A reader who recently took part in an online public meeting of the ICC has raised questions about our position on the trade unions, the Russian revolution and other vital questions. Here we publish part of the correspondence dealing with the question of the trade unions.

Letter from R:

“The historical justification from left-communists not participating in trade unions was solely based on the conditions of Germany at the time. The SPD and Unions had started to become reactionary and support the status quo. However, theoreticians like Pannekoek didn't argue we shouldn't participate in trade unions, one of the best tools the proletariat have to win short term economic gains, but we can't rely on them as a socialist organisation. I don't understand why in the 'basic positions' you hold that we shouldn't participate in trade unions. “ 

ICC reply: 

Dear comrade

The position of the communist left on the trade unions is not limited to a particular time and place as you argue, but is based on the historic passage of world capitalism from the ascendant to the decadent period, clearly marked by the outbreak of World War One. The opportunists of social democracy, followed by the majority of trade unions, made clear their allegiance to the capitalist camp by helping to recruit the working class for the war, a phenomenon which was by no means limited to Germany. The gradual bureaucratisation of the unions which had already been underway for decades now moved onto a qualitatively new stage, in which the unions ceased being defensive instruments of the class and became state organs charged with controlling the working class. Pannekoek, in World Revolution and Communist Tactics (1920) saw that, like the capitalist state as a whole, the working class would have to destroy the trade unions; and again, he was not only talking about Germany, but about the needs of the world revolution:

“Marx’ and Lenin’s insistence that the way in which the state is organised precludes its use as an instrument of proletarian revolution, notwithstanding its democratic forms, must therefore also apply to the trade-union organisations. Their counterrevolutionary potential cannot be destroyed or diminished by a change of personnel, by the substitution of radical or ‘revolutionary’ leaders for reactionary ones. It is the form of the organisation that renders the masses all but impotent and prevents them making the trade union an organ of their will. The revolution can only be successful by destroying this organisation, that is to say so completely revolutionising its organisational structure that it becomes something completely different”[1]. 

This was a position he never abandoned. A text written in 1936 defines the unions as instruments of the ruling class, recruiting sergeants for war, and fundamentally opposed to communism:

“Trade unions, however, in war must stand upon the side of the capitalist. Its interests are bound up with national capitalism, the victory of which it must wish with all its heart. Hence it assists in arousing strong national feelings and national hatred. It helps the capitalist class to drive the workers into war and to beat down all opposition.

Trade unionism abhors communism. Communism takes away the very basis of its existence. In communism, in the absence of capitalist employers, there is no room for the trade union and labour leaders. It is true that in countries with a strong socialist movement, where the bulk of the workers are socialists, the labour leaders must be socialists too, by origin as well as by environment. But then they are right-wing socialists; and their socialism is restricted to the idea of a commonwealth where instead of greedy capitalists honest labour leaders will manage industrial production.

Trade unionism hates revolution. Revolution upsets all the ordinary relations between capitalists and workers. In its violent clashings, all those careful tariff regulations are swept away; in the strife of its gigantic forces the modest skill of the bargaining labour leaders loses its value. With all its power, trade unionism opposes the ideas of revolution and communism”.[2]

And the capitalist function of the unions was not only evident in moments of war and revolution. Having begun as organisations for the daily struggle against exploitation, in the new period they become tools of the ruling class for sabotaging workers’ struggles and imposing the bourgeoisie’s attacks on working class living standards:

“It was the task and the function of trade unionism, by their joint united fight to raise the workers out of their helpless misery, and to gain for them an acknowledged place in capitalist society. It had to defend the workers against the ever-increasing exploitation of capital. Now that big capital consolidates more than ever into a monopolistic power of banks and industrial concerns, this former function of trade unionism is finished. Its power falls short compared to the formidable power of capital. The unions are now giant organizations, with their acknowledged place in society; their position is regulated by law, and their tariff [Court Award] agreements are given legally binding force for the entire industry. Their leaders aspire at forming part of the power ruling industrial conditions. They are the apparatus by means of which monopolistic capital imposes its conditions upon the entire working class. To this now all-powerful capital it is, normally, far more preferable to disguise its rule in democratic and constitutional forms than to show it in the naked brutality of dictatorship. The working conditions which it thinks suitable to the workers will be accepted and obeyed much more easily in the form of agreements concluded by the unions than in the form of dictates arrogantly imposed. Firstly, because to the workers the illusion is left that they are masters of their own interests. Secondly, because all the bonds of attachment, which as their own creation, the creation of their sacrifices, their fight, their elation, render the unions dear to the workers, now are subservient to the masters. Thus under modern conditions trade unions more than ever are turned into organs of the domination of monopolist capital over the working class”.[3]

This passage is from the 1947 pamphlet Workers’ Councils, where Pannekoek develops a theme he had already begun to elaborate prior to the First World War – the necessity for the working class to create new organs for its struggle against capital, both in its defensive and its offensive phases. Organs like mass assemblies and elected, revocable strike committees, precursors of the councils.

In our view, the role of revolutionaries in every struggle is to push for the workers to take control of their movement and spread it to other workers, outside and against the trade union machinery which divides them into a myriad of categories and sectors, and subjects them to the repressive laws of the ruling class (strike votes by ballots rather than mass assemblies, limits on numbers of pickets, ban on secondary picketing etc), exactly as we are seeing in the current struggles in the UK. As we show in our current international leaflet[4], these struggles are extremely important despite being generally controlled by the unions; but revolutionaries have to defend a perspective for the struggle to go forward, and this can only mean a confrontation with the unions around their attempts to limit and divide the class movement. We don’t think putting forward such a perspective is compatible with working inside the unions (eg, by accepting the role of shop stewards, campaigning for a more radical leadership, etc).

Our general position on the unions is explained in our pamphlet, which is available in print but can also be read online[5].

Very fraternally

Alf for the ICC.

The text “Divergences with the Resolution on the International Situation of the 24th ICC congress (explanation of a minority position, by Ferdinand) [6]” presents comrade Ferdinand’s disagreements with the ICC’s analyses of the current period. These disagreements, as he himself stresses (“Because I had similar disagreements as comrade Steinklopfer”) to a large extent cover the same ground as those formulated by comrade Steinklopfer at the 23rd Congress of the ICC and recalled by him in a text presenting his amendments to the resolution of the 24th ICC Congress. We have broadly responded to these divergencies in 2019 and more recently in a contribution posted here. The arguments developed in the latter put forward arguments which are also generally valid in relation to the criticisms expressed in Ferdinand’s text, and we won’t go over them again here[1].

This contribution will instead focus on the understanding of the situation in China, which occupies an important place in Ferdinand’s contribution. Above all, we agree with Ferdinand when he stresses the importance of debate, particularly in a period marked by the appearance of new events where “it is no surprise that within a lively revolutionary organisation, controversies about the analysis of the world situation arise”. In fact, in a non-monolithic organisation like the ICC, it would be worrying if, faced with the convulsions of the last few years, no questioning or disagreement were to arise. At this level, understanding “the evolution of China, its economic power and state capitalism” constitutes a central question, not only for getting a better understanding of the present dynamic of capitalism but also for applying the marxist method to analysing the situation.

From the start of his contribution, Ferdinand expresses his criticisms of the organisation’s analysis of the situation in China and poses the method he intends to develop: “The assertions that China is a ticking time bomb, that its state is weak and its economic growth looking shaky are expression of an underestimation of the real economic and imperialist development of China in the last 40 years. Let us check first the facts and then the theoretical foundations on which this wrong analysis is based”. So let’s examine more closely what facts are being referred to here and then the theoretical foundations which Ferdinand judges to be erroneous. But before that, what about the assertion that the ICC has always underestimated the development of China and continues to do so?

1. A continual under-estimation of the development of China by the ICC?

A first somewhat insidious way of putting in doubt the organisation’s analysis is to assert that it has always neglected the development of China (“The development of China has been downplayed in our ranks for decades”) and that it continues to do so (“But this recognition was half-hearted. Soon the old schemes crept again into our analyses”). In fact, it is quite wrong to say that the ICC has neglected the development of China for decades.

Thus, at the end of the 1970s, the ICC pointed to a development in the relation of forces between the blocs that would have major importance for the future:

“as elsewhere, the slogan of Chinese capital has become ‘export or die’. But because of the weakness of its economy, and lacking positions on the world market, China can no longer play the Lone Ranger and is thus compelled to integrate itself more strongly into the western bloc, as can be seen at the economic level from its trade balance and at the political level with its support for all western or third world policies hostile to Moscow” (Révolution Internationale 41, September 1977)

“The past several years have seen a considerable strengthening of American imperialism and weakening of its Russian rival. The integration of China into the US bloc and the commitment to Peking’s massive rearmament mean that the Kremlin will face an increasingly powerful force on its eastern frontier -- and one which can firmly bar the way to the industrial riches of Japan. Not even Russian imperialism’s effort to outflank China through the Indo-Chinese peninsula can minimise this victory for US imperialism in the Far East” (International Review 18, Report on the International Situation from the 3rd ICC Congress)

This was a crucial dynamic which began in the 60s and 70s with China’s “ideological split with Moscow”, its detachment from the Russian bloc and, in the course of the 1970s (with Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972 and the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1979), a gradual rapprochement with the American bloc, in order to “work together and unite to counter the polar bear” (Deng Xiaoping in 1979).

For 70 years (30 of them under the domination of the “Communist” Party), i.e. for the most part of the 20th century, China had been one of the most evident expressions of capitalism’s entry into decadence – an economy in ruins, civil wars, interference and invasion by foreign imperialisms, gigantic famines, floods of refugees and the massacre of millions of people. Its integration into the western market enabled its economic development and a formidable technological modernisation, in particular towards the end of the 80s and during the 90s. During the 90s and at the beginning of the 2000s. the ICC increasingly pointed to and analysed China’s rise to power:

• At the economic level, underlining that this in no way put into question the analysis of the decadence of capitalism:

“The decadence of capitalism has never meant a final and sudden collapse of the system, as certain elements of the German left argued in the 1920s, or a total halt in the productive forces, as Trotsky mistakenly thought in the 1930s… the Chinese bureaucracy has pulled off an amazing feat merely by surviving, let alone by presiding over the current ‘boom’. Critics of the notion of capitalist decadence have even pointed to this phenomenon as proof that the system still has the capacity for real growth and development

In reality, the present Chinese ‘boom’ in no way calls into question the overall decline in the world capitalist economy. In contrast to the ascendant period of capitalism:

• China’s current industrial growth is not part of a global process of expansion; on the contrary, it has as its direct corollary the de-industrialisation and stagnation of the most advanced economies who have re-located to China in search of cheap labour costs;
• the Chinese working class does not have the perspective of a steady rise in living standards, but is predicated upon increasingly savage attacks on living and working conditions and on the continued impoverishment of huge sectors of the proletariat and peasantry outside the main areas of growth;
• China’s frenzied growth will contribute not to a global expansion of the world market but to a deepening of the world crisis of overproduction: given the restricted consumption of the Chinese masses, the bulk of China’s products are geared towards export to the more developed capitalisms;
• the fundamental irrationality of China’s swelling economy is highlighted by the terrible levels of pollution which it has generated – a sure sign that the planetary environment can only be harmed by the pressure on each nation to exploit its natural resources to the absolute limit in order to compete on the world market;
• like the system as a whole, the entirety of China’s growth is founded on debts that can never be reabsorbed through a real expansion of the world market.

Indeed, the fragility of all such spurts of growth is recognised by the ruling class itself, which is increasingly alarmed by the Chinese bubble. This is not because it is worried about the terrifying levels of exploitation upon which it is based - far from it, these ferocious levels are precisely what makes China such an attractive proposition for investment - but because the global economy is becoming too dependent on the Chinese market and the consequences of a Chinese collapse are becoming too horrible to contemplate, not just for China, which would be plunged back into the violent anarchy of the 1930s, but for the world economy as a whole…

It is true that the onset of decadence occurred well before the total exhaustion of such markets, and that capitalism has continued to make the best possible use of such remaining economic areas as an outlet for its production: the growth of Russia during the 1930s and the integration of the remaining peasant economies in Europe during the period of post-war reconstruction are examples of this. But the dominant trend by far in the epoch of decadence is the use of an artificial market, based on debt. (IR 122, Resolution on the International Situation, 16th ICC Congress)[2].

• As on the level of the expression of its increasingly predominant imperialist power from the beginning of the 21st Century:

In particular it will not be able to discourage China from pushing forward the imperialist ambitions which its recent status as a big industrial power enables it to have. It is clear that this country, despite its demographic and economic importance, does not have, and is unlikely to have, the military or technological means to constitute itself as the new head of a bloc. However, it does have the means to further perturb American ambitions, whether in Africa, Iran, North Korea or Burma, and to throw a further stone into the pond of instability which characterises imperialist relations. (IR 146, Resolution on the international situation from the 19th ICC Congress).

It was not a lack of attention to the development of China, but a certain schematism, in particular at the level of understanding the manifestations of decadence, which characterised the application and deepening of this framework of analysis, as the ICC itself noted at its 21st Congress in 2015:

“The denial, in some of our key texts, of any possibilities of expansion for capitalism in its decadent phase also made it difficult for the organisation to explain the dizzying growth of China and other ‘new economies’ in the period since the downfall of the old blocs. While these developments do not, as many have argued, call into question the decadence of capitalism, and indeed are a clear expression of it, they have disproved the assertion that in the decadent period there is strictly no possibility of industrial take-off in any of the ‘peripheral’ regions. While we were able to refute some of the more facile myths about ‘globalisation’ in the phase following the collapse of the blocs (from the right seeing it as a new and glorious chapter in the ascent of capitalism, from the left as a basis for reviving old nationalist and state capitalist solutions), we were not able to discern the kernel of truth in the globalisation mythology: that the removal of the old autarkic model did open up new spheres for capital investment, including the exploitation of a huge new fund of labour power reared outside of directly capitalist social relations” (IR 156, Resolution on the international situation from the 21st ICC Congress).

“However, we were less able to foresee the capacity of Russia to re-emerge as a force to be reckoned with on the world arena, and most importantly, we have been very late in seeing the rise of China as a new and significant player in the great power rivalries which have developed over the past two or three decades – a failure closely connected to our problems in recognising the reality of China’s economic advance”( IR 156, Resolution on the international Situation from the 21st ICC Congress, point 11).

However, the very assertion by Ferdinand that if this has been the case in the past it can still only be the case today is a fallacious method of argument. Since this danger was recognised by the organisation, we can see that the attention given to the framework for understanding the development of China has been maintained in the recent analyses of the organisation:

“The stages of China's rise are inseparable from the history of the imperialist blocs and their disappearance in 1989: the position of the communist left affirming the ‘impossibility of any emergence of new industrialised nations’ in the period of decadence and the condemnation of states ‘which failed to succeed in their ‘industrial take-off’ before the First World War to stagnate in underdevelopment, or to preserve a chronic backwardness compared to the countries that hold the upper hand’ was valid in the period from 1914 to 1989. It was the straitjacket of the organisation of the world into two opposing imperialist blocs (permanent between 1945 and 1989) in preparation for the world war that prevented any major disruption of the hierarchy between powers. China's rise began with American aid rewarding its imperialist shift to the United States in 1972. It continued decisively after the disappearance of the blocs in 1989. China appears to be the main beneficiary of ‘globalisation’ following its accession to the WTO in 2001 when it became the world's workshop and the recipient of Western relocations and investments, finally becoming the world's second largest economic power. It took the unprecedented circumstances of the historical period of decomposition to allow China to rise, without which it would not have happened.

China's power bears all the stigma of terminal capitalism: it is based on the over-exploitation of the proletarian labour force, the unbridled development of the war economy through the national programme of ‘military-civil fusion’ and is accompanied by the catastrophic destruction of the environment, while national cohesion is based on the police control of the masses subjected to the political education of the One Party and the fierce repression of the populations of Uighur Muslims and Tibet. In fact, China is only a giant metastasis of the generalised militaristic cancer of the entire capitalist system: its military production is developing at a frenetic pace, its defence budget has increased six-fold in 20 years and has been ranked second in the world since 2010” (IR 164, Resolution on the International Situation from the 23rd ICC Congress).

In reality, it’s not the underestimation of China’s expansion which poses a problem for Ferdinand, but the framework of interpretation with which it is approached (“The formulation ‘China’s extraordinary growth is a product of decomposition’”). For Ferdinand, examining “the facts” in themselves already demonstrates the inconsistency of the ICC’s approach

2 What sanction by the facts?

Ferdinand wants to examine “the facts”. But he begins by selecting those which suit him: “We cannot trust the Chinese propaganda about the strength of its system. But what the western or other non-Chinese media tell us about the contradictions in China is propaganda as well – and in addition it is often wishful thinking”. From there, he can sweep away one aspect of the “facts” advanced by the organisation (“The elements mentioned in the Resolution are not convincing”), while selecting those he thinks are “credible” (“I base the information in this article on Wikipedia and The Economist”).

Consequently, the “facts” that he deigns to examine are limited solely to the question of the internal tensions within ruling classes. What’s more, his way of arguing is rather curious:

• Ferdinand quite absurdly compares the changes in battle order among certain bourgeoisies in western Europe in the 1970s, under the pressure of the class struggle, with the exacerbation of internal tensions between cliques within the national bourgeoisies, which is above all a phenomenon of the phase of the decomposition of capitalism and more specifically of the last decade. It derives in fact from the increasingly strong pressures faced by the different bourgeoisies at the economic and imperialist level and the difficulty of maintaining control over the whole political system (as with the upsurge of populism in the US or Britain, but also with the tensions between cliques in the state apparatus in China).
• It puts forward the false and preposterous idea that the ICC defends “the thesis that the proletariat is threatening Xi Jinping’s regime”.

This argument in fact hides (a) an underestimation of the weight of decomposition on the bourgeoisie’s political apparatus and (b) a tendency to see the form of Chinese capitalism as an “advanced” form of capitalism, like in the European countries, and not as a caricatural expression of the putrefaction of capitalism. The issue for Ferdinand is not one of a faction fight within the Stalinist party-state but is about proposing an alternative model (“no alternative model for the course of Chinese state capitalism is visible”) by bourgeois factions outside and inside the party.  This shows that he doesn’t see that the system of Stalinist state capitalism in China is not an expression of the strength of capitalism but is a pure product of barbarism, decadence and decomposition.

In this perspective, his analysis of the repression of the private capitalists singularly reveals the lack of method in his approach to “the facts”. He points to the recent repression of private capitalists: (“The Party is clipping the wings of some of the most profitable enterprises and richest tycoons; it is letting air escape from some speculation bubbles in order to control the whole economic activity more strictly”). But what is proved by this tighter grip by the state over the private enterprises? The context of the phase of decomposition highlighted by the ICC is precisely what makes it possible to understand that this “taking in hand” of entire sectors of the economy by the party, which underlines of the rigidity of the Stalinist political system in China under pressure at the economic and imperialist level, just as with the tensions between factions within it, are essentially an expression of the WEAKNESS of the regime and not of its strength.

Whereas the “facts” that he wants to examine are limited to the question of tensions within ruling classes, he remains silent about the multitude of elements advanced by the organisation that attest to China’s difficulties, since the report on imperialist tensions of June 2018 (IR 161) to the report on the pandemic and the development of decomposition adopted by the 24th ICC Congress in 2021 (IR 167):

“In the longer term, the Chinese economy is faced with the relocation of strategic industries by the United States and European countries and the difficulties of the ‘New Silk Road’ because of the financial problems linked to the economic crisis and accentuated by the Covid-19 crisis (with its impact on Chinese financing but above all because of the level of indebtedness of ‘partner’ countries such as Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, etc.) but also by growing mistrust on the part of many countries and anti-Chinese pressure from the United States. So, it should come as no surprise that in 2020 there has been a collapse in the financial value of the investments injected into the ‘New Silk Road’ project (-64%).

The Covid-19 crisis and the obstacles encountered by the ‘New Silk Road’ have also accentuated the increasingly evident tensions at the head of the Chinese state, between the ‘economist’ faction, which relies above all on economic globalisation and ‘multilateralism’ to pursue China's capitalist expansion, and the ‘nationalist’ faction, which calls for a more muscular policy and puts forward force (‘China defeated Covid’) in the face of internal threats (the Uighurs, Hong Kong, Taiwan) and external threats (tensions with the USA, India and Japan). In the perspective of the next People's Congress in 2022, which should appoint the new (former?) president, the situation in China is therefore also particularly unstable”.

Since then, all the reports on imperialist tensions have put forward a number of elements concerning the calamitous management of the Covid crisis: the accumulation of problems for the Chinese economy, the stagnation of the “New Silk Road” project and the accentuation of antagonisms within the Chinese bourgeoisie. The report on imperialist tensions from November 2021 (IR 167) synthesises China’s difficulties at the different levels:

“In the last decades China has undergone a dazzling rise on the economic and imperialist levels which has made it the most important challenger to the United States. However, as events of September 2021 in Afghanistan have already illustrated, it hasn’t been able to profit either from the decline of the US or from the crisis of Covid-19 and its consequences in order to strengthen its position on the level of imperialist relations; again quite the contrary. We’ll examine the difficulties which faced Chinese bourgeoisie in handling the pandemic, and in the management of the economy, imperialist relations and tensions within the ruling class”.

On each of these levels, precise elements are provided to illustrate that “far from taking advantage of the present situation, the Chinese bourgeoisie, as others, is confronted with the weight of the crisis, the chaos of decomposition and internal tensions that it is trying by all means to contain within the capitalist structures of a worm-eaten state”. (IR 167, Report on Imperialist Tensions, November 2021). Unfortunately, all this is studiously ignored by Ferdinand.

So what is it that pushes the comrade to dispute the assertion that “China is a ticking time bomb”, when this cannot be based on an insufficient following by or lack of evidence from the ICC, especially with regard to the present period, as all the references to our Congress texts show? In the last analysis, don’t the arguments discussed here constitute a smokescreen aimed at hiding the real reason for his disagreement, which is to be sought at the level of the “theoretical foundations”?

3. A wrong, schematic application of decadence and decomposition, but by whom?

Ferdinand aims to demonstrate that he is criticising “a wrong, schematic understanding of capitalist decadence” by raising a number of questions.

The first question is that the ICC is underestimating the tendency towards the constitution of new blocs (“The resolution downplays the danger of a future bloc constellation”), which for Ferdinand is the dominant one: “The capitalist logic of the polarisation between China and the US pushes both to find allies, to take part in the arms race and to head towards war”. This analysis however makes an abstraction of the characteristics of the present phase of decomposition which:

1. Radically counterposes itself against the tendency towards the formation of imperialist blocs which marked the period of the “Cold War”. This has been clearly posed by the ICC since 1990:

“the tendency towards a new share-out of the planet between two military blocs is countered, and may even be definitively compromised, by the increasingly profound and widespread decomposition of capitalist society, which we have already pointed out” (IR 61, “After the collapse of the eastern bloc: destabilisation and chaos”).

“And this reality will not be called into question by the disappearance of the world's division into two imperialist constellations as a result of the Eastern bloc's collapse.

The constitution of imperialist blocs is not the origin of militarism and imperialism. The opposite is true: the formation of these blocs is only the extreme consequence (which at certain mo­ments can aggravate the causes), an expression (and not the only one), of decadent capitalism's plunge into militarism and war”. (IR 64, “Orientation Text: Militarism and decomposition”).

Thus, in the present context of the war in Ukraine, the position adopted by India towards the US and Russia, by China towards Russia or by Turkey towards NATO (of which it is a member) and Russia underline, among other examples, the degree to which instability marks the relations between imperialist powers and not the constitution of imperialist blocs.

1. In no way implies a reduction of military barbarism, of the danger of war, as we stressed more than 30 years ago:

“military confrontations between states are not going to disappear, even though they may no longer be used and manipulated by the great powers. On the contrary, as we have seen in the past, militarism and war are decadent capitalism's way of life, and the deepening of the crisis can only confirm this.

By contrast with the previous period, however, these military conflicts no longer take the form of a confrontation between the two great imperialist blocs” (IR 63, Resolution on the International situation, June 1990);

“…the end of the blocs can only open the door to an even more barbaric, aberrant and chaotic form of imperialism” (IR 64, Militarism and decomposition”).

And in response to Ferdinand’s interpretation that “Should we think that capitalism in its period of decomposition is more rational and thus more inclined to avoid war?”, the exact opposite is true: the ICC has pointed out that the current instability and chaos derived from the tendency towards every man for himself does not reduce militarism and the danger of war but paradoxically has made the danger of a nuclear spiral more real than during the “Cold War” between blocs ( see IR 168, “Significance and impact of the war in Ukraine”).

According to Ferdinand, another point that shows the schematism of the ICC is our failure to recognise that Chinese state capitalism is the big winner of the situation and is getting stronger: “The resolution underestimates the fact that the strong economies are far better off than the weak ones… And it denies that China is a winner of the situation… China is one of the winners of the pandemic crisis so far”. According to Ferdinand, “The ruling circles in this country are using the pandemic crisis to restructure its economy, its army, its empire. Even if the economic growth in China has slowed down in recent times, behind this is to some extent a calculated plan of the ruling political elite to harness the excesses of private capital and to strengthen state capitalism for the imperialist challenge”.

The ICC does not at all deny that in this phase of mounting decomposition, national bourgeoisies may, temporarily and in certain areas, profit from the situation: during the first decade of the phase of decomposition, the USA seemed to succeed in imposing its overall hegemony (first Gulf war, Dayton accords for ex-Yugoslavia); even today, certain oil or gas-producing countries are raking in an unexpected windfall of dollars; similarly, China did indeed experience a remarkable economic expansion between 1990 and 2016. However, the real issue is to explain the following: of what is this expansion the product?

For the ICC, capitalism’s entry since 1989 into the final phase of its decadence, the phase of decomposition, makes it possible to situate and comprehend both the ingredients in the sudden emergence of China but also the internal and external fragilities and contradictions which menace this expansion. This task of putting things into context is precisely what Ferdinand avoids in an extensive and explicit way.

Furthermore, contrary to Ferdinand who seems to see Stalinist state capitalism as the dynamic motor of China’s development, the Gauche Communiste de France in its review Internationalisme in 1952 was already underlining that state capitalism is not essentially a solution to the contradictions of capitalism, even if may delay their effects, but is an expression of these contradictions:

“Since the capitalist mode of production entered its period of decadence, the pressure to fight against this decline with state capitalist measures has grown constantly. However, the tendency to strengthen state capitalist organs and forms is anything but a strengthening of capitalism; on the contrary, they express the increasing contradictions on the economic and political terrain. With the acceleration of decomposition in the wake of the pandemic, we are also witnessing a sharp increase in state capitalist measures. These are not an expression of greater state control over society but rather an expression of the growing difficulties in organising society as a whole and preventing its increasing tendency to fragmentation” (IR 167, Resolution on the International Situation, 24th ICC congress, point 23).

In this framework, the implosion of the eastern bloc also signified the failure of Stalinist state capitalism, which is particularly outmoded and inefficient. If China, by going over to the side of the US, was able to open itself to private capitalists and to the world market (where it played a central role in the policy of the globalisation of the economy) it has held onto the decrepit structures of Stalinist state capitalism which necessarily imply (a) a closely monitored and relative freedom for capitals and private capitalists (b) a vivid fear of social conflict which it can only deal with through brutal repression and (c) Machiavellian and pitiless struggles between rival factions within the party-state.

The central question that emerges in a confused way through a forest of specific elements is that the framework of decomposition put forward by the ICC implies a univocal approach:

• “ (…) everything is subordinated to “decomposition, a kind of homogenous fragmentation”) and misses out some of the central characteristics of capitalism: “understanding of the period of decomposition is schematic and – to the extent that it denies the persistence of elementary capitalist laws – for example capital concentration and centralisation –an abandonment of marxism”. 

In fact:

1. Understanding decomposition as the dominant framework for grasping the development of the situation over the last 40 years was put forward by the ICC towards the end of the 1980s and has been confirmed by the events which have shaken the world order and the relation between classes since 1989-90:

“For a year, the world situation has undergone considerable upheavals, which have greatly modified the world which emerged from the second imperialist war. The ICC has done its best to follow these events closely:

- to set out their historical significance,

- to examine how far they confirm or invalidate analytical frameworks which had been valid previously.

Although we had not foreseen exactly how these historic events would take place (Stalinism's death-agony, the disappearance of the Eastern bloc, the disintegration of the Western bloc), they integrate perfectly into the analytical framework and understanding of the present historical period that the ICC had worked out previously: the phase of decomposition (IR 64, Militarism and Decomposition.

This situation provoked a dynamic of capitalism rotting on its feet, accentuating characteristics which were already present since its entry into decadence, such as the irrational explosion of militarism, an imperialist free for all, chaos or the difficulty of the bourgeoisie to maintain control over its political apparatus, but which become dominant characteristics in this final phase:

“it is vital to highlight the fundamental distinction between the elements of decomposition which have infected capitalism since the beginning of the century and the generalised decomposition which is infecting the system today, and which can only get worse. Here again, quite apart from the strictly quantitative aspect, the phenomenon of social decomposition has today reached such a breadth and depth that it has taken on a new and unique quality, revealing decadent capitalism’s entry into a new and final phase of its history: the phase where decomposition becomes a decisive, if not the decisive factor in social evolution” (IR 107, Theses on Decomposition).

Why doesn’t Ferdinand position himself in relation to the predominance of this framework in the ultimate phase of capitalist decadence, the phase of social decomposition, which has been discussed and unanimously approved by the organisation, and recalled in the preamble to the resolution on the international situation from the 24th ICC Congress:

“This resolution is in continuity with the report on decomposition to the 22nd ICC Congress, the resolution on the international situation to the 23rd congress, and the report on pandemic and decomposition to the 24th Congress. It is based on the proposition that not only does the decadence of capitalism pass through different stages or phases, but that we have since the late 1980s reached its ultimate phase, the phase of decomposition”.

1. Does this framework for understanding the situation imply, as Ferdinand claims, that the ICC has “forgotten” certain tendencies inherent to capitalism, such as the tendency towards concentration and centralisation, which has been further accentuated in decadence? Far from denying them, the ICC has shown how the application of these tendencies have further exacerbated the chaos and barbarism of the period:

“in continuity with the platform of the Communist International in 1919, which not only insisted that the world imperialist war of 1914-18 announced capitalism’s entry into the “epoch of the breakdown of capital, its internal disintegration, the epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat”, but also emphasised that “The old capitalist ‘order’ has ceased to function; its further existence is out of the question. The final outcome of the capitalist mode of production is chaos. This chaos can only be overcome by the productive and most numerous class – the working class. The proletariat has to establish real order - communist order”. Thus, the drama facing humanity was indeed posed in terms of order against chaos. And the threat of chaotic breakdown was linked to “the anarchy of the capitalist mode of production”, in other words, to a fundamental element in the system itself. According to marxism, the capitalist system, on a qualitatively higher level than any previous mode of production, involves the products of human labour becoming an alien power that stands above and against their creators. This decadence of the system, with its insoluble contradictions, is marked by a new spiral in this loss of control. And as the CI’s Platform explains, the necessity to try to overcome capitalist anarchy within each nation state – through monopoly and above all through state intervention – only pushes it onto new heights on a global scale, culminating in the imperialist world war. Thus, while capitalism can at certain levels and for certain phases hold back its innate tendency towards chaos (for example, through the mobilisation for war in the 1930s or the period of economic boom that followed the war), the most profound tendency is towards the “internal disintegration” that, for the CI, characterised the new epoch.” (IR 167, Resolution on the International Situation, 24th ICC Congress).

It appears then that the various disagreements expressed by Ferdinand with regard to the analysis of China basically derives from an insufficient assimilation of the central tendencies of the phase of decomposition. In reality, if you begin from this framework and take up the elements referred to in the preceding points, you can only conclude that the development of China is indeed “a product of decomposition”. Certainly, Ferdinand claims that he is in agreement with this framework “The polarising tendencies that I put forward are not in contradiction with the framework of decomposition”, it’s just that the ICC has exaggerated things with its “decomposition everywhere”. In fact, and the examination of the previous points confirms this, Ferdinand demonstrates a profound lack of understanding of decomposition, and one phrase is particularly illustrative of this: “The latter (= the “decomposition everywhere” position) is a permanent search for phenomena of dislocation and disintegration, losing sight of the more profound and concrete tendencies (our emphasis) that are typical for the current shifts”. In other words, every man for himself, chaos and exacerbated individualism are not fundamental tendencies of the present period: from here, despite a formal agreement with this framework, we see, through a cloud of smoke, a concrete undermining of this framework via an empirical and evasive approach.

4. How to go forward in the debate?

We began, along with Ferdinand, in stressing the importance of this debate. For Ferdinand, it consists in a confrontation between theories and affirmations, Thus, he underlines in his contribution on analysing the emergence of China that “my thesis is the opposite one. The ruling circles in this country are using the pandemic crisis to restructure its economy, its army, its empire”. As Ferdinand recalls at the beginning of his text, a debate in the ICC has to develop with a method. Let’s recall what is meant by the marxist conception of debate:

“Contrary to the Bordigist current, the ICC has never considered marxism as an ‘invariant doctrine’, but as a living thought enriched by each important historical event. Such events make it possible either to confirm a framework and analyses developed previously, and so to support them, or to highlight the fact that some have become out of date, and that an effort of reflection is required in order to widen the ap­plication of schemas which had previously been valid but which have been overtaken by events, or to work out new ones which are capable of encompassing the new reality.

Revolutionary organisations and militants have the specific and fundamental responsibility of carrying out this effort of reflection, always moving forward, as did our predecessors such as Lenin, Rosa, Bilan, the French Communist Left, etc, with both caution and boldness:

- basing ourselves always and firmly on the basic acquisitions of marxism,

- examining reality without blinkers, and developing our thought ‘without ostracism of any kind’ (Bilan)” (IR 64, “Militarism and decomposition”).

In short, a debate does not consist in a free “confrontation of factually based arguments”, a free opposition between “hypotheses”, a juxtaposition of “theories”, “opinions” put forward by a “majority” and a “minority” as the comrade puts it on various occasions: («confrontation of factually based arguments”; “there are no elements in favour of the thesis that the proletariat is threatening Xi Jinping's regime (…), my thesis is the opposite one”; “we have to consider the theory behind the majority position and thus the present resolution »). The starting point of a debate is above all the framework shared by the organisation, adopted and made more precise by different reports from its International Congresses.

Consequently, the ICC’s approach is in no way a dogmatic one but simply applies the marxist method when it confronts new elements with the shared framework, acquired in common on the basis of the past debates in the history of the workers’ movement, in order to evaluate to what extent these new elements confirm or on the other hand put into question the acquired framework of analysis. In contrast, hidden behind the formally systematic approach of Ferdinand, who presents point by point his critical comments on the resolution on the international situation, adopted by the ICC at its last International Congress, lies the disarray of an approach which aims to befog the fact that the comrade is in reality tending to put the framework into question by starting off from a different implicit logic.

R. Havanais, November 2022 

An exchange relating to the significance of the current wave of workers’ struggles in Britain and their connection to the period of the Covid pandemic

First of all I agree with the ICC’s analysis of the current strikes in Britain and their potential as being “significant” along with the general perspectives arising from them. The proletariat fighting directly against the war in Ukraine within this is nowhere on the cards given that such a fight would imply a working class engaged in a revolutionary response – that would be a major overestimation of the present state of the working class. But what the working class can do is take the first steps to defend itself from attacks and this defence will by no means be linear and ever-rising and certainly involve defeats along the way. But the first thing that the working class has to do is to express itself and its struggle and this is what is happening in Britain now and pointing to further developments on a wider scale.

Within this overall agreement I want to defend a position that this particular strike wave had its immediate and unexpected genesis from the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and not as the “ICC presentation to the September meetings” says: “... the impact of the pandemic, which had interrupted the tendency towards the revival of combativity shown by the struggle against the pension reform in France and the strikes in different countries (USA, Italy, Iran, Spain”. I agree with the point about pension reform in France being a very positive point of the struggle and the development of struggles elsewhere but I defend the idea that the struggles of the working class in Britain at the very beginning of the pandemic were not an “interruption” but were in continuity with and advanced that struggle up to those that are breaking out now. The Covid-19 pandemic was a phenomenon of capitalist decomposition that really hurt the economy and the conditions of the working class and the proletariat responded to this rather than the pandemic “interrupting” or “paralysing” the class struggle.

Some context first:

The general analysis of the ICC, quite correctly in my opinion, strongly suggested that the pandemic, certainly on the back of its loss of perspective and identity, would further smother the class and any development of class struggle. That seemed to be a highly likely probability but it was to be proved manifestly incorrect by the actions of a significant minority of workers and the immediate outbreak of struggles in Britain. These were not massive by any means but they were widespread and virtually all of them had some significant and interesting features.

The context of Britain at the time was similar to all the major capitals: the culpability, negligence and incompetence of the ruling class around the pandemic, an attack on the conditions of the working class to the point of them and their loved ones being put in immediate danger through contracting the disease, a massive campaign of propaganda over the virus and an unprecedented beefing up of state repression in the democracies. On the latter a couple of examples will suffice: following some unrest by university students over issues relating to their suffering over the policing of the pandemic, Manchester, Durham (from memory) and other universities student buildings were enclosed with 2 metre high steel cages with private security guards patrolling the perimeters and generally given carte blanche to push the students around; secondly, a silent, candlelit vigil on Clapham Common for Sarah Everard, the young woman who had been recently raped and murdered by a Metropolitan policeman, was deemed illegal by the police who then manhandled and wrestled some of the attending women to the ground before handcuffing and arresting them under hastily passed laws (a jury recently cleared them).

Just like the “boys in blue”, the policemen on the shop floor, the trade unions, took up a similarly repressive approach dealing with what they thought was an acquiescent, submissive working class. As we’ve seen in so many serious threats to the national interest of the British state over the century, the trade unions came forward as its defenders and working with management began to organise the practicalities of maintaining work and production during the pandemic.

Trouble started immediately. There were refusals to work, arguments between workers and unions about being sent out in unsafe conditions with inadequate protective gear, rows about the dispensations and exemptions given out willy-nilly by the unions avoiding health considerations. Demonstrations, walk-outs and strikes started over the issue of working conditions – the bin strikes started here almost at the beginning of the pandemic and others, bus drivers, delivery drivers, etc., were taking their own actions along the same lines of unsafe working conditions. These were mostly unionised low-paid manual workers, old and young (from what I remember of the images), mostly male but many female workers and all sorts of skin colours. These rumbled on and off and, emboldened, there were some small strikes by un-unionised workers some of which ended up with union-recognised “negotiations” along with other strikes for wages and compensation that were not instigated by the unions. A bit later HGV drivers began to join the action – both unionised drivers and those recently unionised over disparate movements. The sort of lorry drivers’ “protests” that we saw after the Thatcher period were the petty-bourgeois campaigns of “owner-drivers” along the lines of the Gilets Jaunes but here lorry drivers joined the struggle as part of the class fighting for working conditions and wages.

One of the spurs to this militancy at the early stages of the pandemic was what we noted at the time as being the obviously intrinsic nature of the working class, particularly its “lower” levels, to capitalist production, distribution and the general running and well-being of society. Indeed, there were articles appearing in the Guardian, the Times and even the likes of the Daily Mail, saluting the workers with some envisaging a brave new world of equality and respect for the now cherished “lower orders” which would be the “fair” and natural outcome of the survival from the pandemic. Thus, and with the aim of responding to the class struggle, the bourgeoisie came up with its “heroes” campaign, a highly emotional campaign – particularly promoted by the BBC - aiming to isolate and halt the struggles, and this campaign was taken up the bourgeoisie internationally.

Also taken up internationally were similar elements of the class struggle in similar layers of the class for similar demands around working conditions and pay. Walkouts at Amazon started in March 2020 in Italy, in Britain Amazon workers struck against conditions and strikes at Amazon took off in the United States and around the world, certainly by mid-2020 over both pay and conditions.  The Economic Policy Institute (June 2020) said that 2018-19 in the United States there was already “an upsurge in major strike activity marking a 35-year high for the numbers of worker engaged in a major work stoppage”. The monthly data that the EPI was working on didn’t cover the pandemic, nor smaller strikes but the dynamic is clear. Rent strikes also followed, as did various small-scale student actions but the strikes that started in Britain at the beginning of the pandemic, despite the lack of bourgeois figures, were spreading throughout the world and continued to do so. 

I think that it’s very interesting that what certain economists call the “lower quartile” of the working class should be taking the lead, showing the example in the strikes and actions that broke out from the beginning of the pandemic; it took more than courage. I see it as an example of the “old mole” coming up, sniffing the air and not liking the way the wind was blowing and, more than that, acting upon it. It took more than courage to confront the repressive and ideological weight of the state and risk the physical dangers of the pandemic to come together, to assemble, discuss, decide and act as workers have done for generations in difficult circumstances. I don’t want to overestimate it and it’s certainly at the rudimentary end of the scale, but on the scale it was and it took an element of conscious reflection that marked a point for the class to build on.

While the strikes and actions of local authority workers, bus drivers, rubbish collection and like continue today, they have been joined (to some extent) by bigger battalions of train drivers and all sorts of railway staff, engineers, technicians, dock workers etc., who have made their feelings clear through overwhelming 90-odd percentage votes to strike while there have been wildcat stoppages that the unions have gone along with but pushed by the workers, and some of the picket lines have shown numbers far in excess of the legal maximum. This dynamic looks to continue but unlike the beginning of the pandemic, when the unions took on the management role as defenders of capitalist production, today the unions have put on their militant face even suggesting “joint actions” and “wider struggles” and are very much in control. Even with this and the ups and downs that will affect the struggle, the working class in Britain, followed by the world, have made a significant step forward.

Baboon, 13.9.22

ICC reply

Dear comrade,

We have received your letter about “The Covid 19 pandemic and the struggles of the working class”.

First of all we want to welcome your initiative to send us your comments with regard to the public meeting of September 2022.

We also welcome your effort to closely monitor the situation in Great Britain and your support for our analysis of the significance of the recent struggles in Britain.

We welcome the production of the text in which you explain your criticism of our analysis, since the confrontation of positions is the only way to develop clarity.

In the letter you write that you have some disagreement with the position developed in the presentation to the public meeting of September about“... the impact of the pandemic, which had interrupted the tendency towards the revival of combativity shown by the struggle against the pension reform in France”. You say that “the struggles of the working class in Britain at the very beginning of the pandemic were not an ‘interruption’ but were in continuity with and advanced that struggle up to those that are breaking out now. (…) These were not massive by any means but they were widespread and virtually all of them had some significant and interesting features”. The general analysis of the ICC that the pandemic “would further smother the class and any development of class struggle, (…) was to be proved manifestly incorrect by the actions of a significant minority of workers and the immediate outbreak of struggles in Britain”.

You are right that from the start of the pandemic courageous expressions of working class struggle took place in Europe; however they also remained dispersed and rather isolated, and ended fairly quickly because “in these conditions the confrontation remains fragile, poorly organised, largely controlled by the unions” (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! [9]), while the search for solidarity and coming together in general assemblies encountered rather rigorous restrictions, imposed by the pandemic.“Conditions of isolation and shut down pose a huge barrier to any immediate development of the struggle” (Covid-19: despite all the obstacles, the class struggle forges its future [10]) and as you write yourself: the struggles were limited to “a significant minority” of the working class.

At the beginning of the pandemic there was quite a significant break in the development of the class struggle: “The pandemic crisis was a blow to the class struggle” (Covid-19: despite all the obstacles, the class struggle forges its future [10]). In the UK “hymns to national unity are being sung by the media every day, based on the idea that the virus is an enemy which does not discriminate. (…) The reference to war, the spirit of the ‘blitz’ during World War 2 (…) is incessant.”(Covid-19: despite all the obstacles, the class struggle forges its future [10]).

In the first year and a half of the pandemic the social terrain was dominated by protests, not on the proletarian terrain but mainly on the bourgeois terrain, such as the Black Lives Matter, the protests of the anti-vaxxers, the MAGA and the assault on the Capitol in the US, the “culture wars”, the Brexit campaign, etc. And all the struggles of workers, including the ones you mention in your letter, took place completely in the shadow of these bourgeois protests.

The situation only began to change in the second half of 2021with, among others, an important strike movement in the US (Striktober), in Iran (the nationwide strike of the oil workers), in South Korea (a general strike with 800.000 workers), but even then only few strikes took place in Western Europe where the most experienced and concentrated battalions of the working class are gathered. There was only one significant strike in Spain (the metalworkers of Cadiz) and some days of action in Italy (organised by grass roots unions).

The real change in the situation, in the social atmosphere, only occurred this summer when the strikes in the UK started. It was for the first time since the strikes in France against the pension reforms in the winter of 2019-2020 that workers in a central country of capitalism expressed their discontent week after week, in various sectors of the economy against the sacrifices demanded. And even today this combativity has not yet really waned.

The resurgence of the struggle in the UK is all the more remarkable when you understand the difficulties the class had to overcome to achieve such a struggle:

• the deafening campaign of the British bourgeoisie about the need to defend democracy in Ukraine against the autocratic regime of Putin;
• the long-standing campaign about Brexit, which began around 2016, and which had also a big impact on the working class;
• the important defeat of the working class in the UK with the sabotage of the miners’ strike, from which the British working class had never really recovered.

Despite these huge difficulties, and this is what you don’t refer to in your letter, the workers in the UK, by their refusal to swallow the sacrifices imposed by the bourgeoisie,

• have put an end to a long period of passivity, suffering one attack after another
• have placed the struggle firmly and squarely back in the centre of the social situation
• have shown that suffering a defeat in the struggle is better than not fighting at all.

That’s why the ICC says that it is a class movement of international significance. We even see that the workers in other West-European countries are starting to follow the example of the working class in the UK.

In contrast to what you write, there was no real continuity between the movement against the pension reforms in France and the strikes, mentioned in your letter, which took place at the beginning of the pandemic. With the start of the pandemic and the nationwide lockdown the social situation had dramatically changed and the struggles in that period very quickly revealed their limitations. Moreover, the protest against the lockdowns in 2020, just as the pacifist campaigns after the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022, had a very negative impact on the working class and its capacity to defend its interests.

What you don’t seem to recognise fully is the impact of this acceleration of decomposition as we affirmed at our 24th Congress: “The Covid Pandemic that began in early 2020 strikingly confirmed the acceleration of the impact of the period of the social decomposition of capitalism. (…) The current Covid-19 pandemic is a distillation of all the key manifestations of decomposition, and an active factor in its acceleration. (…) The acceleration of decomposition poses important problems at the level of militancy, theory and organisational tissue" (Resolution on the international situation adopted by the 24th ICC Congress [11]).

In this framework the growth of irrationalism was one of the most spectacular attacks on the consciousness of the working class. That’s why we regularly “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” (Anti-lockdown protests: the trap of “partial” struggles [12]).

Furthermore, the ICC has always defended the view that the bourgeoisie will try to turn the effects of the decomposition against the working class. The pandemic, as a classic example of decomposition, has amply been used by the bourgeoisie to attack working class combativity and consciousness, as was clearly emphasised at the 24th Congress as well: “While the lockdowns have been motivated primarily by the bourgeoisie’s understanding that it had no other recourse to prevent the spread of the disease, it will certainly take advantage of the situation to enforce the atomisation and exploitation of the working class” (Resolution on the international situation adopted by the 24th ICC Congress [11]), in particular by developing all kind of ideological campaigns to exacerbate the effects of the pandemic, such as the highly emotional and perverse campaign about the ‘heroes’ of the NHS.

The pandemic thus led to a definite retreat in the class struggle. And the moment the working class slowly began to recover from this retreat in the second half of 2021, the war in Ukraine started, which again led to a feeling of impotence and paralysis within the class. The fact that the working class suffered these repeated blows emphasises the importance of the breakthrough brought about by the strike movement of this summer in the UK.

You say that you agree “with the ICC’s analysis of the current strikes in Britain and their potential as being ‘significant’ along with the general perspectives arising from them”. But if you don’t recognise the full impact of the retreat in the working class struggle because of the pandemic, something you tend to underestimate, and because of the war, which you don’t mention, you can speak several times of “the working class in Britain, followed by the world, have made a significant step forward”, but you will not be able to fully understand all the implications of the present strikes in the UK. The idea of a kind of unbroken continuity with the strikes in the beginning of the pandemic prevents you from properly comprehending the reality of a break with the previous period. 

Differences about the defeats of the 1980s

We can add that the position you defend in your letter is an expression of a much larger problem: the underestimation of the negative impact of the effects of decomposition on the working class struggle. Because we think that you underestimate not only the impact of the acceleration of decomposition of the past two years and a half, but also the setback caused by the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the campaign around the “death of communism” which accompanied this collapse. This historic event was far more decisive for the deep reflux in the combativity and consciousness of the international working class than the defeat of the miners’ strike in 1985.

There has been a discussion on the Forum of the ICC in which we already expressed our disagreement with the position, as put forward in your letter of 9 September, where you speak about “a working class that was already on its knees” after the defeat on the miners’ strike in the UK. Why? Because we do not share the position that with the defeat of the miners’ strike it was a done deal and any possible recovery of the struggle was excluded. The ICC does not defend the position, as you suggest in the same letter, that the struggle “was continuing to rise until the collapse of the Eastern Bloc”. However, while the defeat of the miners was a big blow against the working class in the UK, on the international level there were further attempts to develop radical, even anti-union struggles and in 1985 the outcome of this international strike wave was not a foregone conclusion, as you seem to imply.

For instance, only one year after the defeat of the miners’ strike, the biggest strikes in Belgium's history took place. “In this small country at the heart of industrialized Europe, in the middle of the largest concentration of workers in the world, the workers have multiplied their spontaneous strikes, breaking out of union directives, to respond to the acceleration and threat of new economic attacks from the government; that they have begun to try to unify the struggles, acting collectively without waiting for the unions, by sending massive delegations - such as the 300 Limburg miners who went to the public service workers' assembly in Brussels - in order to demand the unification of the fight.” (Massive strikes in Norway, Finland and Belgium: From dispersion toward unification [13])

With fraternal regards,

D for the ICC

June 2021: striking oil workers at a refinery

Introduction, February 2023

With this new introduction to the article below about the street demonstrations in Iran in reaction to the barbarity and repression of the existing regime, we want to further insist on the very significant danger that the working class will be led to abandon its own class terrain and pulled into this interclassist movement. This warning certainly is present in our article, but it’s not brought out sufficiently since this is the first message we needed to get across, given the reality of this danger of fractions of the working class being swayed by the sirens of the left and extreme left to join up with this vast protest in favour of democracy. This is all the more valid given that some parts of the class have indeed been involved in mobilisations on the terrain of the struggle against capitalist exploitation.  The title of the article, which is very general, also does not serve the need for this warning. We should also have earlier on explicitly closed the door to  any illusion that the working class in Iran has already constituted itself into a force capable of overthrowing capitalist rule in Iran, contrary to the demagogic appeals for “soviet power” emanating from the extreme left of capital.

**************************************************************************************************************

The widespread protests in Iran may have been sparked off by the murder in custody of a young woman arrested for “bad hijab” by the regime’s morality police, but they express a much deeper discontent throughout the Iranian population, with hundreds of thousands pouring onto the streets and confronting the police. As well as a generalised disgust with the Islamic Republic’s open and legal oppression of women, they are a reaction to spiralling inflation and shortages exacerbated by western-imposed sanctions against Iran and powerfully exacerbated by the heavy and long-standing weight of a war economy swollen by Iran’s relentless pursuit of its imperialist ambitions. They are a reaction, as well, to the sordid corruption of the ruling elite which can only maintain itself through brutal repression against all forms of protest, including the resistance of the working class to stagnating wages and wretched working conditions. The Iranian parliament has just passed new laws sanctioning executions for “political” crimes, and hundreds if not thousands of demonstrators have been killed or wounded by the state’s police and grotesquely misnamed “Revolutionary Guards”.

This reliance on direct repression is a sign of the weakness of the Mullahs’ regime, not of its strength. It’s true that the disastrous outcome of US interventions in the Middle East since 2001 has created a breach which has allowed Iranian imperialism to advance its pawns in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria, but the US and its more reliable allies (Britain in particular) have responded in kind, fuelling the Saudi military in the Yemen war and imposing crippling sanctions on Iran on the pretext of opposing its policy on the development of nuclear arms. The regime has become increasingly isolated, and the fact that it is now supplying Russia with drones to attack infrastructure and civilians in Ukraine will only sharpen western calls to treat Iran, alongside Russia, as a pariah state. Iran’s relationship with China is another reason why the western powers want to see it weakened even more than it is already. And at the same time, we are seeing a concerted effort by US and western European governments to instrumentalise the protests, notably by seizing on the most well-known slogan of the protests, “Women, Life Freedom”:

“On 25 September 2022, the French newspaper Liberation decorated its front page with the slogan ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ in Persian and French along with a photo of the demonstration. During a speech about the repression of protesters in Iran, a member of the European Union Parliament cut her hair while saying the words ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ on the floor of the European Union Parliament”[1]. Many other examples could be given.

What kind of revolution is on the agenda in Iran?

Given the weakness of the regime, there is much talk about a new “revolution” in Iran, particularly by leftists and anarchists of various kinds, the latter in particular talking about a “feminist insurrection”[2], while the more mainstream bourgeois factions stress a more “democratic” overturn, installing a new regime which would abandon its hostility to the US and its allies. But as we wrote in response to the whole mystification of the 1978-9 “revolution”: “the events in Iran serve to demonstrate that the only revolution on the agenda today, in the backward countries as much as in the rest of the world, is the proletarian revolution”[3]

In contrast to the 1917 revolution in Russia, which saw itself as part of the world revolution, the current protests in Iran are not being led by an autonomous working class, organised in its own unitary organs and able to offer a way forward to all the oppressed strata and categories of society. It’s true that in 1978-9 we saw glimpses of the potential of the working class to offer such a way forward: “Coming in the wake of workers’ struggles in different countries in Latin America, Tunisia, Egypt, etc, the strikes of the Iranian workers were the major, political element leading to the overthrow of the Shah’s regime. Despite the mass mobilisations, when the ‘popular’ movement - regrouping almost all the oppressed strata in Iran – began to exhaust itself, the entry into struggle of the Iranian proletariat at the beginning of October 1978, most notably in the petroleum sector, not only refuelled the agitation, but posed a virtually insoluble problem for the national capital”[4].

And yet we know that even then the working class was not politically strong enough to prevent the hi-jacking of the mass discontent by the Mullahs, supported by a host of “anti-imperialist” leftists. The international class struggle, although entering a second wave of workers’ movements since May 68 in France, was itself not at the level of raising the perspective of proletarian revolution on a world scale, and the workers in Iran – like those in Poland a year later –were not in a position to pose the revolutionary alternative on their own. Thus, the question of how to relate to the other oppressed strata remained unresolved. As our statement went on to say: “The decisive position occupied by the proletariat in the events in Iran poses an essential problem which must be resolved by the class if it is to carry out the communist revolution successfully. This problem centres on the relationship of the proletariat with the non-exploiting strata in society, particularly those without work. What these events demonstrate is the following:

• Despite their large numbers, these strata by themselves do not possess any real strength in society;
• Much more than the proletariat, such strata are open to different forms of mystification and capitalist control, included the most out-dated, such as religion;
• But in as much as the crisis also hits the working class at the same time as it assaults these strata with increasing violence, they can be a force in the struggle against capitalism, provided the proletariat can, and does place itself at the head of the struggle.

Faced with all the attempts of the bourgeoisie to channel their discontent into a hopeless impasse, the objective of the proletariat in dealing with these strata is to make clear to them that none of the ‘solutions’ proposed by capitalism to end their misery will bring them any relief. That it is only by following in the wake of the revolutionary class that they can satisfy their aspirations, not as particular – historically condemned  - strata, but as members of society. Such a political perspective presupposes the organisation and political autonomy of the proletariat, which means, in other words, the rejection by the proletariat of all political ‘alliances’ with these strata”.

Today, the mystifications leading the popular movement into an impasse are not so much religious ones – understandably so when the masses can easily see the brutal and corrupt face of a theocratic state - but more “modern” bourgeois ideologies like feminism, freedom and democracy. But if anything, there is an even greater danger of the working class being dissolved as a mass of individuals in an inter-classist movement which has no capacity to resist the recuperative schemes of rival bourgeois factions. This is underlined by the international context of the class struggle, where the working class is only just beginning to rouse itself after a long period of retreat in which the advancing decomposition of capitalist society has more and more eaten away at the proletariat’s sense of itself as a class.

Workers’ militancy and leftist deceptions

This is not to deny the fact that the proletariat in Iran has a long tradition of militant struggle. The events of 78-79 are there to prove it; in 2018-19 there were very widespread struggles involving the Haft Tappeh sugar workers, truckers, teachers, and others; in 2020-21 the oil workers began a series of militant nationwide strikes. At their height these movements gave clear signs of solidarity between different sectors faced with state repression and powerful pressures to get workers to return to work. In addition, faced with the overtly pro-regime nature of the official trade unions, there have also been important signs of workers’ self-organisation in many of these struggles, as we saw with the strike committees in 78-79, the assemblies and strike committees at Haft Tappeh and most recently in the oil fields. There is also no doubt that workers are discussing what to do about the current protests and there have been calls to go on strike in protest against state repression. And we have seen, for example in May 68, that indignation against state repression, even when not initially directed at workers, can be a kind of flashpoint for workers to enter onto the social scene– on condition that they do so on their own class ground and using their own methods of struggle. But for the moment these reflections in the class, this anger at the brutality of the regime, seems to be under the control of rank and file union bodies and leftists, who try to create a false link between the working class and the popular protests, by adding “revolutionary” demands to the slogans of the latter. As Internationalist Voice wrote:

“The phrase ‘woman, life, freedom’ is rooted in the national movement and has no class burden. This is why this slogan is raised from the far right to the far left, and its echoes can be heard from the bourgeois parliaments. Its components are not abstract concepts, but a function of capitalist production relations. Such a slogan makes working women the black army of the democracy movement. This issue becomes a problem for the left of capital, which employs the radical term ‘revolution,’ so they suggest that this slogan should be ‘saved’ by adding extensions. They have made the following suggestions:

• Woman, life, freedom, council administration (Trotskyists)
• Woman, life, freedom, socialism
• Woman, life, freedom, workers’ government”[5]

This call for council or soviet power has been circulating in Iran at least since 2018. Even if it originated in the real but embryonic efforts at self-organisation at Haft Tappeh and elsewhere, it is always dangerous to mistake the embryo for a fully grown human being. As Bordiga explained in his polemics with Gramsci during the factory occupations in Italy in 1920, workers’ councils or soviets represent an important step beyond defensive organs like strike committees or factory councils, since they express a movement towards a unified, political, offensive struggle of the working class, and the leftists who claim that this is on the agenda today are deceiving the workers, with the  aim of mobilising their forces into a struggle for a “left-wing” form of bourgeois rule, decorated “from below” by fake workers’ councils.   

The tasks of the communist left

As Internationalist Voice go on to say:

“Contrary to those on the left of capital, the task of communists and revolutionaries is not to save anti-dictatorship slogans, but to provide transparency regarding their origin and content. Again, in opposition to the demagogues on the left of capital, distancing themselves from such slogans and raising the class demands of the proletariat is a step in the direction of refining the class struggle”.

This is true even if it means that revolutionaries have to swim against the tide during moments of “popular” euphoria. Unfortunately, not all groups of the communist left seem to be immune from some of the more radical deceptions being injected into the protests. Here we can identify two worrying examples in the press of the Internationalist Communist Tendency. Thus, in the article “Workers’ Voices on the protests in Iran”[6], the ICT publishes statements on the protests by the Haft Tappeh Sugarcane Workers’ Syndicate, the Council for Organising Protests by Oil Contract Workers and the Coordinating Council of Trade Union Organisations of Iranian Teachers. No doubt these statements are a response to a real discussion going on in the workplaces about how to react to the protests, but the first and third of these bodies make no secret of being trade unions (even if they may owe their origins to genuine class organs, by becoming permanent they can only have  assumed a trade union function) and thus cannot play a role independent from the left of capital, which, as we have said, does not stand for the real autonomy of the class but seeks to use the power of the workers as an instrument for “regime change”. Parallel to this, the ICT also fails to distinguish itself from the leftist rhetoric about soviet power in Iran. Thus, the article “Iran: Imperialist Rivalries and the Protest Movement of ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’"[7], while providing some important material regarding the attempts of imperialist powers outside Iran to recuperate the protests, promises a follow up: “In our next note, we will argue for a different alternative: Bread, Jobs, Freedom – Soviet Power!’ We will deal with the workers' struggle and the tasks of the communists, and in the light of that, we will outline the internationalist perspective.”

But we are not in Petrograd in 1917, and to call for soviets in a situation where the working class is faced with the need to defend its most basic interests faced with the danger of dissolving into the mass protests, and to defend any initial forms of self-organisation from their recuperation by leftists and base unionists, is at best to severely misjudge the present level of the class struggle and at worst to lure workers into the mobilisations of the left of capital. The communist left will not develop its capacity to develop a real intervention in the class by falling for the illusion of immediate gains at the expense of fundamental principles and a clear analysis of the balance of class forces.

A recent article in Internationalist Voice points out that there are currently a number of workers’ strikes taking place in Iran at the same time as the street protests:

“In recent days, we have witnessed workers’ demonstrations and strikes, and the common feature of all of them has been the protest against their low level of wages and the defence of their living standards. The slogan of the striking Esfahan Steel Company workers, ‘enough with promises, our table is empty’, is a reflection of the difficult life conditions of the entire working 3 class. A few examples of labour strikes in recent days that had or have the same demand are as follows:  Esfahan Steel Company workers’ strike; Hunger strike of the official employees of oil, gas and petrochemical refining and distribution companies; Esfahan City Centre complex workers’ strike; workers’ strike at the Abadeh cement factory in the province of Esfahan; Damash mineral water workers’ strike in the province of Gilan; Pars Mino Company workers’ strike; Cruise industrial company workers’ strike; National steel group workers’ protest”[8].

It seems that these movements are still relatively dispersed and while democrats and leftists are increasing their calls for a “general strike”, what they mean by this has nothing to do with a real dynamic towards the mass strike, but would be a mobilisation controlled from above by the bourgeois opposition and mixed up with the strikes of shop-keepers and other non-proletarian strata. This only emphasises the need for workers to stay on their own terrain and to develop their class unity as a minimum basis for blocking the murderous repression of the Islamic regime.

Amos, November 2022

There has been uproar in the UK about how the government has handled the refugee issue. More and more refugees are entering the country, daring to cross the Channel in rickety boats, over 40,000 people so far this year. While waiting for a decision on their asylum applications, these refugees are locked up in overcrowded detention centres under the most appalling conditions. And the recent agreement between the UK and France, aimed at preventing further illegal crossings by increasing surveillance at French ports and beaches, will not solve the problem. Even if other and safer routes are opened up, it will not prevent dangerous crossings from continuing and more lives being lost.

A world-wide phenomenon, running out of control

This terrible development does not limit itself to the UK, it’s a problem all over the world. According to UNHCR reports, there are nearly 30 million refugees adrift each year, the vast majority of whom flee to Western Europe or North America. The main reason is that capitalism is making large parts of the planet uninhabitable through countless imperialist wars, escalating gang violence, and life-threatening conditions for entire populations because of droughts, floods and cyclones resulting from accelerating climate change.

The flood of refugees is one of the effects of capitalism’s decomposition, which rebounds like a boomerang on the "western world" and which the bourgeois state tries to control mainly through institutionalised violence. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, more walls, more barbed wire fences and other barriers have been erected in the world than ever before[1], but even these have not been able to stem the tide of victims of the effects of capitalism’s inexorable decay.

The situation in refugee camps and detention centres is poignant around the world. A number of these barracks can well stand comparison with concentration camps (an invention of the European nations used mainly in imperialist wars). The violence of the state repression to keep the refugees in line has an impact on the mutual relations within the camps and makes the situation downright unsafe there, above all for women and children.

Because of those miserable circumstances, people who have been housed in these centres have staged many protests, not least in “democratic” countries that pride themselves on defending “human rights”. One of the more recent protests took place on Saturday 6 August 2022 in France, when a real revolt broke out in the largest administrative detention centre, Mesnil-Amelot, near Charles de Gaulle airport. “The prisoners of the two detention centres (CRA 2 and CRA 3) mobilised for several hours by setting fire to the buildings that lock them up, by climbing on the roofs, by trying to escape and by resisting the police.” The response to the revolt was, as usual, violent state repression. “It was the umpteenth rebellion that shakes this prison for undocumented migrants, after the fire of January 2021, the hunger strike of March 2021, the collective escape of July 2021, the protests of December 2021, the hunger strike of April 2022.”[2]

Another British crisis

The detention centres in the UK cannot handle the growing influx of refugees. In 2021, the UK received 48,540 asylum applications from main applicants only (i.e. children and other dependents not included). This was 63% more than the previous year and the highest number for almost two decades[3]. The Covid-19 pandemic reduced the number of asylum seekers arriving by air routes in 2020 and 2021. However, during this time the number of people arriving in small boats across the Channel rose substantially. The total number of migrants who have crossed the English Channel this year has at the time of writing well surpassed 40,000.

The centres in GB, as in most of the other western countries, are overcrowded. An example of this is the Manston processing centre in Kent, which was designed to hold 1,600 people for around 24 hours for processing, but was revealed to be housing 4,000 people, sometimes for more than a month. As a result there was an outbreak of diphtheria this month, leading to the closure of the centre. But the ruling class does not hesitate to use the distress of the refugees for its own ideological ends. One of the slogans of the supporters of Brexit was “taking back control of our borders”, but recently Home Secretary Suella Braverman characterised the UK's migration system as “broken”, claiming that “illegal immigration is out of control”.

Present-day capitalism is a highly destructive system and hostile to human life. Refugees are seen as collateral damages to be handled efficiently, with the least effort and cost, without the least concern for their personal needs. To that end, the states have set up a whole bureaucratic machine aimed at returning arriving refugees as soon as possible to some desolate place. In the case of the UK the plan is now to send them to Rwanda, allegedly to process their asylum applications, in reality to abandon them to their fate in a country which has a notoriously poor “human rights” record.

A campaign to divert the attention from the class struggle

The bourgeoisie’s migrant policies are always accompanied by sordid campaigns that demonise refugees by portraying them as people who profit from “our” wealth, take “our” jobs, live off “our” social benefits, in one word: parasites. Braverman herself has talked about “an invasion on our southern coast”. As a side effect of such campaigns the refugees in the UK, locked in several state-provided and private-run accommodations, have been victims of at least 70 violent attacks since 2020. 

In response to this relentless policy of the state the left always cries blue murder about the rights of the refugees to apply for asylum, even about the rights to be treated as human beings. But this a deception, a trap, since it starts from the idea that the non-exploiting layers have rights within capitalism. Revolutionary workers know better: as an exploited class we have no rights in this system and neither do the vast majority of the oppressed layers of society.

The refugee crisis is also used against the revival of the working class struggle in the UK[4].On the one hand, as workers in struggle begin to recover their class identity, it appeals to a sense of national identity under threat from foreign invaders. On the other hand, it enables the liberal and left factions of the bourgeoisie to shift the focus from the struggle for higher wages and the most basic living conditions to the protest against the inhumane treatment of refugees. The left thus tries to lure the workers from their own terrain into a "democratic" defence of the civil rights of refugees.

But in essence, the left is appealing to the state just as much as the right. While the right appeals to the state to protect the British people from the wave of refugees threatening to flood the country, the left appeals to that same state to act less arbitrarily against the refugees, by offering safe routes and acting against the illegal routes used by people traffickers and smugglers.

The state is there to protect the interests of the ruling class in the global framework of the defence of the national economy. The working class and other exploited layers in capitalist society cannot expect any favour from it. In the same sense the state does not defend the interests, or even the lives, of refugees. The working class must indeed express its solidarity with all the oppressed, all the wretched of the earth, but not by getting sucked up into bourgeois campaigns for "democratic rights". But by taking forward the struggle to defend its own interests as a class it can begin to include proletarian refugees in its struggles against this miserable society. 

Dennis, 2022-11-24

The reader’s contribution published here is about a recent, unprecedented event in the history of British politics: Truss resigning after only 44 days and after several tumultuous weeks, making her the shortest-serving prime minister in the history of the United Kingdom. In that short amount of time one minister had had already been sacked and another (Home Secretary Braverman) withdrew after expressing her no-confidence in Truss, but that was not the real reason for her resignation. In the background was a much more important issue and that was the government’s incompetent financial-economic policy in face of an obvious rise in class struggle in the UK, a policy that was strongly disapproved by the US. The comrade’s contribution shows very well how the US then put pressure on the UK government by financial manipulations and blackmail in cooperation with the IMF, with the aim of forcing it to change its policy, or better, to resign in favour of a new government, led by Sunak.

This example, as well as the different historical examples in the contribution, shows that the “special relationship” between the UK and the US - and there should not be the slightest ambiguity about this - is characterised by ruthless force in which the policy of the stronger imperialism is “to bring and maintain the weaker partner in line”. The bourgeoisie of the UK, as the weaker partner, has understood the message and has backed down.

We support the contribution because of the clarification it is able to bring in a period which is determined by the global free-for-all, in which events are more and more unpredictable. It meets the needs of the working class to make a correct assessment of the strength and weaknesses of its historical enemy, the bourgeoisie, and therefore contributes to the development of clear perspectives for the working class struggle.

***

The pressure is on all the major capitals from the deepening of the economic crisis, the effects of decomposition and the fall-out from the war in Ukraine. But more so than many others, Britain, the fifth (or sixth) world economy has been particularly hit, not least through the self-imposed and completely irrational Brexit decision (“taking back control”) which has left this already weakened country extremely vulnerable to further economic shocks and instability. The “Tory crisis”[1] has further exacerbated Britain’s difficulties, putting into power, as it did, two completely unsuitable characters and cliques – Johnson and Truss – that could only further increase the problems faced by British capital in a much more uncertain world. The Conservative Party, the oldest and most stable of all the democratic parties, has been particularly inept faced with crises and global problems and its reputation for economic competence has taken a severe knock. Given the continuing deep-seated problems in the ranks of the Conservatives it is difficult to see the Tory party coming back from this into a relative coherence by the next election, and the bourgeoisie look to be preparing the Labour Party for power – which is maybe something it did not want to do just yet.

The factor of the class struggle

If the general publicity around the position of the British economy – the IMF warnings, the fall in government bonds and the surging price of borrowing - has been centred on the question of money-markets, borrowing rates and so-on, then there was something much more fundamentally related to the class struggle from the original outcry and warnings from the USA via the IMF to the British bourgeoisie; while the economic aspects are undoubtedly important, what also spooked the IMF and world leaders most was that, through its tax-cutting budget “for the rich” and its promotion of discredited “trickle-down” economics, the British bourgeoisie (as represented by the Truss cult) was flinging down a direct challenge to the working class in Britain. Behind all the original warnings and statements from the IMF regarding the British plans was the concern that this could be incendiary for the class struggle in Britain, in a situation where the IMF and world leaders could clearly see a profound resurgence of workers’ struggle in Britain, posing a threat for Western Europe and the English-speaking countries of the world where significant strikes are also breaking out.

Such a frontal attack from a relatively weak bourgeoisie against a working class that had become an example of proletarian combativity alarmed all the other major western powers, and the first utterances of the IMF expressed this with its talk about the dangers of increased “inequality” and the like (as if they cared about that). President Biden led the charge; immediately stating that the British “mini-budget” with its tax cuts for the wealthy was a “mistake” and that a British climbdown was “predictable”, “because I wasn’t the only one who thought it was a mistake”. Their fears confirmed the reality of the analysis of the ICC concerning the importance of the workers’ struggle in Britain for English-speaking countries (US, Canada, Australia and South Africa) along with the countries of Western Europe.

So, if the economic aspects of the Truss government’s lunatic economic policies have perturbed certain global issues relating to debt and so on, the political and social aspects – the class struggle – has been a very important factor in the USA pulling Britain back into some sort of line, and in that respect it is a line that many European governments could go along with.

The US unleashes an attack on the British economy

The class struggle was a very important factor in the actions of the IMF against the British economy over concerns about a particularly dumb section of the bourgeoisie facing a militant and active working class; this is not at all about any concern for the living conditions of the working class but an expression of the real concern about the “contagion” of class struggle spreading wider. But, following this, we can’t leave out the prime role of the US administration in bringing the UK to heel politically and getting its economy under tighter control, meaning that the Truss government had to go, a requirement which the British bourgeoisie complied with almost immediately by rigging the party’s vote to ensure that Sunak was elected PM and that the vote didn’t go to the membership, who would have voted overwhelmingly for Johnson and his populist clique to come back again.

Against its foes and potential rivals, we’ve seen the propensity of the Biden administration to sow the most terrible chaos in order to defend the imperialist interests of the USA (mainly in continuity with previous administrations). Thus, China’s main hubs for its “Silk Road” have been systematically destroyed by direct and indirect American action: Afghanistan, Ethiopia/Tigray, Ukraine and Sri Lanka. But when it comes to its “oldest and most trusted” ally, Britain, American imperialism can be no less hostile and ruthless. The US action in what The Independent newspaper called “the political and economic maelstrom that followed Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwartang’s mini-budget” provoked increased British borrowing costs, increased government debt, increased interest rates and a bond market in free-fall. An immediate knock-on effect was that UK pension funds, holding around £1 trillion, has had to be rescued by the Bank of England in order to stop it going into a “doom loop”.

It’s true that there is a very close relationship between American and British intelligence services (and probably a great rivalry) and this could be particularly more so now given that Israel maintains some ambiguities within the current free-for-all of international relations, intensified by the decomposition of capitalism, that are not in the interests of the US. But while there is a strong relationship through intelligence and language, the history of the British/American “special relationship” has been one of ruthless aggression by the latter, containing actions destined to bring and maintain the weaker partner in line. It was the US administration that, along with and through the IMF, led the run on the British bond market, forcing the bourgeoisie to abandon its recently-elected Truss faction and her backers and go for Sunak, who was always the favoured candidate of the US with the unreliable and untrustworthy Johnson out of the way. Through the manipulation of the British bond market and its borrowing costs, the IMF was deploying the means put forward by the US administration in order to blackmail the British political regime in the interests of US imperialism.

Britain’s “special relationship” with the US is one of imperialist force

The whole history of the UK/US “special relationship” has been one based on the most ruthless plunder of the former by the latter. It was only in 2006 that Britain paid its last instalment of the war debt it owed to America – which amounted to about a trillion dollars in today’s money. The US billed Britain for everything: arms, war-planes, the factories to build them, the land purchased to build the factories; the same for new naval vessels (along with some rusting hulks), food, the cost of the transportation of everything right down to the cost of the saxophones played by US jazz bands entertaining US troops on British bases. Every last cent was itemised. During the period from World War I, when the US began to replace Great Britain as the world’s major imperialist power, the US has plundered from Britain goods, monies, materials and territories. Particularly profitable and strategic territories were blatantly seized and the British bourgeoisie has had to swallow it all through clenched teeth.

During the Suez crisis in the mid-50’s, when the British disregarded US strictures not to invade Egypt, the Eisenhower administration set in motion a run on British government bonds along with other financial measures in order to punish Britain (and France which was part of the Suez invasion force) for its actions. The Conservative Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, was forced to resign soon afterwards as the British bourgeoisie, grudgingly but pragmatically, accepted US “order”. The “Eisenhower Doctrine” of 1957 established US domination of the Middle East and relegated Britain and France to bit players. Just as Truss’s chancellor Kwarteng was summoned to the IMF to hear the strictures of the State Department in person (while it was taking measures to undermine the British economy), past Labour governments have also seen a couple of chancellors summoned in this way in order to be told what to do in order to comply with US interests.

While links between US and British security services have remained strong, those between joint military activities of the two forces have been more fractious, hostile even as during the war in ex-Yugoslavia (1991-2001) when Britain refused US diktats and supported military factions opposing those of the US. The British army’s debacles and eventual defeats in Helmand, Afghanistan and Basra, Iraq, dressed up and sold as “victories”, drew nothing but scorn from the US military.

Ireland: a continuing and major bone of contention between British and American imperialism

The Trump administration fed and encouraged the Brexit “project” as well as the right-wing figures of the Conservative Party and likes of Nigel Farage and his xenophobic populism. But Trump couldn’t undermine the US position on Ireland, both for reasons of domestic politics and the interests of US imperialism. This, and its relationship to any trade deal with the UK, will remain the same under any Democratic or Republican administration. As punishment for Brexit Britain has remained firmly “at the back of the queue” (President Obama, April, 2016) for any trade deal and remained so just as much under Trump. The Brexit decision to leave the EU, and related to it, British manoeuvres to undermine the US-imposed Irish “peace process”, continues to exasperate the US administration and aggravate tensions.

Recent statements by British officials (after the economic meltdown caused by US economic manipulations) regarding talks with the EU about Ireland have apparently taken a more “positive” turn, reflecting I think renewed State Department pressure on Britain over the issue of the Northern Ireland Protocol. But the British bourgeoisie continues to prevaricate, not least through its Unionist factions, and is now proposing fresh elections for “power sharing”, which everyone agrees will end up in exactly the same blockage on a Northern Ireland Assembly that resulted from last May’s election.

Beyond these sordid manoeuvres - the “experiments” of a weakened British regime, the response of the USA to bring its “trusted ally” back into line - the ravages of capitalist barbarism and decomposition continue to bite and the ruling class everywhere will saddle the working class with the bill; and through its policies regarding “the return to austerity” (as if we ever left it) the workers will be faced by the ever-rising costs of a capitalism in crisis and decay.

Despite the worst being avoided by the bourgeoisie with the unceremonious dumping of the Truss clique and its replacement by Sunak under American pressure, the Tory Party continues to tear itself apart, not least with stories coming from British intelligence about the weakness of security among Tory ministers which can only lead to further fragility within the Conservative Party and greater concern from US imperialism.

Baboon, November 1st 2022