from Iowa to Georgia, Illinois to Colorado, have been on strike ever since; refusing to degrade their future colleagues they have voted no on several tentative agreements brought to them by Deere and the UAW during the course of their strike. Here again, we see the workers of John Deere struggling against a joint offensive of their bosses and the workers’ own union! The workers are forced to stand tall on their own – but just because they are “on their own” does not indicate an isolation or weakening of the struggle. It is, rather, a positive development that the workers are prepared to reject the advice of the union and insist on maintaining their own demands. This is a trend in many of the battles being waged by the working class, in which the unions are trailing behind an increasingly combative class which is awakening labor militancy across the country (and the world for that matter). In fact, autoworkers in Detroit, Michigan, who are also members of the UAW, expressed solidarity with the striking John Deere workers[5] [160]. It is clear to see that John Deere workers are not alone in the struggle against the maneuvers of the union, nor are they alone in fighting the system of tiered labor imposed on them by the bosses and unions.

Kellogg’s: signs of solidarity between the generations

The struggle against the two-tier system of wages and benefits is also prevalent in the strike of the workers of Kellogg’s, as their union, the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM) is allowing the further expansion of a two-tier system which was approved in the last contract with the cereal makers – it should be noted that it is the BCTGM union which “represents” the Nabisco and Frito Lay workers who were on strike earlier this year, citing absurdly long work weeks (sometimes up to 70 hours) with no overtime pay. The lower tier of wages which was negotiated in the last contract was to be capped at 30% of the workforce – a weak check against this divisive policy, but a check nonetheless. Kellogg’s is seeking to raise this cap, and to allow more workers to be hired into this lower tier. The workers have seen this as a clear attack not just on future colleagues, but their present coworkers as well – allowing Kellogg’s to lift this cap could very well open up the path to further denigration of the current workforce and a fall in the standard of living for these workers. On top of this is another issue: workers are only ever growing older. As the workers of the higher tier retire or seek employment elsewhere, slowly but surely it will be the lower tier which dominates and eventually makes up the whole of the workforce. There can be no doubt about it: this is a system of not only dividing workers but one of keeping them in an ever-increasing state of precariousness. This is evident not only in the struggles of Striketober, in which the workers are actively identifying this as an attack on their existence and putting up a serious resistance to it, but in the labor regulations which have shaped the division of labor in the United States in the phase of decadent capital for decades – the system of tiered labor created by automation and the New Deal.

Workers face divisions old and new

The policies implemented throughout the 1930’s which made up the New Deal provided secure union jobs with pensions and benefits in manufacturing and transportation, the sectors of the economy where the intensification of productivity was entirely possible on an enormous scale – thus setting the scene for the massive improvement in the living standards of manufacturing workers compared to their pre-Great Depression standards which would result from the period of post-war reconstruction. In spite of these policies setting up workers in these industries for success over the next few decades, there was an enormous section of the American workforce which was missing from these improvements: workers in the service sector. While the service sector was hardly negligible in the 1930’s, it would experience a massive growth in the decades to come due to the widespread implementation of computer-assisted labor-saving technologies throughout heavy industry – automation was set to shock the labor market and stimulate the growth of the service sector in a way that would set the stage for the current state of labor and the economy in our present day. As author Jason Smith puts it in his Smart Machines and Service Work, due to the rapid implementation of automation, “factories that had been roiled by worker unrest were expanding production at unprecedented rates, and with far fewer workers.”[6] [161] As such, manufacturing shed jobs and workers found themselves tossed into unemployment with no option other than to sell their labor for cheap in the service sector. Because of the dominant presence of the unions, it was often workers who were unaffiliated with any union who could be most easily laid off – and in the landscape of America’s labor economy, this often meant black workers. Around this time, as well, women began entering the labor market in a more significant manner than previously, spurred on by the second wave of feminism’s slogans of “jobs for women”. The jobs they often found were in the swelling service sector, finding work in “clerical and business services, in healthcare, education, and retail”[7] [162].

We should keep in mind that the service sector’s lack of legal protections and regulations meant that, overall, workers in service occupations were paid far less and received far fewer benefits on average than their counterparts in manufacturing. Hence the creation of a two-tier system in the general labor economy as a whole, not merely in the union contracts which workers are struggling against today. The way in which this division of the class took place conveniently split workers along the lines of race and gender; the ideological hangover of chattel slavery, the racist image of the “subservient” black worker was upheld by their entry into service sector jobs while the patriarchal image of the “submissive” woman was also confirmed by their employment. As such, capital had divided the working class in such a way that previous prejudices could be affirmed by reality so long as no worker should dare to look beyond the surface. The predominantly white and male manufacturing workers could easily be separated from their black and female counterparts, while movements for racial and gender equality would separate workers from the class struggle and lead them into dead-end identity struggles which cannot find an emancipatory answer to the issues of race and gender in capitalist society. Meanwhile the workers of the manufacturing sector, which has been shrinking for decades now, find themselves downwardly mobile, and this too expresses itself through another version of the impasse of identity struggles; rather than finding solidarity with those in the service industries as it increasingly becomes the only avenue for employment in many places across the country, they shrink back into their white identity and feel they must defend their social standing from the minorities, the migrants, the feminists, and the “elite” (which, in most cases, only refers to wealthy Democrats). This fuels the flame of populism which has swept the United States since the 2016 election cycle and continues to shape the stances of the Republican party for the time being.

This split, however, is not an unbridgeable gap – in fact, it is in the struggles of today that an answer to these divisions can be found. Not only are workers struggling in manufacturing, but also in the service sector. Similar to the strikes described above, healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente facilities along the west coast were set to strike against a two-tier deal; unions have stepped in at the last minute with a deal, which still lacked many of the workers’ demands, in order to avert the strike. Not only have nurses been quelled[8] [163], but so too have Kaiser pharmacists[9] [164] who were set to strike starting November 15th. Another strike which was crushed by union representation was film and television production crew members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) who were set to strike until a tentative agreement was put forward and ratified in spite of a majority rejecting the deal[10] [165]. This goes to show that outside of the traditional industrial landscape, there is an increasing indignation and demand for better living and working standards coming from the workers themselves, while unions run to catch up and weigh these workers down. Workers who have hitherto not been unionized have also been forced to take action – following the example of school bus drivers in Cumberland County, North Carolina who have been staging “sick outs” in protest of their unlivable wages[11] [166], cafeteria workers in nearby Wake County have taken to using the same tactic[12] [167] for much of the same reason.

Unions aim to preempt workers’ militancy

All of this goes to show that the combativity of workers across the country is reverberating: strikes stimulate workers who are facing similar conditions and breed more strikes. However, the working class still faces many obstacles which come with the pandemic, the period of capitalist decadence more generally, and its phase of decomposition. One of these, as mentioned briefly above, is the issue of the trade unions which serve the capitalist state in the period of decadence. While they struggle to contain many of the ongoing struggles, they have intervened to prevent strike action in many other cases. It should be noted that not only do unions pose a direct threat, but an indirect threat as well; the UAW is currently set to vote on measures which would “democratize” the union, making their elections direct as opposed to the current delegate system. While the implementation of this may seem to be a victory for the rank and file, it also puts forward an illusion which may serve to derail future struggles: the identification of the rank and file with the union itself, the illusion that the union belongs to the workers. The ICC has written previously on the character of the unions in decadent capitalism[13] [168], so I will not go into this further.

“Identity Politics”: a crucial divide in the working class

Yet another threat faces the working class: the interclassist struggles and partial identity struggles which have reared their ugly heads over the past few years. Particularly in the United States, the previous year’s summer of Black Lives Matter action which had its basis in the very real indignation and specific issues of black people in America found its footing on a bourgeois terrain and raised a slogan which comes nowhere close to the heart of the issue, the slogan “defund the police”. Democrats have done their best to gesture vaguely toward creating a policy which would do just this, only to immediately reverse course; even reduced to such slogans and promotion of Democratic policy, the simple, liberal demand which echoed across the BLM marches finds its echo dampened. Should the current class struggles develop further, as struggling workers find themselves uniting across lines of plant, company, and industry, the very real material inequality of black workers will be an issue which the working class will have to answer on its own terrain, with no concessions to any bourgeois movement. One last obstacle is the isolated actions which have been taking place in the form of mass resignation from employment. The labor market remains tight as more and more workers are quitting their jobs, often sharing their final texts to their supervisors on social media in a show of solidarity with all those who may be considering doing the same. While this may put the capitalists in a tight spot, the isolating nature of individual resignation avoids the question of self-organization altogether, and the shared experiences of workers cannot be expressed so clearly through social media, no matter how far texts shared in solidarity may reach.

In spite of these obstacles, however, the working class today still seems to be moving tentatively forward. The minor defeats it has experienced do not seem to be putting the brakes on the momentum of the working class, and more and more workers are finding themselves with no option but to strike for a better life by the day. We cannot but express great satisfaction at this refusal of the workers to take the degradation of their lives lying down, and we must clearly emphasize that only by uniting can these struggles be taken further and further, perhaps eventually coming to a point where it must pose very significant political questions. It is a clear demonstration in the united action across many plants, such as at John Deere, that it is only through further extension of struggle can momentum be kept up. Such extension requires the intervention of communist militants in order to provide a political perspective, especially as the struggle may develop to cross borders within and beyond the United States – the working class worldwide, despite the enormous difficulties it faces, has shown that it is not defeated, that it still contains a potential to fight back and to take its struggles forward. While we may observe this phenomenon with great enthusiasm, it is also imperative that we participate in these struggles so that we may assist the working class in realizing its strength and its historic task: the abolition of class society.

Noah L, 11/16/2021, updated January 20, 2022

[1] Oakland Socialist, November 24, 2021 [169]

[2] In the 1870s, McGuire was also a founding member of the Social Democratic Workingmens Party of North America, a Lassallean [170] socialist organization that proposed to achieve socialism through organization of a socialist party and the organization of trade unions

[3] Oakland Socialist, November 24, 2021 [169]

[4] The “Peter J. McGuire” Facebook group bans WSWS writers - World Socialist Web Site [171] [1] The “Peter J. McGuire” Facebook group bans WSWS writers - World Socialist Web Site [171]. According to the WSWS, they were banned because an article they wrote criticising the Peter J McGuire group for trying to force the union bosses to act in a more militant manner: “The article was widely circulated among striking carpenters and no doubt triggered a debate about the call by the WSWS to form rank-and-file strike committees not to appeal to union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party, but to mobilize broader sections of the working class to strengthen the strike. Rather than allow such an important debate, the administrators of the group decided to censor criticism of their false orientation”. We have no illusions about the leftist character of the WSWS but the Peter J McGuire Group’s reaction to these slogans is further proof that the latter is entirely part of the repressive apparatus of the trade unions.

[5] [172]World Socialist Website, November 11, 2021 [173]

[6] [174]Jason E. Smith, Smart Machines and Service Work, pp. 8, 2020, Reaktion Books.

[7] [175]Ibid. pp. 30

[8] [176]World Socialist Website November 14, 2021 [177]

[9] [178]Yahoo News, November 14, 2021 [179]

[10] [180]World Socialist Website, November 16, 2021 [181]

[11] [182]CBS Local Cumberland Country News: School Bus Drivers out for living wage [183] (Unavailable in Europe/GB)

[12] [184]ABC Channel 11 Eyewitness News, November 16, 2021 [185]

[13] [186]ICC Pamphlet: Unions Against The Working Class - The Unions in Decadent Capitalism [187]

 

Today, a series of strikes in the United States, led by disgruntled workers, is shaking large parts of the country. This movement called “striketober” has mobilised thousands of workers who are denounce unbearable working conditions, physical and psychological fatigue, the outrageous increase in profits, including during the pandemic, made by employers of industrial groups like Kellog's, John Deere, PepsiCo or in the health sector and private clinics, as in New York, for example. It is difficult to count the exact number of strikes because the federal government only counts those involving more than a thousand employees. The fact that the working class can react and show combativity in a country that is now at the centre of the global decomposition process is a sign that the proletariat is not defeated.

For almost two years, a lead blanket had been falling over the working class all over the world with the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic and the repeated episodes of lockdown, emergency hospitalisations and millions of deaths. All over the world, the working class was the victim of the generalised negligence of the bourgeoisie, of the decay of overburdened health services subjected to the demands of profitability. The pressures of day-to-day life and fears for tomorrow reinforced an already strong feeling of vulnerability in the ranks of the workers, accentuating the tendency to withdraw into one’s shell. After the revival of combativity that had been expressed in several countries during 2019 and at the beginning of 2020, the social confrontations came to a sudden halt. If the movement against the pension reform in France had shown a new dynamism in social conflicts, the Covid-19 pandemic proved to be a powerful stifler.

But in the midst of the pandemic, struggles on the terrain of the working class were nevertheless able to emerge here and there, in Spain, Italy, France, through sporadic movements already expressing a relative capacity to react in the face of unbearable working conditions, particularly in the face of the increased exploitation and cynicism of the bourgeoisie in sectors such as health care, transport or trade. However, the isolation imposed by the deadly virus and the climate of terror conveyed by the bourgeoisie prevented these struggles from putting forward a real alternative to the degradation of living conditions.

Worse, these expressions of discontent with hellish and health-threatening working conditions, workers’ refusal to go to work without masks and protection, were presented by the bourgeoisie as selfish, irresponsible demands and above all as guilty of undermining the social and economic unity of the nation in its fight against the health crisis.

A fragile but real awakening of workers’ combativity

After years in which the American population has been under the thumb of an all-powerful state, of being fed by the populist lies of Donald Trump, who wanted to be the champion of full employment, and by the Democratic spiel of the “new Roosevelt”, Joe Biden, thousands of workers are gradually creating the conditions to form a collective force that they had once forgotten, slowly rediscovering confidence in their own strength. They have been openly rejecting the despicable “two-tier pay system” ([1]), thus demonstrating a solidarity between generations, with the majority of experienced and “protected” workers fighting alongside their young colleagues who work in much more precarious conditions.

Even if these strikes are very well supervised by the unions (which have, moreover, allowed the bourgeoisie to present these mobilisations as the “great revival” of the unions in the United States), we have seen some signs of questioning of the agreements signed by different unions. This protest is embryonic and the working class is still far from a direct and conscious confrontation with these watchdogs of the bourgeois state. But it is a very real sign of combativity.

Some might think that these struggles in the US are the exception that proves the rule: they are not! Other struggles have emerged in recent weeks and months:

• In Iran, this summer, strikes in the oil sector against low wages and high living costs saw workers from more than 70 sites participate in the movement. This was the first time this had happened in the 42 years since the advent of the Islamic republic. Other sectors also supported the strikers;
• In Korea, a general strike had to be organised by the unions in October for social benefits, against precariousness and unequal wages;

• In Italy, last September and October, there were numerous days of action, strikes and calls for a general strike against redundancies, and also against the discussions between the Italian General Confederation of Labour, the government and the employers for a “social pact” to get out of Covid. In short: for easier dismissals and the abolition of the minimum wage;
• In Germany, the public services union Vereinte Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft feels obliged to threaten strikes in an attempt to obtain wage increases.
• In Britain strikes are underway or have been voted by refuse workers, university staff, transport workers and others.

Inflation will worsen living conditions

If you listen to all the bourgeois economists, the current inflation that is pushing up the prices of energy and basic goods, thus draining purchasing power, in the US, France, the UK or Germany, is only a cyclical product of the “economic recovery”.

According to the economic experts, the surge in inflation is linked to “specific aspects”, such as bottlenecks in maritime or road transport, to the “overheating” in the recovery of industrial production, particularly the spectacular increase in fuel and gas prices. In this view it’s just a passing moment while the whole process of economic production regains its balance. Everything is done to reassure us and justify a “necessary” inflationary process... which is nevertheless likely to last.

The resort to “helicopter” money, the hundreds of billions of dollars, euros, yen or yuan that the states have printed and poured out without counting the cost, for months, to deal with the economic and social consequences of the pandemic and avoid widespread chaos, has only weakened the value of currencies and is pushing a chronic inflationary process. There will be a price to pay, and the working class is in the front line of these attacks.

Even if there has not yet been a direct and massive reaction against this attack, inflation can serve as a powerful factor of development and unification of struggles: the increase in the prices of basic necessities, gas, bread, electricity, etc. can only directly degrade the living conditions of all workers, whether they work in the public or private sector, whether they are active, unemployed or retired. Being hungry and cold will be major elements in triggering future social movements, including in the core countries of capitalism.

The governments of the world are proceeding with caution. Although they have not yet imposed formal austerity programmes but, on the contrary, have massively injected millions and millions of dollars, yen and euros into the economy, they know that it is absolutely necessary to revive activity and that a social time bomb is ticking away.

While the governments thought they would quickly end all Covid-related support measures and “normalise” the accounts as soon as possible, Biden (to avoid social disaster) has thus put in place a “historic plan” for intervention that will “create millions of jobs, grow the economy, invest in our nation and our people”. ([2]) You'd think you were dreaming! The same is true in Spain, where the socialist Pedro Sanchez is implementing a massive plan of 248 billion euros of all-out social spending, to the great displeasure of a part of the bourgeoisie that does not know how the bill will be paid. In France, too, behind all the hoopla and electoral rhetoric for the 2022 presidential election, the government is trying to anticipate social discontent with “energy vouchers” and an “inflation allowance” for millions of taxpayers.

Major difficulties and pitfalls to overcome

But recognising and highlighting the capacity of the proletariat to react must not lead to euphoria and the illusion that a royal road is opening up for the workers’ struggle. Because of the difficulty of the working class to recognise itself as an exploited class and to become aware of its revolutionary role, the path to significant struggles that open the way to a revolutionary period is still a very long one.

In these conditions the confrontation remains fragile, poorly organised, largely controlled by the unions, those state organs specialised in sabotaging struggles and which accentuate corporatism and division.

In Italy, for example, the initial demands and the combativity of the last struggles have been diverted by the unions and the Italian leftists towards a dangerous impasse: the rotten slogan of “the first mass industrial strike in Europe against the health pass” that the Italian government has imposed on all the workers.

Similarly, while some sectors are strongly affected by the crisis, closures, restructuring and increased work rates, other sectors are confronted with a lack of manpower and/or a one-off production boom (as in freight transport where there is a shortage of hundreds of thousands of drivers in Europe). This situation contains a danger of division within the class through sectional demands that the unions will not hesitate to exploit or to stir up.

Let's add to that the calls of the “radical” left of capital to mobilise ourselves on bourgeois terrain: against the far right and the “fascists” responsible for violence in demonstrations or in favour of the “citizens’ marches” for the climate... This is one more expression of the vulnerability of proletarians to the discourses of the far left, which is capable of using any means to deviate the struggle onto a non-proletarian terrain, notably that of interclassism

Similarly, if inflation can act as a factor of unification of struggles, it also affects the petty-bourgeoisie, with the increase in the price of petrol and taxes, elements which had moreover given rise to the emergence of the interclassist movement of the “Yellow Vests” in France. The current context remains, in fact, conducive to the occurrence of “popular” revolts in which proletarian demands remain buried in the sterile and reactionary preoccupations of the small bosses, themselves hit hard by the crisis. This is, for example, the case in China where the collapse of the real estate giant Evergrande symbolises in a very spectacular way the reality of an over-indebted, fragile China, but which leads to the protest of small owners who have been robbed of their savings or properties.

Interclassist struggles are a real trap and do not allow the working class to assert its own demands, its own combativity, its own autonomy, its own historical perspective. The rotting of capitalist society, increased by the pandemic, weighs and will continue to weigh on the working class, which is still facing great difficulties.

Only the united struggle of all proletarians can offer a perspective

Absenteeism at work, chains of resignations, the refusal to return to work for very low wages, have not stopped growing in recent months. But these are individual reactions that are more a reflection of an (illusory) attempt to escape from capitalist exploitation than to face it through a collective struggle with class comrades. The bourgeoisie does not hesitate to exploit this weakness in order to denigrate and make these “resigners”, these “demanding” workers feel guilty by making them directly “responsible” for the lack of staff in hospitals or restaurants, for example! In other words, to sow more division in the workers' ranks.

Despite all these difficulties, these pitfalls, this last period has opened a breach and clearly confirms that the working class is capable of asserting itself on its own terrain.

The development of class consciousness depends on this renewal of combativity, and this is still a long road full of pitfalls. Revolutionaries must welcome and support these struggles, but their primary responsibility is to fight as best they can for their extension, for their politicisation, which is necessary to keep the revolutionary perspective alive. This implies being able to recognise their limits and weaknesses by firmly denouncing the traps set for them by the bourgeoisie and the illusions that threaten them, wherever they come from.

Stopio, 3 November 2021

"Just one hundred years ago, on 4 September 1921, the Parti Communiste Belge was founded" announced CARCOB/Communist Archives in an e-mail in September. Why revisit this anniversary, this milestone in the history of the workers' movement in Belgium? Marxism is not a dead, unchanging theory. It is a living method, a way of confronting reality from the point of view of the working class. In this framework, a continuous struggle must be waged to defend marxist theory against the slide towards bourgeois positions, to deepen it, to analyse correctly the new experiences of the class struggle. It is in the light of this fact that we must learn from the struggle for the foundation of the PCB and its subsequent degeneration, that we must defend the marxist approach against bourgeois lies, such as the idea that the party was founded on September 4, 1921, when in reality it was constituted as early as November 1920.

We republish here an article from the ICC’s publication in Belgium, Internationalisme, (no. 188, 1993) which traces the general framework of the history of the PCB. We will return in later articles in more detail to the different phases of its existence: the struggle for the foundation of the PCB after the betrayal of social democracy, the struggle against the growing opportunism within it and its definitive passage into the bourgeois camp at the beginning of the Second World War.

By voting for the war credits, the opportunist wing of the social democratic parties passed into the bourgeois camp in 1914. It chose the national defence of the bourgeois state and betrayed proletarian internationalism. It signed the death warrant of the Second International. But the currents of the marxist left continued for some years to fight against the degeneration of these parties. They tried to uphold marxist positions and to regroup as many healthy elements as possible, first within and then next to the old party, to form new parties, the Communist parties, and a new International, the Third.

It was a hard blow to see that social democracy, which in some countries like Germany had become a powerful proletarian organisation, was slipping from the hands of the workers as a weapon of struggle. It was also difficult to make a complete and conclusive analysis of all that had changed since the beginning of the 20th century in the conditions of the class struggle. In her Accumulation of Capital, Rosa Luxemburg had set out the general framework of analysis: capitalism had entered its phase of decadence. But it was the Bolsheviks and the abstentionist (anti-parliamentarian) fraction of the Italian PSI who went furthest in terms of political consequences. The Bolsheviks were the clearest on the most burning issue of the moment, the world war. While everyone, from pacifists to "minority socialists", called for peace, they instead called for "the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war". Out of the war was to come the revolution. And this was not only confirmed in Russia in 1917, but in a revolutionary wave that swept across the world until 1927 (China).

The consequences of the entry into the period of "wars and revolutions" were synthesised in the positions on which the Communist International was founded in 1919: reforms are no longer possible, proletarian revolution is the order of the day everywhere. Parliamentarianism, trade unionism, fronts with bourgeois fractions, all this was valid in the previous period, that of the ascendancy of capitalism, but was now outdated. A mass party, such as social democracy, was no longer adapted to the new period in which the conviction and political clarity of a small vanguard is decisive.

Foundation of the PCB: defence of marxism against the opportunism of social democracy

The Parti Ouvrier Belge (POB), a section of the Second International, had always been very conciliatory towards the bourgeoisie, despite the fact that it was precisely in Belgium that, at the beginning of the 20th century, the first radical mass strikes had taken place, heralding the new type of struggles that would later be developed in Russia in 1905 and 1917. Nevertheless, during the First World War, from 1916 onwards, groups to the left of the POB also arose in Belgium. In the Young Socialist Guards in Ghent, Antwerp, Brussels, Liège, Charleroi, resistance to the war was the first motive, but very quickly the Russian revolution became for them the beacon towards which they oriented themselves. Gradually, they arrived at marxist positions and tried to regroup. In 1920, the PCB was founded. It defended the positions of the second congress of the CI, except at the level of parliamentarism, where the CI, despite the resistance of the West European parties, had already taken a step backwards. The PCB remained fervently anti-parliamentary.

There was also a minority of hesitating elements within the POB, the "minority socialists" grouped in the "Friends of the Exploited". During the war, they had only insisted on holding a "peace conference" with the German social democrats in Stockholm (i.e. trying to revive the corpse of the Second International). They were not very enthusiastic about the Russian revolution. Their criticism of the social democratic leaders was radical in tone, but in practice they proposed nothing in their place. They actually wanted to return to the pre-war programme of the POB, the Quaregnon programme (15 July 1894). They were typical centrists: radical criticism of the leaders coupled with plugging the gaps in social democracy, always under the pretext of "not losing contact with the masses". In 1921, they finally agreed to break with the POB. But because they considered the existing PCB to be sectarian, not a party for mass action but a grouping of 4 or 5 propaganda groups, more anarchist than communist, they founded a second Communist Party.

As the revolution was still awaited in countries outside Russia and, after the defeats in Germany, Italy and Hungary, the CI increasingly questioned the 'radical' positions of its first congress. It advocated fusion with the left of social democracy. In Belgium, too, the merger of the two parties took place in 1921, in which the radical, marxist positions of the first PCB were swept under the carpet. As the CI deviated towards opportunist positions and the Russian revolution became mired in its own isolation, the old "Friends of the Exploited" became more and more enthusiastic, while the marxists became more and more critical about the evolution of the Russian situation.

The fractions of the communist left: making a marxist assessment of the degeneration of the Russian revolution

Devastating choices had to be made because the world revolution was overdue: peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk, war communism, the "New Economic Policy". In the context of the isolation of the revolution, the Bolshevik party more and more substituted itself for the class and merged with the state, a process that led to the crushing of the Kronstadt uprising in 1921. The CI also began to play an increasingly dubious role in workers' uprisings in other countries (putschist actions of the KPD in Germany resulting in bloodshed, alliances with the bourgeoisie of the "oppressed peoples"). These developments gave rise to a continuous discussion, both among the RCP itself and in the other parties of the Comintern. Opposition groups were formed against the positions and decisions which the RCP, as a "state party", was forced to take and which would lead to its Stalinisation. In 1921, opposition groups in Russia were banned. The Dutch and German left-wing communists (KAPD) were excluded from the CI. They laid the blame for all the mistakes made in Russia at the feet of the Bolshevik party. The most extreme expressions of the German left (precursors of the "councilist" current) would reject the party as a useless evil (which was certainly not the position of the KAPD at the first congress of the CI). They went so far in their criticism that they rejected the Russian revolution as non-proletarian. In 1922, Gorter and co. founded the stillborn Communist Workers' International (KAI).

Just as in the other communist parties, Russia was at the centre of discussions in the PCB. The marxist current in the PCB respected party discipline and even disapproved of the publication of "unofficial" texts of the Russian Opposition (around Trotsky, and his "Lessons of October"). The PCB limited itself to asking for "more information" from Moscow.

It was only at the beginning of 1928, when Trotsky and his friends had already been excluded from the Russian party and the Comintern had definitively abandoned proletarian internationalism with the theory of "socialism in one country", that the debate on Russia was opened in the Belgian party. In the name of the marxist minority, War van Overstraeten demonstrated the rightward shift of the Russian party: in the Chinese revolution (where the communists and revolutionary workers of the Shanghai Commune in 1927 had been handed over by the CI to the bloody repression of the nationalist Kuomintang), in the struggle against the kulaks or rich peasants in Russia, but above all in the idea of "socialism in one country". He called for the reintegration of oppositionists into the Russian party, but continued to oppose fractional activity. His report was rejected and, one after the other, the leaders of the minority were expelled from the party.

The opposition regrouped outside the PCB and wondered what to do: form a second party (which implied that the old party was no longer working class and that Russia was no longer under proletarian rule), work for the recovery of the PCB by asking to be reinstated, or form a fraction of the party? The Belgian opposition was much less clear on this question than the Italian Fraction which published Bilan from 1933. Unlike the groups which founded a new party or even a new International in a hurry, the Italian left always proceeded methodically. While the International was not dead, and there was still a breath of life in it, it continued to work towards it. Its conception of organisation was a unitary one; for it, a split was an evil that must be avoided, so as not to disperse the forces that tend towards a centralised international organisation. Only when the death of the International was assured did it envisage constituting itself as an autonomous body. The constitution of the party is achieved first by founding the fraction of the old party which maintains its old revolutionary programme, and only in revolutionary upheavals does it proclaim itself a party. It is the task of the fraction to draw up a balance sheet of the revolutionary experiences of the post-war period without prejudice in order to prepare the class for new confrontations.

In 1935, Bilan came to the conclusion "That in 1933, with the death of the Third International, the phase in which the possibility of the regeneration of the CI was posed thanks to the victory of the proletarian revolution in a sector of capitalism (...) was definitively closed.  That the centrist parties, still organically linked to the corpse of the Third International, are already operating in the concert of the counter-revolution" and that “the Left Fraction affirms closed the phase envisaged in 1928, as regards a possible regeneration of the parties and the CI (...). "(Report no. 18, April-May 1935)

Trotsky's International Left Opposition lost interest in the objective which the Italian Fraction gave itself, to make a thorough assessment of the failure of the revolutionary wave. Deep divergences soon appeared in the opposition: on the question of the party (regeneration or new party), on the characterisation of the regime in Russia (proletarian or state capitalist), on the attitude towards the rise of fascism in Germany. Both the Belgian and the Italian left were confronted with Trotsky's refusal to discuss with them. The Charleroi federation (with Lesoil) left the Belgian opposition before the conclusion of the debate on the imperialist nature (or otherwise) of the Russian policy towards China (the attack by the Red Army which wanted to seize the Manchurian railway in 1929), and it joined Trotsky's International Left Opposition. Those who remained (with Hennaut) formed in 1932 the Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes which formed a working community with the Bilan group in Belgium.

The main divergence between the two organisations was on the question of fascism. For Bilan, there was no fundamental opposition between bourgeois democracy and fascism. On the contrary: the worst product of fascism is precisely anti-fascism, an analysis confirmed in 1936 by the period of the Popular Front in France: "Under the sign of the Popular Front, 'democracy' has achieved the same result as 'fascism': the crushing of the proletariat (...) to prepare a second world war” (Bilan no. 29, March-April 36).

The dramatic events of the war in Spain led to a split in the two organisations. The majority of Bilan considered that Spain was the prelude to a second world war and called for revolutionary defeatism. The majority of the LCI called on the workers to fight against Franco and then to sweep away the remains of the Republican government and take power themselves. Patiently, Bilan criticised the LCI for claiming to be able to "go beyond the anti-fascist phase to the stage of socialism", while Bilan wrote: "for us it is a question of negating the programme of anti-fascism, because without this negation the struggle for socialism becomes impossible" (Bilan no. 39, Jan-Feb 1939). The minority of the LCI (with Mitchell) founded in April 1937 the Belgian Fraction of the International Communist Left, on the same positions as the Italian Fraction.

The PCB becomes a party of national capital

From 1933 onwards, anti-fascism was the central mystification of the PCB, with which it made a significant contribution to the mobilisation of the workers for the Second World War and to the dampening down of workers' struggles "so as not to play the fascist card". Unlike the POB, the PCB managed to keep the insurrectional struggles of 1935 and 1936 under control on behalf of the bourgeoisie. For a short time, during the German-Russian non-aggression pact, the PCB advocated Belgian neutrality, but otherwise it was, before and during the war (in the resistance), a fierce defender of national capital. After the war, it was repaid with a few ministerial posts.

Since then, in the few places where it could still exert an influence on the workers (port of Antwerp, Walloon mines and steel industry), it continued, in the trade unions and on the left of the PSB (Belgian Socialist Party), to be the faithful defender of the interests of the Belgian bourgeoisie by maintaining control over strike actions. In countries like France or Italy, where social democracy is weaker, the Communist Party had the opportunity to show clearly that it is not only the "fifth column" of Moscow imperialism, but in the first place a reliable faction of the national bourgeoisie (as the "historical compromise" in Italy or the "Common Front" in France have shown).

Since 1933 at the latest, the PCB has been the party of the Stalinist counter-revolution. Although it had a majority in 1928 in Belgium, the opposition could not conquer the party. The torch of the "October 17 party" passed into the hands of the International Communist Left. And its successors will create the party of the revolution again tomorrow.

Internationalisme

China's overwhelming responsibility for the outbreak of Covid-19, and especially its rapid spread, which has led to the current global pandemic, has been widely publicised in the media. However, the limited number of deaths and the absence of large waves of contagion in the country - at least according to official data - as well as the fact that China is the only major power not to have announced an economic recession in 2020 (+2% of GDP) have led many observers to present China as the big winner of the Covid-19 crisis on the chessboard of the balance of power between the major imperialist powers.

It is true that since the beginning of the 1980s, by opening its economy to the US bloc, China has largely benefited from the globalisation of the economy and the implosion of the Soviet bloc. It has had a meteoric rise in economic and imperialist terms over the past thirty years, and this has made it the most important challenger to the United States. Today, however, dealing with the pandemic, managing the economy and expanding its zone of influence are creating major difficulties for the Chinese bourgeoisie. The Covid-19 crisis is sharply accentuating factional confrontations within its political apparatus and exacerbating tensions between imperialist sharks in the Far East.

Slow response to the Covid crisis

While banking from the start on an eventual herd immunity before opening the country, China is in the meantime applying a policy of drastic lock-downs in entire cities and regions whenever infections are identified, which severely hampers economic and commercial activities: for example, the closure of the port of Yantian, the third largest container port in the world in May 2021, led to the blocking of hundreds of thousands of containers and hundreds of ships for months, totally disrupting world maritime traffic. In fact, the slightest outbreak of infection, even a few cases, is seen as a major danger: recently, drastic lockdowns were ordered in 27 cities and 18 provinces (August ’21), in Xiamen, a city of 5 million (September ’21), and since September, infections have been reported in half the provinces and in the city of Shanghai.

In addition, the mass vaccination campaign to achieve herd immunity has prompted some Chinese provinces and cities to impose financial penalties on those who are wary and avoid vaccination. However, in the face of numerous protests on Chinese social networks, the central government blocked such measures, which tended to “jeopardise national cohesion”. But the most serious setback is undoubtedly the converging data on the limited effectiveness of Chinese vaccines, observed in various countries that use them, such as Chile: “All in all, the Chilean vaccination campaign – quite effective with 62% of the population currently vaccinated - does not seem to have any noticeable impact on the proportion of deaths” (H. Testard, "Covid-19: la vaccination décolle en Asie mais les doutes augmentent sur les vaccins chinois", Asialyst, 21.07.21). The Chinese health authorities even recommended importing doses from Pfizer or Moderna to compensate for the ineffectiveness of their own vaccines.

The extremely heavy-handed and inefficient management of the pandemic by Chinese state capitalism was illustrated last November by the Ministry of Commerce's call for the Chinese population to stockpile emergency rations at home. And the situation is likely to deteriorate further as the omicron variant spreads.

Dark clouds gathering on the Chinese economy

The strong growth that China has experienced for the past four decades - even though it was already slowing down in the last decade - seems to be coming to an end. Experts expect China's GDP to grow by less than 5% in 2021, compared with an average of 7% over the last decade and more than 10% in the previous decade. Various factors highlight the current difficulties of the Chinese economy.

First, there is the danger of the Chinese real estate bubble bursting: Evergrande, China's number two real estate company, is now crushed by some 300 billion euros of debt, which represents 2% of the country's GDP. Other developers, such as Fantasia Holdings and Sinic Holdings, have almost defaulted on their payments, and the property sector, which accounts for 25% of the Chinese economy, has generated a colossal public and private debt of trillions of dollars. The Evergrande crash is only the first sequence in a global collapse of this sector. Today there are so many empty homes that 90 million people could be housed. Of course, the immediate collapse of the sector will be avoided insofar as the Chinese authorities have no choice but to limit the damage at the risk of a very severe impact on the financial sector:

“(...) ‘there will not be a snowball effect like in 2008 [in the US], because the Chinese government can stop the machine’, says Andy Xie, an independent economist and former Morgan Stanley employee in China, quoted by Le Monde. ‘I think that with Anbang [insurance group, editor's note] and HNA [Hainan Airlines], we have good examples of what can happen: there will be a committee bringing together around a table the company, the creditors and the authorities, which will decide which assets to sell, which to restructure and, in the end, how much money is left and who can lose funds’.” (P.-A. Donnet, “Chute d’Evergrande en Chine: la fin de l’argent facile”, Asialyst, 25.09.21).

Many other sectors are also in the red: at the end of 2020, the overall debt of Chinese companies represented 160% of the country's GDP, compared with around 80% for American companies, and "toxic" investments by local governments alone now represents, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs, 53,000 billion yuan, a sum that represents 52% of Chinese GDP. The bursting of the real estate bubble risks not only contaminating other sectors of the economy but also generating social instability (nearly 3 million direct and indirect jobs linked to Evergrande), the great fear of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Secondly, energy cuts have multiplied since the summer of 2021: they are the consequence of a lack of coal supply, caused among other things by the record floods in Shaanxi province (which alone produces 30% of the country's fuel), and also by the tightening of anti-pollution regulations decided by Xi. The steel, aluminium and cement sectors are already suffering in several regions from the limited supply of electricity. The shortage has reduced aluminium production capacity by around 7% and cement by 29% (Morgan Stanley figures) and paper and glass could be the next sectors to be affected. These cuts are now holding back economic growth across the country. But the situation is even more serious than it first appears. “The power shortage is now spilling over into the residential market in parts of the Northeast. Liaoning province has extended power cuts from the industrial sector to residential networks.” (P.-A. Donnet, «Chine: comment la grave pénurie d’électricité menace l’économie», Asialyst, 30.09.21).

Finally, energy shortages but also lock-downs resulting from Covid infections are affecting production in industries in various parts of China, which in turn is increasing the extent of disruptions in already stretched supply chains at national and global level, especially as manufacturing chains in many sectors are facing acute shortages of semiconductors.

Recent data confirm that economic growth is slowing, with domestic consumption falling, household incomes and wages falling.

The “New Silk Road" project is running out of steam

The development of the “New Silk Road” project is encountering increasing difficulties because of the financial weight of the Covid crisis in China, but also because of the economic difficulties of the “partners”, who are being asphyxiated by the pressure of debt, or because of their increasingly obvious reluctance to accept Chinese “interference”.

Due in particular to the Covid crisis, the indebtedness of various "partner" countries has reached staggering levels and they find themselves unable to pay the interest on Chinese loans. Countries such as Sri Lanka, Bangladesh (external debt growth of +125% over the last decade), Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan ($20 billion in bilateral loans from China), Montenegro, and various African countries have asked China to restructure, delay or simply cancel repayments due this year.

At the same time, there is growing distrust in various countries towards China's actions (non-ratification of the China-EU trade treaty, distancing from Cambodia, the Philippines or Indonesia), to which must be added anti-Chinese pressure exerted by the United States (in Latin America towards countries like Panama, Ecuador and Chile). Finally, the chaos produced by decomposition has the consequence of destabilising certain key countries of the “New Silk Road”; this is the case, for example, with Ethiopia, which is sinking into a terrible civil war between the Ethiopian central government and the Tigray region. This was a country, presented as a pole of stability and the “new workshop of the world”, that constituted an important point of support for the “Belt and Road Project” in North-East Africa, with a Chinese military base in Djibouti.

In short, it is not surprising that in 2020 there was a collapse in the financial value of the investments injected into the “New Silk Road” project (-64%), while China has lent more than 461 billion dollars since 2013.

Accentuation of antagonisms within the Chinese bourgeoisie.

All of these difficulties are fuelling tensions within the Chinese bourgeoisie, even if, because of the Stalinist state capitalist political structure, they do not manifest themselves in the same way as in the USA or France for example.

Under Deng Xiao Ping Chinese Stalinist-style state capitalism, under the guise of a policy of “creating wealth to share the wealth”, established “free” zones (around Hong Kong, Macao, etc.) to develop a “free market” type of capitalism, allowing the entry of international capital and also favouring a private capitalist sector. With the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the “globalisation” of the economy in the 1990s, the latter developed exponentially, even though the public sector under direct state control still represents 30% of the economy. How did the rigid and repressive structure of the Stalinist state and the single party handle this “opening” to private capitalism?

As early as the 1990s, the party massively integrated entrepreneurs and private business leaders. “In the early 2000s, the then president Jiang Zemin lifted the ban on recruiting private sector entrepreneurs, who had previously been seen as class enemies (...). The businessmen and women thus selected become members of the political elite, which ensures that their companies are, at least partially, protected from predatory managers” (“Que reste-t-il du communisme en Chine?”, Le Monde Diplomatique 68, July, 2021). Today, professionals and managers with higher education constitute 50% of the CCP's membership.

The oppositions between the different fractions will therefore be expressed not only within the state structures but within the CCP itself. For several years (see already the Report on imperialist tensions to the 20th Congress [188], International Review 152, 2013), tensions have been growing between different factions within the Chinese bourgeoisie (1), in particular between those more linked to the private capitalist sectors, dependent on international trade and investment, and those linked to state structures and financial control at the regional or national level; those advocating an opening to world trade and those advancing a more dogmatic or nationalist policy. President Xi's “anti-corruption campaign” involved spectacular seizures of huge fortunes amassed by members of various cliques, while the “left turn” involved less economic pragmatism and more dogmatism and nationalism. The result has been to intensify political tensions and instability in recent years: witness “the continuing tensions between Premier Li Keqiang and President Xi Jinping over economic recovery, as well as China's 'new position' on the international stage” (A. Payette, "Chine : à Beidaihe, ‘l'université d'été’ du Parti, les tensions internes à fleur de peau", Asialyst, 06.09.20).

Other examples of these tensions: the explicit criticism of Xi that appears regularly (most recently the “viral alert” essay published by a renowned professor of constitutional law at Qinghua University in Beijing, predicting Xi's demise), the tensions between Xi and the generals leading the People's Army, who are targeted in particular by the anti-corruption campaign, and the interventions of the state apparatus against entrepreneurs who are too “flamboyant” and critical of state control (Jack Ma and Ant Financial, Alibaba). Some bankruptcies (HNA, Evergrande) could also be linked to the struggles between cliques within the party, for example in the framework of the cynical campaign to "protect citizens from the excesses of the “capitalist class” (sic).

In short, the Chinese bourgeoisie, like other bourgeoisies, is facing increasing economic difficulties linked to the historical crisis of the capitalist mode of production, the chaos resulting from the decomposition of the system. This is leading to the exacerbation of factional tensions within the CCP, which it is trying, by all the means available to it, to contain within its outdated state capitalist structures.

Increased tensions with other imperialisms in the Far East

Meanwhile, the situation is just as delicate for the Chinese bourgeoisie on the international level, firstly because of the aggressive policy of the USA, but also because of the growing tensions with other major Asian powers, such as India and Japan, intensified by the chaos and the “every man for himself” of this period of decomposition.

The “America First” policy, implemented by Trump from 2017 onwards, has essentially led on the imperialist level to a growing polarisation and aggressiveness towards China, increasingly identified by the US bourgeoisie as the main danger. The US has made the strategic choice to concentrate its forces on the military and technological confrontation with China, in order to maintain and even accentuate its supremacy, to defend its position as the dominant gang against the rivals (China and also Russia) that most directly threaten its hegemony. The Biden administration's policy is fully in line with this orientation; it has not only maintained the aggressive economic measures against China implemented by Trump, but has further increased the pressure through an aggressive policy:

- at the political level: defence of “human rights” in relation to the repression of Uighurs or “pro-democracy” demonstrations in Hong Kong; exclusion of China from the Democracy Conference organised by Biden in favour of Taiwan, which the USA is clearly moving closer to on the diplomatic and commercial level;

- at the military level, in the China Sea, through explicit and spectacular demonstrations of force in recent months: increased military exercises involving the US fleet and those of allies in the South China Sea; alarmist reports of imminent threats of Chinese intervention in Taiwan; the presence in Taiwan of US special forces to mentor Taiwanese elite units; the conclusion of a new defence agreement, the AUKUS, between the US, Australia and Britain, which establishes military coordination explicitly directed against China; Biden’s pledge of support for Taiwan in the event of Chinese aggression.

China has reacted furiously to these political and military pressures, particularly those in the China Sea around Taiwan: organising massive and threatening naval and air manoeuvres around the island; publishing alarmist studies, which report an “all-time high” risk of war with Taiwan, or plans for a surprise attack on Taiwan, which would lead to a total defeat of the island's armed forces.

Tensions are equally high with other Asian powers: they are at their height with India, its great rival in Asia – there were serious military incidents in Ladakh in the summer of 2020; sharpening tensions with Japan, whose new Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, for the first time since 1945, wants to “consider all options, including the option [for Japan] to possess capabilities to attack enemy bases, to continue the strengthening of Japanese military power as much as it will be necessary” (P.-A. Donnet, “Les relations entre la Chine et le Japon se détériorent à grande vitesse”, Asialyst, 01.12.21).

However, these countries keep a certain distance from the US (and have not joined the AUKUS military pact). India's reluctance can be explained by its own imperialist ambitions; Japan’s, by the fact of being torn between on the one hand the fear of China's military reinforcement and on the other hand their considerable industrial and commercial links with this country (China is Japan's biggest commercial partner:Japan exported more than 141 billion dollars to China in 2020, compared to 118 billion dollars exported to the United States).

The chaos and the every man for himself mentality of decomposition also accentuate the unpredictability of the situation for China, as the example of Afghanistan illustrates. The lack of centralisation of the Talibans’ power, the myriad of currents and groups with the most diverse aspirations that make up the movement, and the agreements made with local warlords to quickly take over the whole country mean that chaos and instability characterise the situation, as the recent attacks on the Hazara minority demonstrate. This can only intensify the intervention of the various imperialisms (Russia, India, Iran, etc.) but also the unpredictability of the situation, and therefore also the ambient chaos. For China, this chaos makes any coherent and long-term policy in the country uncertain.

Moreover, the presence of the Taliban on China's borders constitutes a serious potential danger for Islamist infiltration into China (in particular given the situation in Xinjiang), especially since the Pakistani “brothers” of the Taliban (the TTP, cousins of the ISK) are engaged in a campaign of attacks against the “New Silk Road” construction sites, which has already led to the death of a dozen Chinese “co-operators”. To counter the danger in Afghanistan, China is tending to establish itself in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan). But these republics are traditionally part of the Russian sphere of influence, which increases the danger of confrontation with this "strategic ally", to which its long-term interests (the “New Silk Road”) fundamentally oppose it anyway.

The prospect of intensifying chaos, loss of control and military confrontations

China is not only directly affected by the deepening decay of capitalism, it is also a powerful active factor in it, as its involvement in the Covid crisis, the collapse of its economy and the internal confrontations within its bourgeoisie amply demonstrate.

Its spectacular effort to try to compensate for its military backwardness compared to the United States is in particular an important factor in the acceleration of the arms race, especially on the Asian continent which is experiencing a significant increase in military expenditure: the inversion of the respective weight of Asia and Europe between 2000 and 2018 in this respect is spectacular: in 2000, Europe and Asia represented 27% and 18% respectively of world defence expenditure.

By 2018, these ratios had been reversed, with Asia accounting for 28% and Europe 20% (Sipri data). For example, the Japanese military budget will reach a level not seen since 1945 with more than 53.2 billion dollars for 2021, an increase of 15% compared to the same period in 2020 (see P.-A. Donnet, “Les relations entre la Chine et le Japon se détériorent à grande vitesse”, Asialyst 01.12.21) The massive arming of states significantly increases the danger of confrontation between major Asian powers or tensions with the USA, which are preeminent, even if they do not induce a tendency towards the formation of imperialist blocs, since neither the USA today nor China have managed to mobilise other powers behind its imperialist ambitions and to impose its leadership on other countries in a sustainable manner. But this is not reassuring: “At the same time, ‘massacres from innumerable small wars’ are also proliferating as capitalism in its final phase plunges into an increasingly irrational imperialist free for all” (Resolution on the international situation adopted by the 24th ICC Congress [141] ; point 11, International Review 167).

China is therefore in no way imposing itself through the Covid-19 crisis as the “bulwark of global stability” nor as the beacon that would show global capitalism the way out of the crisis. “China's extraordinary growth is itself a product of decomposition. The economic opening up during the Deng period in the 1980s mobilised huge investments, especially from the US, Europe and Japan.  The Tiananmen Massacre in 1989 made it clear that this economic opening was being implemented by an inflexible political apparatus which has only been able to avoid the fate of Stalinism in the Russian bloc through a combination of state terror, a ruthless exploitation of labour power which subjugates hundreds of millions of workers to a permanent migrant worker status, and a frenzied economic growth whose foundations are now looking increasingly shaky. The totalitarian control over the whole social body, the repressive hardening of the Stalinist faction of Xi Jinping, is not an expression of strength but a manifestation of the weakness of the state, whose cohesion is endangered by the existence of centrifugal forces within society and important struggles between cliques within the ruling class” (Resolution on the international situation adopted by the 24th ICC Congress [141]; point 9, International Review 167). China looks more and more like a gigantic "time bomb" announcing a frightening spiral of barbarism for the planet if the working class does not put an end to this putrefying system (2).

R. Havannais, 20.12.21

(1)The literature on the CCP enumerates for example the Qinghua faction (former students from the Qinghua polytechnic university in Beijing, such as the ex-president Hu Jintao and the prime minister Li Keqiang), with their more modest background and with a somewhat reformist orientation; the “Red Princes” faction who have come from the families of the CCP nomenklatura (Xi Jinping) and leading the main big public and semi-public groups; or again the Shanghai clique around Jian Zemin, oriented towards opening up and economic reforms.

(2) A recent and added factor in this threat has been shown up by the risk of the propagation of the Omicron variant in China. Much more transmissible than previous variants, it is liable to undermine the Chinese strategy of “Zero Covid-19” based on drastic lockdown measures. And this on top of the fact that recent studies agree on the mediocre effectiveness of the main vaccines being used in China. Given the scale of the lockdowns in China (local, regional, or other) and the resulting halt in economic activity, it’s easy to foresee the possible consequences of all this in China and worldwide (added on 31.12.21)

On Wednesday 24 November 2021, 27 refugees downed in the Channel near Calais. This revolting tragedy is unfortunately nothing new: since the beginning of the 2000s, more than 700 people have drowned in the Channel

All over the world, populations are fleeing poverty, war, gang violence, climate disasters. Entire regions of the globe are becoming a nightmare to live in. These mass migrations reached unprecedented levels in 2015 and are again on the increase in the wake of the Covid pandemic and its disastrous economic and social consequences. And this in spite of the border walls and the ferocious repression which migrants are faced with, like the refugees who have been massing on the Polish frontier for weeks.

After the le Touquet agreement in February 2004 between Britain and France, coercive measures have become more and more brutal and systematic. Let’s just recall the savagery of the French police when they dismantled the Calais “Jungle” on 25 October 2016. Everywhere, the only means for bourgeois states to deal with the “migrant question” comes down to police violence and an Orwellian surveillance which forces refugees to take more and more risks, in this case by trying to cross the channel in rubber dinghies. To the indecent political joust between Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron after the tragedy in the Channel, we can add cynical declarations like those of the French minister Darmanin who straight away justified the EU policy of militarising coasts and frontiers, while putting the blame on the people smugglers: “those who are the most to blame for this ignoble situation are above all the people smugglers”. We had similar words from Johnson who talked about the gangs “literally getting away with murder”.

Yes, the people smugglers are conscienceless exploiters of human misery, but the politicians of the great democracies are no less criminal. It is them and their shameful policies which are behind the emergence and flourishing of the people-smugglers, the result of the fact that the increasingly criminalised migrants are finding it harder and harder to go from one country to the next. The bourgeoisie is looking for a scapegoat to cover up its own inhuman policies. The gangs are used to obscure the real criminal: capitalism. Just as the media point their fingers at Lukashenko, as though he is the only one instrumentalising refugees, here it’s the gangs that provide the alibi.

What none of the politicians can say is that their policies are dictated by the defence of private property and the national capital. Among all those forced to become refugees, only those who are suitably qualified and whose labour power can be used profitably, are acceptable to capital. All the rest must be pushed back by physical or administrative barriers, and more and more by armed force. The implacable law of capital is that you “open the borders” only when it suits the needs of exploitation and profit. In this cause, bodies on the beaches are just a minor price to pay.

WH 29.11.21

We are publishing a statement on the rising cost of living in Turkey by some comrades who sympathise with the positions of the communist left. Although the nature of the street protests last November does not appear very clearly in the text, the comrades are clearly in favour of a proletarian response to the crisis –denouncing parliamentarism, bourgeois parties and unions, rejection of all national “solutions” and insistence on the necessity for class struggle across all divisions and borders.

 

"Clench your fist, not your belt, fill the streets, not the ballot boxes!"

Capitalism means poverty for the working class, it means living on the edge, it means the fear of being unemployed and hungry. Although the cost of living has increased at an extraordinary pace in the recent period and has rapidly reduced purchasing power, capitalism has never promised us more than this. Even though the sudden rise of the exchange rate increased our problems and concerns about our future, most of us were already unable to make it to the end of the month with years of constant price increases.

The economic crisis, which has become undeniable today, is only one of the reflections of the structural crisis of capitalism. No need to look far to see the point that the decay of capitalism has reached and that it is dragging humanity towards extinction: with the production and health crisis we witnessed in the Covid-19 epidemic; with the terrible fires and floods of last summer; with the ecological crisis whose direct consequences we are now experiencing; with the refugee crisis that is getting more tragic every day. In addition, we are seeing the housing problem getting more urgent for workers all over the world, with increasing rents and students' dormitory demands.

Even though these experiences anger us, unless a generalised and realistic solution is found, every word spoken or action put forward ultimately leads to nothing but growing despair. Although immediate reactions such as the street demonstrations that took place after the sudden increase in foreign exchange rates are meaningful, they cannot become permanent and massive in conditions where a revolutionary alternative is not presented.

Of course, the establishment parties are doing their bit to prevent these reactions. While the government is trying to prevent a possible mass uprising through police investigations, attacks and threats against those who took to the streets, the official opposition is trying to hinder the growth of street protests with the fallacy that "it benefits the government". It is understood that they are planning to hold legal rallies - probably together with the official unions - in which the demand for "early elections" will be brought forward in order to stop a mass mobilisation before it starts, to counter any radical demands, to obscure the reality of a deepening crisis. In other words, millions of people who are impoverished day by day and live on the border of hunger are being fed bullshit: "Don't fight, wait, we will save you".

First of all, it should be emphasised that the main reason for the economic crisis is not only the mismanagement of the government, but is part of a worldwide economic crisis. Therefore, the claim that the issue can be resolved with a change of power is completely baseless. Of course, the ruling classes may need a change of government power. In times of crisis, instead of right-wing populist parties such as AKP-MHP, “social democratic” parties such as CHP may be more useful in order to suppress the working class and impose austerity policies on them. It needs to be understood that the current function of the alliance, of which CHP and IYIP are the main elements standing against the AKP-MHP government, is to distract the working class with the election agenda in the face of the burning crisis, to divide the working class with hostility to Kurds and refugees, and to prevent the broad masses from entering into struggle.

The left wing of the establishment, which is attached to the back of these parties and tries to produce national solutions to the crisis of capitalism, has no solution to offer to a proletariat which directly suffers the crisis. Although it has been demonstrated through numerous recent examples that no change is possible with elections: neither the HDP and the political groups clustered around it, nor the search for alliances initiated by the TKP, SOL Party and EMEP, nor any transformation focused on elections presents a perspective other than providing “critical” support to the government from the outside.

We have seen recently in the examples of the PSOE-Podemos coalition in Spain and Syriza in Greece how the left of the establishment has pushed the working class into a dead end all over the world. We also know that left wing establishment parties are quite "useful" to impose "austerity policies" on the working class. We have no choice but to clench our fists, to fill the streets, not the ballot boxes, so as not to tighten our belts any more.

There cannot be national response to the global crisis of capitalism. The answer can only be found through the international unity of the proletariat and its mass action that transcends the parliamentary understanding. The proletariat can achieve its emancipation only by developing mass actions aimed at overthrowing capitalism and by creating appropriate organs of struggle. We need to remind ourselves of all this. We no longer have time to wait, nor any chance of aiming for anything less than the overthrow of capitalism.

We know that we can rely on neither the establishment parties, nor the official unions, which are the guardians of the existing order, in the face of the burning problems we are experiencing today. We see over and over again in every instance that the working class has no other savior other than itself. The increasingly impoverished working people have nothing to rely on but their own self-determination and their class brethren struggling all over the world. Today, in our workplaces, living areas, schools, that is, wherever we are, we need to come together, organise, and stubbornly proclaim these facts.

Class war against capitalism! We want the world, not a few crumbs!

 

Abbreviations:

AKP: Erdogan's party

 

MHP: racist coalition party

 

CHP: main opposition party, so-called "social democrats"

 

IYIP: right wing populist/nationalist party

 

HDP: Kurdish party

 

TKP: mainstream Stalinist Communist Party

 

SOL party: similar to die Linke in Germany