Blair or Brown? Brown or Cameron? Or should we look to more ‘radical alternatives’, like Respect or the BNP, who claim to be different from the usual gang of politicians?
All the politicians, from far right to far left, want to manage the existing state, the existing economy. They want to make the existing state machine and the existing economic system more efficient, more profitable, or more ’democratic’. But the existing economic system is based on the exploitation of our labour power. It can only prosper at our expense. And in any case, today it is not prospering: it is sunk in a profound crisis. And the only response to the crisis by the politicians and other managers of the system is to try to cut costs by further reducing our living standards and by further ransacking the environment. It is to make the national economy compete better against other national economies, which not only means intensifying our exploitation, but also serves to drag the whole planet into a spiral of imperialist conflicts and wars.
All the alternatives offered by the official political parties are false alternatives. The real alternative is offered by the struggles of our class brothers and sisters, in Britain, France, Spain, America, Argentina, India or China, against the attacks on living standards and the effects of the economic crisis. It is through these struggles that we will discover our own interests, our own ability to organise, our own power to paralyse the existing system and replace it with a society based on the needs of humanity.
A month ago all talk was of how soon Blair should step down as prime minister. Today the focus is on John Prescott, and how soon he should go now he no longer has a cabinet department to run. He has described himself as a ‘shield’, being attacked as a proxy for Tony Blair. In other words this is all part of the campaign to put pressure on the PM and the Labour government. This is the only way to make sense of the campaign: the use of subordinate staff, such as Prescott’s diary secretary, for sexual favours may be scandalous but it is hardly unusual for powerful politicians; the use of lavish grace and favour properties such as Dorneywood is also normal for our political rulers.
The focus on the Deputy Prime Minister follows a whole series of scandals about the government, and an increasing number of articles looking at the advantages of replacing Blair with either Gordon Brown or David Cameron, and more recently of replacing Prescott, or even Blair, with Alan Johnson. And as we write this, more cabinet ministers are vying for the deputy PM job.
This doesn’t mean that the government is not doing a good job for the ruling class. Far from it. The bourgeoisie needs a governing team that can manage the economy in open crisis, and that means being able to deliver constant attacks on the working class. Right from the start, in 1997, the Blair government made it clear that it had no intention of changing the policies of its predecessor, whose spending plans would not be exceeded. Attacks on the unemployed and others relying on benefit were a feature of every budget, with each ‘new deal’ or ‘hand up, not hand out’ representing a new way of forcing them off benefits. When Rover went bust at the time of the last general election, there was hardly a pretence of a government rescue. And now that the crisis is getting worse, with the so-called ‘Brownian miracle’ at an end, the attacks are accelerating. Cost limits imposed by the government are leading to thousands of redundancies in the health service. The pension age is to set to go on rising and pensions are more precarious. Competition and payment by results are being brought in for education.
The Blair government has served the ruling class well in other ways. Repression has increased: more jails for children, tougher sentences, 28 days detention without due process for suspected terrorists, shoot to kill for suspected terrorists in the streets and on the underground. And in the last few days we have seen a terrorist suspect shot in his own home in East London, but so far no weapons have been found. Since this government came in it has competed with the opposition to hurl the most insults at ‘bogus’ asylum seekers, to introduce the most repressive measures of deportation, and to use immigrants as a scapegoat for all the problems faced by workers today.
Nor has the government disappointed the ruling class in defending its imperialist interests abroad. So far as possible it has stayed close enough to the USA, in order to keep in the game in Iraq and Afghanistan, while trying to maintain its independence (see page 8). All in all a very good job for the ruling class.
A change of face in no. 10, when it comes, will not mean a change in policy. Neither would a change in governing party. It is not just that Blair is in so many ways the continuator of Thatcherism, but Thatcher herself was only continuing attacks begun under the previous Labour government. If we remember the 1980s for the phenomenal rise in unemployment, we should also remember that the 1979 Tory election slogan, ‘Labour isn’t working’, referred to the rise in unemployment under the Callaghan government. When the Tories introduced cuts, such as those in shipbuilding and steel, they were “merely putting into practice policies drawn up by the previous Labour administration” (WR 25, August 1979).
Today, David Cameron has made it clear that a new Tory government would largely continue the policies of the present administration. The Conservatives have even supported the government on the Education Bill.
So why change the government? When Thatcher came in it was after the ‘winter of discontent’, a wave of strikes led by council workers against the policy of holding wages down in the face of inflation – wage cuts in real terms. The Callaghan government had failed to keep control of the working class. A period of very important class struggle was opening up – the steel strike and later the miners’ strike in Britain in the 1980s were only part of a wave of class struggle around the world. In these conditions, having the left party in opposition was vital to help the government bring in its attacks because it provided a safe, i.e. useless, channel for workers’ protest against the attacks on their jobs and living conditions.
When the Labour government was elected in 1997, we were in a period of retreat in the class struggle. After 18 years of Tory governments there was a need for a change. However well they were doing, if they went on for much longer as a much hated party, continually being re-elected, democracy was going to look pretty threadbare.
Today we have a government that has won three general elections and has brought in many attacks on the working class. This has led to a build-up of discontent in the working class, and we are now entering a new period of class struggles internationally. The student struggles against the CPE in France were the most advanced in the search for solidarity from workers already in employment, in the choice of demands relevant to the whole class, and in the organisation of the struggle through general assemblies and revocable delegates. While that struggle was still going on there were large scale movements in Germany and Britain – tens of thousands of state employees striking against wage cuts and increases in the working week in Germany, a million council workers in Britain striking against attacks on pensions. These struggles were not so advanced as the struggles in France, but important for the international simultaneity of the movement, for the fact that workers are ready to struggle not just in one country, but across the most important countries in Europe and the world.
Nor is this just a flash in the pan. In Spain the metalworkers of Vigo organised massive general assemblies on the streets (see page 3). In Britain, we have seen the issue of solidarity posed very clearly in the Heathrow strike last year, as well as by postal workers in Belfast and power workers at Cottam more recently; workers at Ellesmere Port responded to the announcement of redundancies by walking out on the spot (see page 2).
This does not mean that we are facing a situation identical to 1979, when the bourgeoisie had to change the governing team very rapidly in order to control the working class. Nor are we in a situation like 1997, when democracy would lose credibility if they kept bringing back the same unpopular government election after election. But the ruling class is preparing its options because it knows it will need to change its governing team sooner or later in order to be able to continue its policy of attacks on pensions, jobs, health and education, as well as the defence of its imperialist interest in Iraq and Afghanistan. WR, 4.6.6
On Saturday 8 July the ICC will be holding a public meeting in London (2pm, Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, Holborn, WC1). The meeting will be on the war in Spain, which began 70 years ago, with Franco’s attempted coup on July 19 1936.
We have advertised the meeting in our paper World Revolution as ‘Spain 1936-37: the Italian communist left and the Friends of Durruti’.
We will start by presenting the analysis made by the Italian communist left of the events of July 1936, which can be summarised as follows: the Francoist putsch was countered by the working class, fighting with its own methods: mass strike, fraternisation with the troops, self-arming of the workers. But this initial proletarian response was very quickly diverted from its logical goal of insurrection against the bourgeois state towards a struggle in defence of the Popular Front; and, in a global context of growing military conflicts, the ‘civil’ war in Spain was rapidly transformed into an inter-imperialist war, a dress rehearsal for the second world massacre.
Against the mobilisation of the working class on this terrain, the Italian left refused to support the Republic and called for class struggle against both camps. In this they were extremely (though not totally) isolated, because the majority of those who called themselves revolutionaries came out in one way or another with the position of ‘fight fascism first, then deal with the Republic’ – in short, with a more or less open support for the Republic. This famously included the CNT in Spain, which sent ministers into the Republican state.
We will then focus on the events of May 1937 and the Friends of Durruti group. For the Italian left, the strikes and barricades ‘behind the lines’ in Barcelona in May 37 were a striking confirmation of its analysis: the working class had returned to its own methods of struggle against the whole of the Popular Front regime. The Friends of Durruti group, which had emerged from within the CNT as a working class reaction to the official betrayals, attempted to live up to the responsibilities of a revolutionary organisation during these events. The Friends of Durruti was a genuine expression of the wider revolutionary aspirations which had come to the surface in July 1936 and which made their last stand in May 1937. At the same time it was unable to make a complete break from the CNT and anarchist ideology, which prevented it from drawing all the necessary conclusions from this experience.
We think that this meeting provides an opportunity to hold a constructive debate about the lessons of these historic events. We naturally encourage all our contacts and sympathisers to attend, and at the same time invite those less familiar with, or even highly critical of, left communist positions to come along and put forward their views. We will ensure maximum time for discussion and for the presentation of alternative interpretations of the war and the role of the Friends of Durruti group.
Contacts and readers of our press who are unable to attend the meeting are invited to send e-mails or letters dealing with the subject of the forum. These will be read out and discussed at the meeting.
We particularly encourage participants on the libcom.org [2] forums to respond to this invitation, both by making responses on this thread and by coming to the meeting. Again, we will read out and discuss contributions to the meeting posted on this thread by those who are unable to come to the meeting to put forward their views in person.
For those that are interested in preparing for this discussion we have a number of articles on Spain 36-37 and the Friends of Durruti collected here [3].
The following articles have been put online especially to encourage reflection and discussion on these questions:
Bilan 36: The events of 19 July (1936)
ir/006_bilan36_july19.html [4]
Spain 1936: The Myth of the Anarchist Collectives
ir/015_myth_collectives.html [5]
The article below was written and published on our website a few days before General Motors confirmed that 900 jobs were to go at Vauxhall’s Ellesmere Port plant. The government sent Gordon Brown and the Trade Minister Alistair Darling to reassure the workers that “We will do what we can for each and every one of the workforce who may lose their jobs” but the workers know how tough it is going to be to find similar work, which partially explains why the wildcat strike was supported so solidly. As Roger Maddison of the Amicus union said: “If the experience of workers from Rover at Longbridge is anything to go by, it is going to be very difficult… Everybody is reducing staff - even the companies with increased productivity.”
Despite how difficult it is to actually reverse factory closures, there is a determination amongst the workers to stand up to these attacks, not only within the car industry (such as at Peugeot’s factory at Ryton in Coventry), but in other sectors as well, for example among the workers at the HP sauce factory in Birmingham which is also faced with closure. However, it is becoming clear to many workers that the first obstacle in their way is the unions, and there is growing criticism of them.
“‘Woodley (TGWU boss-ed) is ‘awkward’ only when it suits him,’ said John. ‘He used to work here, but he was a lot keener on meeting Brown and the managers than us. We should just say, ‘Sod you, we’re out.’ We’re angry and disgusted because we’ve worked really hard to improve quality and production – and this is what we get.’ Dave, a Peugeot Ryton worker, says, ‘Most of the time the trade unions are just nodding their heads. You feel like it’s our own shooting us in the back. They say the shop floor isn’t strong enough. But we need leadership. The union just keeps letting them get away with it. I think the buck stops with the government.’ Simon, another Ryton worker, said, ‘They say it’s the economy and at least there’s no compulsory redundancies. Lots of us have heard that before. Some of us want to make a stand and walk out. But certain people in the union keep calming things down. I wish they wouldn’t – the bastards need to know how people feel.’”
These comments were published in the Trotskyist paper Socialist Worker, 27/5/06. They won’t prevent the SWP from calling for workers to strengthen the trade unions and make them more ‘democratic’. On the contrary, ‘saving’ the trade unions from proletarian anger is one of the most valuable services the SWP renders to the present system. But the workers’ growing suspicion of the unions, and their increasing willingness to take action outside their numbing grip, is a phenomenon that is becoming more evident on a world-wide scale.
The walkout by up to 3,000 Vauxhall car workers at the Ellesmere plant on the 11th May only lasted a day, but it expressed something very important: the refusal to passively accept being thrown onto the unemployment scrap-heap. Upon hearing that 1,000 jobs may go, the morning shift walked out. They were joined by the afternoon shift. “Strike action spread through the plant after workers took the comments to mean that GM had already decided to cut the posts” (Guardian 12/5/06). By the end of the day all three thousand workers had joined in this struggle. The management and the unions rapidly make it clear that there had been no decision on the numbers to be thrown on the street. The unions got the workers to go back with the promise that they would negotiate with the management.
This spontaneous rejection of the threat of lay-offs has to be seen in a wider context. It came within days of the announcement of up to 2,000 lay offs at Orange mobile phones, another 500 health workers being laid off - this time by Gloucestershire’s three Primary Care Trusts with the closure of community hospitals - and the dismissal of 6,000 telecommunications workers at NTL. It also came after the decision of the French carmaker PSA Peugeot Citroen to close its central England plant next year, eliminating 2,300 jobs, and the closing of Rover last year. Thus, the evident determination of the Vauxhall workers not to passively accept unemployment was an example to the rest of the working class.
The Vauxhall workers’ action also needs to be seen against the background of a resurgence of struggles. The strike of over a million council workers on the 28th March in defence of pensions, the postal workers’ unofficial strike in Belfast, the massive student movement in France this spring, the strike by council workers in Germany at the same time, the transport workers’ strike in New York in December – all these movements provide proof that there is a new mood developing in the international working class, a growing determination to defend its interests against attacks, especially on the issue of jobs and pensions.
The struggle at Vauxhall was right from the beginning a response to international conditions. The ignition-key for the struggle were comments by GM Europe’s chief executive, Carl-Peter Forster “We know, thank God, that the English labour market is more capable of absorption than, let’s say, the German or the Belgian markets”. (BBC News on-line 12/5/06). Whether this was a provocation or simply an unguarded comment is hard to tell, but one thing is for certain: the unions and bosses used them as an excuse for playing the nationalist card. It is not only in Britain that Vauxhall workers are under threat but throughout Europe and world wide, as are other car workers at Ford, GM and elsewhere. In order to try and stop any international solidarity against these attacks, the unions used Forster’s comments to try and set up a barrier between the Ellesmere workers and their comrades in the rest of Europe. Both the TGWU and Amicus played the nationalist card: “British car workers are among the best in Europe, but they’re the easiest to sack”, said TGWU General Secretary Tony Woodley (BBC on-line 12/5/06). Whilst according to the BBC, “Amicus said it wanted cuts to be spread throughout Europe’s Astra plants in Belgium and Germany.” (www.bbc.co.uk/news [7] 12/5/06).
The unions may have played the nationalist card to divert the workers’ discontent, but they have shown real international solidarity with Vauxhall’s bosses: for weeks before and during the struggle they had both been planning “ways of spreading any job losses across Europe, and talks between the two sides will continue today” (The Guardian 12/5/06).
Forster’s comments also contained the very poisonous idea that even if workers are laid-off, there are jobs in Britain to go around. This is the lie pushed by the government as well. The economy is working well over here, so if you are unemployed it is your own fault. This idea seeks to reduce the unemployed to isolated individuals. The fact that there are officially over one and half million unemployed is simply brushed aside. However workers are increasingly not willing to accept the capitalist logic of accepting one’s fate. The fact that this struggle was reported on the main BBC evening news, albeit with the unions pushing the nationalist message of the defence of British jobs, showed that discontent is growing in the class.
This increasing militancy is in its initial stages but there is a growing determination within the working class to defend jobs. As with Ellesmere, workers have gone through years of accepting attacks on working conditions, on wages and job security in order to at least maintain some level of employment where they work. Today however increasing numbers of workers are no longer willing to make these endless sacrifices. There is a growing realisation that all workers are under attack, as night after night there are reports of lay-offs in plants, in hospitals, or in offices.
Fighting unemployment is not easy: often bosses will try to use strikes as a pretext for pushing through the plant-closures they want anyway. But it is far easier to do this when the workers’ resistance remains isolated to one factory or company. On the other hand, the threat or reality of struggles extending across union, sectional and other divisions – in short, the threat of the mass strike – can oblige the ruling class to back down, as it did over the CPE in France.
Such retreats by the bourgeoisie can only be temporary. The remorseless deepening of the economic crisis will force it to return to the offensive and make even more desperate attacks on living and working conditions. In the final analysis, massive unemployment is a sure sign of the bankruptcy of capitalist society. For the working class, they must become a stimulus for struggling not only against the effects of exploitation, but against exploitation itself. ICC 16.5.06.
The last few months have seen no let up in the violence and chaos ravaging many parts of the world. In Iraq the civil war kills and maims hundreds every week. In Afghanistan the worst fighting since the war has shown that large parts of the country remain beyond the control of the central state. In the midst of this stand the world’s greatest powers, with the US, as the greatest of them all, at the very centre. Bush junior’s ‘war on terror’ is now mired in blood and destruction, just as Bush senior’s ‘new world order’ before it resulted in bloody disorder and helped to spread terror around the world. “Today we can measure the effectiveness of this ‘intransigent struggle’ against the ‘scourge of terrorism’ and for ‘peace and freedom’ waged by the great powers with the US to the fore. Never has there been such an explosion of warlike tensions, of military conflicts, of blind terrorist attacks, in short of barbarism from Africa to Asia via the Middle East” (WR 294, ‘Capitalism plunges into barbarity’).
This situation does not diminish imperialist rivalry in any way; rather it stimulates it as each power tries to seize any opportunity to advance its interests at the expense of its rivals. One power’s difficulty is always another’s opportunity. While the US seeks once again to reassert itself, the second and third-rate powers try to exploit every opportunity the situation offers them.
This is the case with Britain today. The current difficulties of the US have allowed Britain to consolidate its strategy and to gain some breathing space. This follows the intense pressure it has been subjected to in recent years as it sought to chart an independent course between the US and Europe. In Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq it has recently been able to assert its interests to a limited extent after a long period in which it has had to run before the storm stirred up by Washington’s offensive.
A significant feature of Britain’s strategy is its pretence that it is based on the defence of human rights, democracy and international order. The ‘ethical foreign policy’ announced when New Labour came to power was subsequently obscured by the reality of military intervention in Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, but it was never abandoned. For example, before the second Gulf war Britain pushed for a second resolution at the UN prior to the start of fighting, but at that time the US was forging ahead with its ‘war on terror’ and was dismissive of the UN. Of course it is true that all countries claim the moral high ground: the dominant power to mask the reality that its domination is based on violence, and the lesser powers to try and compensate for their lack of such dominance. The current difficulties of the US have required it to make more supportive noises about the UN and international co-operation. Washington’s ambassador to the UN, who once said that its headquarters in New York would benefit from having a few storeys removed, has adopted a more conciliatory tone despite the fact that the USA’s reform proposals have been defeated. This has made it easier for Britain to resume its ‘multilateral’ theme, most recently with Blair using a speech during a trip to the US to call for changes in various international bodies to “fashion an international community that both embodies and acts in pursuit of global values – liberty, democracy, tolerance, justice”. He called specifically for the expansion of the UN Security Council to 25 members, including countries such as India, Japan, and Germany as well as representatives from Latin America and Africa. Such a step would favour the secondary powers by diluting the influence of the US. It would also allow Britain to play its favoured role as loyal ally of the US and honest broker, safe in the knowledge that other powers more openly opposed to the US will be at work. In short, it is trying once again to forge its independent path, in particular by playing one power off against another. British initiatives in Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq clearly show this.
Throughout the developing crisis over Iranian nuclear ambitions Britain has played a double game. On the one hand it has condemned Iran’s nuclear programme and played an active part in taking it to the UN, and has expressed support for a resolution to the UN that could open the door to the use of force. On the other it has remained part of the EU negotiating team that recently revived its offer to provide Iran with a nuclear power plant, and the materials to run it, in exchange for the cessation of its uranium enrichment programme.
In fact, Britain currently has to do very little to benefit from the situation, since it can be confident that China and Russia will continue to frustrate US efforts. This tends to support the suggestion that Jack Straw was dismissed as Foreign Secretary in the reshuffle in May because he opposed the idea of military action too vocally, labelling the idea “unthinkable”, even “nuts”. Certainly his successor, Margaret Beckett, has been cautious about making similar statements. As we have argued before, Britain wants to see Iran reigned in and to end the offensive Tehran has been able to mount in the face of the situation in Iraq where, on the one hand, its old rival no longer poses a threat and, on the other, the US is struggling to maintain any kind of order. Britain has no interest in seeing a disproportionately powerful Iran in the Middle East; but equally it does not wish to see it removed from the equation by US action.
The deployment of 3,300 British troops to Afghanistan is taking place under the banner of NATO and is part of the wider plan for the ‘international community’ to replace the ‘coalition’. This is a strategically important deployment for Britain given the position of Afghanistan between the Indian sub-continent, Asia and the Middle East. While this can be seen as the US getting others to do its work now that its focus has moved on (as was certainly the case in the immediate aftermath of the war when the US still firmly held the initiative), in the present context it tends to work the other way by emphasising the necessity for the US to take note of the ‘international community’, in other words of the necessity to reign in its ambitions.
In Iraq Britain has recently announced that it will hand over one of the areas it controls to the Iraqis in July and a second shortly afterwards, allowing it to reduce the number of troops from 8,000 to 5,000 by the end of the year. This has helped to maintain the fiction that its military forces are uniquely skilled at building peace.
One consequence of these developments has been to reduce the immediate pressure on Blair, since he is clearly defending the position of the dominant part of ruling class. The replacement of Straw by Beckett has not been widely criticised and the reports on the July 7th bombings exonerated the security forces of any serious errors, and, by implication, the government too. While some on the left of the ruling class have suggested that this means Blair is kow-towing to the US again, it really shows that he has the confidence of the British ruling class. However, there is still pressure for an orderly transition to Brown, in part because Blair is so entangled in the lies surrounding the war in Iraq. Blair has been forced to concede that he will leave in time for Brown to prepare for the next election.
The easing of the pressures on British imperialism is fundamentally a consequence of developments outside Britain’s control – its skill lies in being able to exploit these opportunities when they arise. The fundamental contradiction of British imperialism remains and the overall development of the international situation suggests that the sharpening of that contradiction will continue.
The areas where Britain can be said to have had some success are all very fragile. In Iraq, despite the planned departure of some troops, the prospect is that a force of some kind will stay for another five or even ten years. The recent violence in Basra, where the local Iraqi authority declared a state of emergency on 31st May, gives the lie to claims of British superiority at ‘peacemaking’. In fact British losses are proportionate to American ones given the difference in numbers and the evidence suggests that hostility in the British-controlled areas continues to grow. There are also reports of an increase in desertion and of mental health problems in British troops who have served in Iraq. The denunciation of Iranian involvement in the insurgency in Basra shows the bourgeoisie’s awareness of the volatility of the situation.
The province of Helmand in Afghanistan, where the British forces are going, is one of the most violent in the country. Recent months have seen the worst violence since the war and in Helmand the very announcement of the arrival of British troops seems to have stimulated resistance. While there are grand plans to restore the infrastructure of the area no action is intended against the opium trade and the warlords who dominate it. Here too Britain seems to be facing the opposition of a regional power in the shape of Pakistan, whose alleged backing of the resurgent Taliban has been denounced by British military personnel.
A decision by the US to attack Iran, either itself or, as has been suggested, by allowing Israel to do the job, would cut the ground from underneath Britain since it would be forced again to take sides. While it is not possible to predict with certainty that Iran will be attacked – although a recent US government report branded Iran the most active sponsor of state terror in the world – the tendency that has been seen several times in recent years is for the US, when under pressure, to try and regain the initiative and to do this through the use of military force, where it still retains the advantage globally. Each time this has happened the impact on British imperialist policy has been greater and greater as the contradiction of its position has become sharper. After 9/11 the tensions that exist within the British ruling class over imperialist strategy emerged a little. The worsening of its position may push this further. Thus despite its best efforts, British imperialist policy cannot escape the crisis it finds itself in: any easing of its situation, let alone any advances it makes, can only be short-lived, and may well be counter-productive since they will certainly provoke responses from its rivals. In this, Britain is but a specific example of the general tendency for imperialist tensions to worsen, giving rise to ever-greater instability and violence. North 1/6/06
We want to welcome and express our solidarity with the struggle that the metal workers of Vigo in NW Spain have been waging since 3 May. The official media, union websites and those of so-called ‘radical’ groups maintain almost total silence about this strike. It is important that we discuss this experience, draw its lessons with a critical spirit, and put them into practice, since all workers are affected by the same problems: precarious working, increasingly unbearable working conditions, sky high prices, lay-offs, the announcement of yet more cuts in pensions…
At the same time as the infernal trio of the government, bosses and unions were signing a new ‘Labour Reform’ with the excuse of the ‘struggle against precarious working’ – a ‘reform’ which makes it even cheaper to lay people off and proposes fixing the period of temporary contracts to two years - a massive struggle has broken out in Vigo. Its central concern is precisely the struggle against precarious working conditions, in a sector where up to 70% of workers suffer from them.
The real struggle against the new Labour Reform cannot be waged through the numerous mobilisations or protest actions by the ‘radical’ unions. The only effective way of struggling against precariousness is the workers’ direct struggle: strikes that come from collective decisions, strikes that spread from one enterprise to another, and can thus unite the forces necessary for standing up to the constant attacks of capital
The metal workers’ strike in Vigo has been massive and has adopted the street public assembly as its form of organisation. An assembly that the workers decided should be open to those who wanted to express their opinion, to express their support or to pose their problems or complaints. More than 10,000 workers took part in its meeting each day in order to organise the struggle, to decide on what actions to take, to see which enterprises to go to in order to ask for solidarity from the workers, to listen to what was said about the strike on the radio, to the comments of people and so on. It is significant that the workers in Vigo have developed the same methods as the recent movement of the students in France. There the assemblies were also open to workers, the retired, and the parents of students. There the assemblies were also the lungs of the movement. It is significant that now in 2006 the workers of Vigo have recuperated the practice of the great strike in 1972 when general assemblies of the city were held daily. The working class is an international and historic class and that is its strength.
From the beginning the workers posed the necessity to gain the solidarity of other workers, principally those in the large engineering factories that have a special contract, and who, therefore ‘are not affected’. They have sent massive delegations to the shipyards, to Citroen and other large enterprises. In the shipyards the workers have unanimously been on strike since 4 May. To the cold and egotistical calculation inculcated by bourgeois ideology, according to which everyone must look after his own interests, this action is ‘mad’. But from the point of view of the working class it is the best response to the present attacks and those being prepared for the future. Faced with the present situation, each sector of workers will only be strong if it can count on the common struggle of the whole of the class.
On the 5th, some 15,000 metal workers surrounded the Citroen factory in order to try and call on their comrades to join the strike. However, there were divisions amongst them: some wanted to unite with the strike, whilst others wanted to work. In the end, they decided to go into work united. However, it appears that the seeds sown by the massive delegation on the 5th have begun to germinate: on Tuesday the 9th, there were stoppages at Citroen and other large enterprises.Solidarity and the spreading of the struggle were also powerful aspects of the students’ movement in France. In fact, at the beginning of April, when spontaneous strikes took place in large enterprises such as Snecma and Citroen in solidarity with the students, the French government withdrew the CPE. Moreover, solidarity and the extension of the struggle dominated the general strike of the whole of Vigo in 1971, and they made it possible to hold back the murderous hand of the Franco dictatorship. Here again we see the international and historical strength of the working class.
On 8 May, following the street assembly, some 10,000 workers made their way to the railway station with the aim of discussing with travellers. The police attacked them from all sides with outrageous violence. The police charges were brutal; the workers were dispersed into small groups which were surrounded by the police and attacked without pity. There were many injured and 13 arrests.
This repression says a lot about so-called ‘democracy’ and the beautiful words about ‘negotiation’, ‘freedom to demonstrate’, ‘representation for all’. When workers struggle on their own terrain, capital does not hesitate for one moment to unleash repression. Here we see the true colours of the cynical champion of ‘dialogue’, Mr Zapatero, Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister. And he certainly had some teachers! His Socialist predecessor, Mr González, Prime Minister in the 1980s and 90s, was responsible for the death of a worker during the struggle at the navel dockyards in Gijón (1984) and that of a worker during the struggle in Reinosa in 1987. Another illustration is the republican Azaña (president of the 2nd Spanish Republic in the early 1930s), quoted a lot by Aznar: he gave direct instructions “to shoot in the guts” the day labourers during the massacre at Casas Viejas in 1933.The brutal repression at the railway station was a foretaste of the policy to come, which was to trap the workers into an exhausting confrontation with the forces of repression, pushing them to replace massive actions (demonstrations, general assemblies) with dispersal through confrontations with the forces of the state. They want to trap them in pointless battles which will have the effect of making them lose the sympathy of other workers.This is the same policy that the French government used against the students’ movement: “The depth of the students’ movement is also expressed by its ability to avoid falling into the trap of violence which the bourgeoisie set for it on several occasions, including the use and manipulation of the ‘wreckers’: at the occupation of the Sorbonne, at the end of the 16th March demo, the police charge at the end of the 18th March demo, the violence by the ‘wreckers’ against the demonstrators on 23rd March. Even if a small minority of students, especially those influenced by anarchistic ideologies, allowed themselves to be pulled into the confrontations with the police, the great majority of them were well aware of the need not to allow the movement to get dragged into repetitive confrontations with the forces of repression” (‘Theses on the students movement in France’, point 14, International Review 125).The workers have massively mobilised to free those who have been arrested. More than 10,000 demonstrated on the 9th for their release, which was finally granted.It is very telling that until now the national means of ‘communication’ (El Pais, El Mondo, TVE etc) have maintained a deadly silence about this struggle, and that, above all, they have said absolutely nothing about the assemblies, the massive demonstrations and solidarity. Now however they are making a song and dance about the violent clashes of the 8th. The message that they want to give us is very clear: ‘if you want to get noticed and to do something, mount violent clashes.’ It is of the utmost importance to capital that workers become caught up in and exhausted in a series of sterile confrontations.
It is a long time since the unions stopped being a weapon of the proletariat and became a shield protecting capital, as we can see from their participation in the ‘labour reforms’ of 1988, 1992, 1994, 1997 and 2006. The three unions (CCOO, UGT and CIG) have gone along with the Vigo strike in order not to lose control and in order to be able to undermine it from within. Thus, they have opposed the sending of mass delegations to other enterprises. Instead they called for a general strike of metal workers on 11 May. However, the workers have not waited and, above all, they have not accepted the union methods of a one-day strike. They have developed genuine workers’ methods: the sending of mass delegations, making direct contact with other workers, collective and mass action.
However, on 10 May, after 20 hours of negotiations, the unions reached an agreement which, though it is not clear, represents an underhand blow against the workers, making some of their main demands disappear. A large section of the workers showed their indignation and the vote was postponed until the morning of 11 May.Workers must draw clear lessons from this manoeuvre: We cannot leave negotiations in the hands of the unions. Negotiations must be totally controlled by the assembly. The assembly must nominate the negotiating commission and every day this has to give an account of its actions to the assembly. This is what happened in the struggles in the 1970s and we must re-appropriate this practice to prevent the unions from blindfolding us.
We do not know what is going to happen with the struggle. Nevertheless, it has provided us with a vital experience. Capital in crisis will give no quarter. For more than 20 years every country has seen terrible falls in workers’ living conditions and ever worsening attacks. Therefore, we have to struggle, we have to affirm the strength of the working class, and in the struggles such as Vigo we are given a fundamental lesson: the union methods of struggle gain us nothing and they will grind us down through demoralisation and impotence. The proletarian methods of struggle that we have seen in Vigo and which we saw before on a bigger and more profound scale in the student movement in France give us the strength and unity that we need. We have to stop being numbers in the hands of the union leaders and turn ourselves into a force that thinks, decides and struggles on the foundations of unity and solidarity.
International Communist Current 10.5.06
We are publishing below the statement of basic principles by a new proletarian group in Turkey, Enternasyonalist Komünist Sol, Internationalist Communist Left. In the last issue of WR we published their leaflet on Mayday, which we helped to distribute. In a forthcoming issue, we will publish our comments on the statement. To contact the EKS, write to [email protected] [12] .
The positions of the EKS are basic points of adherence. They were written very quickly with a view of moving from being a group who came together to make, and distribute, leaflets for specific demonstrations to moving towards being a political group, and as such they are open to change in the future. They take a stand on what we see as the four basic positions that revolutionaries hold today:
1) The rejection of parliamentarianism, and social democracy.
2) The rejection of Trade Unionism.
3) The rejection of all forms of nationalism, and the defence of internationalism.
4) Communist struggle, and the nature of communism.
They do not define us as either a ‘Marxist’, or an ‘anarchist’
group. While most of our members consider themselves to be communists, we do
not discount common work in the same political organisation as anarchists who
adhere to the basic working class positions. We feel that in the present
situation in Turkey, where virtually nobody holds revolutionary positions, it
would be a huge mistake to exclude people, who basically hold the same
positions as us today, on the basis of historical arguments about things that
happened in the earlier part of the last century. That does not mean, however,
that these are issues that we do not discuss, and that we are not trying to
develop greater clarity on them. Enternasyonalist Komünist Sol
1) The rejection of parliamentarianism, and social democracy.
The idea that the existing order can be changed through parliamentary or democratic means is the main obstacle that the workers’ movement is confronted with at every step. While this illusion is consciously created by the dominant class, it is also defended and proposed as a solution by the leftist groups, who are unable to grasp the class nature of parliament, which is based on the idea that the working class have a stake in the nation, but in reality, it is no more than a circus that tries to impose the idea that a class based movement is both meaningless, and useless, in order to mobilize the proletariat behind the interests of the bourgeoisie. Social democracy also doesn’t refrain from taking part in that circus itself. Social democracy, which defends the ideology of democratic rights and liberties, and the change of the existing equilibrium in favour of the working class by means of reforms, which are no longer possible under capitalism, is because of its position a tool to create a middle point between the dominant class, and the working class, which defends the interests of the bourgeoisie. While social democracy does not constitute an obstacle to the dominant class, it is anti-working class, and takes a counter revolutionary position in times that proletarian movements arise, and constitutes a collaborative ideology of the class enemy on behalf of the bourgeoisie.
2) The rejection of trade unionism
Just like parliament, unions also organise the workers as a part of capital. Moreover because of their position in the heart of the working class, they constitute the first obstacle to the proletariat’s struggle. When the working class seems to be passive, and its struggle in the face of capital is not clear, radicalised or generalised, the unions organise the working class as variable capital, and as wage slaves, as well as generalise the illusion that there are both honourable and just ways to live in this way. Not only are the unions incapable of undertaking revolutionary action but also they are incapable of defending worker’s basic living conditions in the here and now. This is the main reason that the unions use bourgeois, pacifist, chauvinist, and statist tactics. When the working class movement radicalises, and develops, the unions put democratic, and revolutionary slogans forward, and in this way try to manipulate the movement, as if the interests of the working class is not emancipation from wage labour itself, but in continuing it in different forms. The methods of base unionism and self-management are used in different places and situations, resulting in no more than the workers’ own voluntary acceptance of the domination of capital. In reality the only thing that the unions do is to divide workers into different sectional groups, and pull their class interests as a whole behind social democratic slogans.
3) The rejection of all forms of nationalism, and the defence of internationalism
Nationalism is a basic slogan used by the bourgeoisie to organise the working class in capitalist interests. The claim that, independent from their class position, every member of a nation is on the same boat, only serves to destroy the revolutionary potential of the working class by joining two antagonistic classes on an ideological level. Starting form this premise, it comes to say that every person has to work for ‘his or her’ own nation, own capitalist class, and the struggle for their own class interests would result in the sinking of the boat. Unlike the whole left’s claims in the case of both Turkish and Kurdish nationalisms, they have no different characteristics.
The basic reality denied by people who talk about national liberation struggles against imperialism is that the characteristic of the struggle of the working class for liberation is above nations. The liberation of the working class can only be achieved by raising the flag of class struggle against every kind of national liberation struggle, demagogy, and imperialist war. Today people who talk about a ‘national front’ against imperialists, and national independence, are in a race with liberals, whom they think that they oppose, to deny class contradictions. Kurdish nationalism, the so-called opponent of Turkish nationalism, which it also feeds upon, realises the complete separation of the working class by performing the same role as Turkish nationalism for the workers in its own region.
4) Communist struggle, and the nature of communism
Communism is not a beautiful utopia that someday can be reached, nor a theory that’s necessity is scientifically proven, but it is the struggle of workers for their own interests as a movement. In that sense, communism has no relation to the leftist’s definition of it. It is rather born out of the workers’ struggle for their daily interests, and an expression of their need for emancipation from wage labour, capital, and the state. Due to that, it is denial of all the separations between intellectuals and workers, absolute goals, and daily interests, ‘trade union’ consciousness and ‘socialist consciousness’, and aims and means. Whenever workers start to struggle for their own interests autonomously from the unions and self-proclaimed workers’ parties, then communism flowers inside the struggle. In the same way the communist organisation is formed organically inside this struggle, and is born from the international union of the most radical, and determined minorities’ interventions in the class struggle, which express the antagonism between workers and capital.
(June 2006)
In recent editions of WR we have reported the revival of class struggle taking place in India today, with examples such as the strikes by Honda and airport workers as clear expressions of the international resurgence of the working class since 2003. In April the ICC held a public meeting in New Delhi in order to take up the lessons of the student movement in France.
After a presentation from the ICC, the discussion developed on the character of struggles today. One participant correctly remarked that the bourgeoisie still has the upper hand, even after the recent struggles. He had the impression that the working class was still not showing signs of initiative and that, for example, “in India, if the bourgeoisie decides to go to war against Pakistan, the working class would follow it without significant resistance”. His main question: Are today’s struggles ‘offensive’ or ‘defensive’?
It is true that because capitalism must be overthrown by the world working class, to prevent the destruction of the planet and to offer a perspective for the humanity, the outcome of the struggles in France is not enough. What is necessary is a revolution, there’s no doubt about that! It is also true that even after weeks of struggle in France the ruling class still holds power - capitalism survived these events. What happened in France was at first a defence of the working class against a concrete attack on their living conditions. But does it mean that the struggle only had a defensive character? Does it devalue recent events in France to say that they were not directly an attempt at a revolutionary upheaval?
It is absolutely normal for the working class to defend itself. The history of the workers’ movement shows us that it is not an abstract idealism for revolution and a better world that pushes the working class forward. Concretely, the worsening of living conditions, brought about by the capitalist crisis and war, brings the proletariat into struggle. This was also the initial driving force for the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the worldwide revolutionary wave that followed it. In this sense each struggle, however ‘defensive’ it might look on first superficial view, is an essential school of experience for the working class, for its self-confidence, and can serve as a point of departure for a revolutionary dynamic.
The ICC thinks that the healthy defensive reaction inside the working class today must be saluted! History has shown us periods when the working class had lost even this important and fundamental defensive capacity. It happened in the 1930s and 1940s when the proletariat was beaten politically. Because of this capitalism was able to unleash the Second World War.
We think it is important to have different criteria than ‘defensive’ or ‘offensive’ when looking at workers’ struggles. This method of differentiation does not really help in analysing the real dynamic of class struggle. In the texts we have recently published on the struggles of the students in France, we have raised the following points:
- Is this struggle taking place on a class terrain? Our answer was ‘yes’, because the demands of this movement were not limited to questions facing students, but took up a question concerning the whole working class.
- Did this struggle give itself a structure of organisation that belongs to the heritage of workers movement? Our answer was again ‘yes’, because the general assemblies were open to all, and made it possible to strengthen the struggle with intensive debates and allowed the participation of other parts of the working class.
- Is this struggle a conscious trap of the ruling class to recuperate the discontent of the working class? No, it surprised the French bourgeoisie and was evidence of its weakness.
- Has this mobilisation been a planned and controlled manoeuvre by the trade unions? No, the unions found it quite hard to take control of this struggle in the service of capitalism.
It is more appropriate to judge the dynamic of a workers’ struggle by looking at the terrain it’s fought on, the capacity for self-organisation and self-initiative and the ability to resist the efforts of the unions to gain control. We are convinced that this is the best way to understand the importance of a struggle rather than trying to classify it as ‘offensive’ or ‘defensive’.
In the discussion the ICC emphasised that the struggles in France had a historical significance because they were a concrete expression of the revival of international class struggle since 2003. There’s a new generation participating in the class struggle after years of disorientation in the ranks of the working class since 1989.
When assessing a struggle its international and historical context should never be forgotten. The following example shows the necessity for a wider view than just looking at events in isolation. Shortly before World War II, the working class in France and Spain engaged in militant strikes and other mobilisations. You can identify some ‘offensive spirit’ in this period. But despite all its militancy, it was more like the last gasp of a working class that had already been beaten in the 1930s. The recent events in France are exactly the opposite: an announcement of a new generation within a working class that is not beaten and that is now overcoming the worst effects of the campaign over the ‘death of communism’.
The discussion turned to the question of the demands that the working class puts forward in its struggles. A doubt was put forward by a participant in the discussion: if you fight against a law like the CPE you’re still accepting exploitation. Simply put, it’s like saying: ‘Do not exploit us with the CPE, but continue to exploit us with all the other means available to capitalism’.
The discussion tried to show that this is not really a fruitful method to look at the class struggle. As we say in the ‘Theses on the students movement in France’ (IR 125) “Now that the government has retreated on the CPE, which was the movement’s leading demand, the latter has lost its dynamic. Does this mean that things will ‘return to normal’ as all the fractions of the bourgeoisie obviously hope? Certainly not.“ As the Theses say, “[the bourgeoisie] cannot suppress all the experience accumulated through weeks of struggle by tens of thousands of future workers, their awakening to politics and their developing consciousness. This will be a real treasure-trove for the future struggles of the proletariat, a vital element in their ability to continue down the path towards the communist revolution”. In the works of Engels, Marx and Lenin there is a similar view of strikes as ‘schools for socialism’ in which the ultimate threat of revolution is present.
The idea that the struggle against the CPE implied a tacit acceptance of all other forms of exploitation is linked to a very dubious method. As with the view of certain anarchist currents we can see an attempt to separate ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ struggles, leaving the working class with ‘all or nothing’, ‘revolution or nothing’.
We think, on the contrary, the concrete demand posed by struggling students was correct as it focused on an attack not specifically on students but on the whole working class. It was this demand that gave the whole movement in March and April in France the possibility for solidarity from other parts of the working class. Even if today we do not find the same spectacular ‘cry for revolution’ as in 1968, we have to be clear that the revolutionary demands of 1968 were often marked by Maoist, antifascist and other dodgy currents that were not such paragons as nostalgia might portray them.
The discussion argued that it is not sufficient to look on the demands of a struggle in an isolated manner. We need to look at the whole dynamic. There are well known examples that show that at the beginning of some revolutionary movements there were often demands that, in themselves, may have appeared crude or limited or ‘defensive’.
In Russia in January 1905 workers in St. Petersburg marched to the Tsar’s Palace with a petition in which they described their pathetic living conditions and asked the open minded father Tsar to take care of the situation! The opening words of the petition to the Tsar read: “Sire! We workers, our children and wives, the helpless old people who are our parents, we have come to you, Sire, to seek justice and protection”. But the class movement of 1905 developed a great revolutionary dynamic and give birth to the first workers’ councils in history. Similarly, toward the end of World War I the revolutionary movement in Germany started with female workers in arms factories protesting about their working conditions. That’s only an innocent looking demand if you ignore the context of global slaughter and the growing dynamic of the class struggle.
The same applies to Russia in 1917. The working class related to the slogan of ‘Bread and Peace’, which looks more pacifist than revolutionary. But we know that it was a whole dynamic process that allowed the working class to become convinced of the necessity for revolution and to go forward to clearer and more political demands, like the ones formulated in Lenin’s April Theses.
The discussion concluded that these examples from the past show us that it is not the task of revolutionaries to lose courage or to complain if demands do not contain the call for revolution. On the contrary it is our task to be present in such mobilisations with a view of the general and international dynamic and to put forward a clear political intervention in relation to the consciousness maturing within our class. This is exactly what the ICC was committed to doing in the recent struggles in France. Matthias, 8/5/6
We are publishing here part of our intervention on Alasbarricadas, a Spanish language anarchist internet forum (www.alasbarricadas.org [15]).The thread, entitled “Anarchism, anti-imperialism, Cuba and Venezuela [16]”, raised the question of what position to take faced with Chávez and his ‘Bolivarian revolution’ in Venezuela.
Chávez has been turned into a new myth which tries to make us believe that within capitalism, within the oppressive state, within the defence of the nation, it is possible to make some ‘advances’ towards the ‘liberation of the people’.
In order to keep us tied hand and foot to the logic of capital, the bourgeois Left is dedicated to selling us false models of ‘social liberation’. In the 1930s it was the myth of the ‘socialist fatherland’ in Russia – based on the ashes of the proletarian revolution which had been defeated from the inside through the degeneration of the Bolshevik party. Faced with the exhaustion of that myth, in the 1960s and 70s the extreme left of capital (‘critical’ Stalinists, Trotskyists, Maoists, official anarchists) set up new idols with Che Guevara, the Cuban ‘revolution’, Vietnam, the China of Mao... These frauds had a short life, so they have tried to mould new idols with feet … of capitalist clay. New hopes have emerged: the Sandinistas, Zapatistas, the Brazilian PT ... all of which have the same capitalist plumage!
We want to say that we share and support the arguments of the anarchist and non-anarchist comrades who have rebutted those anarchist arguments which ask for ‘critical’ support (as would any Trotskyist) for Colonel Chávez. Is it not paradoxical that elements who claim to be anarchists propose to ‘critically’ support what is happening in Venezuela even though it is based on the strengthening of the absolutist state, on the domination of the army and the most brutal militarism, a fierce state capitalism and the cult of the personality of the ‘great Bolivarian leader’ Chávez? We are going to take up three arguments from the forum to expose the Chávez swindle:
1. His supposed anti-imperialism
2. The so-called socialist conquests of the people
3. The ‘organisation of the people’.
Rosa Luxemburg denounced the slaughter of the First World War showing that “Imperialist policy is not the creation of one country or a group of countries. It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capitalism. Above all it is not possible to understand it except in its reciprocal relations and from which no state can escape”.
All nations are necessarily imperialist. Capitalism is a world system and all national capitals are integrated into it. Each nation state carries out an imperialist policy appropriate to its economic position, its strategic role, its military capacities etc. The US aspires to be world policeman. On the other hand, the ambitions of Venezuela are more limited - the Caribbean and Latin America - but they are not any the less voracious. The Venezuelan bourgeoisie is divided over what option to follow: the traditional alliance with the great neighbour to the North defended by the classic parties, the Christian Democrats and the ‘Socialists’ of Mr Pérez? Or the ‘Bolivarian defiance’ that Colonel Chávez proposes? Every thing indicates that the latter option is supported by an important sector of Venezuelan capital that sees the necessity to expand into and conquer areas of influence. For example, there’s the advantage of an alliance with the Castroist regime given a breath of oxygen by replacing Russian oil with that of Maracaibo.
P. Moras, one of the participants on the Forum who defends anarchism, says that “it is indispensable that the anarchist movement participates in the anti-imperialist struggles”. ‘Anti-imperialist ideology’ is based on the reduction of imperialism to a small group of states and with the rest of the world as ‘victims’. This can only lead to the logical conclusion that the United States is the only imperialism or ‘imperialism number 1’. Using this ‘dialectical’ trick you support states that oppose Uncle Sam whilst hiding the fact that they are part of the same system as the United States and that their hands are equally stained with blood. In addition, this rattling on about the United States as ‘imperialism number 1’ throws a dense smokescreen over the cynical ambitions of its France and German rivals (or their followers, such as the Zapatero government in Spain).
The ‘anti-imperialist’ ideology of Chávez is as imperialist as Mr Bush’s ‘war on terrorism’. Both of them carry out the same function: to act as recruiting sergeant for the workers and exploited to give their lives to the capitalist cause. Faced with this we insist that the struggle against all of the capitalist gangs should be seen as preparing the conditions for the world social revolution which will put an end to them all.
The bourgeoisie is the most hypocritical class that has ever existed. It always puts forward ‘arguments’ to justify its exploitation, its wars and barbarity. In Venezuela, Chávez justifies the worsening of poverty and hunger in the name of helping the most impoverished through the ‘Missions’, through which “working conditions are made more ‘informal’ and ‘flexible’ (that is, even more precarious) of the work force via the cooperatives, where workers receive starvation wages, lower than the minimum wage and without any kind of social cover; at the same time, each area of production or services that has been effected by the missions has seen a worsening of the working and living condition of the workers in these areas, since their collective contracts have been broken and they are being blackmailed with unemployment” (Internacionalismo, publication in Venezuela of the ICC)
In relation to the so-called ‘social conquests’ that have been carried out by Chávez, the post by El Libertario, a Venezuelan anarchist group that has clear positions on Chávez, denounces the myth about health and education which is the same fairy tale that is used to call for support for the Cuban regime. The ‘progress’ in education and health is used to hide the dizzying increase in poverty and exploitation over the last 8 years. The comrades of the Argentinian group Nuevo Proyecto Histórico in its interesting text ‘Social war by all means’ give very clear figures “according to the Instituto Nacional de Estadisticas (INE), the Venezuelan INDEC, in 1999 extreme poverty reached 19.9 per 100 and has now got even worse, since it effects 28.1% of the population. In 1999 poverty was of the order of 43% and in 2005 it had increased to reach 54%. 22 in every 100 Venezuelans are undernourished and 47% live on only $2 a day.”
The poor neighbourhoods of the cities, the most remote peasant settlements, all have ‘Bolivarian circles’, ‘militias’, ‘joint-management bodies’ etc. This labyrinth of ‘participatory organs’, the majority led by members of the army, is presented as ‘participatory democracy’, as opposed to the old liberal ‘representative democracy’.
Some interventions on the Forum get emotional about the ‘experiences of self-management’ that are underway in Venezuela. We are not going to go into the question of self-management here, we simply want to give our support to the forceful reply by El Libertario to these speculations: “for example, they talk about workers and farmers in struggle, apparently alluding to the imaginative stories that Chavist propaganda spreads abroad about the taking over of factories and housing, something that has happened in a very limited way under the control of the governmental apparatus, that has brought bankrupt agricultural and industrial companies or those with serious judicial problems under state control, operating them under the regime of state capitalism and without any intention to leave them in the hands of its workers”.
The Venezuelan state has given the ‘participatory’ instruments the mission to control the workers and the population, to subject them to an iron vigilance, to blackmail them (‘if you do not participate in the revolution you have no right to social support’), to repress workers’ strikes and demonstrations. What is the real difference between these organisms of state imprisonment and the ‘popular militias’ of the Stalinist regimes or the Nazi SA? The only difference is the ideological justification.
Chávez’s ‘anti-imperialism’, his ‘representative democracy’, his ‘social conquests’, are some of the things that are supposed to make us see him – even if ‘critically’- as the new ‘Liberator’. And if we reject these fairy tales we are told that all those who take a principled position of class independence don’t want “to get their hands dirty”. However, as P Mattick, another participant on the Forum who defends councilist positions, rightly said: “What are you saying? That it is correct ‘to dirty one’s hands’ or ‘to muddy our feet?’”
To these blackmailers there is a very simple answer. The practice of the bourgeoisie is not that of the proletariat. For the bourgeoisie there is a very practical result when the workers choose between the camps of different gangsters: that we accept exploitation, war and poverty in the name of the ‘anti-imperialist struggle’.
This is not the practice of the working class or the immense majority of humanity! The practice for the proletariat is the defence of its class autonomy, maintaining its independence in its demands, organisation and method of struggle. The most pernicious weapon of the bourgeoisie is its attempt to make us choose a dish from the putrid menu of capitalism: between Chávez and Bush, between Zapatero and Aznar, between anti-globalists and globalisers, between democrats and fascists, between the military and civilians... The proletariat must recognise that these are unconditional servants of the capitalist state and struggle to build autonomy from them. We recall the words of the ‘Internationale’: “No saviour from on high delivers/ No faith have we in prince or peer/ Our own right hand the chains must shiver/ Chains of hatred, greed and fear.”
Accion Proletaria, Section of the ICC in Spain, May 2006.
We are publishing here the second part of the article on outsourcing which appeared in WR 290. In the first part, against the lies of the leftist and alternative worldists, we dealt with the fact that outsourcing is not a recent or new phenomenon. It was born with capitalism as a consequence of the unbridled competition between capitalists, something inherent to this system. It is a means of increasing the exploitation of the whole working class. In this second part, we will see that outsourcing is a means of putting the workers of the world into competition with each other, and look at how the left wing of capitalism presents it as something ‘avoidable’ and thus less ‘acceptable’ than other attacks. This is just a way of masking the mortal crisis of the capitalist system.
Outsourcing has caused the destruction of thousands of jobs in the western countries. In a few decades entire industrial branches have been almost entirely transferred to countries with much lower manpower costs: “The French textile industry now only employs 150,000 people, the same as Tunisia, against a million twenty years ago”(L’Expansion, 27.10.04). In other sectors they explain the continued loss of jobs. “Wage earners in the French automobile industry went from 220,000 to 180,000 since 1990 despite the arrival of foreign firms such as Toyota, without whom the figures would have been still lower” (ibid). Outsourcing is one of the most brutal attacks by the ruling class. First of all, because of the scale that it can reach at times. In Belgium, for example, between 1990 and 1995, more than 17,000 workers were affected by outsourcing, which represents 19% of collective redundancies. Then, from the fact that the workers concerned have every chance of not finding another job and of joining the ranks of the long term unemployed. Finally, outsourcing is spreading to new categories of workers, white collar and skilled labour. In France “200,000 jobs in the service industry (including 90,000 coming from services to business, 20,000 from research and development) are threatened with being transferred to eastern Europe or Asia between now and 2010”(L’Expansion, 19.4.05).
However, the effects of outsourcing don’t only hit those who lose their jobs in the western countries. It is the whole of the world proletariat which is subjected to the pressure of the insane, competitive race between capitalist nations and to the blackmail of outsourcing, both in the country of departure and in the relocated industry. There is, in India, the fear of competition from Russia, Pakistan and China. The working class in eastern Europe in certain sectors (food, textiles, petro-chemicals and communication equipment) is also confronted with contracting out to the countries of Asia. The pursuit of production at the cheapest cost has made relocation inside China, towards the poor regions of the centre and the east, a dominant tendency in the textile sector. For capital the Bolkestein directive (which claims to establish a legal framework to facilitate the free movement of services between EU states) is ignored in order to use ‘inverse’ relocations, bringing in workers from countries with an ‘economic differential’ to replace existing manpower. The recourse to the employment of illegal immigrants has undergone a considerable increase since the 1990s; it has reached 62% in agriculture in Italy!
What illustrates the reality of outsourcing is the ruthless competition that is forced on different parts of the working class at the international level.
In contracting out to eastern Europe and China, the big businesses of the western states aim to profit from the terrible conditions of exploitation that capital imposes in these regions. Thus in China, “millions of people work between 60 and 70 hours a week and earn less than the minimum wage in their country. They live in dormitories into which up to twenty people are crammed. The unemployed who have recently lost their jobs are as numerous as everyone else” (CISL on line, 9.12.05). “The unemployment payments and benefits promised to the workers are never paid (…) the workers can be refused the right of marriage, they are often forbidden to go outside of the factories (where they lodge) or of leaving outside of working hours (…). In the factories of the special zone of Shenzhen, in the south of China, there are on average 13 workers who lose a finger or an arm every day and a worker is killed in an accident every 4.5 days” (Amnesty International, China, 30.4.02).
What pushes capital to relocate to eastern Europe is the same aim of exploiting “a well trained and cheap population (…) All these countries have longer working hours than the west, 43.8 and 43.4 hours in Latvia and Poland respectively. There is often little or no overtime payment. We also see a strong move to part-time working. This latter is often the prerogative of older people, handicapped and youth coming onto the labour market. In Poland, 40% of part-time workers are either retired or the infirm (…) Often it is foreign businesses “which have the most ‘unsocial’ hours of work; it is standard to find the big stores open 7 days a week, 24 hours a day” (Le Monde, 18.10.05).
In the western countries, outsourcing means the casting aside of workers whose exploitation is insufficiently profitable for capital. However, relocations are one of a number of other attacks. They are not the unique source of unemployment and worsening living conditions; and the aim of the bourgeoisie is not to massively impose the transfer of all production towards countries with lower wages. Thus, “their impact on jobs is not negligible, but remains limited. (…) Relocations only explain 7% of restructurings and 5% of jobs lost in Europe. (…) Between 1990 and 2001, the relocation of German businesses towards the countries of central and eastern Europe led to the destruction of 90,000 jobs in Germany or 0.7% of the manpower of the companies concerned and 0.3% of total German employment” (Le Monde, 26.5.05).
In France, “95,000 industrial jobs have been suppressed and relocated abroad between 1995 and 2001; on average 13,500 per year. By way of comparison, the annual loss of jobs in industry is of the order of 500,000. (…). The contribution of relocations comes to a total of 2.4% of industries’ manpower outside of energy (…). Only a little less than half are destined for countries with ‘lower wages’. These latter welcome about 6,400 jobs relocated per year, or 0.17% of industrial jobs outside of energy. In other words, relocations towards emerging nations explain only less than 2% of industrial jobs lost. About one factory closure per 280 corresponds to a relocation to a country with lower wages” (Dossiers et documents du Monde, Nov. 05). The statements of the bourgeoisie give the lie to the idea that outsourcing is the main explanation for deindustrialisation and mass unemployment.
On the contrary, the systematic recourse to the blackmail of outsourcing as a means of making the proletariat accept still greater sacrifices show where the real stakes lie for the ruling class, which has to impose still harder conditions of exploitation and reduce the cost of the labour force (lowering wages). This in areas where production cannot be relocated and must not be, where the stakes for economic power are most important for capital and where competition between the capitalist sharks is most severe.
The example of Germany is particularly illustrative. It’s in the name of the competitiveness of “the German enterprise” and thanks to the blackmail of relocations and loss of jobs that flexibility of working hours has been imposed, either reduction of hours with loss of wages, or longer hours on the same pay. Thus Siemens, after having transferred its services and development activities to the Czech Republic, India and China, in 2004, increased the working week to 40 hours without wage compensation to a majority of its 167,000 German wage earners under the threat of the relocation of less than 5,000 employees. In 2005, after having announced the loss of 2,500 jobs in its information service branch Com, it reduced the working week from 35.8 hours to 30 with a reduction in wages! At the same time, it was the public sector that made itself the champion of “work longer”. The railway company DB raised the working week to 40 hours and numerous regional states increased working hours from 40 to 42. In all, it is in Germany where the bourgeoisie has in its line of sight the highest cost of labour in the OECD: “wages have fallen 0.9% in real value between 1995 and 2004”. As elsewhere, the blackmail of relocations cannot be separated from other attacks and goes in tandem with the ‘reform’ of the labour market as well as calling into question pensions and health services.
If the campaigns of the bourgeoisie put so much emphasis on relocations alone, it is because the dominant class is drawing benefit from this. When unions, parties of the left, leftists and alternative worldists blame outsourcing and complain of a return to 19th century conditions, it’s to better obscure from the proletariat the real significance of its situation in society.
Marxism has never argued that the tendencies towards the lengthening of the working day and the lowering of wages to their minimum of vital subsistence is the product of the carnivorous character of this or that capitalist in particular. They result from the contradictions implied in the very nature of capitalism. By its nature capital is a vampire on the labour force, from which it draws profit and feeds itself. “In its blind and living passion, in its gluttony for extra work, capital not only goes beyond moral limits but also the extreme physiological limits of the working day (…). Capital is thus not concerned how long the labour force lives. Its only interest is the maximum that can be spent on it in a day. And it reaches its aim in shortening the life of the worker (…). Capitalist production, which is essentially production of surplus value, the absorption of extra work, doesn’t just produce the deterioration of the workforce by the working day that it imposes, by depriving it of its normal conditions of functioning and development, physical or moral – it produces the exhaustion and early death of this force” (Marx, Capital, Book I, chapter 10. For ideas on the labour force, surplus value and extra work, see the first part of this article in WR 290.).
The enormous difference with today is that in the 19th century, the proletariat could hope for an attenuation of its situation within the capitalist system. “The first decades of large scale industry had such devastating effects on the health and conditions of life of the workers, provoked an alarming morbidity, such physical, deformations, such a moral abandonment, epidemics, inaptitude for military service, that the very existence of society appeared profoundly threatened (…). It was thus necessary, in its own interests and in order to permit future exploitation, that capital imposed limits to exploitation. It was necessary to go from a non-profitable economy of pillage to a rational exploitation. From this were born the first laws on the length of the working day” (Rosa Luxemburg, Introduction to political economy, chapter on ‘Wage labour’).
This result was only imposed against the ferocious resistance of the capitalists and after decades of an implacable struggle of the classes. It could only be obtained because the capitalist system then found itself in a phase of ascendancy, in full expansion.
Today the relentless competition between capitalist nations, struggling for still more restricted markets, can only provoke a general, unremitting attack on the living standards established in the western countries. All these facts confirm the expectations of marxism: the collapse of capitalism into social catastrophe.
It is up to the workers of the whole world to understand themselves as comrades in struggle and hold out their hands across the limits of sectors and frontiers. They need to make their disparate movements into a single struggle against capitalism and develop the consciousness that this struggle can come to fruition through the destruction of the capitalist system. This means the abolition of wage labour and of labour power as a commodity, which is the root of the proletariat’s slavery. Scott
The credibility of the US forces as protectors of the Iraqi population took another hammer blow with the allegations of an ‘Iraqi My Lai’, in which US marines are accused of running amok after a roadside bomb attack in Haditha last November, slaughtering 24 defenceless Iraqi men, women and children. On top of which there appears to have been a cover-up of the whole incident involving (at least) senior marine officers. The Haditha affair is already being described as “more damaging than Abu Ghraib”. The ‘humanitarian’ pretexts for the US invasion are being exposed as worthless lies.
The claims of Bush, Blair and Co. that the invasion would install a prosperous and stable democracy in Iraq have also been shot to pieces. The country is already in a state of low level civil war. The massacre of Haditha was shocking, but it is only one incident in a daily litany of murder. A day in the life of present-day Iraq:
“At least 40 corpses, shot in the head and showing signs of torture, have been found in different locations around Iraq, an interior ministry official said.
The largest cache of 16 bodies turned up in Baladiyat in the eastern outskirts of Baghdad, while five were found in Husseiniya, northeast of the capital where a car bomb killed 22 people on Tuesday.
Another four were found in Baghdad’s impoverished Shiite district of Sadr City, three decapitated bodies were discovered in Muqdadiya, northeast of the capital and another 12 around Baghdad.
All bodies had their hands tied and showed signs of torture, the official said.
The sudden flood of corpses comes after a comparative hiatus in night-time killings believed to be carried out by armed gangs on sectarian grounds following the destruction of a Shiite shrine in February.
Monday and Tuesday saw an explosion of violence and bombings around the country, mostly focused on Baghdad, that claimed the lives of over 100 people.
In other violence Wednesday, a bomb went off against a police patrol in the northern city of Mosul, wounding five policemen and 12 civilians.
Clashes also erupted in Baghdad when insurgents assaulted a police station in the predominantly Sunni neighbourhood of Adhamiyah with explosions audible across the city, but no reports of casualties.
A joint Japanese-Australian patrol was attacked by a roadside bomb in Samawa, south of Baghdad. and a civilian was injured.
The former governor of the southern province of Qaddisiyah was shot dead in Diwaniyah, also south of Baghdad, on Tuesday.” (AFP, 31 May)
An interview with a Sunni fighter, published in the Guardian on 20 May, gives us an insight into the increasingly irrational and chaotic nature of the conflict taking place there, and completely exposes the so-called ‘Resistance’ as an instrument of imperialist war:
“‘Look, a full-scale civil war will break out in the next few months. The Kurds only care about their independence. We the Sunnis will be crushed - the Shia have more fighters and they are better organised, and have more than one leadership. They are supported by the Iranians. We are lost. We don’t have leadership and no one is more responsible for our disarray than [Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi, may God curse him,’ he said.
The logic of Adel The Patriot’s new sectarian struggle against the Shia is driving him and his fellow Sunnis into radical new directions. Asked what will save the Sunnis, he replies almost instinctively.
‘Our only hope is if the Americans hit the Iranians, and by God’s will this day will come very soon, then the Americans will give a medal to anyone who kills a Shia militiaman. When we feel that an American attack on Iran is imminent, I myself will shoot anyone who attacks the Americans and all the mujahideen will join the US army against the Iranians.
Most of my fellow mujahideen are not fighting the Americans at the moment, they are too busy killing the Shia, and this is only going to create hatred. If someone kills one of my family I will do nothing else but kill to avenge their deaths.’”
Such is the insane logic of imperialist war in a society in full decomposition.
With the suspension of financial aid to the Palestinian Authority by the US, Israel and the EU following the electoral victory of Hamas, the ‘humanitarian’ situation in the Gaza strip is going from bad to worse. At the same time, there has been an explosion of tensions between different armed factions inside this vast open-air concentration camp. The prisoners number a million and a half people, half of them under 15 years old, and they have little hope of finding a way out. “Imagine a slum 30 kilometres by 10 with one of the highest population densities on the planet” (Le Courrier, Switzerland, 23 May). There are incessant missile and shell attacks from the Israeli side, sometimes with an explosion every five minutes. The economic blockade imposed by Israel as a political measure against the Hamas authority is making the population pay a very heavy price. Karni, the only outlet for goods between Gaza and Israel, has been closed for 60 days out of the last three months. As a result not only are basic provisions in short supply, but the prices of things like milk, bread and fish are skyrocketing.
Thus, the ‘Road Map’ which Bush tried to impose in 2004 is not only a dead letter but has actually resulted in an aggravation in the situation in the occupied territories, with sharpening tensions between Palestinians and Israelis but also between different Palestinian factions. After months of settling scores in a more covert manner, Fatah and Hamas are now in a situation of open armed confrontation. The ‘national dialogue’ which was supposed to take place between the two factions has given way to shooting on the street. The perspective of a stable Palestinian government is just a vague memory. The Palestinian population is offered the choice of tamely submitting to the exactions of both factions, or siding with one against the other.
Meanwhile the Israeli state is conducting an increasingly aggressive policy towards the Palestinians, stepping up the number of rocket attacks and making bellicose statements towards the Arab countries and towards Iran. And this in turn exacerbates anti-Jewish feelings which are fuelling an increase in suicide bombing inside Israel.
As for America, the utter failure of its adventure in Iraq, and the growing threat posed by Iran, give it little choice but to give unconditional support to Israel’s imperialist policies.
The situation in Afghanistan has also continued to deteriorate since the US invasion of 2001 and the fall of the Taliban regime. The post-Taliban regime, a mish-mash of extremely backward factions who live mainly off the proceeds of the drug trade, has created all the conditions for a resurgence of the Taliban, despite the US occupation.
The USA has now launched a massive military offensive in response to a growing number of Taliban attacks on foreigners, aid workers, or schools which dare to teach girls, but also on government and occupation troops. This operation, begun on 17 May, has been one of the most murderous since the invasion in 2001. As in the latter, the civilian population has suffered the consequences. Thus, in the village of Azizi in the south of the country, American bombardments of the Taliban resulted in 30 to 60 Taliban deaths but also wiped out scores of civilians. Tom Collins, the spokesman for the US command, justified this massacre by saying that “the real reason why civilians have been wounded or killed is that the Taliban quite deliberately decided to occupy the houses of the victims; it is they who have no consideration of civilians”. Collins added that his air forces were “using precision weapons” against houses “without knowing whether there are civilians inside” (AFP news service). These cynical declarations were echoed by the governor of Kandahar province, Asadullah Khalid, who said that “this kind of accident does happen in combat, especially when the Taliban hide in peoples’ houses. I really call on people not to shelter them”. In sum, the massive slaughter of the civilian population is just an ‘accident’, and in any case it’s their own fault for ‘volunteering’ to shelter fighters.
Little wonder that feelings against the Americans are running high. At the end of May, massive riots broke out in Kabul itself:
“An early morning traffic accident in Kabul involving a US military vehicle rapidly degenerated yesterday into the worst upheaval in the Afghan capital since the fall of the Taliban, as angry protesters burned vehicles and buildings, ransacked shops and aid agencies and hurled rocks and invective at American soldiers.
By the time the authorities imposed a rare night-time curfew in the normally peaceable capital, eight people had been killed and more than 100 injured. The upheaval was a shock to a city long considered an oasis of security, and a serious blow to the authority of the president, Hamid Karzai, who is struggling to contain an escalating insurgency in the south”. (Guardian, 30 May)
From the very beginning revolutionaries have insisted that the US military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq would only succeed in bringing further chaos and destruction to an already war-ravaged region. And the massacres in the Middle East are also being played out in Sudan, Chad, Niger, Chechnya, Sri Lanka or Indonesia, just as they were in Europe’s south eastern flank during the 1990s. War and chaos may currently be restricted mainly to the most impoverished regions of the planet, but they indicate the future capitalism has in store for all of us if we don’t destroy this rotting system first. Amos/Mulan 1/6/6
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