The current immigration crisis that has captured so much attention in the capitalist media is not solely limited to the U.S. but is increasingly experienced by all capitalist metropoles in Europe and North America. The rioting in France last autumn by immigrant youth and the children of immigrants, primarily from North Africa, the recent flood of illegal immigrants and refugees to Spain’s Canary Islands, and the massive immigrant demonstrations in the U.S. this spring, predominantly by Latinos, but also including Asian and European immigrants stand as a clear reminder that this issue is a problem of global capitalism that exposes the bankruptcy of the capitalist economy and the inexorable decomposition of its outmoded social system.
For some years now in the U.S. as in France, Great Britain, Italy, Germany and other countries in Western Europe, the capitalist media and politicians have fueled an anti-immigrant ideological campaign. The central message of this campaign is that the recent immigrant, particularly the illegal immigrant, is responsible for the worsening economic and social conditions faced by the “native” working class, by taking jobs, depressing wages, overcrowding schools with their children, draining social welfare programs, increasing crime, and just about any other social woe you can think of.
This scapegoat propaganda is a classic example of capitalism’s strategy of divide and conquer, to divide workers against themselves, to blame each other for their problems, to fight over the crumbs, rather than to understand that it is the capitalist system that is responsible for their suffering. Blaming these problems on the immigrant workers is particularly cynical, since it is American state capitalism, which needs immigrant workers to fill low paid jobs, to serve as a reserve army of unemployed and underemployed workers to depress wages for the entire working class.
Under cover of this campaign the bourgeoisie implements increasingly repressive policies ostensibly aimed at immigrants, but which augment the state’s repressive apparatus and increase social tolerance for such repression that will ultimately be available for use against the working class as a whole in moments of decisive class confrontations.
At the same time that it ruthlessly fans anti-immigrant hatred, the U.S. bourgeois cynically boasts that it is “a nation of immigrants,” providing opportunity for a better life for millions of people. And it certainly is true that because of the particular historic conditions under which American capitalism developed – an enormous territory with an extremely small native population – it was built on the backs of immigrants, whether imported against their will as slaves and indentured servants or as voluntary immigrants. Put in other words, the “American” working class was historically recruited from all around the world.
During the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, wave after wave of workers and ruined peasants from Europe, and to a lesser extent from Asia, supplied the labor force needed for the expansion of American capitalism. However, the time when American capital used any and all imaginable means to entice a desperately needed labor force to the U.S., that time of “generous” and essentially unrestricted immigration, is long gone.
It is no accident of history that the period of unrestricted immigration corresponded with the period of capitalist ascendency, when capitalism was still an historically progressive mode of production, dramatically expanding the forces of production, and that repressive, restrictive immigration policies characterized the period of capitalist decadence when the relations of capitalism became a fetter on the further development of the productive forces around the time of the First World War. Thus for instance, the Immigration Act of 1917 barred all Asian immigrants and created for the first time the concept of the non-immigrant foreign worker – who would come to America to work but was barred from staying. The National Origins Act enacted in 1924 limited the number of immigrants from Europe to 150,000 persons per year, and allocated the quota for each country on the basis of the ethnic makeup of the U.S. population in 1890 – before the massive waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. This was a blatantly racist measure to slow the growth of “undesirable” elements like Italians, Greeks, Eastern Europeans and Jews. In 1950, the McCarran-Walter Act was promulgated. Heavily influenced by McCarthyism and the anti-communist hysteria of the Cold War, this law imposed new limits on immigration under cover of the struggle against Russian imperialism and the “world communist threat.”
In 1986, America’s anti-immigrant policy was updated with enactment of the Simpson-Rodino Immigration and Naturalization Control Reform Act, which dealt with the influx of illegal immigrants from Latin America, by imposing for the first time in American history sanctions (fines and even prison) against employers who knowingly employed undocumented workers. The influx of illegal immigrants had been heightened by the economic collapse of Third World countries during the 1970s, which triggered a wave of impoverished masses fleeing destitution in Mexico, Haiti, and war ravaged El Salvador. The quantitative proportions of this out of control upsurge resulted in the arrest of a record 1.6 million illegal immigrants in 1986 by immigration police.
However, this repressive “reform” law had only short-lived success in blocking immigration, as the devastating effects of capitalist decomposition in the underdeveloped countries throughout the period since the 1980s – poverty, civil war, disease, untold suffering – has impelled millions of workers in the Third World to seek refuge in Europe and America. By 1992, arrests of illegal immigrants in the U.S. were back up to 1.1 million for the year. At that time the U.S. government responded by increasing the number of airport immigration officers, introducing counterfeit-resistant green cards, increasing the number of agents patrolling the Mexico-US boarder, introducing the use of “surplus” military vehicles for patrol use, and constructing an American-made “Berlin Wall” – a 10-foot high solid steel barricade which ran inland from the ocean for about 10 miles in the Tijuana-San Diego area. Fourteen years later, the Bush administration plans to extend this wall for 700 to 2,000 miles depending upon the final version of the immigration bill that will be worked out by the House-Senate conference committee.
While immigrants come to the U.S. fleeing deplorable conditions in their countries of origins, the social and economic situation they find themselves in once they get here is far from a paradise. They are as a rule condemned to the most hazardous and lowest paying jobs. Hispanic industrial workers, who comprise the majority of illegal immigrants in recent decades, are suffering work-related injuries more often and more seriously than other workers in similar jobs. Nor do they receive comparable medical care or workmen’s compensation for their injuries. In addition, immigrants are forced into the ghettoes of the big cities where they face crowded housing, miserable hygienic conditions, reminiscent of the 19th century conditions faced by Italian and Irish immigrants more than a hundred years ago.
There are two essential differences between the flight of today’s illegal immigrants and their class brothers of the past. First the working class and peasant immigrants of the 19th and early 20th centuries, after a period of extreme exploitation at the hands of the bosses were either integrated as part of the working class into the normal relations of production in an expanding bourgeois society, or to some extent became part of the petty bourgeois element in the cities and countryside. In this way the immigrants’ standard of living rose to the average economic and social norm for the rest of the working class. The situation has largely been different for today’s immigrants, who have been subjected to social marginalization, hazardous and low-paying jobs, and over-exploitation in an ever-growing cash/off-the-books economy.
The second difference between the immigrants of the ascendant period of capitalism and today is that contemporary immigrants confront a different historical situation: capitalist decomposition. Pushed to emigrate from the periphery of capitalism to its center regions due to economic collapse and political chaos, rejected, socially marginalized, victimized by racism and other bourgeois prejudices in the so-called “land of opportunity,” this “immigrant” sector of the working class is particularly trapped in the turmoil of capitalism.
Historically the working class has always been a class of immigrants, migrating in the first place from the countryside to the cities in search of work and the chance to be exploited at the dawn of capitalist development, or later migrating from city to city following opportunities for work as new industries and centers of production sprang up. In this sense the tension between “native” workers and immigrants is alien to the class interests of the proletariat, and has always represented the intrusion of bourgeois ideology into working class life. In the last analysis what matters for the world working class is to understand that both the wave of impoverished immigrant masses and the anti-immigrant campaigns we are witnessing today are expressions of the dead-end to which decadent capitalism has condemned humanity. The global economic crisis has put the working class standard of living under attack everywhere. The social decomposition of capitalism has created chaos and despair in the underdeveloped countries forcing millions to seek the opportunity to sell their labor power in the more stable capitalist metropoles. Only the working class movement, with its revolutionary communist perspective can deliver society from its current impasse. It is essential for proletarian revolutionaries and class conscious militants to point out the fundamental unity of the working class against all our enemy class’s attempt to poison us with hatred and disunity.
ES/JG, July '06.
This spring hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers, most of them “illegal aliens”, as the bourgeoisie calls them, predominantly from Latin American countries, took to the streets in major American cities across the country, from Los Angeles, to Dallas, to Chicago, to Washington DC, and New York City, protesting a threatened crackdown proposed in legislation advocated by the right-wing of the Republican party. The movement seemed to erupt overnight, coming from nowhere. What is the meaning of these events and what is the class nature of this movement?
The anti-immigrant legislation that won approval in the House of Representatives and provoked the demonstrations would criminalise illegal immigration, making it a felony for the first time. Currently being an illegal immigrant is a civil violation, not a criminal offense. Illegal immigrants would be arrested, tried, convicted, deported, and would forfeit any possibility to ever legally return to the US in the future. State laws which forbid local agencies, from police to schools to social services from reporting illegal aliens to immigration officials would be nullified, and employers who hired illegal aliens would suffer legal penalties as well. Under this legislation, upwards of 12 million immigrants would face arrest and deportation. This extreme legislation does not have the support of the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie, as it does not correspond to the global interests of American state capitalism, which clearly needs immigrant workers to fill low paid jobs, to serve as a reserve army of unemployed and underemployed workers to depress wages for the entire working class, and considers the idea of mass deportation of 12 million people to be an absurdity. Opposed to this proposed crackdown are the Bush administration, the official Republican leadership in the Senate, the Democrats, big city mayors, state governors, major corporate employers who need to exploit a plentiful supply of immigrant workers (in the retail, restaurant, meat packing, agribusiness, construction and home care industries), and the trade unions who dream of extracting membership dues from these destitute workers. This motley crew of bourgeois “champions” of immigrant workers favors more moderate legislation, which would tighten up the border, slash the numbers of new immigrants, allow illegal immigrants who have been here for a number of years to become legalized, and force those who have been here for less than two years to leave the country, but with the possibility to return legally in the future. Some form of “guest” worker program would be set up to allow foreign workers to find temporary work in the US on a legal basis and maintain the supply of needed cheap labor.
It was in this social and political context that the immigrant worker demonstrations erupted. Coming on the heels of the unemployed immigrant youth riots in France last autumn, the student revolt triggered in France this spring against the government’s attack on job security, and the transit strike in New York in December, the immigrant demonstrations were hailed by leftists of all stripes, many libertarian and anarchist groups as well. It is certainly true that the immigrants threatened by the legislation are a sector of the working class that confronts a particularly harsh and brutal exploitation, suffers a harrowing existence, denied access to social services and medical treatment, and that their situation demands the solidarity and support of the working class as a whole. This solidarity is all the more necessary because in classical fashion the bourgeoisie uses the debate over legal and illegal status of the immigrants as a means to stir up racism and hatred, to divide the proletariat against itself, all the while that it profits from the exploitation of the immigrant workers. This could indeed have been a struggle on the proletarian terrain, but there is a big difference between what could be and what actually happens in any given movement.
Wishful thinking should not blind us to the actual class nature of the recent demonstrations, which were in large measure a bourgeois manipulation. Yes, there have been workers in the streets, but they are there totally on the terrain of the bourgeoisie, which provoked the demonstrations, manipulated them, controlled them, and openly led them. It is true that there have been some instances, such as the spontaneous walkouts by Mexican immigrant high school students in California – the sons and daughters of the working class – that implied certain similarities to the situation in France, but this movement was not organized on the proletarian terrain or controlled by immigrant workers themselves. The demonstrations that brought hundreds of thousands into the streets were orchestrated and mobilized by the Spanish-language mass media, that is to say by the Spanish-speaking bourgeoisie, with the support of large corporations and establishment politicians. The fact that the demonstrations announced for May 19 during the May 1 protests never materialized is testimony to the bourgeois control of the movement.
Nationalism has poisoned the movement, whether it was Latino nationalism, which cropped up in the opening moments of the demonstrations, or the sickening rush to affirm Americanism that followed more recently, or the nationalist, racist-based opposition to the immigrants fomented by right-wing talk show broadcasters on the radio and right-wing Republicans. When there were complaints in the mass media that too many immigrant demonstrators carried Mexican flags in California and that this showed they were more loyal to their home country than their adopted home, movement organizers supplied thousands of American flags to be waved in the demonstrations that followed in other cities to affirm the loyalty and Americanism of the protests. The demand for citizenship, which is a totally bourgeois legalism, is another example of the non-proletarian terrain of the struggle. This putrid nationalist ideology is designed to completely short circuit any possibility for immigrants and American-born workers to recognize their essential unity.
By the end of April a Spanish language version of the national anthem recorded by leading Hispanic pop stars was released and broadcast on the radio. Of course the right-wing nationalist opponents of the immigrants jumped on the Spanish-language version of the national anthem as affront to national dignity. Even though he opposes the extreme anti-immigrant legislation rammed through the House of Representatives, even Pres. George W. Bush criticized the Spanish-language version of the anthem, in an attempt to placate the far right base of the Republican Party. This was particularly ironic since Bush himself appeared in campaign rallies in Hispanic communities during the 2000 presidential election and sang along with Spanish renditions of the Star Spangled Banner.
Nowhere was the capitalist nature of the movement more evident than in the mass demonstration in April in New York City (with an estimated 38% of the adult population born in a foreign country) when 300,000 immigrants rallied outside City Hall, where they had the support of the city’s mayor, Republican Michael Bloomberg, and Democratic Senators Charles Schumer and Hilary Clinton, who spoke to the crowd and praised their struggle as example of Americanism and patriotism.
It’s been 20 years since the last major immigration reform effort undertaken by the Reagan administration, which granted amnesty to illegal immigrants. But that amnesty did nothing to stem the tide of illegal immigration that has continued unabated for two decades, because American capitalism needs a constant supply of cheap labor and because the effects of the social decomposition of capitalism in underdeveloped countries has so degraded living conditions as to impel growing numbers of workers to seek refuge in the relatively more stable and prosperous capitalist metropoles.
For the bourgeoisie the time has come to stabilize the situation once again, as it has become more difficult to absorb an increasing flood of immigrants and more and more difficult to tolerate a situation where millions of workers are not officially integrated into the economy or society, who don’t pay taxes, are not documented, after nearly 20 years of illegal status. On the one hand, this has led the Bush administration to resort to clumsy efforts to restrict new immigration at the border, for example by militarizing the border with Mexico, literally constructing a Berlin Wall to make it difficult for immigrants to cross into the US. On the other hand it has also led the administration to favor legalization for workers who have been here more than two years. Because the U.S. economy is such that it needs a constant flow of cheap labor in a big sector of the economy, it is highly unlikely that the several million workers who have been in the U.S. under two years and will be legally required to leave the country, will actually do so. Most likely they will remain here illegally, and will become the base of the future illegal workforce that will continue to be necessary for the capitalist economy, both to provide cheap labor and put pressure on wages for the rest of the working class.
The recalcitrance of the right-wing to accept this reality reflects the increasing political irrationality created by social decomposition, which has previously manifested itself in the ruling class’ difficulty in achieving its desired results in the presidential election. For example, the irrational xenophobia exhibited by the right is completely at odds with the interests of American state capitalism. In the last decade and a half the presence of immigrants has spread from the traditional population centers in California, New York, Florida, Texas, and Illinois to more rural, more traditional ethnically homogenous regions in the south and Midwest. The meat packing industry, for example, has brought thousands of illegal immigrants to work in their meat packing and poultry processing plants in places like Nebraska, Iowa, Georgia and North Carolina. The racist reaction to the immigrant influx in these areas is a classic illustration of the effects of decomposition. The immigration bill passed by the Senate which coincides with the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie’s policy orientation, with a few measures thrown in to placate the right, such as the construction of a wall at the Mexican border, beefing up border patrols, and the administration’s decision to dispatch National Guard troops to police the border, still has to be reconciled with the House. It’s hard to believe that the extreme right cannot see the impossibility of mass deportations of 12 million people, and the need to stabilize the situation. It’s only a matter of time before the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie imposes its solution to the problem as the bourgeoisie moves to integrate the newly legalized population into the mainstream political process.
Internationalism 5/30/06
As the Memorial Day weekend neared the price of gas at the pump in New York State skyrocketed to $3.21 per gallon for regular. In the past year crude oil has risen 33 percent. The Bush administration and the mass media claim the cause is the law of supply and demand. According to them the industrialized countries are “addicted” to oil and, particularly in the U.S., as the summer vacation period approaches, demand is going up. Add to this the lingering effects of Hurricane Katrina on oil production and the refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, and the burgeoning energy needs of the booming economies of India and China and fears of political instability in the Middle East, particularly because of the continuing war in Iraq, where oil production has not returned to pre-war levels, and a possible military confrontation over Iranian nuclear ambitions, and terrorist attacks on oil facilities in Nigeria, and the result, according to the bourgeoisie, is a classic situation in which demand far outstrips current oil supplies. As National Public Radio put it, “So you have a situation where demand has been growing steadily and inexorably, and the systems of supply is quite vulnerable. That’s the basic recipe for high prices” (NPR April 27, 2006).
The leftists, including consumer spokesman and Greens leader Ralph Nader, offer yet another explanation. For them, corporate greed and unconscionable price gouging are to blame, pure and simple. It’s the work of evil, money hungry capitalists. They point to soaring oil company profits as proof.
Whatever grain of truth these explanations contain that give them some semblance of plausibility, neither corresponds to a comprehensive explanation of reality.
Despite the current controversy over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, oil supplies are unaffected. Iran has not even threatened to cut oil production as a political tactic in the current confrontation. As Iranian oil minister, Kaxem Vaziri-Hamaneh, put it during the January OPEC meeting in Vienna, “We are not mixing politics with the economic decisions on this issue.” Despite the American bourgeoisie’s claim that there are inadequate supplies, all the evidence indicates that current inventories of crude oil are adequate to meet current purchases, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. According to forecasts for future global oil production from sources as diverse as the U.S. Energy Department, Daniel Yergin of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and Simmons and Company International, global oil production will continue to grow for the next 10 to 30 years. All the political instability and war that the bourgeoisie says might reduce supplies in the future are the inevitable by-products of imperialism and the social decomposition of capitalism. It is imperialism and decomposition that is responsible for soaring oil prices, not the invisible hand of supply and demand.
If there is pressure on world oil supplies, it comes from the headlong rush of industrialized countries to augment their Strategic Petroleum Reserves, in anticipation of possible interruptions in oil production due to the threat of war. Currently there are 26 nations with SPR of over 1.4 billion barrels of oil, oil that is artificially removed from world oil supplies, oil that it is not available to meet current consumer demand. With the growing threat of war (imperialism again!), the U.S. is reportedly planning to increase its current SPR of 700 million barrels of oil, by 300 million. Australia, the countries of the European Union, and Japan and Korea are also expected to increase their SPR as well. In addition, China, Russia, and India plan to create their oil SPR in the period ahead. India seeks to create an SPR of 40 million barrels initially. China plans an SPR of 100 million barrels. While Russia has not announced its SPR goal, 78 million barrels would give it a reserve equivalent to 30 days of typical oil consumption. To fill these expanding SPR needs, as much as 1,000,000 barrels of oil per day are likely to be withdrawn from the open market over the next few years, putting more pressure on crude oil prices (www.energybulletin.net/11386.html [3], May 22, 2006). This inflationary pressure on crude oil prices is the direct fruit of U.S. imperialism’s strategy in the Middle East for the past decade, to put pressure on Europe, particularly German and French imperialism, by exerting control over world oil supplies. As increasingly happens under the conditions of capitalist decomposition, every action U.S. imperialism takes to defend its hegemony only exacerbates its problems, in this case by sending petroleum prices through the roof, even for the U.S. itself.
In this context the leftist grumbling about greedy capitalists becomes a caricature. Nader’s arguments about corporate greed rest primarily on the contention that American petroleum industry has artificially created an oil shortage by shutting down “scores of refineries and then turn ‘refinery shortages’ into higher gas prices at the pump.” (Nader, “The Price of Oil,” April 28, 2006 www.pirg.org [4]). Even if this were true, it wouldn’t explain why the price of crude oil would rise so dramatically so fast. Sure, greed is inevitably a factor in the capitalist economy. The oil corporations, as any capitalist enterprise in the same circumstances, have not hesitated to take immediate advantage of soaring crude prices, to raise prices at the pump, even if it will take two to three months for current higher priced crude oil to make its way to retail outlets. Since their original investment in crude oil production, from which they gain most of their profits, was made at a time when oil prices were much lower and their break even point is therefore much lower, naturally profits will rise dramatically.
To the extent that the Hurricane Katrina impacted oil refineries in the Gulf Coast, that is a manifestation of decomposition, in that capitalism’s total disregard for the environment has negatively affected world meteorological patterns and caused the rash of extreme weather disturbances in the last few yeas. Years of neglect of the infrastructure, a fruit of the social decomposition of capitalism, has made the Gulf Coast unnecessarily vulnerable to catastrophic storm damage.
The bourgeoisie can spout all the mumble-jumble it wants about supply and demand as its alibi for skyrocketing oil prices, but it is the world imperialist system itself that is the fundamental cause of the current difficulties.
JG, July ’06.
Clearly the proletariat in the U.S. is completely inscribed in the same generalized return to struggle that has been occurring on the international level since 2003, as the world working class struggles to emerge from the disorientation, confusion and reflux in consciousness that ensued after the fall of the two bloc system at the end of the 1980s, which was so deep and so profound that in many ways the proletariat, while not defeated in the historic sense, experienced great difficulty in even recognizing is own identity as a class and in having confidence in itself as a class with the capacity to defend itself.
As we have noted on the Web site and in the press, the dramatic high point of this trend was the New York City transit strike in December, but it is important to stress that this struggle was not a sudden development but rather the fruit of an ongoing tendency to retake the struggle as seen in the grocery workers struggle in California, the struggles at Boeing and North West Airlines, Philadelphia transit, and the graduate assistants strike at New York University. As in other countries, workers in the U.S. have been pushed by the seriousness of the global economic crisis and consequent escalation of attacks by the ruling class on their standard of living to defend themselves as shake off the effects of the period of disorientation. The primary task posed by these nascent struggles in many countries was not the extension of struggles across geographic and industrial sector lines, but the reacquisition of consciousness at the most basic levels, of class self identity and solidarity.
The return to struggle in the U.S. occurs within a social situation increasingly free of illusions. Gone is the sense of a false reality that characterized at least part of the Clinton years, with promises of unending growth, the Internet bubble, the soaring stock market. Today there is a generalized sense that the future is not rosy, that things are not going right, there is nothing to brag about in the economy, no cause for optimism – no alternative but to struggle, to fight against the escalating austerity attacks on the standard of living. Coupled with the fact that there are today two generations of undefeated workers in the proletariat also favors the development of class struggle.
There is a qualitative aspect to the current return to struggle that is significantly different from previous experiences since the onset of the global crisis in the 1960s. Yes, there is anger, even rage, about austerity attacks, particularly in regard to cuts in pensions and medical benefits, which is in fact a drastic cut in the compensation or wages of the workers. But the struggles that are emerging today are not driven by blind anger or unthinking combativeness, as they were more likely to be in the late 60s or the 70s. Today workers are returning to the struggle with a great consciousness of what is at stake and what has to be done. A strike today means risky replacement by scabs, it risks the threat of company bankruptcy and the permanent disappearance of jobs, it risks trading increasing difficulty to support one’s family, for absolute disaster. In the case of the transit workers, their strike was illegal, with the loss of wages not only for everyday they were on strike, but also a penalty of two additional days’ pay for every strike day—in other words for a three-day strike, they lost nine days pay. In addition they faced the threat of a $25,000 fine for the first day of the strike, which would double each day – thus for the three-day strike, the court could have imposed a fine of $175,000 on each individual striker!
Conscious of all these risks, dangers, and penalties, workers have struck, because they increasingly understand the necessity to fight and that they are not just fighting for themselves but their class. This reclamation of class self identity and the closely linked revival of class solidarity are perhaps the most important legacies of the transit strike. We can see it in many manifestations, in the statement of the bus driver who told one of our comrades, “It was good that we stood up for the working class.” We can see it in the tremendous sympathy for the strike throughout the working class in NYC during the strike, even though the strike inconvenienced many workers. Workers everywhere talked about the need to stand up for the erosion of pensions, against the imposition of two-tier systems that would penalize new workers. It could be seen in the voice of the older African American worker who was seen on television denouncing Mayor Bloomberg for branding the strikers “thugs.” “If they’re thugs, then I’m a thug, too,” she said. It was seen as well in the tendency for other workers to refuse to leave the strikers isolated and alone, but the desire to demonstrate their support and solidarity. Other workers visited the picket lines, to march with workers, to bring food and hot coffee in the extreme cold weather, to talk to the strikers – and they were welcomed wholeheartedly by the strikers. In one case, several teachers brought their classes to visit the workers and offer support. The transit strikers knew they were not alone, that they were not isolated, and it was because their struggle confronted exactly the same problems and conditions that the rest of the class confronts.
During the 3rd wave of class struggle we used to argue that real solidarity meant joining the struggle, spreading the struggle to other sectors, having other sectors joining the strike, integrating their own demands, etc. This type of generalization, and spreading and politicization of struggles is absolutely necessary and integral to the revolutionary process, but perhaps the present manifestations of solidarity emanating from the proletariat itself shows how much deeper, and even more elementally human solidarity can be in the working class. During the waves of class struggle that occurred in the 70s, there was often a simultaneity of struggle, but not necessarily any significant sense of solidarity between the workers in struggle at the same time. Today, as workers turn to struggle with an increasing consciousness of the importance and difficulties of their struggles, a re-emerging sense of class self-identity, and a profound need for solidarity, the situation is qualitatively different. While the struggle ahead will be exceedingly difficult, there is room for optimism about the perspectives for class struggle, and a growing responsibilities for the intervention of revolutionary minorities in the class struggle.
Internationalism, July '06.
With the elections of Evo Morales in Bolivia and Michelle Bachelet in Chile, the bourgeoisie’s mouthpieces are once again spewing ideological venom, according to which these democratic elections have opened the door to new possibilities to help the have-nots in certain countries of Latin America. This is possible because the victors of such elections belong to Left parties, or to Center-Left coalitions. People such as Carlos Fuentes [1] portray the election of Morales to the Bolivian presidency as a positive event, which supposedly serves to strengthen democracy, as before then “The Left had no other recourse but armed insurrection” (Reforma, 02/01/06).
This trend began with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela; then Lula in Brazil; Lucio Gutierrez in Ecuador; Kirchner in Argentina; Tavare Vasquez in Uruguay; and Toledo in Peru. Could it be that democracy is finally paying off? Have the have-nots finally succeeded in electing candidates to office that represent their interests? Is the “Bolivarian dream” of a united American continent becoming a reality? Could this new united America—or at least part of it—offer a response to US imperialism, and in this way improve the lot of poor countries?
Perhaps we would do better by asking ourselves why it is that the bourgeoisie itself has been so welcoming of the newly elected Left, as the World Parliamentary Forum did: “We claim as ours the powerful presence of popular movements, one of the central elements in building alternatives that strongly put in question the capitalist model on its phase of neo-liberal globalization – a presence in which the social movements, and the mobilizations of native American Indians are on the first line of combat. In particular we claim the importance of the victory of the popular sectors in Bolivia and the election to the presidency of their American Indian leader Evo Morales…” (Final Declaration of the WPF, February 16, 2006).
Those still holding illusions about democracy and the democratic process believe that the main factor determining the policies of a particular candidate for office is his character. That is why the bourgeois media has focused greatly on the personal and social lives of presidents, in their “revolutionary” language, and on whether or not they are “indigenous.” These bits of information are used as guarantees that these governments will act on behalf of the exploited, and in opposition to the bourgeoisie.
However, we need to understand that it is not a candidate’s party affiliation, his intentions, or his ethnic origins that will determine the type of politics he will practice. On the contrary, his influences will always be the necessities of the capitalist system. That is why in today’s world it is impossible to implement a Left political platform that is essentially different from that of the Right.
Under decadent capitalism, parliamentary structures and electoral processes are mere circuses that the bourgeoisie uses to trap the working class in a democratic illusion. This is why left parties that participate in the electoral process - by claiming to champion the interests of the exploited - help reinforce the oppression of the exploited. These parties serve as agents of the capitalist class who have infiltrated the ranks of the working class. When they use names and rhetoric similar to that historically employed by the working class, or by “revolutionaries,” they do so with the intention of keeping the exploited under the illusion that a vote for the candidate that “fights on their behalf” will help the exploited “win” and have a chance for a better future.
In Revolucion Mundial (ICC newspaper in Mexico) No. 86, May-June 2005 [7], we wrote that the arrival of left parties to Latin American governments reflected “…a weakness of the political apparatus, which desperately seeks to unite the bourgeoisie and strengthen its control of the workers, in a time in which the later have been making their will known as a response to the on-going and deepening crisis of capitalism.” By following this line of thought, it becomes possible to understand that the political presence of left populist governments is fundamentally due to:
This is why the election of left parties, and the celebration of the “triumph of the oppressed” are only means by which the bourgeoisie takes combativeness and class-consciousness away from the class struggle.
In Latin America in particular, the election of leftist administrations have made the myth of democracy more believable once again (in the past, decades of poor living conditions in the continent had almost ruined the reputation of democracy). This is why we contend that although the elections of these “new” governments in Latin America reflect the inability of the bourgeoisie to produce a candidate capable of imposing discipline among the different factions of the ruling class; it is also an opportunity for the bourgeoisie to strengthen its ideological dominance. For example, with the election of Evo Morales, the Bolivian bourgeoisie accomplished something it had not been able to do in 40 years: to obtain the support of 54% of the population during the election. This trend can be seen in Brazil with Lula, in Argentina with Kitchner, and (as is expected) in Mexico with Lopez Obrador.
“In general, the mechanism is the same: to convince workers that the left will ‘change things,’ and that it’s enough to follow a ‘Messiah’ to solve society’s problems. The electoral campaigns attempt to have workers do away with their methods of struggle, their strikes and their soviets (soberain general assemblies…) to instead take refuge in ‘democratic channels and elections—and in doing so, they attempt to prevent workers from developing class consciousness, and lose themselves in the labyrinth of a ‘voting citizenry’…The election of Lula needs to be analyzed from a proletarian perspective. The illusions that Brazilian workers had in his candidacy gave the bourgeoisie the tools through which they were able to pass tough economic and political measures. However, let us make it clear: Lula did not betray the workers; his policies were merely a continuation of his anti-proletariat maneuvers that began with his invocation of ‘democracy’ and his alluring ways to trap the workers in the ballot box mystification.” (Revolucion Mundial, No. 86 [7])
Another myth that the socialist presidential candidates have spread is that their national economies will benefit from protecting their “sovereignty” through the nationalization of businesses, or by confronting “yanqui imperialism.” Hugo Chavez has been the most successful selling this lie, which was helped by his alliance with Fidel Castro. “Anti-imperialism” is as effective as nationalism in helping the bourgeoisie recruit proletarian participation in the exploitation of the latter, and the defense of the former.
The Bush administration defines Chavez and Castro as “negative forces within this region,” but not because Bush actually believes Chavez and Castro are dangerous in and of themselves. The Bush administration is aware that these two heads of state are just tools that are used by political and economic rivals of the USA to advance their own national interests. The election of left governments in Latin America will not necessarily strengthen the enemies of “yanqui imperialism,” even if the newly elected left joins the rhetorical anti-imperialist bandwagon. With the arrival of left governments, the Latin American bourgeoisie need not change its political alliances; Lula is a perfect example of this. [2]
When a government or group of governments (such as the ones that came together at the World Parliamentary Forum) screams anti-imperialist clichés, it is safe to assume that either its alliances lie with the imperialist’s enemy, or is attempting to use the anti-imperialist rhetoric to win votes (as Evo Morales did). [3]
The anti-imperialist “formula” used by the left factions of Capital can be summarized as such: the exploited need to take disease, misery and hunger with a smile so that their “poor” national bourgeoisie will not have such a hard time in life. And to help the workers swallow the nationalist poison, the bourgeoisie uses tactics such as protests against neo-liberalism, the advocacy of nationalist populism, the nationalization of businesses, co-operativism, auto-management, etc. all of which are sold as measures that are intended to help the workers, but which actually strengthen their particular state capitalisms and thereby help “save” their economies a little. [4]
What the above discussion suggests is that the bourgeoisie’s propaganda about the left’s advances in Latin America is intended to separate the proletariat from its class struggle. Neither the left nor the right of the bourgeoisie have the capacity to fix the state of the economy in Latin America. On the contrary, regardless of the party in power, the misery of the working class—on whose shoulders the bourgeoisie rests the weight of the crisis—will only grow. We thus need to reaffirm that the only way for the working class to obtain its emancipation is to develop its class struggle.
Hector / February 2006.
[1] Carlos Fuentes is a Mexican writer, and is considered one of the best known novelists and essayist in the Spanish-speaking world, according to Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Fuentes [8]
[2] “When asked to comment on the advances of the left in Latin America, and the possibility that this will fuel anti-American sentiments in the region, Donald Rumsfeld, the head of the Pentagon in the United States, answered that the majority of Latin American counties (with the exception of Cuba) are making strides towards democratic governance.” (EFE, 18 February 2006).
[3] “Evo Morales invited George Bush to visit him in Bolivia and have a chat ‘face to face’ about the chances of having their countries develop a relationship of cooperation. Morales also asked Bush to extend the U.S.’s Most Preferred Nations Status for Andean countries—which benefit Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, but expire at the end of this year. Morales has also stated that he will not force the DEA out of his country (AP, 2 February 2006). Yet, he continues to use anti-imperialist rhetoric to try to conserve his political image. And regarding the supposed regional Axis of Evil comprised of Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, he stated ‘What Axis of Evil? Bolivia does not belong to an Axis of Evil; but from its location in Latin America, it builds an axis for humanity, and seeks to liberate the countries of this region…This is not a time when the people are able to raise their weapons against imperialism; this is a time when the empire makes war on the people.” (16 February 2006).
[4] The information that the news media has broadcast on Evo Morales’ first acts as President clearly demonstrate that even if he presents himself as a representative of the exploited, in actuality he represents the bourgeoisie: “President Evo Morales reached out to entrepreneurs in Santa Cruz, who were his most severe critics during the elections…Last Thursday, Morales met with leaders of the influential Chamber of Industries, Commerce, Services and Tourism (CAINCO), the Association of Private Banks, and associations representing the sugar and construction industries, to whom he pledged his support…He augured a new era of good relationship between the Santa Cruz bourgeoisie and the government in La Paz.” (AFP Y DPA, 4 February 2006).
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/1848/mexico
[3] http://www.energybulletin.net/11386.html
[4] http://www.pirg.org
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[7] https://es.internationalism.org/rm/86_GobDerIzqAL.html
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Fuentes
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/south-and-central-america