Once again, "Enough is enough" was the undertone for the days of action that took place in Brussels on 13 December 2024 and 13 January 2025 against the 'austerity plans' that are on the negotiating table in the talks about forming a new federal government, which have been dragging on for six months now. Earlier these plans  were revealed through media 'leaks'; today they are no longer a public secret. The unions speak of the "most drastic measures of the past 80 years". The planned attacks would affect all sections of the working class. While workers in private companies will be laid off en masse (27,000 by 2024) and automatic wage indexation will come under attack, the new national government also wants to axe social security spending, including unemployment benefits and pensions. To crown it all, it wants to implement a two per cent downsizing of the total public workforce and make work even more precarious and flexible for all workers.

During that first day of action, with some 10,000 demonstrators, it was mainly trade union delegates who mobilised (and mainly from the Walloon region), this scenario took on a very different dynamic on 14 January. Instead of the 5,000 to 10,000 demonstrators originally envisaged by the unions, more than 30,000 workers from the various regions of the country and from a growing number of sectors eventually turned out for the demonstration. But also 47,000 teachers in the Flemish region went on strike, which was a historically high number. Work stoppages also took place at the railway, public transport, recycling, postal services and many other public services. A new day of action was announced for 13 February, now under the slogan “for public services and purchasing power”.

But even before these two days of action, another rally had taken place in November that also mobilised far more workers than anticipated. At that health and welfare workers' demonstration on 7 November, the turnout was also three times higher than expected: more than 30,000 workers. In addition, on 26 November there was also a widely supported strike by French-speaking education personnel (Wallonia and Brussels region) against what Roland Lahaya, the secretary-general of the Walloon education union CSC-Enseignement called "a declaration of war". Under the slogan "teaching yes, bleeding no!", the strikers first and foremost rejected the announced cut in education by the already appointed Walloon government, a measure that puts permanent appointments at risk, with significant consequences for staff pensions. On 27 and 28 January, there will be another two days of strikes and demonstrations. And the education union under pressure is considering announcing an indefinite strike.

These demonstrations, strikes, protests confirm the increased militancy worldwide, which we have reported on many times in our press in recent years. The escalation of imperialist tensions and growing chaos, the fragmentation of world commerce, rising inflation and energy costs are so many signs of an unprecedented aggravation of the economic crisis. In all countries, the bourgeoisie is thus trying to push the consequences of the economic crisis onto the workers. Belgium is no exception.

Unions aim to prevent mobilisations gaining momentum

The bourgeoisie is well aware that these plans would provoke reactions in large sections of the class, and not only in the public service sector. It is aware that internationally the working class has already shown that it has overcome decades of declining struggles. That is why the bourgeoisie attaches importance to being well prepared and also putting in place the necessary forces to absorb and divert the expected resistance.

The unions saw the concern and discontent among the workers growing by the week and did not remain passive about preventing the discontent from manifesting itself in "uncontrolled" actions. On Sunday 8 December 2024, Ann Vermorgen (president of the ACV union) declared on television that the joint unions had decided to organise a day of action every month on the 13th in the coming period. This was followed by action days in December and January where the unions tried to limit mobilisations to certain sectors (especially education) and certain demands (pension reform in education).  The unions are using established tactics: the isolation and division of different sectors and regions in a series of days of action will eventually exhaust the will to fight.

However, the strength and dynamism of the 13 January mobilisation was such that it developed in other sectors and all regions and surprised the unions themselves. Indeed, the anger clearly shows that this goes beyond just one particular measure or announced ‘reform’. It is an expression of more general discontent and indignation and the reality of the return of militancy in the face of the rising cost of living, deteriorating working conditions, job insecurity and the spectre of falling into poverty.

 For years, we have been told that capitalism is the only possible system and that democracy is the best and most perfect political institution imaginable. These mystifications have no other aim than to demobilise the working class, to isolate workers and reduce them to powerlessness, to cut them off from the strength and solidarity of their class. However, despite incessant appeals to rely on the ballot box in order to act as a ‘counter-weight’ to austerity, alongside the calls to ‘defend democracy’ against the shameful discourse of the populists, the workers are rediscovering the path of struggle, the need to fight together on their own class terrain. It’s also significant that this dynamic of developing class struggles is taking place in the context of a war and constant increases in military spending which will have to be paid for by the working class.

Solidarity and unity are the strengths of our struggle

In order to really parry the attacks on our living conditions the struggle must be developed from the broadest possible basis by uniting all workers, regardless of the company, institution, sector or region in which they work. All workers are "in the same boat. All these groups are not separate movements but a collective cry: we are a city of workers - blue-collar and white-collar, unionised and non-unionised, immigrants and natives," as a striking teacher in Los Angeles in March 2023 put it. The strikes in Belgium are fully part of the movement which have been taking place over the last three years in other countries, notably Britain, the USA and France.

But it’s vital that the working class, in Belgium as elsewhere, is able to overcome certain weaknesses which appeared in the recent struggles:

• In 2022-23 in Britain, where workers from companies in different sectors, sometimes less than 100 metres apart, made no attempts to break the strict policy of picketing your own workplace alone, rather than seek solidarity and unite their struggles.
• In 2023 in France, where workers participated en masse in 14 ‘days of action’ against the government's pension plans, but failed to broaden the struggle to include strikes in companies and offices.

In Belgium, the bourgeoisie and its unions never cease spreading the poison of division: between the public and the private sectors, as between workers on either side of the language barrier. This is a traditionally difficult hurdle to overcome[1], but not impossible as we saw on 23 April 2023 when the French-speaking and Dutch-speaking teachers demonstrated in unison in Brussels. The strikes of 1983 and 1986 also brought together hundreds of thousands of workers from the public and private sectors and from the regions of Wallonia, Bruxelles and Flanders[2]. Drawing the lessons of past struggles is more than ever indispensable if we are to arm ourselves against the traps laid by the bourgeoisie.

Our strength is unity, solidarity in struggle! Not fighting separately but uniting the struggle together in one and the same movement; going on strike and sending mass delegations to join up with the other workers in the struggle; organising general assemblies to discuss together on the needs of the struggle; uniting around common demands. It is this dynamic of solidarity, expansion and unity that has always shaken the bourgeoisie throughout history.

Lac, 21.01.2025

 

The ravages of three years of war in Ukraine, like the unspeakable barbarity of the fifteen-month Israeli-Palestinian conflict which has set the whole of the Middle East ablaze, are a terrible illustration of the wars engendered by the period of the decomposition of capitalism.

Whatever truces or ceasefires may be concluded in the context of future imperialist manoeuvres, they can only be temporary and will only represent momentary pauses in the reinforcement of the barbaric militarism which characterises the capitalist mode of production.

In February 2022, Putin declared that the Russian army would advance rapidly in Ukraine by means of a “special military operation” of short duration. Three years have passed and, although missiles and artillery continue to destroy entire cities and claim thousands of lives, the war has reached a point where neither side is making significant progress, making military operations even more desperate and destructive. It is difficult to know with any certainty how many people have been killed or wounded in the war, but the media are now talking about more than a million dead or wounded, and the protagonists are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit cannon fodder to fill ‘gaps’ on the front line.

In the Middle East, following the barbaric attack by Hamas, the retaliation by the State of Israel is causing destruction and massacres that are reaching an unimaginable level of savagery. Like Putin, Netanyahu, after the bloody attack on 7 October 2023, promised that in three months he would finish off Hamas: this has already been going on for more than a year and the barbarity it has unleashed has continued to grow. Israel has indiscriminately dropped 85,000 tonnes of explosives, the equivalent of three times the amount of explosive material contained in the bombs dropped on London, Hamburg and Dresden during the Second World War! These ferocious attacks left almost 45,000 people dead, more than 10,000 missing and almost 90,000 injured, many of them mutilated, including thousands of children. According to Save the Children, every day since the start of the war in Gaza, around ten children have lost their legs. In addition to the horror of the bombardments, there is hunger and diseases such as polio and hepatitis, which are spreading because of the inhuman sanitary conditions.

All this warlike madness that has been going on for so long in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip is now spreading to other countries, extending the spiral of chaos and barbarity. After the fighting in southern Lebanon and the bombing of Beirut, the renewed fighting in Syria, which led to the rapid overthrow of Bashar Al Assad, is a good illustration of how instability is spreading. Substantial military support from Russia and Iran had enabled Al Assad to prevail at the end of the Syrian civil war from 2011 to 2020, even if the situation was precarious. With the military weakening of Assad's allies, in particular with Russia trapped in Ukraine and Hezbollah occupied in Lebanon, their military support has been greatly reduced, leading to a loss of control of the situation by the regime. This was exploited by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group to attack and overthrow the government. However, Al Assad's flight in no way means that the new regime that has taken power in Damascus has a coherent, unified project. On the contrary, a multitude of more or less radical ‘democratic’ or ‘Islamist’ groups, Christian, Shiite or Sunni, Kurdish, Arab or Druze, are more than ever involved in the confrontations for control of the territory or parts of it, with the mafia of imperialist sponsors behind them: Turkey, Israel, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United States, Iran, the European countries and perhaps even Russia, each with its own agenda and its own imperialist interests. More than ever, Syria, and the Middle East in general, represent a hotbed of multiple tensions that push towards war and militarism.

War and militarism, barbaric expressions of decadent capitalism

Numerous new and sophisticated weapons have been deployed in Ukraine and the Middle East: missile defence shields, attack drones, manipulation of communication systems to transform them into explosive devices, etc. The budgets that the various states allocate to the purchase of conventional weapons and to the modernisation or expansion of the atomic arsenal are also exploding. According to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), global military spending in 2023 will amount to 2,443 billion dollars, an increase of 7% compared to 2022 (the highest growth rate since 2009). And both the orders and the statements made by heads of state on every continent give us no reason to expect anything other than an impressive general expansion in militarisation, which at the same time is leading to a remarkable increase in the profits of arms companies.

But does this mean that war has a positive effect on the capitalist economy? Capitalism was born in the mud and blood of war and plunder, but their role and function have changed over time. In the ascendant period of capitalism, military expenditure and war itself were a means of expanding the market and stimulating the development of the productive forces, because the new regions conquered required new means of production and subsistence. In contrast, the entry into the period of decadence (which began with the First World War) indicated that solvent markets had been globally distributed and that capitalist relations of production had become an obstacle to the development of the productive forces. In this context, the capitalist system certainly finds in war (and its preparation) an impetus for the production of armaments but, as means of destruction, they do not benefit the accumulation of capital. War represents, in reality, a sterilisation of capital. However, this does not mean, as the Gauche Communiste de France already explained, “that war has become the aim of capitalist production, since this remains the production of surplus value, but that war becomes the permanent way of life in decadent capitalism”[1]. In the period of decomposition of capitalism, which constitutes the last phase of the irreversible decline of this mode of production, the characteristics of decadence are not only maintained, but accentuated, so that war not only continues to have no positive economic function but now presents itself as a trigger for ever-increasing economic and political chaos, thereby losing its strategic purpose. The objective of war is increasingly reduced to irrational mass destruction, making it one of the main factors threatening humanity with total annihilation. The threat of nuclear confrontation is tragic testimony to this.

This dynamic is clearly illustrated in current wars such as in Ukraine and Gaza. Russia and Israel have razed or wiped out entire cities and permanently contaminated farmland with their bombs, so that the benefit they will derive from a hypothetical end to the war will be limited to fields of ruins. The disgusting massacres of civilians and children, like the bombing of nuclear power stations in Ukraine, underline the qualitative change that war takes in decomposition, which becomes increasingly irrational, since the sole objective is to destabilise or destroy the adversary by systematically practising a ‘scorched earth’ policy. In this sense, if “the fabrication of sophisticated systems of destruction has become the symbol of a modem high-performance economy… these technological 'marvels', which have just shown their murderous efficiency in the Middle East, are, from the standpoint of production, of the economy, a gigantic waste”[2].

The bourgeoisie is increasing budgets... in order to extend destruction and massacres.

The growing development of militarisation has recently led some countries which had abandoned compulsory military service to reintroduce it, as in Latvia and Sweden, and the CDU party has even proposed it in Germany. Above all, it is reflected in the widespread pressure to increase military spending, with various bourgeois spokesmen campaigning, for example, for the need for NATO countries to go well beyond the agreed 2% of GNP spent on defence. In a scenario where Trump's United States will play the America First card more than ever, even towards ‘friendly’ countries that thought they were safe under the US nuclear umbrella, European countries are urgently seeking to strengthen their military infrastructures and are sharply increasing their military spending to better defend their own imperialist ambitions. When the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, says: “We have to spend more, we have to spend better, we have to spend European”, she sums up the strategy of expanding Europe's military infrastructure and an autonomous European arms industry.

In reality, the trend towards an explosion in arms spending is global, stimulated by an all-out advance in militarism. Every state is under pressure to strengthen its military power. This basically reflects the pressure of the growing instability of imperialist relations in the world.

Tatlin, 14 January 2025

On 20 January, Donald Trump officially took office as president. A nightmare that the most responsible factions of the bourgeoisie had tried to prevent throughout Joe Biden's term of office. A resounding failure for these factions!

Capitalism is sinking into chaos at high speed

If the bourgeoisie had been surprised at the first election in 2017, it tried afterwards to control the moods and inconsistencies of the occupant of the Oval Office.

But the vengeful speeches and the discredit of the Democrats, proved more powerful than the convictions and trials brought against him for assault, blackmail or criminal behaviour during the January 2021 assault on the Capitol. This time, the American bourgeoisie is clearly overwhelmed by the situation created by this troublemaker who has never hidden his desire to weaken the institutions of the federal state and place himself above them. Trump's grip on all US institutions is now more solid and extensive than it was in 2016, reflecting a greater loss of control over the political apparatus on the part of the more lucid factions of the US bourgeoisie, and the exacerbation of tensions within the ruling class over how to best defend the interests of national capital. Trump's programme, more brutal and outrageous than between 2017 and 2021, clearly reflects the entrenchment and expansion of the populism that is sweeping the world[1].

The height of Trump’s irresponsibility can be seen both in his outrageous statements as in the personnel of the new cabinet, symbolised by the ineffable Elon Musk. Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News presenter, accused of sexual assault, with no experience of high command, finds himself Secretary of Defence. Robert Kennedy Jr, a conspiracy-mongering anti-vax campaigner, becomes Secretary of Health. The climate sceptic Chris Wright has been appointed Secretary of Energy... In short, a team of nickel-and-dimers revealing a historical phase in which the American bourgeoisie, in the vanguard of all the bourgeoisies of the major Western powers, is tending to lose its compass, with the prospect of ever deeper and more chaotic political crises.

In short, what this new mandate prefigures is nothing less than a further accentuation of world disorder. The policies pursued by the new team can only fuel the destructive whirlwind of crises that are self-perpetuating and interacting on a global scale: economic shocks, wars, accelerated climate degradation and the collapse of ecosystems, social crises, uncontrolled waves of migration...

An ideological attack on consciousness

Using the miasma of the decomposition of its moribund system, the bourgeoisie knows perfectly well how to turn it against the consciousness of the working class, both to drive proletarians to despair and to sow the illusion of a ‘fairer’ and more ‘democratic’ future. While the Trump government is a key player and agent in the global disorder, it is not the cause of it, contrary to what a large part of the bourgeoisie and its media are trying to sell, the better to conceal the historical impasse of the system behind the ‘madness’ of one man.

This global ideological campaign is the continuation of a vast political offensive, initiated at the time of the election campaign, aimed of course at confusing the workers behind the flag of anti-fascism and promoting “the defence of the democratic governmental facade of capitalist rule. A facade designed to hide the reality of imperialist war, the pauperisation of the working class, the destruction of the environment, the persecution of refugees. It is the democratic fig leaf that obscures the dictatorship of capital whichever of its different parties - right, left, or centre - come to political power in the bourgeois state”[2]. This democratic ideological campaign is continuing, with each party adding its little stone to the mystifying edifice, like Macron in France denouncing a “reactionary international” or the German and British bourgeoisies denouncing Musk's “interference”.

But it is above all the most left-wing factions of the bourgeoisie who manage, in reality, to mystify the working class most effectively, in the name of defending ‘democracy’ against ‘fascism’. The left-wing parties thus lend their ‘radical’ support and credibility to the idea of a “reactionary international’.

The proletariat must remain deaf to this intense propaganda, which is continuing and will intensify, at the risk of finding itself further weakened in the face of the forces of capital. It must understand that the democratic state is the tool of capital, its worst enemy. Today, the only means of struggle for the working class remains its fight on the terrain of its class interests and the defence of its living conditions in the face of attacks from all these states, even the most ‘democratic’ ones, whether led by the right or the left.

This fight will also have to be waged against those false friends of the working class, the trade unions. In Belgium, despite the trade union common front which seeks to contain and sterilise the struggle by organising a day of action every month, accompanied by other strikes, such as in French-speaking education and on the railways, the class is tending to go beyond the trade union straitjacket and more and more workers are joining the days of action. Proletarians in Belgium are not alone. Since 2022, all over the world, in the United Kingdom, France, Canada and the United States, the working class has been raising its head, refusing to lie down in the face of the crisis, redundancies, inflation and ‘reforms’. Everywhere, they are gradually beginning to recognise themselves as a social force. Everywhere, small minorities are emerging to question the origins of the crisis, war and the chaos into which capitalism is plunging us. It holds out the prospect of overthrowing capitalism and building another society, without exploitation and without the barbarity of war.

WH, 22 January 2025

 

[1] See our article

Graph shows natural disasters in Europe from 1980 to 2007 (European Environment Agency)

In a previous article[1] we condemned the recent catastrophic floods in Valencia and highlighted the crass incompetence of the bourgeoisie both to prevent and to react effectively to a disaster that it presents to us as the result of ‘the unpredictability of nature’ and ‘the impact of bad management’. The figures are frightening: more than 200 dead, more than 850,000 people directly affected, tens of thousands of damaged homes and vehicles, the collapse of transport, business and education centres, and traumatic psychological consequences for the inhabitants. In 2021, we witnessed a similar phenomenon in Germany and other Central European countries[2], with more than 240 dead, thousands injured and billions of euros worth of material damage.

The scale of these two disasters aroused the despair and anger of outraged people. Already in Germany, the media were highlighting the lack of preparation for climate change: “Deadly floods reveal shortcomings in disaster preparedness in Germany”; “while heavy rain was expected, many residents were not warned”; “deadly floods in Germany were up to nine times more likely due to climate change, and the risk will continue to increase”(CNN). But beyond the resigned observations of the bourgeoisie, the search for those to blame, the illusion of ‘solidarity’-type reconstruction and the solemn promises of governments to get involved in the fight against climate change, we need to identify the underlying causes and consequences of these disasters, those that are hidden behind the horror of the images and the negligence of the authorities.

The breakdown of capitalism leads to more disasters

These terrible floods are not just an anecdote in the succession of disasters throughout human history. From the end of the 1980s, a trend began to emerge towards the accumulation of a whole series of natural catastrophes and disasters of various kinds in the daily lives of the countries at the heart of capitalism: the chemical accidents at the Seveso factories, the nuclear disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the deadly effects of heatwaves, the resurgence of epidemics, air crashes and road accidents, the rise of drug addiction, and so on. Until then, the capitalist system had succeeded in limiting the proliferation of these phenomena to peripheral countries, but while they continued to multiply there, they also tended to spread to the whole planet, fully affecting, like a boomerang, the major metropolises at the heart of the system.

See graph showing natural disasters in Europe from 1980 to 2007 (European Environment Agency)

At the end of the 1980s, after years of decaying capitalism, the historical situation reached an impasse: faced with the resurgence of the economic crisis, the bourgeoisie was unable to implement its ‘solution’ of mobilising for a new apocalyptic world war, because of the development of workers' struggles. The proletariat, for its part, mobilised in a series of major open struggles from the late 1960s onwards, but was unable to move towards politicising its struggle and decisively confronting the bourgeoisie. The consequence of this impasse in the balance of forces between the two antagonistic classes was an intensification of the process of social putrefaction, illustrated in particular by the collapse of the Eastern capitalist bloc and the entry into a New World Disorder[3], a terrifying dynamic, apparently less direct, but ultimately just as destructive as world war itself.

The scale of decomposition is perfectly illustrated, on a strictly ecological level[4], by manifestations ranging from the expansion of asphyxiating megalopolises and pollution of all kinds to global phenomena such as the greenhouse effect and climate change, themselves exacerbated by the multiplication of the interconnected effects of war and economic crisis. The bourgeoisie is increasingly unable to conceal its powerlessness in the face of the prospect of a chain of disasters to come.

While the capitalist system exploits the most advanced technology and resources to arm itself to the teeth, to set up instant transatlantic communications and to conduct the most complex scientific and technical research, at the same time it is suffering from the deepening of its internal contradictions and is therefore less and less able to postpone the worst consequences of these to the future and cannot prevent the effects of decades of decline from turning against it.

Referring to the floods of 2021, the Oxford Environmental Change Institute points out that “this shows the extent to which even developed countries are not immune to the impact of extreme weather conditions, which we know will worsen with climate change”. Extreme phenomena will become increasingly frequent, as shown by the recent succession of extreme droughts and floods in the Mediterranean. In the aftermath of 2021, a series of scientific surveys were commissioned to supposedly try to prevent these kinds of unexpected disasters, and the European Environment Agency asked the question: “floods in 2021, will Europe heed the warnings?” The answer is clearly no, as we saw in Valencia. In reality, capitalism is proving increasingly incapable of responding to scientific recommendations concerning the future of humanity and the planet.

On the contrary, there is even a tendency for the state to abandon the population, not just because of a lack of preparation, chaos or the deterioration of warning systems, but fundamentally because of a lack of resources and the way in which the bourgeoisie is dodging the problem, passing the hot potato of responsibility between its various regional or central factions. Already in Germany in 2021, the criticism was that “communities should decide how to react. In the German political system, the regional states are responsible for emergency efforts” (BBC News). In Spain, we have seen a similar spectacle, if not worse. In the face of this growing trend towards abandonment, “what gave hope was the arrival of volunteers from all over Germany at the scene of the tragedy, clearing away the mud, talking to those affected... and donations reached record levels” (DW News). Similarly, the disaster in Spain generated a similar surge of popular solidarity, reflecting the social nature of human beings. But does this kind of social impulse represent hope for the future, does it form the basis of the struggle for a society that will overcome capitalism?

Before delving any further into this question, we should note that, beyond the trivialisation of these disasters and their normalisation, the idea is increasingly propagated of ‘the need to adapt to inescapable changes’, so as to inculcate the idea that it is impossible to anticipate and therefore that we will have to ‘make do’, hoping to contain the most destructive effects, thus stimulating fatalism and despair, the every-man-for-himself attitude and individual resourcefulness in the face of a system that declares itself incapable of reversing the trend. In fact, the world's climate summits have gone from being totally hollow commitments to open shams! The last COP 29, marked by the absence of a large number of world leaders, produced results that were described as disappointing by the bourgeois press itself: “a shameful agreement” (Greenpeace); “a complete waste of time”’ (EuroNews). For Nature magazine, the funds allocated will not convince anyone, and the agreement does not even anticipate the impact of the next ‘Trump scenario’[5]; Cambridge researchers present at the COP confided: “I didn't speak to a single scientist who thought that the 1.5°C limit was still achievable with current resources”.

Where is the hope for the future?

In Spain, the spontaneous reaction of the population to the disaster gave rise to a wave of volunteers and an outpouring of generosity to help those affected and, faced with the inaction and incompetence of the state, even generated slogans such as “only the people can save the people”’. This reaction was shamelessly exploited by various factions of the bourgeoisie, from its extreme right to its extreme left. The far-left groups have shared the work with the left parties by subtly redirecting workers' thinking towards the bourgeois terrain. They never present us with a serious analysis of the evolution and nature of capitalism, but offer workers all sorts of false alternatives based on ‘popular management’ of the capitalist system. Groups like ‘Izquierda Revolucionaria’ in Spain or the German branch of the Committee for a Workers’ International, or the World Socialist Website, spit fire at the “irresponsibility and criminal inaction of politicians and authorities” and first tell us that “capitalism is responsible” only to claim that “it is not the establishment, but the people themselves who have organised solidarity and hospitality and even part of the hospitality. Donations, people, services and rescue workers... a hopeful solidarity ‘from below’ that needs to be democratised and coordinated effectively”. A caricature of the ideology according to which spontaneous solidarity in the face of catastrophe is a proletarian alternative to the negligence of capitalism is defended, for example, by the Trotskyists of ‘Left Voice’ (Révolution Permanente in France) who say that it can provoke a kind of ‘catastrophe communism’, where “people free themselves from the capitalists and start to rebuild society in a collaborative way ... when I feel climate despair, I think of the prospect of joining with other people around the world to fight the catastrophe”.

In Valencia, we saw how all the solidarity, anger, indignation and despair aroused by the disaster were channelled into national unity campaigns such as the joint mourning rallies with businessmen at company gates in ‘support for Valencia’ or ‘for the people of Valencia, proud of their solidarity’. The anarchists who normally call for ‘neighbourhood alternatives’ and self-management have embarked on the adventure of ‘local solidarity networks, for the self-organisation and empowerment of the people’. And the provocation of the arrival of the authorities was met with a shower of mud and insults.

However, there was no hint of a class approach, no protest against the pressure on workers to continue working, or against the loss of wages, unemployment subsidies or housing benefit. As there were no assemblies or discussions to reflect on the root causes of the disaster, the leftists and the unions had no trouble channelling some of the anger, while some of the inhabitants lost their way in pure disorientation, in conflicts between bourgeois parties, or even in populism against the inept political elites, ‘insensitive to the suffering of the people’.

We should have no illusions about the impact of these immediate reactions! When the reflexes of social survival do not find expression on a class terrain, they are immediately put to good use by the bourgeoisie to disarm the proletariat, preventing it from developing its own class response! This kind of spontaneous indignation, despair and rage within society in the face of destruction, fundamentally expresses impotence, frustration and a lack of perspective in the face of the rotting of society. The effects of the decomposition of capitalism, in themselves, do not constitute a favourable basis for a reaction of the proletariat as a class against capitalism, as the leftists would have us believe. They oppose and replace the class struggle of the proletariat with the shapeless magma that is the ‘people’, thus condemning the workers to be diluted into the dominated and powerless mass of ‘those below’.

The acceleration of the decomposition of capitalism will inevitably lead to a multiplication of increasingly terrible catastrophes, in the face of which states will show themselves to be increasingly incompetent and indifferent. The bourgeoisie will ideologically exploit both the effects of the decomposition of its system and ‘spontaneous reactions of solidarity’ to rally the population behind the defence of the state, with supposed purges of the corrupt or promises of improved efficiency in its management. But the exploitation of human solidarity by the ruling class (from voluntary sacrifices at work to humanitarian campaigns to give credibility to the system) does not give rise to any flame of hope for the future. Only the working class, through its struggle against the attacks on its living conditions, and the search for its extension and unity, its politicisation, represents the hope of overthrowing this rotten society.

Opero, 12 January 2025

The most respected economic institutions of the bourgeoisie boast of a rather positive assessment of the current state of the world economy, which “has shown remarkable resilience in the face of the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and a surge in inflation”[1]. The IMF, the World Bank and other institutions are forecasting slightly more growth in 2025 than in 2024, despite their concerns about major uncertainties and risks, due in particular to rising geopolitical tensions. But the reality is quite different: the capitalist system is well and truly continuing its trajectory into the abyss of a chronic economic crisis, plunging the world further into stagnation and poverty.

The unprecedented downturn of the world economy

In 2024, the world economy has not recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic and its strict confinements, resulting in a global economy weaker than ever. How could it be otherwise? Before the appearance of Covid-19, capitalism already had a very fragile monetary and financial system and massive national debt, which presaged a period of serious convulsions[2]. The pandemic that developed in 2020 only accentuated these trends, notably by further disrupting production chains and global commerce.

Over the past 25 years, the global economy has been kept afloat mainly by the administration of a massive dose of credit, leading to a soaring public debt. “Global public debt has more than quintupled since 2000, clearly outstripping global GDP, which has tripled over the same period”[3]. The UN talks of an alarming increase in world public debt (i.e. mainly that accumulated over several years by government bodies) which was scheduled to reach a record figure of 97,000 billion dollars in 2023, while total world debt (a total debt which also includes that of companies and households) was on course reach the delirious figure of 300,000 billion dollars, for a world GDP of only 105,000 billion dollars.

In recent years, the global economy has been hit by the eruption of extremely violent wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. The latter has caused inflation to soar in the two warring countries with a contagion phenomenon in several neighbouring countries, such as the Baltic States, where inflation exceeded 20% in 2022. The sanctions against Russia have had a negative impact both on the Russian economy and on those countries located close to the war zone. The most notable impact has been on the German economy, which has broken off trade relations with Russia and lost supplies of cheap gas.

The years 2020-2024 were the weakest half-decade of GDP growth for thirty years. In 2024-25, growth is expected to be below the average growth of the 2010s in almost 60% of the world's economies. This deplorable situation raises the real possibility that major economies such as the United States, Europe and China will be hit by stagflation.

The central countries are hit hard by the crisis

Europe's already fragile economy is being severely tested by relatively high energy prices and colossal national debts. The German economy is on the brink of recession. Its manufacturing sector (automotive and chemicals), once renowned, is being affected by high energy costs and fierce international competition. It is also suffering from a significant drop in foreign demand. In 2024, industrial production was 15% below the 2016 peak and tens of thousands of workers are on the verge of redundancy. France has lost control of its public finances, with debt levels well in excess of 100% of GDP, a problem also faced by Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Belgium. One of Europe's leading economies is therefore on an unsustainable economic trajectory. The French manufacturing sector is also in crisis, and there are no signs of recovery on the horizon. Escalating imperialist tensions and growing chaos, fragmented world trade, rising inflation and energy costs are all pointing to an unprecedented deepening of the crisis in the European economy.

In China, the impact of US sanctions and containment measures adopted during Covid-19 had already severely weakened the Chinese economy. But the bursting of the property bubble made the crisis even worse, with the total value of unfinished and unsold housing amounting to around 4.1 trillion dollars. The burst bubble has also led to the failure of 40 small banks, and around 3,800 other banks are now in serious difficulty. Finally, it has wiped out around $18,000 billion in household savings, seriously affecting consumer confidence and curbing consumer spending. Combined with a steady decline in export earnings, this situation is leading to a slowdown unprecedented in decades. Today, the Chinese economy will certainly not be able to function as the engine of the global economy[4], as it did after the 2008 financial crisis.

Trump has announced an aggressive protectionist policy, with the intention of imposing customs barriers on all his competitors, including his ‘partners’. This policy will provoke a bitter trade war, with other countries setting their own tariffs. It is likely to fuel inflation and further slow global growth, particularly in China, and probably in Europe too. The tariffs announced represent a new stage in a policy that is throwing the global economy into turmoil, exacerbating its fragmentation and foreshadowing a further dismantling of globalisation. Their implementation will give considerable impetus to the global crisis, which will spare no power, not even the United States.

War is the way of life of capitalism in its decadent phase, so the economy naturally follows the path of militarism which dominates most national economies. With the proliferation of armed conflicts around the world, this tendency is becoming much more pronounced. For example, global military spending increased for the ninth consecutive year in 2023, reaching a total of 2,443 billion dollars, the highest level ever recorded. Germany has doubled its military budget, while the US budget is close to $1,000 billion. Unproductive spending is a net loss for the national economy and could even bankrupt it. Remember that this heavy spending led to the bankruptcy of the ‘Soviet’ economy which contributed to the collapse of the Eastern bloc.

The acceleration of decomposition pushes the global economy into the abyss

Today, capitalist society is in such a state of decomposition that, beyond its ideological superstructure, its own economic foundations are themselves affected by the destructive effects of this social decay. The accumulation of the combined effect of these factors (crisis, war, global warming, every man for himself) is producing “a devastating spiral with incalculable consequences for capitalism, hitting and destabilising the capitalist economy and its production infrastructure ever more seriously. While each of the factors fuelling this ‘whirlwind’ effect of decomposition risks leading to the collapse of states, their combined effects far exceed the simple sum of each of them taken in isolation.”[5]

So the two wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are not only causing catastrophic destruction to the infrastructure of the countries concerned, but also fragmenting and destabilising whole swathes of the global economy. The ‘New Silk Roads’, for example, the land and sea link between China and Europe, one of which passed through the territory of Russia and Belarus, has been completely paralysed since the start of the war. Planes from North America and Europe can no longer fly over Siberia, and these diversions have led to a dramatic increase in the cost of the flights concerned. Various maritime trade routes, such as the Red and Black Seas, are risky for traffic because of the threats posed by the ongoing wars. These serious impediments to world trade are driving up sea freight costs, with the threat of a food crisis in some parts of the world.

Recurrent, random and potentially severe climate shocks lead to the destruction of infrastructure, soil degradation, the collapse of ecosystems and human populations, while nature is less and less able to recover from these catastrophic events, leading to a permanent loss of production capacity. Between 2014 and 2023, around 4,000 climate-related events appear to have resulted in economic losses estimated at 2,000 billion dollars. And since capitalism, due to fierce global competition, is unable to curb global warming, these losses will increase at an accelerating rate.

Under the growing influence of populism, bourgeois measures are becoming increasingly irrational, sometimes to the detriment of national economic interests. Take, for example, the sabotage during Trump's first presidency of the work of the World Trade Organisation, an institution designed to maintain a minimum of stability in the world economy, giving free rein to the international development of every man for himself. Similarly, the British bourgeoisie's decision to withdraw from the EU has created major obstacles to trade with the continent, with a significant negative impact on its economy. Finally, Bolsonaro and Modi's totally irrational handling of the Covid-19 crisis has resulted in many more casualties in these two countries than the general average, adding to the economic crisis.

Capitalism makes the working class pay for the crisis

In recent years, the crisis has already led to significant impoverishment in the most important economic regions of the capitalist world. According to Eurostat, in 2023 16.2% of European citizens were at risk of poverty, which means that around 71.7 million people are suffering material and social deprivation and do not have enough income to lead a decent life. The United States has one of the highest poverty rates in the Western world. According to the Brookings Institute, 43% of all American families are unable to meet their basic needs[6].

In China, there is officially no poverty. But in 2020, 600 million Chinese were still subsisting on the equivalent of 137 dollars a month, struggling to meet their needs[7].

As the economic situation deteriorates, this tendency will continue in the years to come, as the series of redundancies already announced testifies. According to Layoffs.fyi [10], 384 US technology companies, for example, had already laid off more than 150,000 workers by 2024, adding to the 428,449 workers in the same sector who have lost their jobs in the previous two years. In Europe, massive redundancies have been announced at Bosch (5,000 jobs), Volkswagen (35,000 jobs), Schaeffler AG (4,700 jobs), Ford (4,000 jobs), Airbus (2,043 jobs) and Air France KLM (1,500 jobs). China's largest private companies have cut 300,000 jobs. Youth unemployment in China has reached 20%. These figures illustrate how the slowdown in the Chinese economy is affecting the workforce. The staggering plans of Trump's second term will certainly deal a further blow to workers' living conditions.

In response to the worsening global economy and deteriorating living conditions, the working class must prepare for struggle, as the workers in different countries have done since 2022[8] when they clearly demonstrated that they would not accept economic attacks without a fight and took to the struggle with more confidence. This should encourage all workers to overcome their hesitations and to follow the example of their class brothers and sisters and join their struggle.

Dennis, 15 January 2025

It is with great sorrow that we must inform our readers of the death of our comrade Laurie, at a hospital in Birkenhead where he had been a patient for the best part of a year.

Laurie was a real militant of the working class, both in the more immediate sense as a product of workers’ struggles in Merseyside in the early 1970s, and in a more historic sense, as one expression of the resurgence of class struggle that spread across the world after the events of May 68 in France. This is how, in an interview with other ICC comrades, he recalled his ‘initiation’ into politics:

 “I first became politicised when I was 23 years old, an unemployed worker in Birkenhead, made redundant in the shipyards. I attended unemployed claimant’s meetings, and I went to a rally in Liverpool where thousands of unemployed workers listened to the unions and Labour Party speakers; there was the then TUC leader, Vic Feather who was booed off the platform, I think it was ’72, a lot of commotion. The unions were very unpopular.  Reaction from bourgeois press and the local press - the Birkenhead News who wrote an editorial on the booing of Vic Feather.  I wrote to this paper explaining why the unemployed workers were so angry...”.

It was through the publication of this letter that he was contacted by the Workers’ Voice group, another, more directly political product of the revival of class struggle. Laurie describes the origins of the group as follows: “The WV militants were trying to appropriate the lessons of the past, passionately interested in Workers’ Councils and the German Revolution and the KAPD. Shared the same position as the KAPD that the unions were incorporated in the state. More importantly that the Shop Steward Movement was umbilically linked to the ‘official’ unions. Also, re-published many articles from The Workers Dreadnought, Sylvia Pankhurst’s paper based in the East End of London from 1916 onward”.

Workers’ Voice joined the International Correspondence Network initiated by the Internationalism group in the USA, and in 1973 they hosted an international conference of groups which included the Groupe de Liaison pour L’Action des Travailleurs, a councilist group from France, and ex-members of the Solidarity group in Britain, who later on formed themselves into World Revolution and Revolutionary Perspectives (forerunner of todays’ Communist Workers’ Organisation). But the most dynamic force at the conference were the comrades of Révolution Internationale from France, who most clearly defended the framework of the decadence of the capitalist mode of production as the basis for understanding the universal tendency towards state capitalism and the integration of the unions into the state. They also insisted that the aim of the International Correspondence Network should be to provide the starting point for the regroupment of revolutionaries on an international scale. The capacity of RI to convince the comrades of WR, and those in other countries, of the validity of this perspective laid the foundations for the formation of the ICC in 1975.

This was the first time comrades of the future WR/ICC met Laurie, and initially relations with Workers’ Voice were very cordial. Other conferences took place and the lessons drawn by WV comrades about the role of the shop stewards – some of whom had themselves been shop stewards – were a key factor in assisting the comrades of WR to complete their critique of the union apparatus from top to bottom.

However, the challenge of going beyond an essentially local activity and forming a unified international organisation proved too great for Workers Voice, some of whom had been scarred by their experience in the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League (later the Workers’ Revolutionary Party) and had developed a suspicion of the notion of a centralised political organisation, coupled with a very strong ‘workerism’ which was also an inheritance from the SLL. Instead of continuing the debate to clarify our divergencies, they broke off all relations with the ICC, citing an entirely distorted  description of our position on the state in the period of transition as proof of our alleged counter-revolutionary nature. We wrote about this retreat into sectarian isolation at the time[1], but the point we want to make here was that Laurie resisted this process and was in favour of maintaining relations with the ICC, which brought him into conflict with the other members of the group, leading eventually (although this was partly mixed up with personal issues given that this was a very difficult time in Laurie’s life) to his expulsion from the group. Soon afterwards, Laurie moved to London and eventually became a member of the ICC.

Whatever mistakes he made at this time, this was a sign of the comrade’s political courage – the willingness to stand up for your positions even at the price of being on your own or in a minority.

Further proof of this was supplied by the crisis in the ICC at the beginning of the 80s, which was centred around the section in Britain. WR had been split between two clans, partly based on personal likes and dislikes[2], and these divisions were exploited by a dubious element in the French section, Chenier, especially as they became more overtly political in the wake of the steel strike in Britain. Laurie had been drawn into the clan most directly influenced by Chenier, and during the steel strike in Britain these comrades, in Laurie’s words, “got totally tangled up in the support for the shop steward committees in the steel strike.  Effectively they were supporting union shop steward committees.  They thought it was important to look at movement as a whole and claimed it was a break with the unions, which it wasn’t. The strike finished and the antagonisms between clans became more intense”.  It was at this point that Chenier said he was leaving the ICC and most of his followers went with him, stealing typewriters from a comrade’s house with the excuse they would make better use of them than the ICC. Chenier soon left these elements in the lurch and was later seen carrying a banner for the French Socialist Party, confirming the correctness of the ICC’s decision to expel him and issue a warning to the proletarian political milieu. The efforts of the remaining elements to construct something out of a very confused anarchist milieu came to nothing, and nearly all of them quit political life soon after. But Laurie recounts how he had been ostracised by the ex-members of the Chenier tendency for the crime of trying to maintain a channel of communication with the ICC. Following the thefts, “there was an emergency meeting of the WR section in a pub where we met.  I asked to speak to the comrades and Krespel and MC (Mark Chirik[3]) came down to speak to me, comrade Krespel translated and both comrades had a lot to say.  They said we make no concessions, we want all our material back before we talk.  I was unhappy, thought I could be a middleman. But MC insisted – ‘this is a point of proletarian principle’; ‘theft from a proletarian revolutionary organisation is not the basis for a tendency’. I went back and informed (others in the ‘tendency’) that I had been to speak with the WR comrades and MC. Then the dye was cast, I was dead to them.” The comrade entered another difficult period in his personal life, with the break-up with his partner who had stayed with the ‘tendency’. “I missed political life, I realised that I had to return to the ICC, I wrote a letter to MC. I asked for his advice because I trusted him and admired his long years of militancy, his steadfastness.  MC replied, ‘don’t give up, discuss your situation with the comrades of WR, trust them’”.

Indeed Laurie did not give up, and was able to discuss and understand the political mistakes he had made by getting mixed up with the Chenier tendency. From that point on he never doubted his loyalty to the ICC and was always deeply involved in its activities, internal and external. He was in his element discussing with new contacts, distributing our paper and leaflets at demonstrations and pickets, as well as speaking up at his own workplace. In the struggles at the end of the 80s, for example, he was instrumental in his fellow bus workers joining a nurses’ picket line, and even when he was ill in hospital he asked to be taken down to be with the picket line of striking theatre nurses.  He was also particularly committed to travelling to other ICC sections to take part in their conferences and thus contributing to the international discussions within the ICC. It was a long way from the localist ideas that had contributed to the demise of the Workers’ Voice group. Up to his very last weeks, confined to hospital, he always emphasised that he could not wait to get back to militant activity within the ICC.

There is a lot more to say about Laurie’s personal warmth, his obvious enjoyment of the sociable relations he developed with comrades of the ICC and their families. And about Laurie’s abiding interest in literature and culture in general. As we wrote in a tribute written for his family at the time of his funeral, “it was characteristic of him that while he was in hospital he began writing about one of his favourite authors, Varlam Shalamov, a Russian dissident who wrote moving stories about life in Stalin’s gulag. Even though he wasn’t able to get very far with this project, it showed both his determination and his abiding love of literature. Laurie never subscribed to the idea that art, or classical music, or great literature were something for the elite, beyond the comprehension of the uneducated masses, any more than he thought that the working class was incapable of understanding the revolutionary ideas which, in the final analysis, came out of its own struggles for emancipation.  Laurie was truly a man of culture. And part of that was his love of fine food and his skill as a chef….” None of that meant that he lost contact with his roots: he never tired of telling stories, handed down by his parents, of life in the Liverpool docks and surrounding districts; and one of the dishes he most liked to cook and serve was none other than “Scouse”[4].

Within the past two years we have published tributes to three other ICC comrades who are no longer with us, Antonio, Miguel and Enrique[5]. The generation that came out of the historic resurgence of class struggle at the end of the 60s are now largely in their 70s. They have a major task in transmitting the political and organisational lessons they have learned through their long years of militant activity; it is the task of younger generations of revolutionaries to assimilate and develop those lessons in order to construct the revolutionary organisation of the future.  Laurie’s unwavering dedication to maintaining and building the ICC, his life as a militant of our class, is an example for them to follow.

ICC, January 2025