The 2022 football World Cup has expressed the irrationality and rottenness of the capitalist world to the highest degree. The bourgeoisie is well aware that this time the competition openly reeked of corruption, as revealed by the "Qatargate" scandal involving a vast network of corruption within the honourable institution of the European Parliament, subsidised by Qatar and Morocco (one of whose vice-presidents, a "socialist" to boot, was imprisoned after the discovery of the money; €600,000 in cash was discovered in her home) or the strong suspicion that the president of the Union of European Football Associations, Michel Platini, received substantial kickbacks for having supported Qatar's bid to host the World Cup, where the smell of the bodies of thousands of workers who died on the construction sites still lingers! But our rulers prefer to forget about it quickly and rave about the "good organisation of this World Cup". An expression, probably, of their cynical "positive attitude" in the midst of an economic slump! The bourgeoisie can never deny itself an opportunity to stir up chauvinism and nationalism, even if it means rolling in the mud!

Stadiums built on workers' blood

The terrible working conditions of the workers who built the stadiums, metros, housing and the new town of Lusail have been known for a long time: forced labour, prohibition of eating or drinking on the construction site, confiscation of identity documents, wages paid piecemeal (or not at all), rotten and overcrowded housing, imprisonment in the stadiums or other workplaces, prohibition to leave the country or to change jobs...

It is impossible to know the exact number of serious and fatal workplace accidents, as Qatar does everything possible to hide the figures. But investigations by The Guardian, the BBC and Amnesty International clearly indicate that thousands, if not tens of thousands of workers from Bangladesh, India, Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Sudan have died in these labour camps. To top it all off, a few weeks before the World Cup, the workers were evicted en masse from their homes to make room for the fans and to "cleanse" the neighbourhoods of the barbaric reality of sport and capitalist exploitation.

This competition is also a staggering environmental disaster. At a time when the planet is warming up dramatically and water resources are becoming scarce, threatening entire regions with ecological disaster, the bourgeoisie has found no better way than to build eight air-conditioned stadiums, each consuming 10,000 litres of water per day, for a deplorable sports competition!

The hypocrisy of the great "democracies”

Faced with the indignation caused by the barbarity of the Qatari bourgeoisie, part of the Western press and left-wing parties were forced to denounce the horror of the situation, as well as the retrograde character of the regime in place. As usual, we are told that only Qatar and the corrupt football governing bodies (i.e. part of the bourgeoisie) are responsible for this disaster. But the real culprit is capitalism!

The "democratic" countries have also have both feet in barbarism! Because the construction companies, the logistics or transport companies are French, German, Chinese, Dutch, Belgian... The president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, cynically answered the criticisms and accusations coming from European countries: "How many of these European companies that earn millions and millions in Qatar or in other countries of the region (billions every year), how many of them have considered the rights of migrant workers? I have the answer: none, because if they change the legislation, it means less profit”. For once, he cannot be accused of lying! The "democratic" countries thus participated in the World Cup without flinching, and not only in terms of sport. Homophobia, archaic regimes, slavery and death do not count. The juicy profits are worth a few thousand workers' lives. If the Emir of Qatar and his clique of despicable mafiosi inspire only disgust, far from being an aberration, they are only an expression of the sordid reality of capitalist exploitation!

Faced with imperialist stakes, football is not just a "game

The organisation of the World Cup in Qatar was decided in 2010 by the democratic countries, with the strong support of France and the other Western powers, all in an atmosphere of shameless corruption. For these sporting events have nothing to do with the "brotherhood between peoples" so much vaunted by the bourgeoisie. France, for example, supported Qatar and its desire to appear as a respectable regional power, because it has important interests there.

But immediately after the vote, accusations of corruption multiplied, revealing the imperialist stakes and tensions behind the football "party". It was the British media that accused FIFA of corruption. It was the American justice system that investigated and convicted officials in the various international football organisations. US President Barack Obama even openly criticised the choice of Qatar, because the US itself wanted to become the host country for 2022 and reap the revenues and prestige!

Now that the energy crisis is raging in Europe following the war in Ukraine, it is even more important to maintain good relations with Qatar, which is a major producer of liquefied natural gas. It is no coincidence that Germany and China have just concluded agreements to import Qatari gas.

But there is one thing that the various bourgeoisies will not shy away from: the frenzied nationalist propaganda that each of these competitions generates! With its flags, its national anthems, its supporters bellowing their hatred of the opponent, the World Cup is a new opportunity to unleash a huge campaign to make the workers believe that uniting behind the national flag, the flag of the interests of the bourgeoisie, is just a harmless festival of fun.

LC

The tremendous intensification of the military chaos provoked by the war in Ukraine; the Covid 19 pandemic and its millions of victims; the climatic catastrophes descending with redoubled violence on the four corners of the planet; the economic crisis, undoubtedly one of the worst in the history of capitalism, sinking whole sections of the proletariat into precariousness and misery... All these manifestations of barbarism, chaos and misery demonstrate the irreparable impasse facing capitalism.

The 2020s will therefore see an unprecedented increase in convulsions, disasters and the worst forms of suffering in all regions of the world and on all continents. It is the very existence of human civilisation that is openly threatened! How can we explain this accumulation and aggregation of so many catastrophes?

For all that, the workers' struggles which have been developing in Britain since this summer show that the working class is beginning to react, albeit with great difficulty, and is refusing to suffer the attacks of the bourgeoisie on its working and living conditions. It is by developing struggles on this terrain that the working class will give itself the means to rediscover its class identity and will be able to create an alternative to the deadly spiral into which capitalism is plunging humanity.

Essential reading for the discussion: https://en.internationalism.org/content/17287/acceleration-capitalist-de... [1]

You are invited to discuss these questions in ICC public meetings that will be held online on

Saturday 28 January at 11am GMT and

Sunday 29 January at 5pm GMT

Write to the ICC at [email protected] [2] stating which meeting you want to participate in and we will send you the link.

Along with the nurses and the ambulance drivers, the university workers are one of the more recent sectors of the working class to join the current strike wave. In London on November 30, on the third day of strike action called by the University and College Union, there was a rally at Kings Cross station in London which the UCU billed as their biggest ever demonstration. Several thousand workers from up and down the country took part.

Despite the fact that over the last few months we have seen strikes in numerous sectors – trains, buses, underground, post, Amazon, health, schools in Scotland, in the North Sea oil fields and elsewhere - the trade unions have in general been very cautious about calling for unitary demonstrations in major cities. So the fact that the UCU invited leaders from a number of other unions involved in the strikes to speak at this rally – Dave Ward from the Communication Workers Union, Christina McAnea, general secretary of Unison, and in particular Mick Lynch of the RMT – is a sign that the unions are compelled to put on a show of working class solidarity and unity. Charged by the capitalist state with the vital task of keeping the class struggle under control, with taking the temperature within the working class, they recognise that they are faced with a growing understanding among “the membership” not only that the working class exists but that all workers are under attack and need to resist together.

This appeal to a recovering sense of class identity was most clearly expressed in the speech by Mick Lynch, who was given star billing at the rally, second only to Jo Grady, the UCU general secretary. The whole tenor of his speech was that workers cannot rely on the politicians to defend them – he said that when people asked why wasn’t the RMT affiliated to the Labour Party, his response was “why are we still shackled to the Labour Party?” – and that only the united, militant action of ordinary workers, overcoming all divisions between sectors, between male and female, between races and religions, could guarantee victory. And, of course, this unity could only be achieved through the trade unions, aka “the organised working class”[1].

It was significant that the biggest cheers from the audience came in response to these calls for unity in the struggle. The university workers at the rally no longer see themselves as a privileged elite of intellectuals, but as part of the working class, faced with job insecurity (the university sector being one of the pioneers of the “gig economy” with the majority of teachers and researchers on short term and unstable contracts), stagnating wages and rising prices. All this was played up again in Jo Grady’s closing speech.

It is certainly important that the university workers at this rally were coming together to express their solidarity with each other and with other sectors fighting for essentially the same demands. But it comes as no surprise that the organisers of this rally demanded nothing from the participants except to cheer in the right places and to go home when it was all over. Not a hint of workers coming together to discuss, to assess where they are in the struggle, to make concrete proposals for uniting with other sectors. The message of the unions boils down to this: leave it to your official representatives and all will be well.

But these “official representatives”, who in reality “represent” the capitalist state in the ranks of the workers, are precisely those who are keeping workers divided by calling them out sector by sector, on different days, and in different parts of the country. In a number of cases, the strikes are divided even within the sector: for example, in the post, there have been different days of action for sorters, drivers, delivery workers… The unions’ argument in favour of this tactic is that by acting in this way, workers can keep pressure on the bosses and not lose too much in their wage packets. And of course, no workers can afford to sacrifice their wages lightly in a time of deepening economic crisis. But what the union “tacticians” hide is that the ruling class fears, above all, the threat of truly massive, unified actions by the working class, and it is this threat which is the only factor that will force them to withdraw, at least temporarily, their assault on living standards.

And it is these “official representatives” who make sure that massive, unified actions do not break out by policing the state’s so-called “anti-union” laws, which are in fact laws designed to stop workers from struggling outside the unions, from making decisions on strikes in general assemblies, not ballots, from sending “secondary pickets” to other workplaces to call them out on strike, from taking strike action on the spot instead of giving bosses and the government weeks of warning.

And finally, it is with their false promises of victory that the unions systematically hide the reality of the situation facing the working class: a capitalist system at the extreme end of its tether, offering a future of poverty and destruction, where workers’ economic victory in the struggle can only be short-lived, and where the true victory is the growing capacity of the working class to unite and to recognise that the real aim of this unity is the overthrow of the dominant class and its dying order.

Amos, December 2022