Even at the highest level of the American state, it has become evident that the war in Iraq has been a complete disaster. The report of the Iraq Study Group made it perfectly clear that the longer the US and ‘Coalition’ troops stay in Iraq, the worse things are going to get.

And yet Bush’s response to the findings of this panel of wise and loyal servitors of US interests was not to move towards troop withdrawals as the ISG suggested, but to call up another 21,500 troops to ‘get the job done’. It was not to engage in a “constructive dialogue” with Iran and Syria, as the ISG proposed, but to adopt an even tougher stance towards Tehran, typified by the declaration that the US will openly justify killing Iranian agents stirring up trouble in Iraq.

Why this response?

Is it, as practically all the forces organising the official ‘anti-war’ campaign argue, because Bush is a particularly thick-headed, corrupt, self-serving war monger?

Bush is all of that. But his response to the ISG’s proposals is not simply the desperate last throw of a ‘lame-duck’ president. It expresses the impasse facing US imperialism as a whole, and, behind that, the impasse of the capitalist system as a whole.

Despite the fact that the Democrats control both Houses of Congress, they have not come up with a real alternative to Bush’s policy. Nor did Kerry during the last election. And Bush’s ‘Republican’ war-mongering is in perfect continuity with Clinton’s ‘Democratic’ war-mongering in the years prior to 2000. Bush’s military adventurism in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia follows Clinton’s repeated bombing of Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia (and Serbia), which was in turn in perfect continuity with the first Gulf War launched by Bush Senior in 1991. The man, or the party, in the White House is not the issue. The issue is the existence of a relentless and impersonal drive to war which neither the US, nor any other capitalist state, can resist, no matter what the cost in economic or human terms.

Following the collapse of America’s great imperialist rival, the USSR, in 1989-91, we were promised a ‘new world order’ of peace and prosperity. In fact we got a new disorder of war and crisis. As its former great power allies, no longer scared of the Russian bear, began to pursue their own separate national inclinations, the USA was compelled to use its massive military strength to try to re-impose its fading authority. Its focus was Afghanistan and Iraq not just because attacking ‘international terrorism’ and the ‘Butcher of Baghdad’ gave it the perfect alibi to deliver a spectacular warning to its ex-allies, but also because controlling the Middle East is key to the USA’s global strategic domination.

Of course none of this succeeded in creating anything like a state of ‘order’ for US imperialism. The more the US throws its weight around, the more chaos it has left in its wake, the more hostility and hatred it has stirred up, from the petty warlords of ‘radical Islam’ to major regional powers like Iran to great powers like Russia, China, France and Germany. And yet American capitalism has no choice: to back down, to renounce its status as the world’s superpower, would be unthinkable, for Bush, Hilary Clinton, Obama or any other representative of the US bourgeoisie. And so it is driven to go on spreading chaos and destruction. And so all its rivals must go on trying to sabotage its plans, build up their own power bases, support local states and gangs opposed to the US – in short, defend their sordid imperialist interests everywhere in the world. For as Rosa Luxemburg pointed out during the First World War, “imperialism is not the creation of one or any group of states, but is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognisable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will” (The Junius Pamphlet).

The capitalist system has reached a stage of permanent warfare. Therefore, as Luxemburg concluded in the same pamphlet, “it is not through utopian advice and schemes to tame, ameliorate, or reform imperialism within the framework of the bourgeois state that proletarian policy can re-conquer its leading place”. The answer to imperialism cannot be to ask it to become peaceful and to give up its weapons of mass destruction. It’s as logical as asking a shark to become a vegetarian.

Nor is it to support the lesser imperialist sharks against the more powerful ones. The USA may be the most destructive power because it is the most powerful, but all the others follow the same logic. France, for example, played the peace card over Iraq but it is busy playing its own imperialist games in Africa; Russia does the same in Chechnya or Georgia.

Nor is it to support the so-called ‘anti-imperialist resistance’ in Iraq, Lebanon or elsewhere. The resistance forces are would-be imperialists in search of a new capitalist state, and they cannot operate without acting as agents of existing imperialist powers. Hezbollah fights Israeli imperialism with the aid of Iranian imperialism; the Iraqi resistance fights the US and Britain with the aid of Syria, and again Iran.

The only real answer to imperialism is the struggle against the capitalist system of exploitation which has spawned it and which sustains it. It is the struggle of the exploited against their exploiters and against the state which enforces their exploitation. This is a struggle which crosses all borders and which stands as a force of opposition to nationalism, to ethnic and racial divisions and to the drive towards war.

Peace in capitalism is the true utopia. ‘World peace’ can only be established if the class war reaches its final destination: the overthrow of the capitalist system, its states and its borders, and the creation of communism, a society in which all production is geared towards the satisfaction of human need. WR 3/2/7

The situation of capitalism can only be understood at the global level, since it is only by grasping its totality that its real nature and dynamic can be seen. Thus it is a mistake to expect to see every aspect of capitalism expressed equally in the situation of any particular nation state. Britain does not show the devastation of the economic crisis seen elsewhere any more than it bears the direct scars of war and nor has it seen class struggle on the scale witnessed elsewhere. Nonetheless it is part of the international dynamic and the particular developments in this country contribute to the overall dynamic.

A qualitative development of the class struggle

2. Over the last two years the developments in the class struggle internationally have confirmed that the working class is once again moving towards confrontation with capitalism. The reflux in its struggle that weighed on it so heavily after the collapse of the old blocs in 1989 has been coming to an end for several years and in country after country the proletariat has struggled not only to defend its immediate interests against the ever-increasing attacks of capitalism, but also for the long-term interests of the whole class. Indeed, it is this qualitative dimension that most defines the current struggle. Against the culture of look after number one, against the racial, ethnic and religious divisions so assiduously cultivated by the ruling class, the working class has again raised the banner of class solidarity. This principle stands opposed to the whole logic of bourgeois society and contains within it the embryo of the revolutionary challenge to capitalism. In the struggle against the CPE in France, but also in the struggles in Vigo, Spain, this principle has reached a high point with the reappearance of mass, sovereign assemblies that work to unify the class and control the struggle. Here, again in embryo, are the means of the mass strike, the means of the proletariat’s direct confrontation with capitalism, the means of the revolutionary struggle for communism. But, however significant this qualitative dimension is it has to be joined by the quantitative one, by the mobilisation of the masses, if the potential is to be realised. While there have been signs of this - for example the movement against the CPE was successful when it seemed as if the workers would come out in support of it - this task still stands before the proletariat.

3. Over the last two years the situation in Britain has evolved and is now clearly part of this international development. Two years ago we identified a range of factors tending to limit the class struggle in Britain: “the experience of the two classes, the historical strength of the unions, the legacy of the defeats suffered in the miners’ strike, the effectiveness of the gradual introduction of economic attacks and the continuing ideological weight of the Labour government”. Today most, if not all of these factors carry less weight and we can conclude that the proletariat in this country has taken its struggle forwards and has played a significant role in the development of the class struggle. The struggles generally remain small in scale, with the exception of the public workers’ strike in March, and also tend to be short lived; but the signs of a growing combativity and the consciousness shown in the most important actions suggest that the period of relative calm is coming to an end.

This evolution is underpinned above all by the development of the crisis, with the attacks not only becoming more generalised, but also calling into question the viability of capitalism as a whole. The attack on pensions exemplifies this: not only does it confront every worker with the threat of the loss or reduction of their pension or of having to work for several more years, but it also puts in question the fundamental illusion held out by capitalism of a better tomorrow.

The question of war has also begun to have an impact. The war on terror, which has led only to more war and more terror and particularly to the nightmares of Iraq and Afghanistan, has helped to wear out illusions in the Labour government, with surveys showing strong opposition to the war. While this has the potential to pose fundamental questions about capitalism as a whole, rather than the policy of this of that particular government, this has not happened to any very significant extent yet.

4. The development of struggle in Britain, like that globally, is above all qualitative:

- firstly, solidarity between workers that breaches the divisions imposed by bourgeois society. In August 2005 BA workers struck in support of staff sacked by Gate Gourmet. The former were mainly white, the latter Asian. This strike was also significant because it took place in the middle of the campaigns following the bombings in London. In February 2006 Catholic and Protestant postal workers in Northern Ireland went on strike, marching together in Belfast. In the same month workers at Cottam power station struck in protest at the low wages paid to Hungarian workers at the site. In the aftermath of the council workers’ strike in March permanent contracted workers forced the reinstatement of Polish workers employed by an agency after they had taken part in the strike;

- secondly, the development of actions outside of the unions, and sometimes opposed to them. The BA/Gate Gourmet strike, several postal workers’ movements and the Cottam power workers all took the form of unofficial action and were criticised by the unions;

- thirdly, a growing level of combativity. The most significant example of this was the council workers’ strike in March but other examples include the walkout by Vauxhall car workers on the news of job cuts and the strike by police support workers in Devon and Cornwall in the face of pay cuts of up to 28%.

5. The quantitative level of struggle remains low: 2005 saw the lowest number of days lost to strike actions since records began in the late 19th century. The only large-scale struggles in recent years have been the two by local government workers in 2002 and 2006. However, they give an indication of the evolution of the situation. In 2002 the one-day strike was completely dominated by the unions and was essentially a manoeuvre to contain the anger of the working class. The strike this March seemed superficially very much the same in that it was called by the unions and controlled by them. However, the number on strike seems to have been greater and it seems to also have been animated by a more combative spirit, with solidarity being shown between workers – such as that with Polish workers penalised for participating in the strike. This suggests that this time while the unions were still trying to contain the anger of the workers they were less in control. Historically, the working class in Britain has not been the most volatile, due in part at least to the ability of the bourgeoisie to manage the factors pushing the class into struggle on the one hand and to contain and derail the struggle once begun on the other. Today, as we have seen, it is becoming harder to manage the attacks on the working class and there is a real potential for the development of the struggle, including a significant increase in its scale.

6. All of this increases the importance of the unions in defending capitalist order. The history of the working class in Britain, where the creation of the unions was the product of an intense and prolonged struggle and marked a step forward for the whole working class, means that they continue to have a weight on the working class beyond the numbers who are actually members. Nearly a century after they ceased to be a weapon in the hands of the workers this legacy has not been shaken off and the idea that the unions defend the workers remains deeply rooted in many parts of the working class. After 1989 the unions first worked to renew their position with the workers, staging a number of manoeuvres which, for all their modesty in comparison with the larger and more spectacular manoeuvres in other countries, were nonetheless effective. While supporting the election of Labour a deliberate distancing between the two began, which has developed further since, for example with some unions ending financial support for Labour while others campaigned against its ‘move to the right’. This put the unions in a position where they could ‘defend’ workers against the government if necessary. In the face of the solidarity being developed within the working class today, the unions have responded with calls for fake solidarity. One union leader, after criticising the Heathrow workers for staging an illegal strike, called for the legalisation of solidarity strikes – after appropriate consultation and voting had been completed of course. The leftists have a role to play, in particular by turning every struggle into a struggle for union rights or against a particular government policy.

7. A further aspect that poses difficulties to the working class has been the questions of unemployment and of changes to employment. The Resolution on the International Situation notes that during the 1980s unemployment tended to play a negative role, increasing the atomisation and demoralisation of the working class, especially the younger generations. This weight still exists today and can lead to the fatalistic acceptance of the blows of capitalism, or even to the hope that one boss will be better than another. However, the deepening of the crisis makes it more difficult for the bourgeoisie to hold out such hopes, thus leading the issue of unemployment to prompt questions about the nature of capitalist society as a whole rather than just about individual survival within it. The spontaneous walkout by Vauxhall car workers on the news of job cuts was an indication of such a change, while the fact that it was very short-lived shows the road still to be travelled.

Workers in employment experience widely varied conditions that risk polarising full-timers against part-timers, contracted against non-contracted, agency staff against permanent staff and so on. However, the generalisation of attacks on the terms and conditions of work raises the possibility of solidarity developing across all such divisions, as was that case at Cottam power station where permanent contracted staff struck in support of un-contracted, temporary workers.

9. Underneath the developments taking place in the class struggle today is the dynamic towards a new confrontation with the ruling class, that is, towards the mass strike. This is not an immediate perspective, not least because the level of struggle is far below what is required. But this is not the decisive aspect at this stage. What is pointing towards the mass strike is not the numbers involved but, as the Theses on the Student Movement in France in IR 125 say, the means. While the struggle against the CPE was the high point and showed these means most clearly, in many of the struggles seen today the political means that are being used – solidarity between workers in one, going outside the unions in another – are evidence to a lesser degree of the development of those means in embryo. Looking at the general evolution of the situation – the deepening crisis and the question of war (we can recall the latter was a significant factor in the general dynamic that led to 1905) we can see a maturation of the conditions for larger scale struggles. We cannot predict the exact rhythm of this evolution but we must be prepared. Just as 1905 seemed to grow from very little, so today the evolution of the situation and the subterranean development of consciousness that is a feature uniting the minority moving towards communist positions and the wider numbers moving into struggle, makes the rapid appearance of larger and more politicised struggles a real possibility.

The impasse facing British imperialism

9. Over the last two years the difficulties facing US imperialism have developed into a crisis. Iraq has descended into an increasingly uncontrollable and barbaric hell. In Afghanistan the Taliban are regaining control in many regions. In both, the ‘democratically elected’ government is all but powerless and isolated in its capital. The US military, far from reducing its numbers in Iraq has had to increase them, resulting in the death of yet more soldiers. Divisions have developed in the American ruling class; and following the defeat of the Republicans in the mid-term elections in November, Donald Rumsfeld, the architect of the war in Iraq, was immediately dumped. However, the crisis will not be so easily overcome. The Democrats may have won the election but it is far from clear that they have any idea of how to get US imperialism out of the impasse it is in.

10. After the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989 the British ruling class developed an independent strategy based on an effort to steer a course between the US and Europe, playing one off against the other when possible. Initially in the conflict in Yugoslavia, in particular following the bombing of Kosovo, it had some success. But at the same time, it came under increasing pressure from both sides, notably from the US through its intervention into the situation in Northern Ireland. Faced with the offensive launched following the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001, Britain aligned itself more closely with Washington, joining it in the invasion first of Afghanistan and then of Iraq. However, it did not do this because it had decided to throw in its lot with the US but in order to continue to pursue its independent strategy in the new situation. It was a recognition that the point of equilibrium between America and Europe had shifted under the impact of the storm whipped up by the US. Today not only has this tack to the US failed, but the whole strategy is also in crisis and there are serious divisions in the British ruling class. A number of factors have contributed to this situation.

11. Firstly, in Iraq Britain has been drawn into the impasse. From the pretence that its presence was benign it has become clear its forces are no different to the Americans. They are equally involved in the violence, equally unable to venture out unless heavily armed, equally unable to resolve the situation. The British bourgeoisie has contemplated the break up of Iraq and has changed its approach to support the criticism of Iran in order to limit its regional ambitions.

12. Secondly, it has also been drawn into the quagmire in Afghanistan. Britain has continued to participate despite its humiliation by the US during the invasion in order to try and keep a presence in the region. Today it is engaged in the most serious battles since the Korean war and has been unable to contain the situation in Halmand province, effectively being forced to surrender control of some parts. Its forces are over-stretched and taking casualties, leading to increasing disquiet in parts of the military.

13. Thirdly the bombings in London in July 2005 drove home the failure of Britain’s strategy. The issue for the ruling class was not the dead and maimed but the fact that its policy had rebounded on it, revealing its failure and exposing it to the attacks of its imperialist rivals. Essentially, its attempts to play a role beyond its real power and global position had blown up in its face – a point readily driven home by its rivals with their accusations about “Londonistan”. This suggests that the British state was not behind the bombings and it is possible that its rivals had some prior knowledge and merely stood by and watched.

In the aftermath the ruling class used the bombings as one more pretext to further strengthen its state apparatus, to inculcate fear in the population and to demonise part of it, leading to an increase in attacks and official harassment of those deemed to be ‘Muslim’. However, at the imperialist level it gained nothing. Whereas after 9/11 the American bourgeoisie was able to launch an offensive that for a time drove the world before it, the British ruling class failed to gain the initiative, despite some attempts to do so in Afghanistan and Iraq a few months later.

14. The full extent of the weakening of British imperialism was exposed by the conflict in the Lebanon during the summer. Although not a traditional area of British interests, Blair sought to use the conflict to present Britain as a central player by posturing as America’s loyal ally, refusing to condemn even the most blatant of the atrocities committed by Israeli imperialism, and talking grandly of bringing peace to the region. In fact, Britain was excluded by Washington, in alliance with France, from the negotiations to end the conflict; and Blair was left a pathetic figure in his office, waiting for the call to take part that never came. Britain’s weakness on the world stage was laid bare for all to see. The fundamental significance of the Lebanon conflict for British imperialism was that it confronted it with the reality of its status as an imperialist power and marked another stage in the historic decline of British imperialism. Half a century ago the Suez conflict confronted Britain with the fact that it had become a second rate power; today it is confronted with the fact that it has become a third rate power.

Since the collapse of the Eastern bloc the ICC has argued that British imperialism is caught in a contradiction it cannot resolve. In seeking to play an independent role and to continue to punch above its weight, it must play the US off against Europe, but more and more the reality has been that it is caught between these powers. We have seen this contradiction sharpening for years and reiterated this in the resolution adopted at the last WR congress when we wrote: “The danger of the tack towards the US lies in the fact that it makes the British ruling class more vulnerable, not just to pressure from the US but to reciprocal pressure from its European rivals. The perspective is thus for the contradiction to continue to sharpen” (point 12). This was correct but it was a situation that could not continue forever: at some point the situation would demand a qualitative change in strategy. This point has been reached and it has provoked a deep division within the ruling class.

15. These divisions became increasingly clear during the year, growing from a concern to pressure Blair to correct his strategy to the attempt to get rid of him in the early autumn, following which he had to confirm that he would be gone within the year.

The conflict in the Lebanon led to a storm of criticism from within the ruling class, while the media for once showed something of the reality of war in the 21st century. In the aftermath the head of British armed forces publicly criticised government strategy and called for a change of direction. This is an unprecedented event and should have led to the dismissal and humiliation of the general; but far from this Blair was forced to pretend that he agreed and the general remained in post.

The scandal over loans for peerages has been used intermittently as part of this. Today it has been revealed that dozens of MPs have been interviewed, some after being arrested and there is growing speculation that Blair himself will be interviewed, while the police have hinted that they have very strong evidence and are preparing a case that may lead to prosecutions.

However, Blair has shown himself ready to defend his position and it is clear that he is not isolated in the British bourgeoisie. Thus the perspective is for continuing divisions within the ruling class in the period ahead.

16. One feature of the current campaigns is that they have shown that the British ruling class has been quite deeply affected by the phase of decomposition. In the Theses on Decomposition adopted in 1990 we identified a general tendency towards a loss of control by the bourgeoisie: “The absence of any perspective (other than day-to-day stop-gap measures to prop up the economy) around which it could mobilise as a class, and at the same time the fact that the proletariat does not yet threaten its own survival, creates within the ruling class, and especially within the political apparatus, a growing tendency towards indiscipline and an attitude of ‘every man for himself’” (IR 62). That this has affected the British ruling class is particularly significant given its historical stability and renowned intelligence.

This indiscipline has found one expression in the functioning of the Blair government, which has been marked by informalism, cronyism and the replacement of the traditional methods of the administration. This aspect was highlighted in the Butler inquiry, which criticised the tendency to take decisions without records and to ignore official reports. However, while this expressed the concern felt in parts of the ruling class about the lack of discipline, the methods used to put pressure on Blair actually fuelled this tendency. Thus, during the Butler inquiry the security service breached its own rules when it set up a website and published confidential documents that contradicted the government’s claims about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. Today, the loans for peerages scandal has led to the arrest of senior politicians and may yet see Blair interviewed and potentially even arrested and charged.

17. In the period ahead the British ruling class will continue to defend its interests as much as possible. However, the days when Britain could aspire to actually control events is long past, and today it is as dependent on the actions of the greater powers as any other country. This means above all seeing what happens in the US, given the growing difficulties of continuing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the outcome of the mid-term elections. There is no dramatic alternative path open to the US, just a realisation that the current path is leading nowhere. The British bourgeoisie is in a similar situation in that there is a recognition that the imperialist strategy has to change but an absence of any well-defined plan. The next two years are likely to be a period of uncertainty for the British bourgeoisie, although it would be a mistake to underestimate it.

The real depth of the economic crisis

18. At the international level the bourgeoisie is confronted with the relentless deepening of the crisis. While the impressive growth rates achieved by China and India seem to contradict this, at the global level their advances are paid for by retreats elsewhere. World production remains low. The development seen in China reflects the fact that capital has shifted to low-wage countries, rather than an actual overall development. The capitalist economy can only be defended through the active and continuous intervention of the state: “capitalism has kept itself alive through the conscious intervention of the bourgeoisie, which can no longer afford to trust the invisible hand of the market…What is noteworthy is the bourgeoisie’s determination to keep its economy going at all costs, its ability to hold off the inherent tendency towards collapse by maintaining a gigantic façade of economic activity fuelled by debt” (Resolution on the international situation adopted by the ICC’s 16th congress, pt.10).

19. The British economy has continued to keep ahead of many of its rivals in Europe, although not the US. The ruling class has shown that it is still able to manage the crisis, albeit in a more difficult situation that has tended to be marked by flat growth, rising inflation and hidden unemployment. Above all productivity remains low and the bourgeoisie seems unable to address this in any fundamental way. This means that the ruling class continues to rely on increasing the absolute exploitation of the working class, which can only increase the risk that this will provoke a reaction from it.

20. State capitalism has been the means to defend the economy in Britain as much as anywhere else in the world. Indeed in Britain the state has been particularly effective. The Labour government has sought to manage the economy through the adoption of counter-cyclical policies. It has increased state spending to counter the global recession in the short-term, and to smooth out the decline in the longer term. The latest OECD survey of the United Kingdom has explicitly recognised this: “An expansionary fiscal policy has been an important factor supporting demand since the global downturn; between 2000 and 2004 the cyclically-adjusted balance declined by 4½ per cent of GDP, which was only exceeded by the United States. Over the same period over half of new jobs have been created in the public sector, which has experienced average employment growth of 2% per annum (about six times the growth rate in private sector employment)”

21. In short Britain has relied on state spending and debt to sustain the economy. Government debt now stands at 42.1% of GDP. Personal debt has grown from £1 trillion two years ago to £1.25 trillion today – a 25% increase. However, it has been able to manage the housing market – which has been one of the main factors behind the increase in personal debt – engineering a soft landing rather than a sharp drop that would have had a serious impact on rates of growth. It has also created a significant number of jobs.

The government claims to have kept to its ‘golden rules’ but has done so by manipulating the figures. Its plans assume a decrease in the government deficit to balance it out over the cycle, but in the last 20 years there have only been four years of surplus (during the first years of the Labour government). This suggests that it will become harder for the government to continue to manage the economy as it has in recent years.

22. The ‘health’ of the British economy continues to be based on attacks on the working class. Increasing exploitation in work, escalating debt outside. Attacks on its future with the gradual destruction of pensions; degradation of the social wage through the erosion of health, social and public services; the continued decline of the infrastructure through lack of investment.

23. The period ahead poses a number of questions to the British ruling class:

- Will it be possible to continue to manage the economic crisis as well as it has over the last decade given the gradual worsening of the situation?

- Will it be possible to forge a new imperialist strategy in the wake of the failure not just of London’s independent policy but also of Washington’s post-9/11 offensive?

- Will it be possible to contain the divisions within the ruling class?

- Will it be possible to contain the class struggle given the necessity to continue to increase exploitation and impose deeper and more extensive attacks?

These are essentially the same questions as face the bourgeoisie internationally. And, while the British bourgeoisie may still be one of the most capable and unified parts of the ruling class, and while it may in particular have an understanding of the need to unite across other divides against the working class, it can no more hold back the continued decline of capitalism within ‘its’ nation than can the bourgeoisie internationally.

The working class too has questions posed to it. Questions of continuing to develop its struggles, of seeing itself as a class with its own interests, capable not only of fighting against capitalism but of overthrowing it and making the possible new world real. These questions are also posed at the international level and can only be answered at that level. However, unlike the bourgeoisie, this is a source of strength for the proletariat because it is an international class. Marx once commented that communism – the real movement of the working class - is the solution to the riddle of history and knows itself to be such. Today we can see that the working class is struggling to regain this understanding so that to the question confronting it - and the whole of humanity - it can answer decisively: “socialism”.

WR, 21/11/06

During the recent Celebrity Big Brother, apart from the swearing, belching and farting, young British women were singled out for criticism as racist bullies.When Bollywood film star Shilpa Shetty won the vote the media saluted it as a victory against racism. There was general approval in the House of Commons. The people of Britain had displayed the fairness and tolerance that we should have expected.

In the row over bullying in Big Brother, most media observers had little to say about what is bound to happen when you lock people up under 24-hour surveillance, like animals in a crude experiment, because that might suggest that the whole purpose of Big Brother is to promote bullying and encourage the lab rats to gang up on each other. Instead we were treated to a range of arguments about racism, to heart-searching reflections on what Jade’s comments about Shilpa reveal about the true state of Britain today. In short, the air was filled with the stench of righteous indignation and bourgeois hypocrisy, incluing the media bullying of Jade following her eviction.

This was another of capitalism’s endless parades of spectacles and diversions, a further stage in the campaign to keep us fixated on questions of race and religion. With their endless scare-stories about asylum-seekers and Muslim terrorists, the media incite racial and religious hostility and then rush to condemn it. They promote divisions, while trying to get the whole population to march under the banner of national unity bound together by shared British values, like the use of anti-semitism in 1930s Germany. This might seem contradictory, but both the divisions and the ‘unity’ serve the needs of the ruling class. It doesn’t want the working class to recognise that it has shared international interests which cut across all ethnic or religious divisions, but it does want it to identify with the national framework which corresponds to the interests of capital.

So, next time a row blows up over racism, multiculturalism or ethnic identity, don’t look at the headlines but see whose class interests are being served. It’s not usually the working class. Car 2/2/7

What is the situation we are living in? What is the balance of class forces - that is to say, is the working class struggle developing, or has the ruling class got it confused and demoralised? And what are the needs of the working class today? These are questions that a revolutionary organisation must answer in order to be able to understand its responsibilities, and so had to be taken up during the congress of World Revolution, the ICC section in Britain last November.

Regular readers will know our analysis of the period today as the being that of the decomposition of capitalism, a period of increasingly chaotic military barbarism such as exists in the Middle East today, with the US and UK stuck in the Iraqi quagmire. However, it is also a period of growing class struggle. If you just look at the number of strike days in Britain today you would have to think that we are fooling ourselves, but that way of looking at things would leave out the most important developments going on in the working class today. First of all we cannot look at one country in isolation: the working class is an international class, and what is going on in Britain is only one part of the overall situation that includes the student struggles against the CPE in France last year, the garment workers’ strikes in Bangladesh and many others. When we look at the struggles in the UK we do not only consider the size but also the issues posed, such as pensions in the public sector, such as solidarity among power station workers at Cottam, which show the development of consciousness of being part of a class and of the perspectives that capitalism has in store (see the resolution on the British situation opposite).

Among the most important expressions of the developments going on in the working class today is a growing questioning of what this society has in store for humanity and how we can change it. The ruling class knows this and has responded with its own false questions and answers, for example those posed at the various social forums and in general by the anti-globalisation movement. By putting forward nationalism as anti-imperialism (as if nationalism could be anything but imperialist) and by describing media circuses as important moments of struggle, these forums aimed to convince the working class that an alternative world is possible within capitalism. But this has not prevented a growing questioning expressed in the development of discussion circles, on internet discussion forums, in a growing interest in left communist history, positions and organisations. Like the developments in the class struggle as a whole, this is an international trend: we have seen, for example, new expressions of internationalism, such as the EKS in Turkey (see WR 295) and the declaration from Korea (see WR 299), while the internet discussion forums obviously have an international dimension. This open questioning involves only a tiny minority, coming up against the prevailing capitalist ideology expressed in the mass media, and the effects of the period of decomposition, which is characterised by the loss of taste for theory of any kind, the retreat into irrationalism as shown in the growth of religious fundamentalism, and the spirit of ‘look after number one’. Nor is it a question of simply looking for people who agree with us. The very fact that there is a minority of workers willing to question capitalism, to debate seriously, is already an important gain and a promise for the future of the class struggle.

Our congress looked at the developments there have been in this milieu of questioning and discussion. It has certainly grown in the last two years, particularly on the internet discussion forums, but also with the greater potential for new discussion circles. And there has been a greater liveliness of discussions at meetings in general, not just our own. In addition we are seeing a small number of people starting out on the slow and difficult process of breaking from leftism, having left various Stalinist and Trotskyist groups. Above all, there is an increased interest in our positions among the young generation. It was necessary for us to recognise the importance of this development, to see this as an intrinsic part of the class struggle, and to understand that what is at stake is our ability to debate, to defend internationalist positions, and to win the next generation of revolutionaries. This is therefore our most important responsibility in the present period.

Among the themes of our intervention, one of the most important has been to defend the debate itself. It is essential that contributions can be made in a fraternal atmosphere, where positions can be stated and argued passionately - for or against, without personal insults. In order to do this we have argued against flaming on the internet forums, and where there is a dynamic for discussion, as on libcom.org, this has been largely successful. The question of debate is also important in our understanding of discussion circles: they are not support groups or readers’ meetings, but a space for clarification. So we always argue that they are open to anyone who wants to discuss working class positions seriously, whatever view they are starting from. It is also our aim to contribute to the level of debate in any forum of discussion by listening to what is being said and responding with serious arguments. Debate in any one forum is of general interest, and so we write articles for our press and website taking up the issues that come up. For instance we have published articles taking up questions raised in threads on libcom.org (eg ‘Anarchism and the patriotic resistance’ in WR 287), in public meetings, whether our own (eg ‘Report on the public forum in London on Spain 1936/7’ on our website) or others (eg ‘Anarchist bookfair meeting on the struggle against the CPE in France’ in WR 300), as well as selected correspondence.

Are we up to this important work? In order to do it we need to do more than just follow the discussions and reply blow by blow, we also need to understand developments at the deepest level, and ensure that they are centralised internationally so that we can benefit from, and contribute to, the experience of the whole ICC. In keeping with this, our congress was not a private affair of comrades who happen to live in Britain, but a living part of the international organisation. We had a strong international delegation able to transmit the lessons of very important interventions in other parts of the ICC, including the student struggle against the CPE, and also able to examine the WR’s work from a greater distance. International centralisation and solidarity is not just a matter for congresses but an essential part of the life of the ICC. This is not something easy or automatic since it goes against everything that capitalism tries to impose on us, particularly in this period with the emphasis on national divisions and the attitude of ‘look after number one’. Understanding that we are not just part of one small group or circle in this or that city, but part of an international organisation of the working class, gives us great strength for our work.

This article can only give a small taste of the preoccupations and work of our Congress. We are also publishing the resolution on the British situation, since the analysis of the national situation is a particular responsibility of each section of the ICC. WR 1/2/7

It was once hoped that the more scientific explanations contributed to a rational understanding of the world, the less there would be a place for superstition and religion. This was a naive view that failed to take into account the origins of religion in humanity’s alienation, and the ability of the ruling class to make use of any ideology in the defence of its dominant position in society. The use of religious ideologies, not just Christian and Islamic, but all the other varieties, is a worldwide phenomenon. The following article, written by a close sympathiser of the ICC, focuses on the situation in Britain. 

There continues to be a rash of stories about the position of religion in British society. Although these mainly focus on Islam and everything from the adoption of sharia law to the wearing of the veil, there have also recently been many interventions from Anglican bishops, controversy over catholic adoption agencies and the well-publicised case of the British Airways worker fighting for the right to wear a crucifix as a symbol of her Christian faith. From a seemingly different angle there has been the contribution of Richard Dawkins, renowned crusader for rational thought, and his book, The God Delusion.

These episodes are only the latest in a new ideological campaign by the British bourgeoisie. Religion has been increasingly politicised since Tony Blair came to office (and later said that he was only answerable to God.) There has even been speculation about his de facto conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism. At the last General Election, the issue of abortion was thrown into the spotlight with Michael Howard saying he backed a reduction in the legal limit from 24 weeks to 20 weeks. The Catholic Church promptly called for its congregation to support the Tories, and it was openly asked if British politics was going to follow along the route of America where religion is increasingly a dominant political and social force.

But why is the role of religion growing in Britain, a country that is supposedly one of the most secular in the world? Religion has long been a useful tool for manipulating the exploited classes. Although the bourgeoisie, in its revolutionary youth, waged a vigorous battle against religious ideology it quickly accommodated itself to religion once it became the ruling class. The working class, as it began to assert itself on the historical stage also launched into its own critique of religion. So successful was this effort to throw off the shackles of faith that Marx talked in his era of religion being a dead issue for the working class.

Today this is not the case. As the Dutch revolutionary Anton Pannekoek wrote "As soon, however, as it became evident that capitalism could not solve the life problems of the masses ... The world was seen again full of insoluble contradictions and uncertainties, full of sinister forces threatening civilisation. So the bourgeoisie turned to various kinds of religious creeds, and the bourgeois intellectuals and scientists submitted to the influence of mystical tendencies. Before long they were quick to discover the weakness and shortcomings of materialist philosophy, and to make speeches on the ‘limitations of science' and the insoluble ‘world-riddles'." (Lenin as Philosopher)

Although the question of religion has importance for the working class, the bourgeois framework of the debate offers nothing to the proletariat. Religion is not simply the product of ‘ignorance', ‘stupidity' or errors of epistemological method. Although these are factors, religion in the final instance is the product of a social system that reifies humanity's own social powers into objects beyond our control. Religion cannot be combated on a purely intellectual terrain as Dawkins tries with his rationalist ideology. It can only be fought through the development of the class struggle. Only the proletarian struggle can unite human beings to a sufficient level to allow them to become conscious of their social powers and begin to dominate and control them rather than being unconscious slaves of their own activities.

In a more immediate sense, the proletariat must not let itself be drawn into debates about whether this or that religious grouping should be protected or suppressed by the bourgeois state. These campaigns are designed to rally people around either this or that fraction of the bourgeoisie or to defend the capitalist state against growing religiosity or creeping secularism. The proletariat has no business defending the bourgeois state against anything - its only goal is to destroy it. DG 14/11/06

Recent developments in the conflict between Israel and the various Palestinian factions, who have also been at each others’ throats, have reached the height of absurdity. What’s striking is the way that the different bourgeoisies involved have been pushed by the force of circumstances to take decisions which are altogether contradictory and irrational, even from the standpoint of their short-term strategic interests.

When Ehud Olmert offered his hand to the president of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas, along with a few concessions to the Palestinians such as the withdrawal of a number of roadblocks and the promise to unfreeze 100 million dollars in the name of ‘humanitarian aid’, the media immediately began talking about the revival of the ‘peace process’. Mahmoud Abbas has certainly tried to cash in on these offers in his competition with Hamas, since the aim of these pseudo-concessions was to show that his policy of cooperation with Israel could bring advantages.

But it was Ehud Olmert himself who largely sabotaged any common approach with the president of the Palestinian Authority when he was compelled by the pressure from the ultra-conservative factions in his government to renew the policy of implanting Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and to step up the destruction of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem.

The accords between Israel and Fatah resulted in Israel authorising Egypt to deliver arms to Fatah in order to give it an advantage in its struggle against Hamas. However, the umpteenth Sharm-el-Sheikh summit between Israel and Egypt was totally overshadowed by the new military operation by the Israeli army in Ramallah on the West Bank and by a renewal of air-raids in the Gaza Strip in response to sporadic rocket fire. So the message about wanting to revive peace talks was rather drowned out and Israel’s intentions look very contradictory.

Another paradox is that at the moment that Olmert and Abbas met, and just before the Israel-Egypt summit, Israel announced that it possesses nuclear weapons and made open threats about using them. Although this warning was directed essentially against Iran, which is trying to attain the same status, it goes out indirectly to all Israel’s neighbours. How were the latter to start negotiations with such a belligerent and dangerous power?

Furthermore, this declaration can only push Iran to push on further in the same direction and legitimate its ambitions to becoming a gendarme and a protector of the region, resorting to the same logic of ‘deterrence’ as all the great powers.

But it’s not just the Zionist state which is acting in this way – it looks as if each protagonist has lost its compass.

Abbas for example has taken the risk of unleashing a test of strength with the militias of Hamas and has poured oil on the fire by announcing his aim of holding elections in Gaza, which could only be seen by Hamas, which was elected only last January, as a real provocation. But this test of strength, which has also taken the form of bloody street-fighting, was the only way that the Palestinian Authority could try to break out of the Israeli blockade and the freezing of international aid in force since Hamas came to power. Not only has the blockade been a disaster for the local population, which has been unable to go to work outside the areas boxed in by the Israeli army and police; it has also provoked the strike by 170,000 Palestinian civil servants in Gaza and the West Bank who have not been paid any wages for months (especially in vital sectors like health and education). The anger of the civil servants, which extends into the ranks of the police and the army, has been exploited both by Hamas and by Fatah as a means to recruit people for their respective militias, each one blaming the situation on the other, while children between 10 and 15 are being enrolled en masse as cannon fodder in this murderous conflict.

Hamas meanwhile has been trying to take advantage of the confusion by negotiating directly with Israel for an exchange of prisoners, proposing to swap the Israeli corporal captured last June for some of its own activists.

The bloody chaos that has come out of a year’s explosive co-habitation between the elected Hamas government and the president of the Palestinian Authority remains the only prospect. Given this suicidal policy, there should be no illusions about the truce agreed at the end of the year between the Fatah and Hamas militias. It will certainly be punctuated by murderous confrontations: car bombs, street battles, kidnapping, all of it sowing terror and death among the already impoverished population of the Gaza strip. And to cap it all, the Israeli raids on the West Bank or the brutal searches of the Israeli army and police mean that children and school students are regularly being killed in the crossfire, while the Israeli proletariat, already bled white by the war effort, is subjected to revenge operations by Hamas on the one hand and Hezbollah on the other.

At the same time, the situation in South Lebanon, where UN forces have been deployed, is becoming increasingly uncertain. Instability has increased since the assassination of the Christian leader Pierre Gemayel. There has been a major demonstration of force by Hezbollah and other Shiite militias, as well as by the Christian faction led by General Aoun who has provisionally rallied to Syria, besieging the presidential palace in Beirut for several days, while at the same time armed Sunni groups were threatening the Lebanese parliament and its Shiite president Nabil Berri. Tension between the rival factions is reaching a peak. The recent general strike in Lebanon – which seems to have been originally a response to austerity measures by the government – was hi-jacked by the warring factions who look to be hell-bent on renewing the process of ‘Lebanonisation’ which ravaged the country in the 1980s. As for the UN mission disarming Hezbollah - no one takes that seriously.

With Afghanistan and Iraq in an even more disastrous situation, the whole region is descending into a terrifying and irrational spiral of violence. Like the war in Somalia, it provides us with a warning of the future: allow capitalism to continue, and it will destroy the very bases of social existence. Wm, January 07 (Adapted from anarticle in International Review 128)

The judgment and execution of Saddam Hussein were hailed by Bush as a “victory for democracy”. There’s some truth in this: the bourgeoisie has so often justified its crimes in the name of democracy (see International Review 66, 1991, ‘The massacres and crimes of the great democracies’). With boundless cynicism, Bush also announced on 5 November 2006, when he himself was in Nebraska in the middle of an election campaign, that the death sentence handed out to Saddam was “a justification for the sacrifices willingly accepted by the US forces” since March 2003 in Iraq. So for Bush the hide of a murderer is worth the more than 3000 young Americans killed in Iraq, most of them in the flower of their youth. And the hides of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed since the beginning of the American intervention count for nothing at all. In fact, since the US occupation began, there have been more than 600,000 deaths and the Iraqi government is no longer counting so as not to ‘undermine morale’.

The USA was very interested in ensuring that the execution of Saddam took place before the next round of trials. The reason for this is they would have brought up far too many compromising facts. It has been deemed necessary to obscure all memory of the total support given by the US and the western powers to Saddam’s policies between 1979 and 1990, and in particular during the war between Iraq and Iran between 1980 and 1988.

One of the main accusations against Saddam was the deadly use of chemical weapons against 5000 Kurds in Hallabjah in 1988. This massacre was part of a war which cost 1,200,000 dead and twice as many wounded, and throughout which ‘the Butcher of Baghdad’ was supported by the US and most of the western powers. Having been taken by the Iranians, the town was the re-taken by the Iraqis who decided to carry out an operation of repression against the Kurdish population. The massacre was only the most spectacular in a campaign of extermination baptised ‘Al Anfal (‘war booty’) which claimed 180,000 Iraqi Kurdish victims between 1987 and 1988.

When Saddam initiated this war by attacking Iran, it was with the full support of the western powers. After the emergence of a Shiite Islamic republic in Iran in 1979, with Ayatollah Khomeini denouncing the US as the “Great Satan”, and given US president Carter’s failure to overturn the regime, Saddam Hussein took on the role of gendarme in the region for the US and the western bloc by declaring war on Iran and weakening it through 8 years of war. The Iranian counter-attack would have resulted in victory for Tehran if Iraq hadn’t been given US military support. In 1987, the western bloc led by the US mobilised a formidable armada in the waters of the Gulf, deploying more than 250 war-ships from nearly all the major western countries, with 35,000 men on board and equipped with the most sophisticated war-planes. Presenting itself under the guise of ‘humanitarian intervention’, this force destroyed an oil platform and several of the Iranian navy’s most effective ships. It was thanks to this support that Saddam was able to sign a peace accord which allowed him to keep the same borders he had started the war with.

Even before that, Saddam had come to power with the support of the CIA, executing his Shiite and Kurdish rivals but also other Sunni chiefs within the Ba’ath party, falsely accused of conspiring against him. He was courted and honoured as a grand statesman for years, for example, being recognised as a ‘great friend of France’ (and of Chirac and Chevenement in particular). The fact that he distinguished himself throughout his political career by bloody executions and massacres of all kinds (hangings, beheadings, torturing opponents, use of chemical weapons, slaughter of the Shiite and Kurdish populations) never bothered any bourgeois politician until it was ‘discovered’ on the eve of the Gulf war that Saddam was a bloody and frightful tyrant. We should also remember that Saddam was lured into a trap when he believed that he had been given the green light by Washington to invade Kuwait in the summer of 1990, thus providing the US with a pretext to mount a gigantic military mobilisation against him. Thus the US set up the first Gulf war of January 1991 and from now on Saddam Hussein would be deemed public enemy number one. The Desert Storm campaign, presented by the official propaganda as a ‘clean war’, a kind of video war game, actually cost 500,000 lives in 42 days, with 106,000 air raids dropping 100,000 tons of bombs, experimenting with the whole gamut of murderous weapons (napalm, cluster bombs, fuel-air bombs…). Its essential aim was to make a demonstration of the crushing military superiority of the US and to force its former allies, now becoming potentially dangerous imperialist rivals, to take part behind the US at a moment when the old bloc alliances were in the process of falling apart.

With the same degree of Machiavellianism, the US and its ‘allies’ carried out further machinations. Having called upon the Kurds in the North and the Shiites in the South to rise up against the Saddam regime, they left him with the elite troops he needed to drown these rebellions in blood since they had no interest in threatening the unity of the country. The Kurdish population in particular was subjected to the most atrocious massacres.

The hireling European media, even Sarkozy in France who has been very pro-American up till now, are now hypocritically denouncing the “poor choice”, the “mistake”, the “botched job” of Saddam’s hurried execution. It is true that the circumstances of the execution will further exacerbate hatred between the religious groupings. It may have pleased the more fanatical part of the Shiite grouping but not at all the Sunnis, while the fact that it took place at the beginning of Eid, a very important festival in Islam, shocked most Muslims. What’s more Saddam Hussein may now be seen by generations who have not lived under his iron heel as a martyr.

But none of the bourgeoisies had a choice in the matter because they had the same interest as the Bush administration in seeing this execution rushed through in order to hide and erase the memory of their utter complicity in the atrocities of the past and their responsibility in the worsening barbarism going on today. Wm January 07 (Adapted from article in International Review 128)

For 15 years, Somalia has been ravaged by imperialist powers and gangs of local warlords. At the end of December, after a week of bloody confrontations, Ethiopian troops, supported by the American army, routed the battalions of the Islamic Courts, who had to flee the capital Mogadishu, taking refuge with their heavy weaponry in the surrounding areas. But the Islamists are far from defeated and are now waging guerrilla war against the Ethiopian occupation and the federal Somali government.

Under the watchful eye of their various imperialist mentors, the protagonists of this war have been engaged in a truly barbaric contest, involving among other things the mobilisation of children of ten or even less, armed to the teeth to kill and be killed. Several thousand people were slaughtered in the space of a few days, and rape at the point of bayonet has become a standard practise.

The Somali volcano is in the process of shaking the entire region, starting with Ethiopia and Eritrea who are taking advantage of the situation to settle old scores on Somali territory. Both of these states have amassed several thousand men to back up the two main warring factions in Somalia. Kenya is also already involved in the conflict. Tens of thousands of refugees have already fled across the Somali border, and Nairobi is in the process of taking military action to expel thousands of them on the pretext of preventing any incursion of ‘terrorist groups’ into its territories. The war is becoming general while Somalia itself is sliding even further into the most terrible chaos, torn apart by various local war-lords who are in turn being manipulated from afar by the imperialist powers disputing the region since the 90s. Since the overthrow of the former president Said Barre, the country has been put to the sword by a succession of murderous clans struggling for power. The central state has virtually disappeared and the country has been sliced into regions under the control of mafia gangs- like Mogadishu itself, which has in turn been cut up into several zones ruled by cliques who enforce their authority through murder, rape and theft. For the population in general, it has been a true descent into hell.

American imperialism behind Ethiopia’s intervention

Not content with having armed and trained the Ethiopian army which chased the Islamic Courts from the capital, the Pentagon carried out air raids in mid January, leaving dozens of victims. This was a new military offensive by the US in this country, following the humiliating failure of their previous intervention in 1993.

At that time, under the fallacious pretext of the ‘Restore Hope’ operation, the US, accompanied by France and Italy in this instance, made an attempt to bring the situation under control by dispatching tens of thousands of soldiers to the country. This was a total failure and in 1994 the US had to pack its bags and go, but this didn’t stop them from continuing to use local gangs to do their bidding on the spot.

Why this new US offensive?

According to the Bush administration, the aim of the military engagement by the US in Somali is to continue the war against al Qaida This is a gross deception, because the US has been intervening in Somalia long before the formation of al Qaida. Its real aim is to defend its strategic imperialist interests.

“The Horn of Africa is of growing importance to the American administration. The region is seen as strategic both for containing Islamic terrorism and preventing ‘failed states’ like Somalia from becoming a sanctuary for al Qaida; and, more classically, for controlling the approach to the Persian Gulf and protecting oil traffic” (Le Monde, 4.1.07)

As we can see, the real aim of the war being waged by Washington is to control the approach to the Persian Gulf and to make itself a global master of oil supplies. Somalia is directly opposite the Gulf and is a strategic zone for the imperialist powers disputing the region. It was with this very aim that the US has set up a new and specific regional command for Africa, entitled ‘US Africa Command’. In fact, the US is trying to increase its ability to maintain surveillance over the area and already has a military base in Djibouti and another one on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean facing Somalia. It is clear that US ambitions can only come up against the ambitions of rival imperialist powers, which, like the USA, are pushing various local pawns across the chessboard.

The only perspective for Somalia is chaos

As long as the armed hand of world capitalism has not been cut off, the perspective for Somalia is a new plunge into chaos. The bourgeoisie itself admitted this in a UN report cited by Le Monde on 16/11/06:

“Victim of unlimited militarism, Somalia, according to the UN experts, is heading ineluctably towards a wide-scale war which threatens to drag in the countries of the region…the Islamic Courts are consolidating their hold over the country thanks to the military support of Eritrea, but also of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Djibouti.

The transition government, internationally recognised but forced to take refuge in Baidoa, benefits from the ‘aggressive support’ of Ethiopia, Uganda and Yemen. According to this report, the government doesn’t have much weight compared to the Islamists, who control the capital Mogadishu, as well as most of the centre and south of the country, and who have the capacity to turn Somalia into a new Iraq through terrorist attacks and assassinations.”

Of course the Islamic Courts have now been pushed out of the capital, but they haven’t gone far and can count on support from a number of imperialist sources to continue carrying out raids against their enemies. It is more likely than ever that the country is heading towards an ‘Iraqi’ situation: indiscriminate killing, suicide bombings and massive bombardments. Or a ‘Congolese’ situation in which the country is occupied by a number of different powers all slogging it out for control of strips of territory.

Somalia may be miserably poor, but the imperialist vultures need it nonetheless. It is for that reason that it is currently the most striking illustration of capitalist decomposition in the whole of Africa. Amina 13/1/07 (from Revolution Internationale 376)

The media response to the publication of the latest report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was more or less unanimous: the ‘debate’ on whether global warming is caused by ‘human activity’ is now over. There is now overwhelming evidence that climate change is being driven by greenhouse gases produced by factories, power stations, transport, and other sectors of the economy. And it is clear that things are “worse than we thought”, as The Guardian put it the day the report came out. Global temperatures could rise by as much as 6 degrees by the end of the century, with almost incalculable results: melting of the polar ice-caps, vast floods, droughts, famines, and a frightening possibility of ‘feedback’ mechanisms which could lead to an unstoppable spiral of catastrophe.

So we know who’s to blame: mankind. These changes are not brought about by changes in solar radiation or other cosmic phenomena, but by the actions of human beings. In one sense, of course, this is true. It is human beings who build factories and power stations, fly planes and burn down rain-forests.

But this is an observation, not an explanation. The teams of scientists who are trained to analyse and interpret the natural world have no corresponding theory for explaining why mankind’s economic activity operates the way it does, with so little regard for its effects on the natural environment. And as a result they are capable only of identifying the existence of the problem, not of locating its causes and mapping out a solution.

For example: a great deal of attention is paid to the technologies used to generate power and to produce and transport goods. It is recognized that these technologies are unacceptably profligate in the production of greenhouse gases and that new technologies must be found. Power should be produced by wind and tide instead of coal. Cars should be powered by electricity or hydrogen instead of oil. And while the more short-sighted representatives of the energy industry continue to give big hand-outs to the dwindling band of scientists prepared to argue against the conclusions of the IPCC, more and more spokesmen for business express the confident hope that the search for new technologies will generate new markets and so allow them to preserve and even increase their profit margins.

No doubt, any solution to the gigantic environmental problems facing humanity will involve fundamental changes at the level of technology. But the problems, at root, are not to be found in technology. They are to be found in the very structure of present day society, in the basic motivation of economic activity.

Present day society is not just ‘industrial society’. It is bourgeois society – capitalism, a system where for the first time in human history all production is driven by the competitive hunt for profit. It is this motivation which forces the system to grow and grow and keep on growing regardless of the human and ecological consequences. It is structurally incapable of producing for human need, of adjusting production to what is humanly and ecologically viable. For capitalism that would signify the end of accumulation – suicide, in other words. And since, to grow faster than your rivals, you must cut production costs as much as possible, you need to invest in the type of technology that does the job as quickly and as cheaply as possible, regardless of the damaging consequences for the generations of the future.

By the same token, as a system irredeemably divided into competing national units, it is equally incapable of acting in a truly cooperative way at the global level. On the contrary: the more national capitals are faced by economic difficulties and diminishing resources, the more they will be obliged to retreat behind their national barricades and look for military solutions to their problems. Well-meaning commentators may lament the fact that, instead of pouring resources into saving the planet, the world’s leading powers (and, proportionally, all other states) are pouring them into developing the weapons of war. From a human point of view this is indeed absurd and tragic, but it makes sense from the point of view of the ‘nation’, of the capitalist state.

The problem of the environment is indeed a problem for mankind – for the very survival of the human species. But it cannot be solved by the very institutions whose function is to guard and maintain the present social system. This is why a science of society must also be a science of revolution. Amos 3/2/7

In this issue we begin a new occasional series, contributed by a close sympathiser, which looks at the struggle of the working class in Britain to organise itself in the era when capitalism was still a progressive, expanding system. It will examine the pioneering efforts of the proletariat to struggle on an economic and political terrain against inhuman capital and a ruthless bourgeoisie. We hope in this way to demonstrate the immense capacity of the working class to become aware of itself as a class with its own interests, and to create organisations which express its growing confidence and the need for solidarity.

If the working class today is to recover its confidence and solidarity in the face of decaying capitalism, in order to finally put an end to this completely bankrupt social system, it must recover its own history and draw all the possible lessons for its future struggles.

This first article covers the period from the French revolution of 1789 to the rise of Chartism. It shows clearly the evolution in the proletariat’s organisations, from conspiratorial sects to the creation of mass, national organisations of factory workers, and highlights the role of the creation of trade unions in this evolution.

Many today who agree with the ICC that the trade unions act against the working class find it difficult to accept that the trade unions ever expressed the interests of the working class, or that workers should have set up and supported them in the 19th century. The a-historical view that the trade unions have always been reactionary is a common one in the anarchist milieu, which also prefers the violent machine-breaking of the Luddites because this appears as a quasi-insurrectionary alternative to ‘peaceful’, ‘collaborationist’ trade unionism. This article aims to answer these arguments by placing developments in their proper historical and political context.

(These articles will complement our past series on the historic struggle of the working class in Britain to form a class party, which eventually covered the period up to the betrayal of social democracy in the first world war, running from WRs 198 to 237).

The inspiration of the French bourgeois revolution for the working class

The industrial revolution in Britain (1760s to1830s) went hand in hand with brutal repression and deeply reactionary politics, and from the moment of its birth the British proletariat was forced to try to organise itself under the direct threat of imprisonment, transportation or hanging; or more simply a volley of shots and a cavalry charge. As pioneers of the world proletariat, British workers struggled alone for the most elementary rights against both starvation and the concerted violence of a fearful ruling class, which mobilised more troops to suppress its own insurrectionary workers than to fight Napoleon.

The French bourgeois revolution was a turning point for both classes. Initially some radical fractions of the British bourgeoisie were enthusiastic, but sympathy was deepest among the workers, who showed enormous popular support for the republican politics of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and engaged in strikes and riots in support of France. Faced with such a mass radical movement, the bourgeoisie quickly gave way to panic, and Britain’s motives for going to war were explicitly counter-revolutionary: to eliminate the twin perceived dangers of revolution at home and abroad. Preparations against Napoleon’s armies were as much against the ‘enemy within’ as without, and even at the height of the invasion scare there was strong resistance to any arming of the seriously disaffected population.

Deserted by the radical wing of the bourgeoisie, the working class organised its own reform movement inspired by the French Jacobins. Radical groups like the London Corresponding Society, which stood for universal suffrage and annual parliaments, were mainly composed of skilled artisans and small tradesmen rather than factory workers, but their agitation embraced social and economic issues and expressed a genuine internationalism in the British proletariat, for example explicitly linking the struggle for democracy with the cause of Irish and Polish national liberation.

Government repression drove these working class Jacobins and trade unionists underground, where they were thrown into further disarray by the French revolution’s slide into terror. Some small minorities did become further radicalised, and there were shadowy preparations for an insurrection, but by drawing their inspiration from Jacobinism these minorities lacked a distinctly working class political programme, and their vision of revolution was restricted to that of a coup d’état supported by the ‘mob’. However, some working class Jacobins continued their political activity, to re-emerge in future waves of struggle, for example as Luddites during the wars with France (1803 to 1815), and as physical force Chartists in the 1830s.

The rise of the factory system and the reaction of ‘Luddism’

“As soon as the working class, stunned at first by the noise and turmoil of the new system of production, had recovered its senses to some extent, it began to offer resistance, first of all in England, the native land of large-scale industry (...) The English factory workers were the champions, not only of the English working class, but of the modern working class in general, just as their theorists were the first to throw down the gauntlet to the theory of the capitalists.” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1)

It was above all the rise of the factory system which gave birth to the proletariat as a class with its own distinct interests. Industrialisation was a brutal experience: the introduction of machinery, primarily into the textile industry, resulted in the ferocious exploitation of the unskilled, mainly women and children, in the new mills and factories, while inexorably destroying traditional trades and the communities they supported. For hundreds and thousands of artisans and skilled workers, capitalist ‘progress’ was a catastrophe: whereas in the 1820s the number of hand-loom weavers, for example, rose to around 250,000, by the early 1840s this had fallen to just over 100,000, and only a few years later there were “little more than 50,000 starving wretches”(Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire). These workers, previously well organised and with a long tradition of independence and struggle, put up a fierce resistance to an inhuman system which quite literally in many cases meant their death.

Not surprisingly, in this period of capitalism’s advance the class struggle was partly a defence of immediate conditions but also often a rearguard struggle against proletarianisation and the real degradation of conditions it implied. It wasn’t new machinery as such that workers resisted, but the onslaught of capitalist ‘free competition’, which tore up surviving hard-won rights and protective legislation. The political arguments in support of this resistance naturally tended to look backwards for their justification: threatened woollen workers objecting to the shoddy goods of new capitalist entrepreneurs called on parliament to defend Elizabethan statutes and ancient customs, while pauperised agricultural workers fought for “the defence of the customary rights of the rural poor, as free born Englishmen, and the restoration of the stable social order which had - at least it seemed so in retrospect - guaranteed them” (Hobsbawm and Rude, Captain Swing). This past was undoubtedly romanticised and many, not long uprooted from the land, still dreamed of a return. But the resistance of the weavers and others in this period also presented a challenge to the political economy of the capitalist class, and in its widest sense expressed the confused desire to create an alternative social order, in which production was for social need, not profit.

This is the context for understanding the emergence of ‘Luddism’, which actually began as a semi-legal campaign by skilled woollen workers for a minimum wage and poor relief, and in defence of existing protective legislation, only going underground and turning to machine-breaking in response to government repression at the height of the Napoleonic wars. Luddism was certainly a politicised and highly disciplined movement, with an effective military organisation which was quite successful at least in its early phase. But more broadly this expressed the increasingly desperate struggle of the hand-loom weavers, and the revival of Luddism in 1817 was directed far more against the machinery itself, and further extensive machine-breaking during the slump of 1825 was almost the weavers’ last rebellion. The violence of Luddism was also partly an attempt to overcome the scattered nature of production in this declining sector, and can be contrasted with the massive struggles of the factory workers who increasingly took the lead in the class struggle, and which demonstrated an open, massive character, also highly disciplined but with very little violence, as in the first great cotton spinners’ strike of 1818.

Early trade unionism and the strategy of the bourgeoisie

The earliest combinations formed by workers against the capitalists were clandestine by necessity, formed in defiance of repressive legislation which outlawed strikes and trade unions and threatened workers with imprisonment, hard labour and transportation. But combinations grew, at least among skilled workers, in part because employers in some industries were willing to negotiate with their leaders, and with ‘illegal’ trade unions openly parading in the streets even backward bourgeois politicians were forced to recognise the impracticality of stamping them out.

The bourgeoisie had emerged from the war with backward landed interests (‘Old Corruption’) still in control of the state apparatus; indeed with their grip strengthened by the need for unity against a semi-insurrectionary proletariat. A movement emerged after the war calling for parliamentary reform, but due to the cowardice of the manufacturing bourgeoisie this was led by the middle class and petty bourgeoisie. The working class, reform’s most consistent supporter, formed a powerful and barely-controlled ‘physical force’ wing of this movement, which constantly threatened to get out of the control of the constitutionalist leadership. The strength of the working class, and its willingness to engage in insurrectionary struggles (as in Derbyshire and Yorkshire in 1817) and in open, mass demonstrations (as at ‘Peterloo’ in Manchester in 1819 when 11 peaceful demonstrators were killed and many hundreds wounded by cavalry), only provoked the bourgeoisie into passing even more repressive laws against public meetings and demonstrations.

But the more intelligent sections of the ruling class could see that in the long term such crude tactics were ineffective in controlling a growing industrial proletariat. With the repeal of the hated Combination Acts in 1824, peaceful trade unionism was finally made legal, although the bourgeoisie was still very careful to outlaw any use of violence in order to prevent any effective class struggle tactics. This marked a change of strategy by the bourgeoisie to contain the class struggle, involving an acceptance of trade unionism within the framework of capitalist political economy. Radical bourgeois MPs argued that the Acts were not consistent with the principles of free competition, and that their removal would soon lead to the peaceful coexistence of workers and employers.

The evolution of class organisation and consciousness

In fact, the following period saw a great advance in the self-organisation of the working class on both the political and economic terrain, with growing efforts to organise the factory workers, primarily in the textile industry, and to extend this organisation to create ‘general unions’ of all trades at a national level. There were also attempts – only partially successful – to co-ordinate solidarity action in support of victimised workers and extend struggles to other sectors, while improved trade conditions led to a wave of strikes in which the workers used their own class violence to enforce demands. This prompted the bourgeoisie to tighten up the legislation on ‘intimidation’, and selective repression certainly did not end - as shown by the famous case of the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’ (the six Dorset farm labourers transported in 1834 for organising a trade union).

The struggles of the factory workers also gave rise in this period to some of the earliest political and economic theorists of the socialist movement; men who, in Marx’s words, “threw down the gauntlet to the theory of the capitalists”. Robert Owen - the ‘model’ manufacturer, founder of experimental communities and advocate of cooperativism - was recognised by Marx and Engels, despite their vigorous critique of his prescriptive utopianism, as “the founder of English Socialism”. By 1830 Owenism was a popular movement of the politicised working class. Others - men like Thomas Hodgskin, William Thompson and James Morrison - were also active at this time in constructing a proletarian theory of political economy based on a primitive theory of labour value, which demanded that the workers should receive the full product of their labour from the capitalists.

Legalisation of trade unions signified a strengthening of the left-wing of the bourgeoisie, but in 1830, just when the right-wing showed signs of weakening, a huge revolt by agricultural workers coinciding with the July revolution in France forced it to oppose the slightest reform. Britain appeared once again to be in a revolutionary crisis; in Bristol workers controlled the city for several days, Nottingham castle was burned and Derby jail sacked. The manufacturing bourgeoisie finally acted by organising a peaceful, counter-revolutionary reform movement in order to force concessions to its own political interests, while the right (the Tories) tried to provoke the working class into violence in order to justify a backlash. The resulting Reform Act of 1832 was a con trick; a new accommodation of ruling class interests masquerading as a reform to divert the threat posed by the working class, and the resistance of die-hard elements in the Church and landed aristocracy only lent greater credibility to this manoeuvre. Even so, there were many working class radicals (for example Bronterre O’Brien and his Poor Man’s Guardian) who saw through the trick and denounced the Act as a cynical consolidation of ruling class power.

One lasting consequence of this defeat was to engender a deep suspicion of political reforms in the British working class and to encourage the growth of syndicalist ideas, i.e. that the trade unions themselves could become organs of dual power, set up their own parliament and ultimately abolish wages. 1834 was certainly a high point for the working class’s struggle to organise itself, with successful solidarity action from clubs and societies throughout the country in support of workers in Derby sacked for belonging to a union, leading to the formation of a ‘Grand National Consolidated Trades Union’ by delegates gathered in London. The ‘Grand National’ grew rapidly with half a million members extending to previously unorganised sectors like agricultural and women workers. But the slump of 1834-5 inevitably saw the collapse of these attempts to create a national trade union organisation and forced a reversion to local societies. In these conditions the working class increasingly turned to the struggle for the vote as the key to political power. MH 12/06

“Wall Street suffered its biggest one-day fall yesterday since the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, as a day of hefty stock market falls around the world culminated in a late panic sell-off in New York.

The Dow Jones industrial average closed more than 400 points down amid fears that the US and China - the twin locomotives for the global economy - were about to plunge into recession and that the White House might be preparing air strikes against Iran’s nuclear capability”. (Guardian, 28/2/07)

Stock market falls come and go and economic experts have a very short-term vision. On the day this one happened, one US economic guru warned that “this could be the lull before the storm.” Elsewhere Andre Bakhos, president of Princeton Financial Group, said “As the afternoon has progressed, there seems to be a sense of panic among some professional investors …There seems to be just an air of nothing is safe anymore, there’s nowhere to go and people are rotating into bonds as a safe haven.”

Two days later, “Dominic Rossi, head of global equities at Threadneedle Investment Services, summed up the City’s insouciant mood after the biggest tremor in globa/ markets since 9/11: ‘Nothing has happened over the past 48 hours that affects our view of the world and the positive outlook for equity markets’” (Guardian, 1/3/7)

The tremors of 27/2 may not mean an imminent global recession. But they do indeed give us a glimpse of the real underlying state of the world economy.

For years now, we have been told that the American economy is sound, strong, a locomotive for the world. What we haven’t been told is that this ‘recovery’ after the recessions of the 80s has been based on a growing mountain of debt. In other words, the US (and global) economy is actually bankrupt, sunk in a deep crisis of overproduction, but keeps going anyway by creating a vast artificial market, supplemented by creating a casino economy where people are involved in all kinds of artificial jobs. In Britain, for example, the biggest contribution to ‘Gross National Product’ comes from…landlords, an economic category which produces absolutely nothing.

For years now, we have also been told that the startling boom in China shows the way forward. Four consecutive years of growth at 10% or more, a 67% increase in its trade surplus. Surely that proves that Mr Rossi is right to be optimistic about the positive outlook for global capitalism. If China can do it, why not the rest of the world?

Simple: China can do it precisely because the traditionally developed countries can’t. China’s industrialisation is based on the deindustrialisation of America, Britain and major parts of Europe. Vast profits can be made in China because the Chinese working class is paying for this ‘economic miracle’ through monstrous rates of exploitation – low wages, long hours, minimum protection from industrial accidents and pollution. Levels of exploitation that the working class in the central capitalist countries has shown it will not accept, much as the bourgeoisie would like it to.

China has thus served as a willing sponge for all the capital that could no longer be profitably invested in the more established capitalist countries. But despite all the talk of the creation of a ‘new middle class’ and the mushrooming of a ‘consumer culture’ in China, the majority of the Chinese population remain desperately poor and the greater part of Chinese industrial output is geared towards exports. The world is being flooded with cheap Chinese products and the limits to its capacity to absorb them are not hard to spot. If the ‘consumer boom’ in countries like Britain is based on trillions of pounds of domestic debt, what happens when the debts (or the interest on the debts) get called in and people and companies have to stop spending?

This is why there are all the fears about the ‘overheating’ of the Chinese economy. The recent shares slump was sparked off by a trivial incident – the announcement that the government was about to crack down on illegal trading in shares in its economy. But the real nightmare that haunts the bourgeoisie is that the Chinese economy, by ‘overheating’ the machine that spews out this endless line of commodities, is heading for an open crisis of overproduction which would have a devastating effect on the state of the world economy.

In short: the ‘prosperity’ of the world economy is built on sand and the sands are beginning to shift. World capitalism, which has been in decline for nearly a hundred years, has found numerous ways of manipulating its own laws and slowing down its descent into the abyss, but only at the cost of preparing new and even more dangerous convulsions in the future.

It is also highly significant that a second aspect of the recent fall in share prices was a new round of speculation about a possible US attack on Iran. Capitalism’s economic crisis has always pushed the system towards the insane ‘solution’ of war. No doubt the stock markets’ jitters were eased when the Bush administration interrupted its sabre rattling to announce that it would be opening talks with Iran and Syria to find ways of stabilising the situation in Iraq. But as we show in the article in this issue, such diplomatic expedients do not in any way contradict capital’s fundamental drive towards war and self-destruction.

If we add that capitalism’s bloated and unhealthy growth is now unquestionably posing a profound threat to the planetary environment, it is evident that the perspective this system holds in store for us is one of unprecedented catastrophe – economic, military, and ecological.

The bourgeoisie, despite all its optimistic whistling, is well aware that things can only get worse. This is why Gordon Brown has just announced that one million public sector workers in Britain will have their pay rises pegged to below 2%. The casino economy has ‘hidden’ inflation in recent years through the housing boom, but inflationary pressures are building up throughout the economy, and the workers, as ever, are being asked to pay.

In the 1970s, inflation was the price we paid for avoiding recession. In the 1980s, recession was judged a better option. But today, we are faced with the threat of both at the same time. This is why, for example, that great ‘model’ of modernisation and growth, Airbus, has announced thousands of job cuts in France, Germany and Britain. This announcement was greeted with the spontaneous walkout of thousands of workers across France and Germany.

Faced with rising prices, wage cuts, job losses today, faced with the prospect of a cataclysmic future if capitalism is allowed to continue, the only path ahead for the working class across the world is the path of struggle. WR 3/3/7

The full resolution has already been published on this site here:

https://en.internationalism.org/wr/301_brit-sit-resolution [12]

The Stop the War demonstration on Saturday 24 February was described by an indymedia contributor as “yet another march from A to B and listen to speeches event, organised by the left of capital in cooperation with the police” (Indymedia [13]) and he added “don’t expect a change in imperialist policy in Whitehall”. There is a long history of such events failing to make any change to imperialist policy, most notably the millions who came onto the streets of several continents to protest against the war in Iraq just before it was launched in 2003. These large demonstrations, whether in the USA, Britain or elsewhere had no impact on government policy whatsoever.

This raises the question of why anti-war demonstrations never stop war. Is it a matter of more militant tactics? Would it be different if there were “large scale, effective, direct anti-war action”? It is not enough to point to the equally ineffective demonstrations that have taken place at Greenham Common and various other military bases over the years. The question still remains whether there is any kind of tactic that could make an anti-war demonstration effective. This can only be answered by an understanding of why nations go to war: is it by choice with a view to a quick buck on the oil market? Or are they forced into it by the very conditions of the capitalist system today? Today, and since the early 20th century, no country has been able to stand aside from imperialism as each is forced to try and expand at the expense of its rivals. This is why the USA and Britain have found themselves bogged down in the chaos they created with the Iraq war. And there are no innocent nations or factions, however small and weak they are all inevitably drawn into imperialism: from ‘brave little Belgium’ backed by Britain, France and Russia in World War I, through the PLO backed by Russia in the Cold War, to Hizbollah backed by Iran today. When we look at the carnage in Iraq today, like any other imperialist conflict, we are not seeing an aberration but the normal operation of capitalism. “Violated, dishonoured, wading in blood and dripping filth – there stands bourgeois society” as Rosa Luxemburg said in 1916, and used in the signature quote from the indymedia contributor cited above.

This is why calling for all occupying troops to be withdrawn from Iraq, for no replacement of Trident and no attack on Iran, as the demonstration did, is utopian. Peace will not be possible and imperialism will not be ended until capitalism is overthrown by the class war.

However, the demonstration did have one slogan that was not utopian, ‘Bush and Blair must go’. Here we descend to the level of farce, since their tenure in office is coming to an end anyway, and their going already decided, especially for Blair who will be gone in a matter of months.

So why hold demonstrations?

Four years ago there was an illusion in the power of demonstrations and democracy to influence government policy. Today even the illusion that the Iraq Study Group and Democratic victories in the USA might attenuate its hawkish imperialist policies has been dashed. And we can be quite sure that none of the organisers, either then or now, had any such illusions. In fact in 2003 the leader of the LibDems was quite open about this, stating that once war started they would support ‘our boys’ in Iraq.

Nevertheless, bourgeois democracy has a need for such demonstrations against unpopular policies. When the democratic mechanisms respond to the views of the public in this way it is not to allow them to influence state policy, but to provide a safety valve and above all to provide false answers to the questions being raised by the state of capitalism today. When workers and particularly young workers see the constant and growing local wars this raises the question of what future capitalism has in store for us, in the same way that growing unemployment or the destruction of pensions does. An anti-war demonstration provides false answers – call for the end of this war, the removal of this or that leader, the exposure of this or that scandal, anything to drown out the discussion of why capitalism cannot be anything else, why it has outlived its use to humanity and become nothing but a source of chaos and misery.

Revolutionaries, those who hold to a clear internationalist position against all imperialist forces of whatever scale, whether official, guerrilla or paramilitary, need to be at these demonstrations precisely to respond to the questioning of those beginning to see through the spectacle of the anti-war demo. We do so in order to stimulate discussion, not to drown it out, to show the roots of imperialism as an essential part of capitalism today instead of providing false hopes. This is why we will understand more about the Iraq war by reading the Junius pamphlet written by Rosa Luxemburg in 1916 than by listening to the speeches at the end of hundreds of anti-war demonstrations. Alex 3/3/07

In mid-January, over 10,000 British Airways cabin workers in the Transport and General Workers Union division, BASSA, voted overwhelmingly and enthusiastically for a strike involving pay, conditions and general discontent. The unfolding of events since then at BA is a real, practical demonstration of the anti-working class nature of the trade unions. Over the years the unions at BA, working hand in glove with management, have implemented massive attacks on the wages and conditions of the workers. And when, in January, these workers had enough and responded to these attacks by wanting to fight back, the unions, working from their deliberately divisive structures, sabotaged that very struggle at the same time as delivering up another crap deal. The unions at BA have undermined any effective fight back, in the first place by isolating the cabin crew from other workers, even from other cabin crew in different unions.

It’s not just the leadership that’s the problem. The T&G head Tony Woodley - member of the ‘awkward squad’, ‘militant leftie’, ‘tough negotiator’ - showed his colours in the carve up of Peugeot workers from 2000 onwards. The problem exists in the whole union structure, particularly its base, in this case the rank and file BASSA committee of convenors and stewards.

The cabin crew strike was called off by the union, and the pay deal ‘negotiated’ gives an upper pay ceiling of £18,600, which still means a pay reduction of £8,000 in relation to the pre-1997 ceiling (‘negotiated’ away by the unions) of £26,600, “the best deal that could be achieved” according to the T&GWU (The Independent, 3/3/07). Not only was this pay cut maintained with the same workers doing the same job for two different pay rates, but the union has also asked for more wage bands, thus imposing more divisions on the workers. As well as this, the union ‘deal’ over conditions has meant the latter will deteriorate and management-bullying tactics over sickness and attendance have been given the green light. The cabin workers are furious. Woodley first of all postponed, then cancelled the address he was to make at a union meeting to defend the ‘deal’ because of the anger and resentment felt against the union. BASSA had to shut down its website because of the level of anger directed against it. A 9-man rank and file BASSA committee had accepted the deal and the two members who voted against it have since resigned. The workers’ anger has been focussed on the rank and file committee and more of them are reportedly resigning. Working within the union structure, even, and especially at the base of the union, rank and file committees will be forced, sooner or later, to sell out the workers and toe the union line. Putting trust or confidence in such union committees means that from the beginning the workers are fighting with two hands tied behind their backs. As far as the cabin crews are concerned any attempt to remedy the situation and fight back against these attacks must begin with their self-organisation and the election of their own delegates in order to confront the inevitable union sabotage. Threats by some BASSA workers to join another union will simply put them back on the union merry-go-round and back in the same position, having learned nothing.

At BA the T&G has 20,000 in its union, Amicus has 6200, the GMB 5000 and Balpa 2750. Amicus has 1500 cabin crew members, and check-in workers are split between different unions. The last ‘deal’ organised by the T&G and the GMB in 2004 was a three-year pay and condition cut, one of the sources of the growing anger of workers earlier this year. The carve up and division of workers by the unions is again reflected over the cuts in the pension scheme, with Amicus and Balpa recommending it, the GMB rejecting, and the T&G “consulting”.

At the present time, the role of the unions, as part of the state’s attack, is to keep workers divided and confused, and prevent any effective fight back. This is clearly shown in their role at BA. Beyond BA, there are about a hundred thousand workers in and around Heathrow, many divided up by the same unions and all of them suffering similar attacks to those at BA. Beyond the divisions, sell-outs, confusion and lies sown by the unions, the workers need to start from their own mass meetings and their own organisation in a similar vein to the autonomous action by the baggage handlers last year in support of Gate Gourmet workers. The current victory of the unions and management over the workers at BA will only be temporary because issues are unresolved, more attacks are needed and the workers will respond. What’s important is they learn the lessons of their own struggle. Baboon, 28/2/7

“I don’t know how many times the president, secretary Rice and I have had to repeat that we have no intention of attacking Iran” (Guardian 10/2/07). These were the words of US Defence Secretary Gates in February a few days after President Bush threatened Iran with retaliation for its involvement in Iraq and as a US fleet of some 50 ships, including two aircraft carriers and others with cruise missiles, moved within striking distance of Iran. Perhaps not surprisingly, Washington’s actions were taken more seriously than its words and numerous commentators in the press speculated about the likelihood of action against Iran: “The US ‘push back’ against Iran comprises many other elements beyond Iraq. Unconfirmed reports suggest Vice-President Dick Cheney has cut a deal with Saudi Arabia to keep oil production up even as prices fall, to undercut Iran’s main source of foreign currency. Washington is pursuing expanding, non-UN global financial sanctions against Tehran; encouraging and arming a ‘new alignment’ of Sunni Arab Gulf states; and highlighting Iran’s role in ‘supporting terrorism’ in Palestine…Almost any of these developments might produce a casus belli. And when taken together, despite official protestations, they seem to point in only one direction. The Bush administration, an American commentator suggested, is ‘once again spoiling for a fight’” (Guardian, 31/1/07).

The campaign being waged by the US against Iran goes back several years. For much of that time the main issue has been Tehran’s nuclear programme, which was only revealed in 2002. There has been a diplomatic dance between the US, Iran and other countries in and out of the meetings of the International Atomic Energy Agency with agreements made and broken, initiatives proposed and ignored, and threats made and reciprocated. A year ago Iran resumed uranium enrichment, leading to a referral to the UN Security Council and first the offer of incentives and then a vote to impose sanctions. The US has made veiled threats of military action while Israel, which bombed an Iraqi nuclear plant in 1980, has been more open.

Iraq provided the second theme with reports of Iranian support for the insurgency leading to the claim that the weapons it had supplied were responsible for the deaths of many American soldiers. The threat to take action against Iranian agents in Iraq was followed just a few hours later by the detention of six Iranians alleged to be members of the Revolutionary Guard. The US has been keen to present evidence to support its claims - such as the serial number of weapons said to confirm their origin in Iran - but such claims, so reminiscent of the ‘intelligence’ used to justify the invasion of Iraq, have been widely ridiculed.

The weakness of US power leads to war

Why is the US making these threats and are they real? Both questions can only be answered by looking at the broader imperialist struggle. Since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc the US has come to depend more and more on displays of military force to try and reassert its global dominance. However, all of its efforts, from the first Gulf War through Bosnia, Afghanistan and numerous smaller wars to the invasion of Iraq, have only provoked more challenges. The more the US has shown off its apparent strength the more its real weakness has been exposed. This paradox has been partially explained by no less a person than Francis Fukuyama, the prophet of the end of history and the untrammelled victory of capitalism: “American military doctrine has emphasised the use of overwhelming force, applied suddenly and decisively, to defeat the enemy. But in a world where insurgents and militias deploy invisibly among civilian populations, overwhelming force is almost always counterproductive: it alienates precisely those people who have to make a break with the hardcore fighters and deny them the ability to operate freely…The Bush doctrine sought to use preventative war against Iraq as a means of raising the perceived cost to would-be proliferators of approaching the nuclear threshold. Unfortunately, the cost to the US itself was so high that it taught exactly the opposite lesson: the deterrent effect of American conventional power is low, and the likelihood of preventative war actually decreases if a country manages to cross that threshold” (Guardian 31/1/07). Of course Fukuyama can’t see that this is not the result of particular circumstances but of the general tendency in decomposing capitalism for a generalised free-for-all amongst all states as they struggle for position. The US epitomises this not because it is the worst power but because it is the biggest. In their conduct and intentions the militias in the Middle East and Africa or the bombers in Spain and Britain are no different.

Since the destruction of the Twin Towers the US has waged an offensive around the globe to reassert its authority against all of its rivals, that is against every state and every would-be state and faction. This offensive has collapsed in the streets of Baghdad and the mountains of Afghanistan and has led to serious divisions within the American ruling class over the way to go. The report of the Iraq Study Group, which called for talks with Iran and Syria, was initially ignored by Bush who, in the State of the Union Address, declared that “to win the war on terror we must take the fight to the enemy” and identified “an escalating danger from Shia extremists” who “are determined to dominate the Middle East” and many of whom “take direction from the regime in Iran, which is funding and arming terrorists like Hezbollah”.

The rise of Iranian imperialism

For its part Iran is no more a peace-loving nation that the US. Since the ‘revolution’ of 1979 this Islamic republic has aspired to regional dominance and has resorted readily to war, notably against its regional rival Iraq during the 1980s. Nor have its principles got in the way: in the 1980s it accepted arms supplied by Israel with US agreement and after 9/11 it moved towards the US: “…Iran’s desire for an accommodation with the US has led it to take steps that would once have been unimaginable. In 2001 it backed the US war against Afghanistan; and in 2003 it demonstrated its willingness to cooperate by encouraging Shia groups in Iraq to support the US invasion” (Le Monde Diplomatique, January 2005). This strategy has been very successful: the invasion removed Iraq as a serious rival and the ensuing chaos offered it opportunities too good to resist: “The winner in this conflict is Iran. The US strategy of disbanding the army and de-Ba’athifying Iraq removed Tehran’s traditional enemy from the region, while the US reliance on Shia clerics empowered Iran’s allies inside Iraq. The US now confronts a greatly strengthened Iran because of its own actions” (Le Monde Diplomatique, February 2007). Iran has developed its influence across the region and is “emerging as the champion of a new front of struggle that combines Arab nationalism with the rising tide of Islamic resistance” (ibid).

Iran has used the divisions between the great powers to pursue its nuclear ambitions and to cultivate its regional influence under the pretence of supporting its Shia co-religionists and has become more bellicose as the crisis in the Middle East has deepened. The election of the supposedly hardline Ahmadinejad and his nationalistic defence of Iran’s ‘right’ to nuclear power correspond neatly to this regional imperialist strategy. It is not Ahmadinejad who has taken Iran away from the path of moderation supposedly embodied in his predecessor Rafsanjani, but the needs of Iranian imperialism that have produced Ahmadinejad. The radical language, including the calls for the destruction of Israel and the denial of the Holocaust, are a calculated strategy to harness the despair of the layers of impoverished and disorientated workers and peasants throughout the Middle East. That the allegations of intervening in the neighbouring countries and of seeking to acquire nuclear weapons are true is obvious: this is the aspiration and the unavoidable need of any state that aspires to real power.

The rise of Iranian imperialism is a consequence of a point we have often made in recent years: that it is far easier for a second rate power to cause problems for the dominant power than it is for the latter to maintain order. War between the US and Iran may not be inevitable but it is inevitable that their imperialist manoeuvres will lead to more bloodshed. This remains true despite the apparent about-face of the administration over the last few days. Bush now seems to be taking on board the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group and has invited both Iran and Syria to take part in talks aiming at the stabilisation of Iraq. This is certainly an admission of weakness on the USA’s part, but experience has shown that the weakening of the ‘Great Satan’ of US imperialism does not bring about an earthly paradise: rather it provides new opportunities for all the ‘Little Satans’ to pursue their own sordid imperialist designs. North, 1/3/07

Baghdad is paralysed by fear. Every night this tortured city resounds to the sound of mortar fire. Using the car, for those who still have one, immediately puts the occupants in mortal danger from heavily armed gangs who can stop the vehicle at any moment and shoot them in cold blood. Every day brings its share of bloody attacks. It is no longer considered proper to give a daily total for the number of dead in a country plunged into the greatest barbarity. More than 200 people were killed in one week in Baghdad at the end of January, and more than 16,800 civilians were killed there in 2006. On its side, the American army announced the death of 3,068 military and associated personnel in the same period. Each day only confirms the worsening of this humanitarian disaster. Shiites have been expelled from the Sunni Al Amariyah quarter in the West of the capital. A Sunni Ba’ath Party rules there. The graffiti proclaims “Death to Muqtada [Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite religious nationalist] and his army of imbeciles!” This reflects what is happening in the whole of the country. In other areas of the capital, like Al-Hurriya, it is the Sunnis who have been forced to flee, also on pain of death. The tension and chaos have reached their worst in Baghdad. Everyone is waiting for a generalised explosion of violence. A majority of the Sunnis are also waiting for an offensive of the armed Mehdi gangs of Shiites at any moment, aiming to kill or expel the Sunnis from the city. All sides are accumulating arms and munitions. So Baghdad is becoming a veritable powder keg. Four years after its intervention in Iraq the American army controls no more than a few fortified zones, leaving the rest of the country to plunge irremediably into the worst kind of bloody anarchy.

America bogged down in Iraq

Some weeks ago in the United States, the Democrat victory in the elections for Congress and the Senate spread a breath of optimism in the bourgeois media. This optimism was reinforced by the proposals put forward by Baker, advisor to Bush senior. American public opinion, with an anti-war majority from now on, could dream of a withdrawal of troops after a reasonable delay. Perhaps even the end of the war in Iraq. That was nothing but an illusion! The Democrats have no alternative proposal. Reality has immediately and dramatically confirmed that there can no longer be peace under capitalism in that region of the world. The budget presented by the American administration envisages a new increase in military spending. It will allocate $622,000 million to the Pentagon, of which $142,000 million is for Iraq. Stuck in the Iraqi quagmire, American imperialism can do nothing but continue its headlong flight. 21,500 extra soldiers are being rapidly deployed for its operations on the ground. The American army, in cooperation with the government police in Baghdad, is preparing a generalised offensive on the capital. Officially its aim is to clear the sectors occupied by the armed anti-American militia. This offensive, like all those preceding it over the last four years, can only end in more massacres and greater chaos. This will only push the armed groups to try to outdo each other in more and more violence. In early February a marine CH-46 helicopter crashed in the Sunni Al Anbar province west of Baghdad, killing 7 of the crew. Six of these have now been hit in less than 3 weeks, according to official figures. The means of destruction used in this shameful war are getting more and more deadly. The American army maintains that Iran is supplying arms to insurgents in Iraq. But as the Washington Post said of this type of allegation on 12 February “Is this deja vu all over again? Is the Bush administration once again building a faulty case for war, this time against Iran?” (Washington Post [19]).

The Middle East sinks into inter-imperialist massacres

America’s accelerating loss of control in the Middle East is stimulating the ferocious appetites of all imperialisms in the region. Iran is asserting itself more and more as a regional power. In Lebanon, in Iraq and wherever it is possible, it is pushing forward its Shiite pawns, thus participating actively in the wars and massacres going on. The United States is sending another fleet, led by the USS Stennis, to the Gulf. The mounting tensions in the Middle East have provoked a new nuclear arms race among the countries in the region. Last December the countries of the council for cooperation in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman, announced a planned joint civil nuclear programme. In January they were joined by Jordan and the Yemen. These are countries which possess large reserves of oil and therefore of energy for non-military use. But equal to Iran in using the same alibi of civilian nuclear power, they are inevitably developing military nuclear programmes everywhere. For these Arab states in the Gulf, the growing power of Shiite Iran is intolerable. The whole Middle East, like Iraq, is in the process of splitting in two. Shiite and Sunni communities find themselves more and more opposed to each other and, within each camp, rival gangs are already tearing each other to pieces. There is not only the risk of the explosion of Iraq, but also the risk of the spread of civil war to the whole region, as in former Yugoslavia 14 years ago. Capitalism in the crisis of its senility is no longer able to hold back the development of barbarism and chaos. Tino 17/2/07 (from Revolution Internationale).

Most of the news that comes out of the Middle East tells us about the daily sectarian slaughter in Iraq, the brutal bombing of civilian populations by the USA and Israel in Iraq and Lebanon, bloody confrontations between Palestinian factions in Gaza, threats of a new military adventure in Iran… It is a constant litany of fratricidal conflict, dividing the population into Shia and Sunni, Muslim and Jew, Arab and Kurd.

Some people who claim to be in favour of a fundamental social change, who call themselves ‘socialists’ and ‘revolutionaries’, tell us that there is something in these conflicts that leads to the better world they say they are fighting for. That there is, contained within this spiral of nationalist and ethnic hatred, an ‘anti-imperialist’ struggle which should be supported by any true socialist. Thus we should back Hizbollah’s ‘resistance’ against Israel in the Lebanon, or the Palestinian ‘intifada’ in Gaza and the West Bank, or the attacks on US forces being carried out by sundry insurgent groups in Iraq.

This is a terrible and dangerous lie. These conflicts don’t in any way counter the domination of the world by the imperialist powers. In most cases, they only serve as proxy battles between different imperialist powers: as in Lebanon, where the ‘resistance’ to Israeli imperialism by Hizbollah serves the needs of the rising Iranian imperialism. Or - as in the case of the insane round of massacres between Sunni and Shia in Iraq – they express a tendency towards the complete collapse of society into chaos and war.

For genuine socialists or communists, the way towards a ‘better world’ lies through the united struggle of the exploited class, the proletariat, against its exploitation. It follows that when you have a ‘struggle’ which divides the proletarians against each other, which drags them into fighting battles on behalf of their exploiters, you are going not towards a better world but towards the catastrophic demise of the present one.

In the Middle East, the working class has been profoundly weakened by decades of nationalist and inter-imperialist confrontations. But its ability to stand up for its own needs has not been completely destroyed.

In WR 300 we wrote about the nearly simultaneous struggles by Palestinian public employees [20] against the non-payment of wages by the Hamas government in the Palestinian territories, on the one hand, and by Israeli public employees against the non-payment of their wages by the Israeli public authorities. We said that this represented a reaction by workers against the ferocious attacks on their living standards brought about by the permanent state of war in Israel and the occupied territories. Without any conscious unity of action between the Israeli and Palestinian workers, it showed the essential unity of their situation and their class interests, and thus shone as a glimmer of hope in the darkness of nationalist division and mutual revenge. Furthermore the issue of unpaid wages in Israel’s public sector has not gone away, as in late February the Histradut (Israeli trade union federation) was again sounding off about calling a new general strike, only to call it off again following talks with the government.

The fact that this expressed something brewing deep under the surface was confirmed in February when Israeli dock workers at the port of Ashdod came out on an unofficial strike against the agreement between employers and the union, the second such strike in the last year. The gulf between workers and trade unions was also shown in a recent demonstration by postal workers, in which workers invaded ‘their own’ trade union HQ during working hours. The workers, both Jews and Arabs, have been on temporary contracts on very low pay and were exasperated by the Histradut’s empty promises to campaign for permanent status. After demonstrating outside the building they decided to force their way inside to confront union boss Ofer Eyni.

Conflicts between workers and the Histradut have a long pedigree in Israel and some people argue that this is because the Histradut isn’t a ‘proper’ trade union, given that it is so deeply enmeshed in the Zionist state machine. In fact its anti-working class actions are typical of unions everywhere.

But the most important expression of the ‘old mole’ of the class struggle in this region has been the massive wave of strikes in Egypt over the past weeks. Over 35,000 workers in state-owned textile, cement and poultry plants, in mines and on the railways have held strikes and demonstrations in defence of jobs and wage levels, defying anti-strike laws and their enforcement by the trade unions. In December 18,000 textile workers at Mahalla north of Cairo came out against low pay and corruption, and have protested vigorously against their local union leadership for siding with management: they even went en masse to a meeting with government officials with the aim of impeaching their local union leader.

The Mahalla workers won an annual bonus and this has inspired other factories and sectors to follow their example. Attempts by the ruling party to blame the agitation on the Islamic militants of the Muslim Brotherhood have been specifically denied by the workers “When the ruling party has a bad dream, they wake up and blame the Muslim Brothers”, said Khalid Ali, a worker who was taking part in an occupation of the Kafr el-Dawwar factory. “You know why we’re striking? Conditions have reached a dismal level. It’s bad for workers all over Egypt” (Libcom, Feb '07 [21]).

So far the government has been cautious in exerting direct repression against the workers, although its nervousness about any form of dissent was demonstrated recently when it arrested a number of bloggers for insulting Islam and other trumped up charges.

Conditions are indeed bad, and not just for the workers of Egypt. In the last year we have seen workers in numerous parts of the ‘underdeveloped’ world engaging in massive struggles in the face of increasingly unbearable living conditions. In Bolivia, Mexico, Brazil, Dubai, Bangladesh, Vietnam and China, to name but a few. More recently we have seen a strike by health workers in Kashmir, and large scale strike movements in African countries like Guinea (see article in this issue) and Zimbabwe.

These struggles are all seeds that will grow into an international movement of mass strikes. But workers in many of these countries face enormous difficulties. Faced with openly corrupt and repressive regimes like in Guinea or Zimbabwe, it is difficult for workers to separate their own interests from those of the ‘democratic’ opposition, who are quite happy to ‘support’ workers’ strikes as a lever for propelling them towards power. In Palestine we saw the resistance of the public employees being manipulated by Fatah in its dispute with Hamas, while in Lebanon Hizbollah used workers’ discontent with government austerity measures to bolster their own efforts to push themselves towards power. In Egypt the fact that the unions are openly on the side of the state has led the most militant sectors – such as those at the Mahalla textile factory – to seek the answer to their problem in the formation of new independent trade unions.

This is why it is more than ever important for workers in the more central capitalist countries, those sectors of the class who have a deeper and longer historical experience of the delights of democracy, to develop a perspective for workers everywhere by developing their own struggles against capital and the state. Amos 28/2/7

Since 10 January, Guinea has been going through an explosive social situation, marked by a strike movement unprecedented even in a country which has seen many strikes over recent years. The workers in Conakry, followed by those in several other towns like Kankan, and actively supported by the population as a whole, have given active expression to their mounting discontent and thrown themselves into a movement of protest. In a country ruled with an iron fist by the president General Lansana Conté, successor to the pro-Stalinist Sekou Touré, the population has been subjected to greater and greater poverty. Consumer prices have increased by 30% since 1995. The policy of deliberate inflation followed by the government has had a devastating effect on living standards. Between 2001 and 2007, the Guinean franc has lost one third of its value: from 2000FG to the dollar in 2001, it’s gone to 6000FG to the dollar this year. One out of two Guineans live on less than a dollar a day; the annual wage for a worker is less than 20 dollars (120,000FG), while a sack of rice, the staple food of the population, went from 150,000 FG at the beginning of January to 250,000 after the strike of 10 January. Crushed by brutal exploitation on the one hand and the all-powerful police and military repression of Conte’s goons on the other, the workers of Guinea threw themselves with all their might into a struggle to demand wage increases and a reduction in the cost of rice. Last year, in June, Conakry had already been the scene of violent confrontations between striking students and the forces of order, leaving thirty dead. However, this didn’t deter the strikers from entering into struggle this time; on the contrary it reinforced their determination. As one demonstrator said: “we are already dead, so we have nothing to lose”. As for going back to work, people said “what work. There is none. And even those who have a wage can’t afford a sack of rice” (reported in Jeune Afrique).

Given this willingness to fight to the bitter end, the unions have had to put themselves at the head of the movement in order to derail it. Thus, the inter-union committee, led mainly by the Union General des Travailleurs de Guinea (USTG) added to the demands on wages and prices a call for the re-imprisonment of the ‘boss of Guinea’s bosses’, Mamadou Sylla, accused of dirty-dealings of all kinds but supported by the president-general. This fixation on corruption in the government, even if it is perfectly real, enabled the unions to put the nomination of a new prime minister as a precondition for a return to work and not the workers’ initial demands. Faced with an increasingly powerful movement that was paralysing the flow of all commodities through the port of Conakry, except for rice and sugar, the inter-union committee was able to bring the strike to an end on 28 January, even though the repression and its resulting 60 deaths had only served to strengthen the strikers’ resolve.

On 9 February, after 12 days of uneasy truce, Lansana Conté, who had not honoured any commitment on the wage demands or the payment of strike days, nominated as prime minister Eugene Kamara, one of his immediate circle, sparking off a new surge of anger in the population, the revival of the strike and a new wave of repression by the state which introduced martial law on 12 February. In this situation, the unions were again well placed to focus even more on the question of the government and the president, now calling for the resignation of Conté, whose forces of order, supported by troops from Liberia and Guinea-Bissau, killed another 50 people in Conakry, and others in various towns where the strike movement had gained ground and where symbols of the regime were systematically attacked: Coyah, Maferinya, Boké, Dalaba, Labé, Pita, Siuiri, N’zérékoré, etc.

Guinea is in a situation of political crisis which has been growing more intense every day. It is a sign of the times that on 24 February, the parliament, usually so obedient to the president, refused to approve the continuation of martial law. The local and international press has talked more and more about preparations for a military coup. The end of the regime has virtually been announced, and France has been sufficiently concerned to have dispatched the military cargo ship Sirocco to the gulf of Guinea to evacuate French nationals, while Chirac has talked about the intervention of French troops stationed in the region. Along with Darfur, Guinea was at the centre of the discussions at the last Franco-African summit in Cannes. The Organisation of African Unity, the UN and other bodies have made various announcements calling for calm and the peaceful regulation of a conflict which threatens to destabilise the whole region.

Although this anxiety on the part of the local and global bourgeoisie is real, their main desire is to put an end to the strike that has been paralysing the transport of bauxite, of which Guinea is the world’s main exporter.

The workers of Guinea need to know that if the good fairies of capital are focusing on them with such attention, it’s not at all because they want to accede to their demands. If Conté is kicked out, as seems likely, the situation of poverty they face will not improve. But the unions are doing all they can to make them think that a new government is the solution to all their ills and to get them back to work with little more than promises for tomorrow.

But beyond the necessity for the working class in Guinea and anywhere else to recognise the unions as false friends and struggle outside and against them, there’s no doubt that the situation of the workers in this country and the ideological barrage directed at them are making it more difficult for them to develop the struggle for their own class interests. This is why it’s up to the proletariat in the more advanced countries, where it is concentrated and powerful, to act as a catalyst for the development of autonomous workers’ struggles all over the planet. Mulan 24/2/07

Post-scirpt: The day after this article was written, the unions called off the general strike when Conté announced that he would replace Kamara with a prime minister more acceptable to them, Lansana Kouyate. But none of these shifts at the top will put food in workers’ stomachs.

A simpler tax system in a largely neutral budget – what could be wrong with that? Nothing at all, if you believe the Chancellor and the Treasury. But no-one does. The budget robbed the poorest sections of the working class by abolishing the lowest 10p in the pound tax band to fund a small cut in the basic rate of tax. Some workers will be ‘compensated’ by tax credits, the very system that has been utterly discredited, not just because it is so complicated that many of those entitled to it don’t apply, but also because so many of those that did have been plunged into debt when the Revenue decided it had made a mistake which had to be clawed back.

This budget is in line with a major trend in all Gordon Brown’s budgets – attack the poorest and weakest sections of the working class, but disguise it with something that sounds really helpful. The earlier budgets concentrated on the unemployed and those on benefits generally. They said it was “a hand up, not a hand out”. In other words, it was an effort to get as many people off benefits and into low paid work as possible – by subsidising employers, by taking people off incapacity benefit, by insisting single parents look for work, and above all by denying benefits to those under 18. This government has simply continued the attacks of the Thatcher and Major governments before them, and the Callaghan government before that.

Attacks on health service workers and cuts in service provision

The attacks on the health service go on all year, without waiting for the budget to be announced. These are the same attacks that workers are facing everywhere. The pay review body recommended a rise of 2.5% for nurses and 2.2% for junior doctors. With inflation estimated at between 3.6 and 4.2% that is already an effective pay cut, but on top of this the award has been staged, so that staff will get no more than 1.5% in April, and the rest in November.

Workers in the NHS used to think that however hard the work, and however low the pay, this was a job for life. The first indication that this is an illusion came in the 1980s with the cuts in hospital cleaning jobs. A year ago the attack was stepped up as health trusts were forced to balance the books at the year end. After the loss of 20,000 jobs in hospital trusts there are still more job losses to come: 1700 in N Ireland over 4 years, 400 in the Yorkshire ambulance service. And newly qualified staff unable to get a job. Last October an RCN survey of newly qualified nurses found 71% still looking for a job, while speech and language therapists and physiotherapists were worse off with 80% and 93% still without the jobs they had trained for. Doctors are starting to find themselves in the same position.

This is going to get worse. Reports that the NHS trusts took on too many new staff at the end of the 1990s should warn us that the state intends to get rid of a lot more jobs, in the region of 100,000. And pay will be under attack through the ‘Agenda for Change’ in which workers will be doubly attacked: first by having to justify their pay level; secondly by the attempt to divide them up into atomised individuals making it harder to struggle against the attacks.

Where money is spent in the NHS, and it is, it is all about saving money, keeping sick people out of hospital, cutting referrals. This also promises more attacks on pay, jobs and services for the future.

The question is not whether we have a great health service, but how to fight back against the attacks on pay, jobs and the social wage (in this case, health services). It is nonsense to call on workers to defend the NHS, the very state institution that is carrying out the attacks. Workers are clearly angry, as shown by recent votes to reject the pay deal in various health trusts, with some saying they would support strike action. But before we go into this we need to think about who or what we are fighting.

Pensions – who is to blame?

Reports have just come out that show that when Gordon Brown changed the tax regime for pension funds in his first budget, he was warned that this could lead to the very problems we have seen. This, like the loss of the 10p tax band, was a simplification bringing pension funds into line with the rest of industry by abolishing tax relief on dividends paid into pension funds. Undoubtedly this decision contributed to today’s pension shortfall, since it axes around £5 billion every year from pension funds. The problem with this sort of story is that it tries to portray the problems in the economy and all the attacks on the working class as the result of this or that policy, giving the idea that we can put it right by campaigning for a different one or voting in a new government. It leaves out the fundamental question of why every single government orchestrates these attacks. It asks us to forget that pensions are under attack in the US, France, Austria, in fact everywhere there are pensions.

The fact is that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, just like every other bourgeois whether in government, the state bureaucracy or private industry, is in the end the representative of capital. He is forced to make decisions required by the economy whether cutting benefits, wages, jobs or services. This does not mean we cannot defend ourselves – sometimes the decision is made to withdraw an attack because of the danger of struggle. For example last year the German government decided not to bring in a measure increasing the precariousness of employment similar to the CPE in France after seeing the reaction of students there. In fact it shows that the only way for workers to defend themselves is through the class struggle, not by campaigns to defend the NHS, nor by relying on an alternative government. WR 30.3.07

Health service jobs under attack, hospital closures, inadequate services getting even worse. This has led to a discussion on the libcom internet discussion forum (https://libcom.org/forums/organise/defending-nhs [24] ) about whether defending the social wage means defending the NHS. Many important questions have been raised. We aim to return to the questions raised in this discussion in a future article. For now we are reprinting an article we wrote in 1998 for the 50th anniversary of the founding of the NHS as a contribution on why we do not regard this state institution as a reform to be defended.

Even when it is clear that the NHS is under funded, even when it is clear the ‘new’ money promised is largely a con, even if you or a relative has been waiting for a year or more for an outpatient appointment just to get on the waiting list for treatment of a painful condi­tion, even then the idea that the NHS is a genuine reform of capitalism remains very powerful. This is an idea which has been celebrated by all shades of bourgeois media on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the NHS this summer. It is, however, an idea that is wrong, a lie to try and tie workers ideologi­cally to the state and its increasing control over society.

In contrast to the reforms of capitalism’s ascendancy

“During the period of capitalism’s ascendant phase, increasing wages, the reduction in the working day, and improved working condi­tions were ‘concessions wrested from capital through bitter struggle... the English law on the 10 hour working day, is in fact the result of a long and stubborn civil war between the capitalist class and the working class’ (Marx, Capital Vol. 1). In decadence, the bourgeoisie‘s con­cessions to the working class following the revolutionary movements of 1917-23 repre­sented, for the first time, measures taken to calm (8-hour day, universal suffrage, social insurance etc) and to control (labour con­tracts, trade union tights, workers’ commis­sions, etc) a social movement whose aim was no longer to gain lasting reforms within the system, but to seize state power.” (‘Under­standing the decadence of capitalism’, part VI, International Review 56).

The lasting reforms of the last century could be fought for, and sometimes won, because capitalism was expanding production and de­veloping new areas of the world. These re­forms, limitation of the working day, educa­tion, despite the resistance of the bourgeoisie, also benefited capitalism as a whole by im­proving the health and productivity of the workforce.

However, these were not the only gains of the struggle for reforms. Such immediate results were not the main aim “because such activity prepares the proletariat, that is to say, creates the subjective factor of the socialist transformation, for the task of realising social­ism.” (Reform or Revolution, in ‘Rosa Luxemburg Speaks’) The struggle was a vital contribution to the development of working class consciousness and organisation.

The NHS, in contrast, was not the product of a stubborn struggle by the working class, but the conscious decision of the government of national unity in World War 2. It was planned in the report by Liberal MP Beveridge in 1942 and the White Paper, A National Health Serv­ice in 1944. In spite of all the ideological hype when it was finally introduced by the Labour government in 1948 it was never intended to be a free gift to the working class. “The plan is not one for giving to everybody something for nothing and without trouble, or something that will free the recipients for ever thereafter from personal responsibilities. The plan is one to secure income for subsistence on condition of service and contribution and in order to make and keep men fit for service.” (Beveridge, quoted in: ‘Britain: the welfare state’, WR 14).

However the measure was designed to ensure workers not just “fit for service” but also socially controlled. “Having learned its les­sons from the 1917-23 revolutionary wave, the world bourgeoisie did all it could to make sure that the end of die 1939-45 war did not give rise to another proletarian outburst. It thus combined a savage repression of the isolated workers’ revolts that did occur (Italy, Germany, East Europe, Vietnam), with a series of conciliatory methods aimed at convincing the proletariat that its struggle against fascism had not been in vain..., in Britain the Labour government came to power, pledged to the building of a ‘Welfare State’ for the benefit of the working people.” (‘Theses on the class struggle in Britain’, WR 7).

This took place as part of the whole process of formalising the state capitalist control of all aspects of society that had been present during the war. Industries that had been controlled and directed by the state for the war effort were nationalised, hospitals included. The measure involved the state taking direct con­trol of a part of the workers’ wages to direct according to the needs of capitalism “The wage itself had been integrated into the state. Fixing wages at their capitalist value has devolved upon state organs. Part of the work­ers’ wage is directly levied and administered by the state. Thus the state ‘takes charge’ of the life of the worker, controls his health (as part of the struggle against absenteeism) and di­rects his leisure (for purposes of ideological repression).... while socialist society will de­fend the individual against illness and other risks, its aims will not be those of capitalist Social Security. The latter only has meaning in the framework of the exploitation of human labour. It’s nothing but an appendage of the system.” (‘On state capitalism’, from Internationalisme, 1952, quoted in International Review 21).

Fit for slaughter

The NHS that came into being on 5th July 1948 was built on and systematised “pieces of a health service, some provided by voluntary bodies, some by local authorities, either under public health or public assistance powers but without coordination.” (Health Trends, vol. 30, no. 1, 1998). All these pieces of the health service had been brought in to ensure suffi­cient fit men to fight and die in the imperialist wars that have dominated this century.

The Boer War marked a turning point. Only 50% of volunteers were fit for military service, leading to an outcry about the “spectre of physical deterioration and racial degenera­tion”, uniting all sections of the ruling class. “An Empire such as ours requires ... a race vigorous, industrious and intrepid” was how Roseberry expressed it (quoted in Socialism in Britain, Callaghan). The Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration investi­gated the situation and a school health service was set up on the basis of its findings. In 1911 came the national scheme for health insur­ance, making the working class pay for the health care the state knew was necessary for efficient workers and soldiers.

However, by the ’30s the health services were still run by various Approved Societies, voluntary groups and local councils. It was the preparation for war that concentrated the minds of the ruling class on the need to reorganise and rationalise this. In World War II, services for casualties, including not only major wartime injuries but care of evacuated children, were organised by Health Depart­ments. That organisation was the basis of the NHS.

Since the various steps in the development of the health service and the NHS have been stimulated by the needs of imperialist war, the death and destruction of two world wars is the cost against which we have to measure the inadequate provision of the NHS.

Health today

When the NHS came in it was part of its ideology that it should be free at the time of use. The introduction of charges for glasses and false teeth in 1951, and since then for eye tests, dental checks, and prescriptions has rendered that a fiction. Unless, of course, you need advice only.

The NHS can, of course, point to the in­crease in life expectancy of about 9 years, to 74.6 years for men and 79.7 for women in 1996, and a dramatic decrease in infant mor­tality, over the last 50 years. Given the devel­opment of medical science over that period it would be shameful if these statistics had not improved. Immunisation against an increas­ing number of diseases, the development of antibiotics, intensive care, have meant that a number of diseases, particularly infections, no longer cause the number of deaths they did 50 years ago. In addition we have been in a period in which imperialist war has largely been confined to the peripheries, and the worst effects of the economic crisis have been de­flected onto the much weaker economies in the ‘third world’.

Nevertheless, there are clear signs that the NHS cannot go on delivering the level of health care we are used to, and that capitalism needs, let alone keep up with the improve­ments that could be put in place as medical science advances. And it certainly cannot make up for the appalling toll that the crisis and decomposition take on workers’ health, no matter what medical advances are made.

Already at the beginning of the ‘80s the European Commission had made it perfectly clear that “in the last few years the lower rates of economic growth have made it much less acceptable for the proportion of publicly fi­nanced social expenditure in the national product to continue to increase.” (Quoted in ‘Capitalism’s health service: no gain for the workers’, WR 56). The result is that services are cut. Administrators are sent in to count and cut costs, while health care services are cut. In particular hospital beds have been consistently cut, having fallen from 10.2 per 1,000 in 1949 to 8.3 in 1976. And that was before the bulk of the efficiency savings started! If an old hospital is closed, beds are lost. When new hospitals are built - new facilities - the first question is ‘how many fewer beds can we cope with?’ While propagandists for the NHS can point out the freeing of the old fever hospital beds, that excuse went out of date 40 years ago. Now we have the annual winter bed crisis, and sometimes recently even a summer bed crisis, as in East London this year. Beds for the mentally ill have been particularly badly hit. The old policy of locking the mentally ill up in inhumane institutions where they could be forgotten has been replaced by the policy of ejecting them into ‘the commu­nity’ where they are woefully neglected. This is very disruptive for the largely working class districts where they are dumped.

It is hardly surprising that the health service has been among the first aspects of working class living standards to come under attack. Because it is part of the social wage, given indirectly, and only needed by any particular worker at certain times, it is particularly easy to cut this without provoking a working class reaction. Workers in the NHS have been attacked very intelligently, with the most brutal job cuts and pay cuts imposed on the most isolated sectors (as at Hillingdon).

What, then is left of the struggle against absenteeism? It has simply changed from one based on health care to one based on repres­sion, with doctors employed for the express purpose of judging who is fit for some form of work. And some attack this task with great zeal, ordering that those with learning difficul­ties or crippled with arthritis should seek work.

When we turn to the inability of the NHS to make up for the toll of the crisis, TB provides an excellent example. The introduction of effective anti-tuberculosis drugs in the ’40s, combined with the improved social conditions in the immediate post-war reconstruction pe­riod, led to an enormous reduction in the ravages of this disease. TB wards emptied. Public health doctors even thought immunisa­tion might no longer be necessary - 15 years ago. Now the disease is returning, not just imported among immigrants, not just among AIDS victims, but also among the poor, the overcrowded, and the victims of the economic crisis. A disease that should no longer exist is becoming a growing threat.

Avoid the trap of defending the NHS

The NHS is not a reform to be defended as an institution as the leftists would have us believe. It is not a question of how the capitalist state organises this particular part of itself, whether money comes from Public Sector Borrowing or the Private Finance Initiative. There is no golden age of the NHS to return to.

In particular workers in the NHS need to avoid any identification with their employer. To defend their interests brings them directly into conflict with the NHS.

Alex, September 1998.

The seizure of 15 British military personnel by Iran represents a serious escalation of the tensions between the occupying powers in Iraq and the Iranian state. It has been used by the regime in Tehran to strike a propaganda blow not only against Britain, but also against the US, and could be used a bargaining chip to secure the release of Iranian agents held by the US in Iraq.

However, Britain’s response to the hostage-taking has shown how limited its options are. On Tuesday 27/03/07 prime minister Blair warned Tehran that the crisis could move to “a different phase” if it did not free the servicemen, an example of empty bluster if ever there was one.

By Friday Britain had taken the matter to the UN Security Council. And what did they get?

“UN Security Council members last night agreed a watered-down statement expressing concern at Iran’s capture of 15 UK naval personnel, as the stand-off between the two countries hardened. … Russia had blocked a tougher statement that would have demanded an immediate release. … Sergei Lavrov, Russian foreign minister, said: ‘The Gulf is in such an agitated state that any action in this region, especially one that involves the navy or other military forces, must take into account the need not to aggravate the situation.’” (Financial Times, Friday, 30 March 2007)

What the Mr. Lavrov is saying here is undoubtedly true, whatever the actual motives of Russia in blocking a tougher resolution. The situation over the hostages highlights the balance of power in the region of southern Iraq, where the British forces are based. Iran is the rising local power, and the British have already indicated that they are intending to leave. Once they do leave Iran will advance its position further and there is little that Britain can do to stop it. The main obstacle to Iran’s regional ambitions was the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and, since the Americans and British have destroyed that regime, Iran has gone from strength to strength.

The Iranians are now pressing the British to leave altogether. This is made evident by the fact that “Iran earlier released a second letter purportedly from the female captive, Leading Seaman Faye Turney, 26, questioning the UK presence in Iraq” (ibid).

It’s true that Britain got a more strongly worded resolution from the meeting of European Union foreign ministers shortly after the UN meeting, fully supporting Britain and calling for the unconditional release of the hostages. But there was little of substance to back up these sentiments.

The USA, meanwhile, has stayed in the background, watching the embarrassment being heaped upon its coalition partner without being able to do much about it in the short term. Part of Britain’s discomfiture certainly rubs off on Washington, which has once again showed itself unable to protect the military forces under its command.

All this underlines the contradictions facing the US and the British. Although there are elements of the US and British bourgeoisies that favour withdrawal, such a retreat would simply leave Iraq a prey to the surrounding imperialist powers – Iran and Syria on the one hand and the conservative Arab states like Saudi Arabia on the other. The conservative states are sufficiently worried about the likelihood of an advance of the Iranian influence in Iraq that they have already indicated that they will feel impelled to support factions in Iraq to stave off such an advance. Even the elements in the US bourgeoisie who put forward the prospect of diplomatic engagement with Iran and Syria as an alternate approach to the current policy must be feeling that such a prospect is receding.

The US intervention in Iraq was aimed at boosting the worldwide authority of American imperialism. The complete mess it has made of the job has weakened its credibility to an unprecedented degree, and has allowed powers like Iran to flow into the vacuum it has created. But this weakening of the US will certainly not lead to a more peaceful and harmonious world. On the contrary, the more it feels itself threatened by the growing ambitions of its challengers, the more the US will be pushed towards taking its military responses onto a higher level. The current hostage crisis is almost certainly not the spark that will ignite a new conflagration in the Middle East, but it is one more sign that the logic of imperialism is indeed pushing things in that direction.

Hardin (30/03/07)

Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams sat down together for the first time at the end of March and agreed to share power. Sinn Fein has given its support to the police service in Northern Ireland while the Democratic Unionist Party looks forward to leading the Assembly in May. The number of violent deaths has declined, city centres are being revamped and nightlife is thriving. For Tony Blair this is a historic moment, a vindication of ten years of effort and a triumph for democracy over terror: “In a sense, everything that we’ve done over the last 10 years has been a preparation for this moment. This won’t stop republicans or nationalists being any less republican or nationalist, or making unionists any less fiercely unionist. But what it does mean is that people can come together, respecting each other’s point of view, and share power, make sure politics is only expressed by peaceful and democratic means.” (Guardian, 27/3/07).

What do these developments mean? Why have they happened and how real are they? To answer these questions it is necessary to look back over the years and also to look outside Northern Ireland.

America uses the ‘peace process’ to punish Britain

There have been frequent efforts to resolve the conflict in the past through secret negotiations and proposals for power-sharing. Between the Executive that fell in 1975 and the IRA ceasefire of 1994 there were a number of attempts, but they all failed. In 1985 the British and Irish governments signed the Anglo-Irish agreement giving Dublin a consultative role in the affairs of the North in exchange for recognition of the existence of Northern Ireland. Today these attempts are portrayed as the building blocks towards the ‘peace process’; but, in fact, they were part of the diplomatic struggle that ran alongside the military one. In the late 1980s the IRA was confronted with the reality that its armed struggle was not succeeding while the British state had to recognise that although it could contain the IRA it could not stabilise the situation.

It was the collapse of the imperialist blocs at the end of the 1980s that created the situation that led to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. As we have argued on many occasions, the collapse of the blocs unleashed the imperialist appetites of all of the powers that had previously been kept in check. Britain began to challenge the US and Northern Ireland became one area of conflict. In 1993, as the peace process began to get under way, we noted: “…the present stage of the ‘troubles’ is another expression of the break up of the blocs and every man for himself. In a period where the US/UK worked in relative harmony under the US ’umbrella’ there was no possibility of Southern Ireland being used as a base for Russia for example. But now, in the ‘new world order’, it has a far greater weight on US/UK relations…Without speculating we can say that there may have been some US push to the latest ‘peace’ talks” (WR 170, “Resolution on the National Situation”). As the ‘peace process’ was pushed forward by the US towards its culmination in the Good Friday agreement in 1998, this analysis was confirmed: “The Good Friday agreement confirms a US-sponsored process…of undermining the hold of Britain over this part of its territory…By supporting the political wing of the IRA, Sinn Fein, the US is punishing Britain for its pretensions at playing an independent role on the wider imperialist arena […] The Peace Agreement…permits Sinn Fein to participate in a regional assembly and government of Northern Ireland […]The agreement…commits Britain to reduce the number and role of the security forces…it gives substantially more power to Sinn Fein without any real likelihood of the ‘decommissioning’ of their weapons” (WR 214, “Imperialist ‘peace’ means further bloodshed”).

Britain tries to regain control

Britain’s response was to try and frustrate this, particularly by mobilising the Unionists who did everything they could to slow down and derail the process. It was not that Britain wanted a return to widespread violent conflict but rather that it wanted to regain control over the situation. The Assembly did not meet until the end of 1999, only to be suspended the following February. It was only restored after the IRA stated that it would completely and verifiably put all of its arms beyond use. Two years later, at the end of 2002 the assembly was suspended again after allegations of IRA spying within the Assembly building.

Throughout this period the US continued to push the process on. During the Good Friday negotiations Sinn Fein was in constant contact with Washington. Later the involvement of US Senator George Mitchell in trying to break the deadlock between the parties guaranteed that US interests would come first. Nor did the replacement of Clinton by Bush lead to any fundamental change in the US approach since throughout the late 1990s and opening of the new century Britain continued to challenge the US

Once again, it was the evolution of the international situation that led to change. After 9/11 the US launched its global ‘war on terror’ offensive and focused first on the invasion of Afghanistan and then of Iraq. Faced with this offensive Britain moved towards the US, posing again as its most reliable ally. Both developments meant that Ireland no longer had the same significance for Washington’s strategy and Britain has taken full advantage of this to restore some of its control over the situation. Its strategy is not simply to frustrate the ‘peace process’ but to take it over and bend it towards its imperialist interests. In particular, it has had some success in turning the IRA and Sinn Fein’s previous enthusiasm for the peace process back against it. The major steps in this have been the decommissioning of the IRA’s weapons some 18 months ago (although undoubtedly some were kept back) and Sinn Fein’s recognition of the Northern Ireland police force this January. The DUP has been used to call Sinn Fein’s bluff by grudgingly accepting the possibility of power-sharing, culminating in the spectacle of Paisley and Adams sat at a table together.

The persecution of the working class continues

It might be said that all of this manoeuvring is unimportant if the threat of death, maiming and destruction has eased. It is true that the figure for the number of deaths from violence has reduced from 80 or 90 a year in the early 1990s to ten or twenty in most of the subsequent years, reaching a low of 1 in 2006. But things are not as peaceful as the politicians and media make out. The reduction in deaths has been matched by a rise in the number of beatings and shootings, which went from about 200 a year before the peace agreement to around 300 in the years up to 2003. These figures are likely to be a serious underestimation of the real level given the reluctance of many to come forwards. Of these a significant number have been children and young adults, including people with learning difficulties. The terrorist gangs have, if anything, tightened their grip on the communities they pretend to protect, leading the author of a report in 2001 to conclude that “It is little wonder, therefore, that some commentators on Northern Ireland, including this one, fear the consolidation of a patchwork of Mafia-style mini-states, of orange or green complexion, operating vendetta-style justice and sustained economically by extortion and other forms of racketeering” (Liam Kennedy, They shoot children, don’t they?). Kerbs are still painted in sectarian colours, children are abused as they walk to school, while families of the ‘wrong’ faith are still driven from their homes. Most people live in areas that have a clear Catholic or Protestant majority, which, with factors such as the rarity of inter-faith schools, reinforces the divisions within the population, including the working class.

The changes that have taken place in Northern Ireland are not the result of any ‘peace process’ but of the changing shape of the conflict between Britain and the US. Thus the current peace in Northern Ireland results from a confrontation that contains within itself the possibility of renewed conflict. The working class might escape renewed bloodshed, but another turn of events might make them all targets once again.

However, there is another possibility within the situation. This possibility was shown last February in a strike by postal workers in Belfast across the sectarian divide. United struggle holds out the possibility not just of an end to killing but an end to the violence, fear and tension altogether. This is the possibility of socialism, of the world revolution in which capitalism and imperialism will be thrown aside. They would genuinely be a historic day in Irish and world history. Then the ‘troubles’ really would be over.

North, 30/3/07

This article was originally published in World Revolution 50, in June 1982. We are reprinting it in anticipation of a flood of articles and TV documentaries commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Falklands war. The article argues that the war was not, like many other wars of that period, a proxy conflict between the American and Russian imperialist blocs, nor was it fought over any serious economic or strategic conflict of interests between Britain and Argentina. It was above all a war aimed at the working class. This was more evident in Argentina, where nationalist hysteria over the ‘Malvinas’ was stirred up to drown out mounting working class resistance to the military junta. But the same applied to the bourgeoisie in Britain, who used the war to boost the standing of its chosen government and to test out the weapons of war, both military and ideological. The article thus argues that the war was a clear example of the cynical Machiavellianism of the ruling class. Subsequent events, though taking place in an altered inter-imperialist landscape, have confirmed this basic appreciation. The propaganda techniques tested out during the Falklands were used again and again in subsequent wars involving the major world powers – the Gulf war of 91, the Balkans war, the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. And these wars fully confirmed the bourgeoisie’s capacity for intrigue and conspiracy – whether in suckering Saddam Hussein into the invasion of Kuwait in 91 or, ten years later, in allowing al Qaida to proceed with the 9/11 attacks in order to provide the perfect pretext for launching the ‘war on terror’.

The cynical bloodletting taking place in the South Atlantic is not to be understood as an inter-imperialist conflict between the US and Russian blocs, nor as the last-ditch effort by old-fashioned Bri­tish colonialism to uphold national honour. First and foremost, we say that the ‘war’ over the Falkland Islands must be seen as part of a war being waged by the world bour­geoisie against the working class. Coming in the wake of the 13th Decem­ber repression[1] in Poland, the Falklands affair is part of a worldwide strategy by the bour­geoisie, aimed at demoralising the proletariat and breaking its will to resist the effects of the crisis.

There are those in the revolu­tionary milieu who see the ICC’s interpretation of these events as a sort of ‘conspiracy theory’, as a ‘Machiavellianism’ gone mad. But the ICC is entirely in its right mind when it explains how the bour­geoisie in this period is capable of working together against the working class: the basis for this resides in the objective conditions of capitalism in its decadent phase, and in the depth of the economic crisis, which makes the question of the class struggle the most crucial and constant concern of the whole bourgeoisie. Those who re­main blind to the implications of these basic realities, and to the fact that the bourgeoisie is capa­ble of ‘conspiring’ against the workers; is able to manipulate events, are in danger of seriously underestimating the strength of the class enemy.

The two key features of deca­dent capitalism which provide the basis for the bourgeoisie’s ‘Machiavellianism’ are:

1. State capitalism, which expres­ses the tendency of the state everywhere to control all the act­ivities of society and become the main agent of capital, in order to prop up the decaying system and avert its destruction. Today, power is concentrated in the execu­tive apparatus of the state to a far greater degree than in the last century, when private capital was still a major force in the economy.

2. The division of the world into two major economic and military blocs, and the subordination of les­ser imperialist powers to the inte­rests of the leading powers, America and Russia, through the or­ganisational structures of world imperialism: NATO, Warsaw Pact, Comecon, the IKF, EEC etc, which provide a framework for the bloc-wide co-ordination of the bourgeoisie’s activities.

Confronted by the threat of the class struggle uniting across nati­onal frontiers, the bourgeoisie has been led to unite its own struggle, even across the blocs. We need only look at the way in which the rival imperialists submerged their own deadly rivalries to work together to isolate and stifle the dangerous mass strikes in Poland in 1980-81, paving the way for the 13th December repression, to realise how far the bourgeoisie will go when its system is threatened.

How the bourgeoisie uses the Falklands crisis

A brief examination of the Falklands events shows that this is another example of a bourgeois ‘united front’ against the working class. But this is almost exclu­sively confined to one imperialist bloc: the two protagonists are both allies in the American bloc. There is no serious danger of Russian destabilising influence in the region. In fact, it would have been hard to find a ‘safer’ part of the world, or a more useless piece of ground for a bloodbath than the Falkland Islands.

Obviously, given the choice, the US would rather not have its friends and allies beating up each other’s military hardware, but it is worth it if in return the Argentine military junta can swamp strikes and unrest in a wave of nationalism; and especially if workers in Europe can be taught an essential lesson for the future: “don’t bother to struggle and be prepared to make sacrifices for the joys of democracy”. This, if successful, would do more in the long term for the bourgeoisie’s war preparations than a hundred Cruise missiles, and represents a key axis of the bourgeoisie’s con­certed efforts to demoralise and divert the main battalions of the working class in Western Europe.

With these basic aims of the bourgeoisie in mind, it is obvi­ous that US Secretary of State Haig’s shuttle diplomacy and the interminable attempts at a ‘neg­otiated settlement’ were merely a calculated countdown to the limited military engagement which would serve to get the message across. If the interests of the US were seriously threatened by this ‘war’, it possesses enough economic, and if necessary, military strength to stop it, using NATO, the IMF and all the bloc structures set up to maintain its hegemony; and the close involvement of the US in the military of the South American States would have given it ample forewarning of Argentina’s inva­sion of the Malvinas, which was allowed to go ahead.

Since Britain is one of the most loyal and well-trained of America’s clients, the response of Thatcher’s government is also worth examining. Although the Argentine invasion was finally prompted by the need to divert a wave of class struggle, since coming to power Galtieri has made no secret of his intention to reclaim the Malvinas, by force if necessary. In addition to these open hints, and its own intelligence reports on Argentine intentions, the British government would have had access to all the paraphernalia of US surveillance, including spy satellites which have the potential (as revealed in recent TV programmes) not only to plot every move of Argentine ships in the South Atlantic, but also to pick up every order radioed out of the Defence Ministry in Buenos Aires!

Such foreknowledge, even accep­ting the fallibility of capitalist high technology, broadly points to deliberate inaction by the British government, which in fact was very close to reaching a permanent sett­lement on the future of the Islands with the junta before the invasion (which is why Carrington and the Foreign Office ministers involved had to go). From some of Carrington’s comments after his resigna­tion, it appears that these officials had been hinting that in view of the imminent settlement, if Argentina did invade, then it would hardly be worth Britain responding.

Some of the more intelligent bourgeois commentators (like Peter Jenkins of the Guardian) have argued that the Falklands are not worth fighting over since Britain will have to negotiate them away eventually. There is indeed no economic sense in the war over the Falklands, but that is not the point: the British government, with tacit American approval, deliber­ately allowed the Argentine inva­sion to take place in order to make a point to the working class at home. The initial ‘loss’ of the Islands was necessary to create the central myth of ‘Argentine aggression’, to mobilise maximum support in the population for the task force and military action. Such a ploy would be nothing new: according to Professor John Erikson of Edinburgh University, the British and American governments had at least eight months warning of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, but cynically kept quiet in order to maximise the anti-Russian propaganda value of a ‘sneak’ attack and it is now an accepted opinion among bourgeois historians that the US knew per­fectly well of the intended Japan­ese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, but allowed it to happen as the most rapid and effective way of mobilising the population for war.

This ‘war’ fought for ‘democ­racy’, ‘freedom’ and ‘national sov­ereignty’ is so artificial that British banks are still allowing Argentina an overdraft and short term loans; although they are wor­ried about its credit rating, in the interests of the stability of the western bloc they are prepared to avoid a default at all costs (Guardian, 1st May ‘82). Meanwhile, top US bankers are even now preparing to visit Argentina - as soon as the hostilities are out of the way - to discuss the rescheduling of its massive $32 billion debts (Guardian 7th May ‘82). Effectively, the present ‘war’ is being financed by the western bloc, and Britain is help­ing to pay for a war against itself, in order to mount a campaign against the working class at home. This further highlights the fact that the ‘war’ in the South Atlantic is a vast spectacle, orchestrated by world imperialism, and directed against the international proletariat.

The importance of understanding how the bourgeoisie ‘conspires’ against the proletariat is obvious: if the working class confronts an enemy that is already organised on a world scale, then it can only fight this enemy by organising itself on a world scale. To defeat the global strategies of capital, the proletariat needs its own glo­bal strategy - the strategy of the international mass strike and the worldwide insurrection.

Mark Hayes, May 1982.

It is 90 years since the start of the Russian revolution. More particularly, this month sees the 90th anniversary of the ‘April Theses’, announced by Lenin on his return from exile, and calling for the overthrow of Kerensky’s ‘Provisional Government’ as a first step towards the international proletarian revolution. In highlighting Lenin’s crucial role in the revolution, we are not subscribing to the ‘great man’ theory of history, but showing that the revolutionary positions he was able to defend with such clarity at that moment were an expression of something much deeper – the awakening of an entire social class to the concrete possibility of emancipating itself from capitalism and imperialist war. The following article was originally published in World Revolution 203, April 1997. It can be read in conjunction with a more developed study of the April Theses now republished on our website, ‘The April Theses: signpost to the proletarian revolution [27] ’.

On 4 April 1917 Lenin returned from his exile in Switzerland, arrived in Petrograd and addressed himself directly to the workers and soldiers who crowded the station in these terms: “Dear comrades, soldiers, sailors and work­ers. I am happy to greet in you the victorious Russian revolution, to greet you as the ad­vance guard of the International proletarian army... The Russian revolution achieved by you has opened a new epoch. Long live the worldwide socialist revolution!...” (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution). 80 years later the bourgeoisie, its historians and media lackeys, are constantly busy main­taining the worst lies and historic distor­tions on the world proletarian revolution begun in Russia.

The ruling class’ hatred and contempt for the titanic movement of the exploited masses aims to ridicule it and to ‘show’ the futility of the communist project of the working class, its fundamental inability to bring about a new social order for the planet. The collapse of the eastern bloc has revived its class hatred. It has unleashed a gigantic campaign since then to hammer home the obvious defeat of commu­nism, identified with Stalinism, and with that the defeat of marxism, the obsolescence of the class struggle and even the idea of revolution which can only lead to terror and the Gulag. The target of this foul propaganda is the political organisation, the incarnation of the vast insurrectionary movement of 1917, the Bolshevik Party, which constantly draws all the vindictiveness of the defenders of the bourgeoisie. For all these apologists for the capitalist order, including the anarchists, whatever their apparent disagreements, it is a question of showing that Lenin and the Bol­sheviks were a band of power-hungry fanatics who did everything they could to usurp the democratic acquisitions of the February 1917 revolution (see ‘February 1917’ WR 202) and plunge Russia and the world into one of the most disastrous experiences in history.

Faced with all these unbelievable calumnies against Bolshevism, it falls to revolutionaries to re-establish the truth and reaffirm the essential point concerning the Bolshevik Party: it was not a product of Russian barbarism or backwardness, nor of deformed anarcho-ter­rorism, nor of the absolute concern for power by its leaders. Bolshevism was, in the first place, a product of the world proletariat, linked to a marxist tradition, the vanguard of the international movement to end all exploi­tation and oppression. To this end the state­ment of positions Lenin brought out on his return to Russia, known as the April Theses, gives us an excellent point of departure to refute all the various untruths on the Bolshe­vik Party, its nature, its role and its links with the proletarian masses.

The conditions of struggle on Lenin’s return to Russia in April 1917

In the previous article (WR 202) we recalled that the working class in Russia had well and truly opened the way to the world communist revolution with the events of February 1917, overturning Tsarism, organising in soviets and showing a growing radicalisation. The insurrection resulted in a situation of dual power. The official power was the bourgeois ‘Provisional Government’, initially lead by the liberals but which later gained a more ‘socialist’ hue under the direction of Kerensky. On the other hand effective power already lay, as was well understood, in the hands of the soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies. Without soviet authorisation the government had little hope of imposing its directives on the workers and soldiers. But the working class had not yet acquired the necessary political maturity to take all the power. In spite of their more and more radical actions and attitudes, the majority of the working class and behind them the peasant masses, were held back by illusions in the nature of the bourgeoisie, and by the idea that only a bourgeois democratic revolution was on the agenda in Russia. The predominance of these ideas among the masses was reflected in the domination of the soviets by Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries who did everything they could to make the soviets impotent in the face of the newly installed bourgeois regime. These parties, which had gone over, or were in the process of going over, to the bourgeoisie, tried by all means to subordinate the growing revolution­ary movement to the aims of the Provisional Government, especially in relation to the im­perialist war. In this situation, so full of dangers and promises, the Bolsheviks, who had directed the internationalist opposition to the war, were themselves in almost complete confusion at that moment, politically disorien­tated. So, “In the ‘manifesto’ of the Bolshevik Central Committee, drawn up just after the victory of the insurrection, we read that ‘the workers of the shops and factories, and likewise the mutinied troops, must immediately elect their representatives to the Provisional Revolutionary Government’... They behaved not like the representatives of a proletarian party preparing an independent struggle for power, but like the left wing of a democracy” (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, vol. 1, chapter XV [28] , p.271, 1967 Sphere edi­tion). Worse still, when Stalin and Kamenev took the direction of the party in March, they moved it even further to the right. Pravda, the official organ of the party, openly adopted a defencist position on the war: “Our slogan is not the meaningless ‘down with war’... every man remains at his fighting post.” (Trotsky, p.275). The flagrant abandonment of Lenin’s position on the transformation of the imperi­alist war into a civil war caused resistance and even anger in the party and among the work­ers of Petrograd, the heart of the proletariat. But these most radical elements were not capable of offering a clear programmatic alternative to this turn to the right. The party was then drawn towards compromise and treason, under the influence of the fog of democratic euphoria which appeared after the February revolt.

The political rearmament of the Party

It fell to Lenin, then, after his return from abroad, to politically rearm the party and to put forward the decisive importance of the revolutionary direction through the April Theses: “Lenin’s theses produced the effect of an exploding bomb” (Trotsky, p. 295). The old party programme had become null and void, situated far behind the spontaneous action of the masses. The slogan to which the “Old Bolsheviks” were attached, the “demo­cratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” was henceforth an obsolete formula as Lenin put forward: “The revolutionary democratic revolution of the proletariat and the peasants has already been achieved...” (Lenin, Letters on tactics). However, “The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution - which, owing to the insufficient class consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie - to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants.” (Point 2 of the April Theses). Lenin was one of the first to grasp the revolutionary significance of the soviet as an organ of proletarian political power. Once again Lenin gave a lesson on the marxist method, in showing that marxism was the complete opposite of a dead dogma but a living scientific theory which must be con­stantly verified in the laboratory of social movements.

Similarly, faced with the Menshevik posi­tion according to which backward Russia was not yet ripe for socialism, Lenin argued as a true internationalist that the immediate task was not to introduce socialism in Russia (Thesis 8). If Russia, in itself, was not ready for socialism, the imperialist war had demon­strated that world capitalism as a whole was truly over-ripe. For Lenin, as for all the authentic internationalists then, the interna­tional revolution was not just a pious wish but a concrete perspective developed from the international proletarian revolt against the war - the strikes in Britain and Germany, the political demonstrations, the mutinies and fraternisations in the armed forces of several countries, and certainly the growing revolu­tionary flood in Russia itself, which revealed it. This is where the appeal for the creation of a new International at the end of the Theses came from. This perspective was going to be completely confirmed after the October insur­rection by the extension of the revolutionary wave to Italy, Hungary, Austria and above all Germany.

This new definition of the proletariat’s tasks also brought another conception of the role and function of the party. There also the “Old Bolsheviks” like Kamenev were at first re­volted by Lenin’s vision, his idea of the soviets taking power on the one hand and on the other his insistence on the class autonomy of the proletariat against the bourgeois government and the imperialist war, even if that would mean remaining for awhile in the minority and not as Kamenev would like: “remaining with the masses of the revolutionary proletariat”. Kamenev used the conception of “a mass party” to oppose Lenin’s conception of a party of determined revolutionaries, with a clear programme, united, centralised, minoritarian, capable of resisting the siren calls of the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie and illusions existing in the working class. This conception of the party has nothing to do with the Blanquist terrorist sect, that Lenin was accused of putting forward, nor even with the anarchist concep­tion submitting to the spontaneity of the masses. On the contrary there was the recognition that in a period of massive revolutionary turbu­lence, of the development of consciousness in the class, the party can no longer organise nor plan to mobilise the masses in the way of the conspiratorial associations of the 19th century. But that made the role of the party more essential than ever. Lenin came back to the vision that Rosa Luxemburg developed in her authoritative analysis of the mass strike in the period of decadence: “If we now leave the pedantic scheme of demonstrative mass strikes artificially brought about by order of the par­ties and trade unions, and turn to the living picture of a peoples’ movement arising with elemental energy... it becomes obvious that the task of social democracy does not consist in the technical preparation and direction of mass strikes, but first and foremost in the political leadership of the whole movement.” (Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Un­ions). All Lenin’s energy was going to be orientated towards the necessity of convincing the party of the new tasks which fell to it, in relation to the working class, the central axis of which is the development of class conscious­ness. Thesis 4 posed this clearly: “The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolu­tionary government and that therefore our task is, as long as this government yields to the influence of the bourgeoisie, to present a patient, systematic and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation espe­cially adapted to the practical needs of the masses… we preach the necessity of transferring the entire state power to the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies.” So this approach, this will to defend clear and precise class principles, going against the current and being in a minority, has nothing to do with purism or sectarianism. On the contrary they were based on a comprehension of the real movement which was unfolding in the class at each moment, on the capacity to give a voice and direction to the most radical elements within the proletariat. The insurrection was impossible as long as the Bolshevik’s revolutionary positions, positions maturing through­out the revolutionary process in Russia, had not consciously won over the soviets. We are a very long way from the bourgeois obscenities on the supposed putschist attitude of the Bolsheviks! As Lenin still affirmed: “We are not charlatans. We must base ourselves only on the consciousness of the masses” (Lenin’s second speech on his arrival in Petrograd, cited in Trotsky, p. 293).

Lenin’s mastery of the marxist method, seeing beyond the surface and appearances of events, allowed him in company with the best elements of the party, to discern the real dynamic of the movement which was un­folding before their eyes and to meet the profound desires of the masses and give them the theoretical resources to defend their positions and clarify their actions. They were also enabled to orientate them­selves against the bourgeoisie by seeing and frustrating the traps which the latter tried to set for the proletariat, as during the July days in 1917. That’s why, contrary to the Mensheviks of this time and their numerous anarchist, social democratic and councilist successors, who caricature to excess certain real errors by Lenin[1] in order to reject the proletarian character of the October 1917 revolution, we reaffirm the fundamental role played by Lenin in the rectification of the Bolshevik Party, without which the prole­tariat would not have been able to take power in October 1917. Lenin’s life-long struggle to build the revolutionary organisation is a his­toric acquisition of the workers’ movement. It has left revolutionaries today an indispensa­ble basis to build the class party, allowing them to understand what their role must be in the class as a whole. The victorious insurrec­tion of October 1917 validates Lenin’s view. The isolation of the revolution after the defeat of the revolutionary attempts in other coun­tries of Europe stopped the international dy­namic of the revolution which would have been the sole guarantee of a local victory in Russia. The soviet state encouraged the ad­vent of Stalinism, the veritable executioner of the revolution and of the Bolsheviks.

What remains essential is that during the rising tide of the revolution in Russia, the Lenin of the April Theses was never an isolated prophet, nor was he holding himself above the vulgar masses, but he was the clearest voice of the most revolutionary tendency within the proletariat, a voice which showed the way which lead to the victory of October 1917. “In Russia the prob­lem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future every­where belongs to ‘Bolshevism’.” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution). SB, March 2007.

The striking victory of Chavez in the elections held on 3 December 2006 (Chavez won 63% of the vote against 37% for the opposition candidate) not only consolidates and legitimates the power of the Chavist faction of the bourgeoisie for the next 6 years, but represents a triumph for the whole of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie. Once again, the conflict between bourgeois factions, which has dominated the political scene since Chavez came to power in 1999, has succeeded in polarising the population and drawing it into participating massively in the electoral process. According to the figures of the National Electoral Council, the rate of abstention was the lowest ever, falling from around 40% to about 25%.

The bourgeoisie, thanks to the return of the opposition to the electoral scene (they refused to take part in the parliamentary election of 2005) has given a shot of oxygen to the democratic and electoral mystifications, which are fundamental ideological mechanisms for maintaining the capitalist system of exploitation. But the biggest boost to this has been Chavism, which managed to focus popular attention on its claim that the opposition candidate was the pawn of the devil, George Bush, who, if he was elected, would threaten the missions[1] through which the government has instituted its policy of ‘social justice’ - that he would undermine the gains of the ‘revolution’. Thus the proletariat and the socially excluded masses remained caught in the trap of an inter-bourgeois faction fight, putting their hopes in a faction of the bourgeoisie which has been able to use the country’s oil revenue to back a left wing, populist policy geared towards the poorest strata in society. In reality, Chavism has meant the management of insecurity, an egalitarianism that equalises downwards, impoverishing not only the middle classes but also the workers and the most deprived strata of society.

Such is the recipe for socialism in the 21st Century which Chavism is exporting to Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua and which is helping Venezuela to advance its geopolitical interests in the region.

The popularity of Chavism is beyond dispute. Its triumph is the fruit of a political process which is consolidating the faction of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie which came to power in 1999, replacing the factions which had governed prior to that. These factions - the social democratic ‘Democratic Action’ and the Christian Democrat COPEI - had become extremely corrupt and had been unable to maintain any level of political and social stability, as could be seen from the social revolts of 1989. Since it came to power, Chavism has undertaken a slow but thorough overhaul of the institutions of the bourgeois state. This has allowed it over the last 8 years of government to progressively weaken its rivals and to enter the electoral battle with the advantage of exerting a quasi-totalitarian control of the state.

But the victory of Chavism is not just the victory of one faction of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie over another: it also represents the legitimisation of the project of ‘Bolivarian socialism’, a model for the management of the state which transcends the frontiers of Venezuela, and through which the Venezuelan bourgeoisie hopes to reaffirm itself as a regional power. Chavez, in the ceremonies around his re-investiture, said that, with his re-election, Venezuela was about to become an ‘economic power’. We know very well what this means and has meant for capitalism since the beginning of the last century: developing an imperialist policy which inevitably leads it towards dominating weaker countries and confronting other countries who are out to preserve or create their own geopolitical zones. In this sense, the Chavist sector of the bourgeoisie has been able to profit from the difficulties facing American imperialism on the world level since the collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989, difficulties which have been considerably accentuated since the interventions by the Bush administration in Afghanistan and Iraq. The ‘radical’ anti-Americanism espoused by Chavez (which is frenziedly applauded by the anti-globalisation movements around the world), the support for the left-leaning governments in Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, as well as the ‘aid’ doled out to a number of countries in the region through cutting their oil bills, are examples of the use of oil as a weapon for dominating the region, to the detriment of the interests of US imperialism, which has always considered Latin America to be its backyard.

What is behind the ‘massive support of the people’ for Chavez?

The Chavist faction of the bourgeoisie, led by civilian and military factions on the left and extreme left, has a social base in the support of the exploited masses, above all of the socially excluded masses, who form a belt of poverty around Caracas and the main cities of the country, as well as the poor population of the villages and provinces. These layers of the population are being fed the illusion that they will have overcome their poverty… by 2021!

The great intelligence of this faction of the bourgeoisie has consisted in presenting itself as being an expression of the people, as being on the side of the poor[2]. At the same time it has portrayed itself as a victim of the malign intrigues of the bourgeoisie and above all of American imperialism, which is used as the external menace that has prevented it from carrying out its plans for taking the country out of poverty. The adoption of this permanent victim status was one of the best bits of advice given by the Cuban bourgeoisie to the new Chavist elite, it allowed the former to justify the exploitation and insecurity of the Cuban proletariat and the population in general for over forty years.

The Chavez government, since mid-2003, has been re-orientating ‘social expenditure’ by setting up the so-called missions, social plans through which the state hands out crumbs to the population with two principal objectives: maintaining social peace (necessary to oil the machinery of capitalist exploitation) and strengthen control over the pauperised masses as a counter-weight to the action of bourgeois sectors who have already made several attempts to get rid of Chavez. This ‘social expenditure’ (which is actually an obligatory social investment for the Chavist bourgeoisie) has been accompanied by unprecedented ideological manipulation, based on presenting Chavism’s state capitalist policies as the activities of a beneficent state which distributes wealth in an ‘equitable’ manner, thus creating the illusion among the deprived masses that the resources of the state are inexhaustible, that it’s simply a question of turning on the taps of petrodollars, and that there are sectors of the bourgeoisie who have a real interest in taking up and resolving their problems. Through the missions, the cooperatives, and numerous political organisations (including the Bolivarian Circles) and the state apparatus in general, Chavism has created a network which penetrates the most remote regions and whose main aim is not to bring people out of poverty as the government propaganda claims, but to control the population ideologically, politically and socially.

In order to win the presidential elections (in which it won 7 million votes out of an electorate of 16 million – it was actually aiming at 10 million) Chavism, as previous governments have done during election periods, concentrated its main public expenditure during the year 2006: increasing the import of foodstuffs in the first months of the year; selling them at subsidised prices; beginning a number of public works, some of which are still going on[3]; decreeing two increases in the minimum wage for regular workers (one in May and the other in September); accelerating the arrangements for giving out old age pensions; paying arrears owed to a number of workers and renegotiating a number of collective agreements, etc. A few days before the elections, extraordinary bonuses were handed over to public employees, pensioners and members of the missions. The government handed out this substantial ‘gift’ thanks to the oil manna, in order to create a mirage of prosperity among the population. These expenditures, the purchase of weapons, the ‘aid’ given to other nations etc, resulted in a major increase in public debt in 2006 – an increase of 58% over 2005, equivalent to 35% of GNP, a time-bomb which will have inevitable repercussions at the level of the economic crisis.

As we can see, behind the triumph of Chavism and popular support for the regime there has been liberal use of oil revenues, a demagogic populist strategy which the Chavist bourgeoisie has learned from those sectors of the bourgeoisie which oppose it today. The essential difference resides at the ideological level, since Chavism is able to sow confusion among the proletarians by stressing the idea that this is the how we can get to ‘socialism’. According to an opinion poll carried out by Datanalisis, which predicted that Chavez would win by a margin of 20%, two thirds of the sectors of the population who support Chavez have been identified as those who have in some way benefited from the government’s ‘gifts’.

According to the propaganda put out by Chavism at the domestic and the international level (supported and advised by all kinds of left wing leaders and intellectuals, and eminent figures in the anti-globalisation movement), Venezuela is heading towards the elimination of poverty between now and 2021, a year given a transcendental meaning by the Messiah Chavez. The ‘social gains’ of the ‘Bolivarian revolution’, in particular the missions, are supposedly moving in this direction. With the investiture of Chavez for a new period of government, this objective will be assured. We only have to wait for the transition from ‘wild capitalism’ to ‘Bolivarian socialism’.

But the reality behind this intoxicating publicity is very different: you only have to visit the poor neighbourhoods of the extreme east (Tetare) and extreme west of Caracas (Catia), or go to the centre of the city, to see the real poverty that lies behind this smokescreen: countless paupers, the majority of them young people, living and sleeping on the streets, under bridges and by the river Guaire (a vast toilet into which the used water of the city is dumped); avenues and streets full of garbage which results in the proliferation of rats and disease; tens of thousands of street vendors (known as “buhoneros”) who sell a few basic items and swell the ranks of the so-called informal economy; a very high level of criminality which has made Caracas one of the most dangerous cities in the region and has resulted in Venezuela becoming the country with the highest rate of crime, outstripping even Colombia. At the national level, there has been an increase in diseases like malaria, dengue, infant mortality, death of mothers in childbirth, etc[4]. This picture is not restricted to Caracas, but affects all the big cities and is increasingly becoming the norm in the medium and small ones. Although the government has taken measures to try to hide this poverty (for example by picking up a number of street kids and paupers, harassing prostitutes, moving the itinerant vendors, etc) or has blamed them on the evil actions of the opposition or of American imperialism, the expressions of this impoverishment can’t really be hidden.

The opposition factions, displaying the most disgusting hypocrisy, criticise the government for all this poverty with the aim of presenting themselves as the best option for the defence of the poor, when their real aim is to get their hands back on the state apparatus to preserve this system of misery and barbarism. For their part, the government networks of communication don’t mention or minimise this situation, which isn’t unique to Venezuelan cities but is the common denominator of many other cities in the peripheral countries. It is the inhumanity of capitalism which Chavism seeks to hide behind its deafening propaganda about being on the side of the poor.

Alongside these visible expressions of poverty, there are other less visible ones which accentuate the impoverishment of the proletarian masses. Through the co-operativism pushed forward by the state, precarious employment has been formalised, since the workers in these cooperatives have less income than the regular workers. According to the declarations of the trade unions and the cooperatives themselves, they don’t even receive the official minimum wage[5]. Negotiation on collective agreements, especially in the public sector, has seen major delays; wage increases are accorded by decree and in the majority of cases through bonuses which are unrelated to social benefits and are often very late in being paid, if at all; through the missions and other governments plans, parallel service networks have been created alongside the formal sectors of health, education and others. They have been used to put pressure on the regular workers and make further inroads on their working conditions. As we can see, precarious working, flexible working and attacks on wages are inevitable for every sector of the bourgeoisie, even the most ‘anti-liberal’ as the Chavist bourgeoisie claims to be.

The wage earners, as well as the excluded masses, are paying the price of the incessant public spending carried out by this ‘new’ Chavist bourgeoisie through an inflation rate which in the last three years has been the highest in Latin America (2004: 19.2%; 2005: 14.4%; 2006: 17% according to the official figures). This increase, basically the result of the state’s economic policies, has led to a deterioration of living conditions for the whole population, in particular the poorest. The latter can use 70% of their income to buy food, an area in which cumulative inflation during this period has been 152% (it was 26% in 2006) according to the figures supplied by the Central Bank of Venezuela. The estimates for 2007 are no more comforting: it is expected to be above 20%. In January it went up by 2%, the highest in the region.

The aggravation of poverty is not the result of bad management by this or that government, whether of right or left. It is the path down which capitalism is obliged to lead the proletariat and the whole of society. And the Chavez government, despite all its ‘revolutionary’ verbiage, is a capitalist government overseeing the exploitation of the workers.

With its electoral victory, Chavism gets the green light for attacking the workers

A few days after the elections, seeing that Chavism had won by a landslide and had firm control over the state institutions, one might have thought there would be a lessening of confrontations between factions of the national bourgeoisie, and even an improvement of relations with the USA. The year had not even ended when Chavez himself took charge of crushing these hopes among certain factions of the opposition: the government accelerated a whole series of measures to strengthen its project of ‘21st century socialism’, arguing that via the elections the ‘people’ had shown their support for this project.

The first thing the government did was to flex its muscles in the face of rival bourgeois factions, both at the national and international level, announcing a series of nationalisations in various sectors of the economy (telecommunications, TV, energy, etc); a majority control over oil exploitation, hitherto in the hands of the multinationals; and an increase in fiscal charges. These measures show the main aim of the Chavist bourgeoisie: ensuring a tighter control of the national economic apparatus through radical state capitalist measures.

But the bourgeoisie knows that control at the economic level is not enough, and that steps towards greater political and social control are also necessary, given the unpopular measures it will have to take to face up to the economic crisis, which is coming to the surface despite the increase in oil revenues. The bourgeoisie knows that sooner or later the crisis will hit home because of the excessive public spending demanded by the Chavist model, and that it will have to deal with problems at the internal level (social discontent, political opposition, dissension within the Chavist camp itself) and external (geopolitical difficulties with the USA, Colombia, Mexico, but also with allies such as Brazil). This is why the leaders of the ‘Bolivarian revolution’ are calling for measures to ensure greater political and social control of the workers and the population in general via so-called ‘popular power’ and the Communal Councils.

At the same time as it announced a strengthening of these organs of social control, the government began the year by announcing a number of attacks on the living conditions of the workers and the general population:

- measures for controlling the itinerant vendors in the capital, to be extended to the rest of the country;

- announcing petrol price increases, to take effect sooner or later;

- a certain abandonment of the missions (like the one involved in the distribution of food and medicine) leading to the closure of several of their installations and a reduction of basic supplies, with prices fixed by the state. The government, in an intelligent way, has accused the private capitalists of being responsible for this situation, when in fact it is the result of government actions;

- a struggle against bureaucracy and corruption has been proclaimed. Chavez has called for a reduction in the fat salaries of high state bureaucrats (who in some cases earn more than 50 times the official state minimum). This is actually a diversionary measure, since Chavism itself has bought the loyalty of the high state and army bureaucrats by giving them huge salaries and allowing them to maintain a discrete management over state funds. The real goal of this campaign is to attack the smaller bureaucrats, i.e. the public employees, by making their condition much more precarious (for example by obliging them to form cooperatives) and even by laying them off.

The government, from the heights of its popularity, is about to show its real face as a bourgeois government: having used the workers and the excluded strata in the elections, it is now announcing its programme of austerity and repression. For the Chavist bourgeoisie, it is vital to reduce expenditure even more, as it has announced a reduction the price of oil for 2007, which will limit the ruling class’s sources of income.

The only way forward is through struggle and the dismantling of Chavist ideology

Faced with this situation, the workers of Venezuela, as in the rest of the world, have no choice but to develop their struggle against the incessant attacks of capital. We know that this struggle will not be easy. This is partly because of the confusions spread by Chavist ideology, which has weakened and manipulated the very idea of socialism, i.e. the possibility of overthrowing this regime of insecurity through the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat.

In order to sow even more confusion, Chavism is having an ‘open’ and ‘democratic’ internal debate about socialism, communism, the party, workers’ control, etc – anything as long as it doesn’t question the class nature of the regime.

At the same time there is the poison of anti-imperialism. For its internal and external survival, Chavism needs both the domestic conflict, but above all the confrontation with the ‘main enemy’, the USA. Hence the permanent, fiery ‘anti-Yankee’ rhetoric, aimed at enlisting the workers’ support for the imperialist policies of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie. This is why Chavism has used the recent proclamations of the left governments of Ortega in Nicaragua and Correa in Ecuador to sign a series of political and commercial agreements and widen the Cuba-Bolivia-Venezuela axis.

This ideological attack on the working class is not only carried out by Chavism, but also by the opposition which has been sharpening its campaign about the need to hold back the totalitarian ‘communism’ of Chavez and his clique. In answer to the demands by several sectors of the opposition (including the Church) that Chavez must explain what he means by ‘21st Century Socialism’, the latter replied “read Marx and you will find the explanation”. The references to real militants of our class like Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and even Rosa Luxemburg are frequent from both Chavez and the opposition, with each side defending their own bourgeois interpretations of them.

Although the government has got one step ahead with an avalanche of economic, social and political measures, the opposition, though weakened, is trying to ‘heat up the streets’ because it can’t rely on its representatives in parliament. Thus growing social discontent is being polarised around rivalries between bourgeois parties.

As we can see, the proletariat is being caught in a cross fire between factions of the bourgeoisie. With the triumph of Chavism, the ideological attack on the working class in Venezuela and throughout the region is being accentuated. This situation has provoked a certain degree of confusion among proletarian elements who have begun to criticise Chavism from a class standpoint. This momentary situation certainly affects the consciousness and militancy of the working class, but it won’t put an end to the process of reflection going on among minorities of the class. Elections are not a real thermometer for measuring the class struggle.

For the future, if the working class doesn’t respond, there is a likelihood of more amorphous social revolts. The government may well overestimate its control over the excluded masses who, well before the elections, were beginning to express their discontent, sometimes in a violent manner, by blaming the functionaries for their situation rather than Chavez. This situation makes the workers’ struggle, and the demolition of Chavist ideology from the marxist point of view, even more urgent, not least because thanks to the ‘alternative worldists’ and the left of capital, this ideology has gone well beyond the borders not only of Venezuela but of Latin America as a whole. ICC, 18.2.07

Faced with the threat of 1600 job cuts in the Airbus Broughton and Bristol plants, and with the elimination of profit-related bonuses, thousands of workers at the Broughton plant in Wales took unofficial strike action in the last week of March. These walk-outs follow similar outbreaks of anger by workers at Airbus factories in Germany and France.

By all accounts the strikes were spontaneous and saw a real divide between the workers and the trade unions. The initial strike, on 23 March, took place after workers demanded a factory gate meeting half way through their morning shift and were not happy with the responses they got from union stewards. The union later announced that they were not supporting the action and had urged their members to return to work. Unions condemned further walkouts on the following Monday and Tuesday.

The anger of the workers has similar roots across Europe. Having been told that they were a ‘flagship’ company, a model of cross-Europe co-operation, having made extraordinary advances in productivity, they are now being told that the company is in crisis and 10,000 jobs have got to in Britain, France, Germany and Spain – a 20% reduction in the workforce. One German worker at the Varel Airbus plant put it succinctly: “we used to build 200 planes a year when we were doing great and now we are even making 438 a year and it’s still the end”.

All sorts of explanations have been put forward to explain the problems at Airbus. Private bosses blame the state for interfering too much; the parties of the left say the state should interfere more. The French press says that the German state has taken too much out of the industry. In Spain, workers are told that it’s not too bad there because the Spanish factories are more competitive. The unions everywhere blame bad management by the bosses. And all of them blame competition from America in the shape of Boeing, whose planes are outselling Airbus.

They’ll say anything but admit the basic truth that the crisis at Airbus is part of a much more general reality – the economic crisis of the capitalist system, which everywhere is faced with a glutted market and everywhere has the same response: make the workers pay through job cuts, wage freezes, cuts in bonuses, ‘outsourcing’ to areas where the price of labour is cheaper. That’s why, despite its apparent success over Airbus, Boeing has also just announced 7,000 job cuts. And that’s why, for the workers, the answer to these difficulties doesn’t reside in making sacrifices and sweating harder. At Varel productivity more than doubled and “it’s still the end”. Airbus workers all over Europe could tell the same story.

For real internationalism

The trade unions, who have participated up to the hilt in these productivity increases, are now being forced by the obvious discontent among the workforce to put themselves forward as champions of the class struggle. Following the initial strikes in France and Germany, the unions organised a Europe-wide day of action on 16 March with official stoppages in most Airbus plants and demonstrations in Hamburg, Toulouse, Chester and elsewhere.

At first sight this seems to be an expression of real workers’ internationalism: simultaneous strikes and demos in several European countries. And who else could have the means to coordinate things on such a wide scale except the trade unions?

But look a little closer. The ‘Europe-wide solidarity’ boasted by the unions does not call for the international solidarity of all workers in all countries: it calls for solidarity between Airbus workers in order to come up with a better plan for Airbus. In the end it is entirely in agreement with the outlook of the Airbus bosses – that Airbus should be more profitable than Boeing, or any of its other international competitors.

And the moment the union machinery took charge of the struggle, the moment union ‘organisation’ took the place of the original workers’ spontaneity, these false perspectives were immediately grafted onto the struggle.

That isn’t to say that workers can do without organisation. But it has to be organisation by themselves and for themselves. The workers at Broughton took an important first step by demanding an immediate mass meeting. They took an important second step by deciding to strike without any regard for the official union rigmarole of ballots. But they didn’t take a third, decisive step: making mass meetings the sole authority for deciding whether to stay out or go back, for organising pickets, for sending delegations to other plants and workplaces and calling for solidarity action.

Given the huge financial and organisational apparatus in the hands of the unions, it’s not surprising that workers should hesitate about taking such steps. Especially when they are clearly facing an attack on their living standards that is continental in scale.

But workers at Airbus are not alone. They face the same problems as numerous other manufacturing workers whose industries are being decimated; as public sector workers whose jobs are being cut or made more precarious and whose wages are being clamped. That’s why solidarity action cannot only be conceived as joint action by Airbus workers, but also and above all as solidarity between Airbus workers and workers in other sectors of the economy. For Airbus workers, the extension of the struggle doesn’t just mean spreading the struggle from one Airbus plant to another, but going to the nearest car plant, hospital, post office, school or hospital. In all these sectors, discontent is simmering, and sometimes breaks out to the surface, as with the postal workers of Edinburgh who were staging wildcat strikes at almost the same time at the Broughton workers. These are all expressions of the same underlying movement of resistance to the sacrifices demanded by an absurd social system. Amos 31/3/7

Zimbabwe is descending into chaos. Inflation is higher than anywhere else in the world. Basic food items cost more than month’s or even a year’s wages. “What is life like in Zimbabwe? Pretty terrible for most people. Many factories and other employers have closed as the economy has gone from bad to worse. Most of the population is trying to feed itself by growing food but the rains have not been good and hundreds of thousands are going hungry. Prices are rising by the day. Zimbabwe’s annual inflation rate is 1,700% - the highest in the world. Basic items such as bread, sugar, petrol are often not available in local shops.” (BBC news website 29/3/7 [31]). Zimbabwe once had the highest life expectancy in Africa, now it is the lowest in the world, with figures of, at most, 37 for men and 34 for women.

In the European press, just about everything is blamed on Robert Mugabe. It is said that his policy of grabbing white-owned farms, which began in 2000 under the pretext of ‘re-distribution’ to the poor, was the major factor that led to the economy being in its current state. Mugabe and his apologists argue that his policies have been sabotaged by ex-colonial governments, especially the British, because they want to drive him from power. The reality is something that no government will admit. The world economic crisis has hit rich, powerful countries hard – mass redundancies, re-locations of jobs to China or India, increased casualisation of work and attacks on workers’ living standards. The weaker economic entities in the world, those unable to deflect the worst aspects of the crisis on to others, are being hit the hardest. It is not this or that individual policy by Mugabe (or Blair) but the overall deteriorating international situation which has ultimately devastated Zimbabwe. In addition to international competition and other external pressures the irrationality of the Zimbabwean government’s policies has certainly contributed to the decline of agriculture, 80 percent unemployment and more than 4 million people (a third of the population ) fleeing to South Africa and elsewhere

The working class is the main victim of the crisis in Zimbabwean capitalism “..Government employees -- the majority of the country’s workers -- earn an average 50,000 Zimbabwe dollars ($400) while official figures show that an average family of five requires Z$228,133 a month not to be deemed poor. Bread ranges between $2.80 and $4.80, while a two litre can of cooking oil costs about $30 and a commuter bus fare costs around $4. Workers also have to contend with burst sewers, power and water cuts and collapsing public infrastructure. Companies have battled to stay in business while the government -- shunned by foreign donors over controversial policies such as the seizure of white-owned commercial farms for blacks -- has no money to pay higher wages.” (libcom.org, 'Wildcat strikes hit Zimbabwe [32]').

In response to this situation workers have not been passive, with, for example wildcat strikes in January in hospitals and power utilities, as well as widespread desertions from the police and army that have led to Mugabe seeking out paramilitary support from Angola.

The media spotlight has, however focused on the action of the unions and the Movement for Democratic Change. The ZCTU (Zimbabwean unions) have called for a general strike in early April, with further actions later. Many workers and union officials have been attacked and badly beaten (and some killed) whilst protesting for higher wages. However, what is clear is that that union’s most important function here is to rally support for the main opposition, Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC. While Mugabe condemns the MDC as terrorists, the main danger for the working class is that it will have illusions in the MDC, which is just another government in waiting for Zimbabwean capitalism. As elsewhere the more democratic alternative offers workers no change in exploitation and repression.

South Africa and Namibia are close allies of Zimbabwe and make only mild criticisms of Mugabe. In many countries he is presented as a heroic fighter against colonialism. The reality is that support for Mugabe and his murderous policies is only judged appropriate if it is seen to benefit the ruling class in, for example, South Africa. And some of the opposition to Zimbabwe in southern Africa stems from the degree to which Mugabe has been backed by Chinese imperialism.

For the working class there can be no support for the capitalist governments in South Africa, Zimbabwe or elsewhere in the continent - whether they wear the mask of democracy or are nakedly dictatorships. Graham 31/3/7

Frederick Engels predicted more than a century ago that capitalism would ultimately drag human society down into barbarism if left to its own devices. The evolution of imperialist war over the last hundred years has shown how this terrible prediction would be realised. Today, the capitalist world also offers another route to the apocalypse: a ‘man-made’ ecological melt-down that could make the earth as inhospitable to human life as Mars. Despite the recognition of this perspective by the defenders of the capitalist order, there is absolutely nothing effective they can do to stop it, because both imperialist war and climate catastrophe have been brought about by the perpetuation of their dying mode of production.

Imperialist war = barbarism

The bloody fiasco of the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the US-led ‘coalition’ marks a defining moment in the development of imperialist war towards the very destruction of society. Four years on, Iraq, instead of being liberated, has been turned into what bourgeois journalists euphemistically call a ‘broken society’. And the situation in Iraq is only the focal point of a process of disintegration that threatens to engulf new areas of the globe, not excluding the central capitalist metropoles. Far from creating a new order in the Middle East, US military power has only brought chaos.

In a sense none of this mass military carnage is new. The First World War of 1914-18 already took the first major step toward a barbaric ‘future’. After the failure of the 1917 October Revolution, and of the workers’ insurrections it inspired in the rest of the world in the 1920s, the way was open to a still more catastrophic episode of total warfare in the Second World War of 1939-45. Defenceless civilians in major cities were now a principal target of systematic mass killing from the air, and a multi-millioned genocide took place in the heart of European civilisation.

Then the ‘Cold War’ from 1947-89 produced a whole series of equally destructive carnages, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Cambodia and throughout Africa, while a global nuclear holocaust between the USA and the USSR remained a continual threat.

What is new in the imperialist war of today is that the possibility of the ending of human society altogether by such war now appears in a much more clear form. For all the brutality and mayhem of the world wars last century, they still gave way to periods of relative stability. All the military flashpoints of the contemporary situation, by contrast, offer no perspective except a further descent into social fragmentation at all levels, of chaos without end.

Deterioration of the biosphere

At the same time that capitalism in decomposition has unleashed an imperialist trend towards a more clearly perceivable barbarism, so it has also speeded up an assault of such ferocity on the biosphere that an artificially created climatic holocaust could also wipe out human civilisation, and human life. It is clear from the consensus of the world’s climate scientists in the February 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that the theory that the over-warming of the planet by the accumulation of relatively high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is caused by the large scale burning of fossil fuels, is no longer merely a hypothesis but “very likely”. The consequences of this anthropogenic warming of the planet have already started to appear on an alarming scale: changing weather patterns leading both to repeated droughts and widescale flooding, deadly heatwaves in Northern Europe and extreme climatic conditions of hugely destructive power, which in turn are already rapidly increasing famine and disease and the refugee crisis in the third world.

Capitalism of course can’t be blamed for starting the burning of fossil fuels or acting on the environment in other ways to produce unforeseen and dangerous consequences. This has been going on since the dawn of human civilisation.

Capitalism is nevertheless responsible for enormously accelerating this process of environmental damage. This is a result of capitalism’s overriding quest to maximise profits and its consequent disregard for human and ecological needs except insofar as they coincide with the goal of wealth accumulation. The intrinsic competitiveness between capitalists, especially between each nation state, prevents any real cooperation at the world level.

Hot air on global warming

The bourgeoisie’s major political parties in all countries are turning various shades of green. But the eco-policies of these parties, however radical they might appear, have deliberately obscured the seriousness of the problem, because the only solution to it threatens the very system whose praises they sing. The constant eco-message from the governments is that ‘saving the planet is everyone’s responsibility’ when the vast majority are deprived of any political or economic power and control over production and consumption, over what and how things are produced. And the bourgeoisie, which does have power in these decisions, has even less capacity than ever to satisfy human and ecological needs at the expense of profit.

One only has to look at the results of previous policies of governments to cut down carbon emissions to see the ineffectiveness of the capitalist states. Instead of a stabilisation of greenhouse gas emissions at 1990s level by 2000, that the signatories to the Kyoto Protocol modestly committed themselves to in 1995, there was instead an increase in major industrialised countries by 10.1% by the end of the century, and it is forecast that they will have increased by 25.3% by 2010.

There are those who, recognising that the profit motive is a powerful disincentive to effective limitation of such pollution, believe that the problem can be solved by replacing liberal policies with state organised solutions. But it’s clear above all at the international level that the capitalist states are unable to cooperate on this question because each one would have to make economic sacrifices as a result. Capitalism is competition, and today, more than ever, it is dominated by the rule of each against all.

All is not lost for the proletarians; they still have a world to win

But it would be quite wrong to take a resigned attitude and think human society must necessarily sink into oblivion as a result of these powerful tendencies – of imperialism and eco-destruction - towards barbarism. Fatalism in front of the fatuity of all the capitalist half-measures proposed to bring about peace and harmony with nature is just as mistaken as the belief in these cosmetic cures.

Capitalist society, as well as sacrificing everything to the pursuit of profit and competition has also, inadvertently, produced the elements for its destruction as a mode of exploitation. It has created the potential technological and cultural means for a unified and planned world system of production attuned to the needs of human beings and nature. It has produced a class, the proletariat, that has no need for national or competitive prejudices, and every interest in developing international solidarity. The working class has no interest in the rapacious desire for profit. In other words capitalism has laid the basis for a higher order of society, for its supercession by socialism. Capitalism is showing itself capable of destroying human society, but it has also created its own grave digger, the working class, that can preserve human society and raise it to new levels.

Capitalism has given rise to a scientific culture that is able to identify and measure invisible gases like carbon dioxide both in the present atmosphere and in the atmosphere of 10,000 years ago. Scientists can identify the specific isotopes of carbon dioxide that result from the burning of fossil fuels. The scientific community has been able to test and verify the hypothesis of the ‘greenhouse effect’. Yet the time has long gone when capitalism as a social system was able to use the scientific method and its results for the benefit of human advance. The bulk of scientific investigation and discovery today is devoted to destruction; to the development of ever more sophisticated methods of mass death. Only a new order of society, a communist society, can put science at the service of humanity.

Despite the past 100 years of the decline and putrefaction of capitalism, and severe defeats for the working class, these building blocks for a new society are still intact.

The resurgence of the world proletariat since 1968 proves that. The development of its class struggle against the constant pressure on proletarian living standards over the ensuing decades prevented the barbaric outcome promised by the cold war: of an all-out confrontation between the imperialist blocs. Since 1989 however and the disappearance of the blocs, the defensive posture of the working class has been unable to prevent the succession of horrific local wars that threaten to spiral out of control, drawing in more and more parts of the planet. In this period, of capitalist decomposition, the proletariat no longer has time on its side, particularly as a pressing ecological catastrophe must now be added into the historic equation.

Since 2003 the working class has begun to re-enter the struggle with renewed vigour after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc brought about a temporary halt to the resurgence begun in 1968.

In these conditions of developing class confidence, the increasing dangers represented by imperialist war and ecological catastrophe, instead of inducing feelings of impotence and fatalism, can lead to a greater political reflection on the stakes of the world situation, and on the necessity for a revolutionary overthrow of capitalist society. It is the responsibility of revolutionaries to actively participate in this coming to consciousness. Como 5/5/7

No! That’s not the communism of Marx, who looked to the abolition of the wages system, the disappearance of the state and of national frontiers. To a society of freely associated producers!

“Oh that communism. A wonderful utopia. A nice idea, but it would never work……. Better to do what we can to make capitalism more humane”.

What doesn’t work is capitalism, which has long outlived itself and is dragging humanity into a nightmare of economic collapse, war and ecological destruction. Communism is a necessity for the survival and future flowering of the human species. Furthermore, it is no utopia. It expresses the fundamental historical interests of the working class.

Since 1990 and the collapse of the ‘Communist’ bloc - in reality a form of state capitalism - the International Communist Current has been publishing a series of articles about communism in its theoretical journal, the International Review. Originally this project was conceived as a series of four or five articles clarifying the real meaning of communism in response to the bourgeoisie’s lying equation between Stalinism and communism. But in seeking to apply the historical method as rigorously as possible, the series grew into a deeper re-examination of the history of the communist programme, its progressive enrichment through the key experiences of the class as a whole and the contributions and debates of the revolutionary minorities. The first volume of this series has just been published in book form.

Although the majority of chapters in the book are necessarily concerned with fundamentally political questions, since the first step towards the creation of communism is the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, it is also a premise of the book that communism will take humanity beyond the realm of politics and release its true social nature. The book thus poses the problem of marxist anthropology, of questions which go to the root of our understanding of humanity as a species. The interweaving of the ‘political’ and ‘anthropological’ dimensions of the series has in fact been one of its leitmotifs. This first volume thus begins with ‘primitive’ communism and the utopian socialists, and with the young Marx’s grandiose vision of man’s alienation and the ultimate goals of communism; it ends on the eve of the mass strikes of 1905 which signalled that capitalism was moving into a new epoch where the communist revolution had graduated from being a general perspective of the workers’ movement to placing itself urgently on the agenda of history.

The second volume of the series deals with the period from the mass strikes of 1905 to the end of the first great revolutionary wave that followed the First World War. A third volume is underway, and we aim to produce both as companion volumes to the one just published.

Communism: not a nice a idea but a material necessity is available from BM Box 869, London WC1N 3XX, at £7.50

ICC Public forums to launch the book

LONDON
Saturday 12th May at 2:00pm
Conway Hall, Red Lion Square,
(Nearest tube: Holborn)

BIRMINGHAM
Saturday 9th June at 2:00 pm
Friends of the Earth Warehouse,
54a Allison Street, Digbeth

As Tony Blair reached his tenth anniversary as Prime Minister and prepared to announce his resignation, attention turned to his legacy. Blair himself is quite clear: “I am convinced that the initial insight that brought us to power has stood the test of time…The idea was that there was no need to choose between social justice on the one hand and economic prosperity on the other ... Ten years on, this is the governing idea of British politics.” (Guardian, 27/04/07). Many commentators agree that politics in Britain has changed: “Britain is better off after a decade with Tony Blair in charge. Wealth has been created, and wealth has been redistributed. That is what Labour governments have always hoped to do. It has happened without a brake on global competitiveness. That is what New Labour hoped to do: build a vibrant market economy with a generous welfare state; economic freedom and social protection. That is Blairism.” (Observer 29/04/07). This is contrasted with the failures of foreign policy as a result of his over-close relationship with the US: “…Mr Blair’s room for pragmatic manoeuvre in foreign affairs was limited by his partnership with George Bush…his insistence on seeing problems of the Middle East in purely Manichean terms - as a global struggle between Good and Evil, between Western Civilisation and apocalyptic terrorism does not lend itself to good policy-making. Stabilisation in Iraq, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Israel’s war with Hizbollah and its occupation of Palestine - these are problems that require separate treatment.” (ibid). While other commentators are more or less harsh about particular aspects of Blair’s performance this is probably the general view of the ruling class.

For ourselves, we were clear when Blair and New Labour were elected what they had been brought in to do: “The difference between New Labour and Old Labour is that the former is telling us in advance that it is going to ruthlessly attack our living standards. On virtually every aspect of the economy, Blair’s policies are identical to those of the Tories. Everything must be costed. Industry must pay its way (which means the sack if you aren’t in a ‘paying’ industry).” (WR 204, May 1997). The other reason for electing New Labour was its ability to defend Britain’s imperialist, interests after the chaos of the final years of the Tory government: “Labour’s huge victory, and the humiliation of many of the Eurosceptics, confirms that the most influential fractions of British capitalism have no intention of going back to the old alliance with the USA” (ibid).

Managing the economy, defending Britain’s imperialist interests and controlling the working class: this is what the ruling class asks of every government it puts into power. So if we are to be clear about Blair’s legacy we have to distinguish between what he has achieved for the ruling class and his impact on the working class.

Blair and the ruling class

Overall, Labour has managed the economy well for the ruling class. Britain has remained the fourth biggest economy in world; it has achieved growth rates above those of its competitors in Europe: the average rate of growth between 1990 and 1999 was about 2%; between 2000 and 2006 it has been about 2.5%. There has not been a recession, in the sense of an absolute decline in production, since the early 1990s. This has meant that more money has come into the government, allowing it to increase spending in some areas. Overall government spending has increased from 38% of GDP in 2000 to 44% in 2004 (although this only returns it to the level of the mid 1990s). Many of Britain’s companies, such as Tescos, BP and Barclays, have made record profits and the stock exchange, despite some recent fluctuations, has been stable in its functioning.

The difficulties for the British economy are at the structural level and in particular at the level of productivity, which remains below that of its rivals. The balance of trade would look even more unhealthy if it wasn’t the contribution of ‘invisibles’, while total government debt stood at £571.8 billion at the end of last year, equivalent to 43.5% of GDP. Gordon Brown has struggled to meet his golden rule of balancing the books over a financial cycle and has only done so by changing some of the rules.

Faced with the working class, Labour has been able to maintain a significant level of social calm. In 1997 it benefited from the mere fact that it was not the Tory party. The loudly proclaimed growth of the economy and increases in state spending prolonged this illusion. Few strikes of any significance have disturbed this calm. The unions have worked closely with Labour. On the one hand they have distanced themselves from Labour to make a pretence of opposing the government and, on the other, struck deals with the bosses. Workers have generally accepted low wage settlements and increasing demands from the bosses as the price of keeping their jobs.

The great failure of the Blair government has been its defence of the ruling class’ imperialist interests and Blair is being forced from office sooner than he intended because of this. Today British imperialism is bogged down with the US in the carnage that has engulfed Iraq and is threatening Afghanistan. The abject failure of Blair’s attempt to bestride the world stage during the conflict in the Lebanon last year confirmed the further decline of British power. This lack of a global standing was further born out in British impotence in the face of the recent Iranian detention of one of its ships. It has roused the fury of considerable parts of the ruling class across the political spectrum. The ‘loans for peerages’ scandal, with the arrest of several people close to Blair and the questioning of the Prime Minister himself, was used to apply pressure and force him from office.

A second concern for the ruling class has been the impact of the Blair faction on the way the British state functions. There has been a tendency to replace permanent officials with the Prime Minister’s personal entourage and formal meetings with informal chats and unrecorded decisions. However, the attempt to control Blair through the ‘loans for peerages’ scandal has only made things worse because it too used methods that undermine the traditional functioning of the state.

Blair and the working class

The price for the successes of British capitalism, as well as its failures, is paid by the working class.

The growth of the British economy without any great improvement in productivity means that it is based on making the proletariat work longer and harder: “The increase has been due principally to an increase in the hours worked and to a lesser extent to an increase in the proportion of the population of working age actually in work. While the official working day has declined there has been a real increase due to the growth of overtime, which is frequently unpaid. The hours worked declined from the start of the last century until 1984 when they began to rise again. Long hours for one part of the working class goes hand in hand with part time work for another part and reflects a general polarisation between overwork and underwork.” (“Resolution on the British situation”, WR 281, February 2005). The attempt to increase the number in work and decrease the cost of maintaining the unemployed lies behind all of the campaigns to get groups such as single mothers and the disabled into work. The same concern lies behind the attacks on pensions. Many workers now face the prospect of working into their old age with lower and more insecure pensions while a significant number have seen their pensions simply disappear. Many younger workers can look forward to no pension at all. Those in work face growing job insecurity: jobs in manufacturing, which have tended to be relatively well-paid, continue to decline to be replaced by low-paid, part-time, temporary contracts in the service sector. Recently, it has become obvious that the government has turned a blind eye to the influx of migrant workers because they are a source of cheap and malleable labour and help to keep wages down overall.

The pressures of work or unemployment, the insecurity that confronts many people and the general atmosphere of ‘look after number one’ undermines the quality of life. The bourgeoisie sense this, but can only offer platitudes about family life and ‘respect’ on the one hand and measures to increase surveillance and control on the other. This is because they are incapable of seeing that it is the very society they defend that is increasingly making life seem meaningless and worthless. These features find expression in the figures of rising mental illness amongst children, in alcohol and drug addiction and in the continuing growth of petty crime.

Even the ruling class has to accept that the growth in the economy has increased divisions: “…riches have not flowed very evenly. At the top of the income scale grotesque sums are earned and splashed around. At the bottom there is still an underclass, unresponsive to state intervention…inequality is more visible than the discreet but more widespread increase in average household wealth.” (Observer, 29/04/07). In fact this ‘discreet increase in average wealth’ is not quite what it seems since it is built on personal debt, which now stands at £1.3 trillion. For British capitalism this is essential if it is to sell the goods and services it produces and make a profit. For the working class it only increases the sense of insecurity and lowers its quality of life.

This explains why the working class is not impressed by all of the reports of improvements in services. Its experience of life is not of better schools and better healthcare but poverty, debt, too much work or too little, isolation, fear and insecurity.

Towards socialism

The balance sheet for the ruling class of ten years of Blair is mixed. On the one hand he has loyally and ably defended its immediate economic interests and controlled the threat posed by the working class. On the other hand he has failed to maintain Britain’s position in the world and has weakened the bourgeoisie’s overall cohesion as a class. Blairism exemplifies the ability of the bourgeoisie to continue to manage the immediate aspects of situation and its inability to manage the underlying structural problems. Thus, at the level of the economy it can keep the system going, it can continue to produce surplus value, it can even manage to increase immediate rates of growth, but it cannot stop the growth of tensions within the system whether coming from the reliance on debt or the threat from other capitalists. At the level of its imperialist interests momentary successes can sometimes be won, for example in the Balkans, but the fundamental contradiction of Britain’s position as a declining power caught between the US and Europe cannot be overcome. At the level of the class struggle it can contain and divert the day to day struggle but it cannot stop the worsening of its situation that pushes the proletariat to struggle. The arrival of Gordon Brown at 10 Downing Street will not alter the material situation in which British capitalism is stuck.

For the working class the balance sheet of ten years of Blairism is negative at the level of its individual and day to day experience. However, there is another dimension to the working class’ experience of Blair. The worsening of its conditions of life force it to respond. The recent increase in the number of strikes is a sign of this. The experience of worsening pay and work and living conditions and the exposure of the reality of the bloody and futile wars that Britain has engaged in prompts reflection about this society and what the future holds.

In the 1840s when Engels wrote the Condition of the Working Class in England, he saw more than poverty, despair and exploitation; he saw the stirrings of a mighty force, of the development of a class woven together through its common struggle and becoming capable of overcoming the inhumanity of its conditions. In the 1880s when he considered the decline of British capitalism’s industrial monopoly he saw more than decline; he saw the return of socialism to England (“England in 1845 and in 1885”, Collected Works, Vol. 26). Today the difficulties facing the working class still contain the possibilities of a new society, still contain the hope of socialism, of a world fit for humans to live in. North, 3/5/07

Wednesday 18 April was an ordinary day in Baghdad. Like virtually every other day of the week, there were bombs. These killed over 190 people, many of them women and children. As so often before, the main target was a market, al-Sadriyah, very close to a building site employing workers who were risking their lives to earn a miserable wage to help their families survive. These attacks, among the most bloody since the fall of Saddam in 2003, were carried out in the same market which was hit on 3 February, killing 130 people. The aim of those who perpetrate such crimes is to kill as many people as they can. The purpose is destruction, the annihilation of human beings whose very existence makes them enemies. This is the rule of bestial hatred; this is a society in profound decomposition.

The bloody failure of US policy in Iraq

In February, the US administration announced to media fanfares its new security plan for Baghdad, known as Fardh al-Qanoon, Imposing the Law. This would involve a spectacular deployment of 85,000 US and Iraqi troops, 30,000 of them arriving directly from the US. This plan resulted in the arrest of over 5000 people. And for several weeks, the darkly famous Death Squads and heavily armed militia could no longer be seen on the streets of Baghdad, without any noticeable let-up in the number of terrorist attacks. The failure of this security ‘surge’ is already evident and the stage is set for an increase in mass murders. After the bombing of al-Sadriyah market, when the Iraqi forces of order tried to get to the scene, in principle to help the victims, they were met with hails of stones by a population that has reached total desperation. Throughout the night, armed confrontations took place in the Sunni neighbourhood of al-Adhamiya.

Now the US government has announced a new strategy which speaks eloquently of the inhumanity of the situation, the utter impasse it has reached. On 10 April, the US army began building a security wall in Baghdad. For some months American forces have been building barriers around insurgent bastions, such as the one around the town of Tal Afar near the Syrian border. But this is the first attempt to completely wall in entire neighbourhoods in Baghdad, such as Dora. These walls remind us of those which already exist in Gaza and the West Bank, and which have certainly not put an end to the violence there. On the other hand, they do result in the majority of the population behind them rotting away under the control of the soldiers of this or that country or bourgeois faction.

The American bourgeoisie is forced to recognise its defeat in Iraq

On 19 April, the leader of the Democratic majority in the US Congress, Harry Reid, for the first time officially recognised that “he believes that the war in Iraq has been lost and that the reinforcements decided on in December have achieved nothing” (Le Monde, 19.4.07). The US has been so weakened in Iraq that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had a “businesslike” meeting with her Syrian counterpart at a conference in Egypt on 3 May, in spite of Syria and Iran being labelled part of the axis of evil.

The American bourgeoisie is today more divided than ever, totally devoid of any constructive policy in Iraq. The Democrat-dominated Congress is voting on new laws financing the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007. The text envisages a programmed retreat by US troops from Iraq. But the Bush administration has already said that it will veto this vote. Its immediate reaction to the new wave of bombings in Baghdad was to send out the US Defence Secretary Robert gates, who cynically declared that “the rebels are going to increase the violence in order to convince the Iraqi people that this plan is doomed to fail, but we intend to persist with it and prove that this is not the case” (ibid). The message is clear: the same policies will continue in Iraq.

What future for Iraq and the Middle East?

In mid-April, the radical Shiite leader Moqtadir al-Sadr withdrew his six ministers from the Iraqi government and called for massive demonstrations against the construction of the walls in Baghdad. Such political gestures confirm that national unity is a thing of the past in Iraq. The conflicts between the different communities, especially between Sunni and Shiite, are set to widen. It’s well known that Iran is participating actively in the war in Iraq, mainly by massively arming the Shiite militia, with the clear aim of defending its own imperialist interests in the region against those of the USA. The Sunni-Shiite split in Iraq threatens to spill over to other parts of the region. The insane acceleration of such conflicts, focused around the confrontation between Iran on the one hand, the US and Israel on the other, threatens to plunge the region still further into chaos and war. Rossi (updated 5/5/07)

“Like these horsemen of the Apocalypse, who descend at dawn on rebel villages and leave nothing in their wake but burning ruins, everything about this conflict is shadowy. How many deaths in the past 4 years? Ten thousand, according to the Sudanese authorities; four hundred thousand, according to the NGOs. What should we call the Darfur tragedy? Counter-insurgency war, ways Khartoum; war crime, says the UN; crime against humanity, says the European Union.; first genocide of the 21st century, add the western intellectuals, recent authors of an appeal to their respective governments. What is the solution to it? Disarm the rebel forces, argues president-general Omar el-Bechir; arm the rebel forces reply the intellectuals and the lobbies; negotiate and impose sanctions on the Sudanese regime, opines the UN…In this maelstrom of passions, of manipulations and sometimes of irresponsibility, some certainties are nevertheless emerging” (Jeune Afrique, 1-14 April 2007).

In fact we can be certain about the responsibility for these crimes: it lies with the great imperialist powers and their local muscle, the Khartoum government and the rebels. It is these capitalist brigands (in particular the Chinese, the Americans and the French) and their local pawns who are behind these hateful massacres, which are indeed crimes against humanity.

What is the bourgeoisie reallyoing about the ‘genocide’?

“Faced with this chronicle of disaster, the UN and the African Union have adopted essentially symbolic measures. For two years, an inter-African force of 7,500 men, the African Union Mission in Sudan, (AMIS) has been deployed in Darfur. This force has shown itself to be completely ineffectual. Its forces are too weak: you would need at least 30,000 men to cover the five hundred thousand square kilometres of Darfur. Furthermore the AMIS is under-equipped and has a ridiculously restrictive mandate: the soldiers don’t have the right to carry out offensive patrols; they have to limit themselves to ‘negotiating’ and in fact are reduced to keeping count of the killings…The African soldiers are desolate and have themselves declared in private that ‘we are of no use at all’”(Le Monde Diplomatique, March 2007).

This is yet another example of the shameless hypocrisy of the imperialist powers who rule the world. They are once again showing their true face in Darfur. The leaders vote for ‘peace resolutions’ and, under UN colours, send soldiers to Darfur whose mission consists of counting the killings, not preventing them as has been claimed with much fanfare. But what else should we expect from the UN, this nest of vultures picking over the carcass of Africa?

Media parades and macabre ballets

But the height of cynicism is reached when the bourgeoisies of the great powers try to camouflage their real responsibilities in the Darfur tragedy through highly publicised ‘mercy missions’ to the agonised victims.

To stifle any reflection and any development of consciousness about their real aims in Darfur, the ‘great democracies’ have regularly organised ‘humanitarian safaris’ in Darfur and meetings and rallies in the capital cities ‘in support of the victims of Sudanese genocide’. For example on 20 March, with the help of Hollywood stars like George Clooney, there was a big meeting in Paris organised by a coalition of groups baptised ‘Urgence Darfur’, and composed essentially of media celebrities (Bernard Kouchner, Bernard-Henri Levy, Romain Goupil and other representatives of the national ‘humanitarian’ lobbies). The aim was “to put Darfur on the agenda of the presidential elections”. And indeed the candidates (especially Segolene Royale and Francois Bayrou) responded to the appeal by signing a text which, alongside other measures, calls for the intervention of French troops (in action in Chad and Central Africa) in order to set up ‘humanitarian corridors’ in Darfur. And like all good demagogues, the presidential candidates wanted to go even further with this cynicism: “with a firmness unprecedented in France, the document hasn’t prevented certain candidates from going further, like Segolene Royale (Socialist Party) and Francois Bayrou (UDF) who are proposing a boycott of the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008 in order to put pressure on China, presented as the main supporter of Khartoum in the UN Security Council” (Jeune Afrique).

What unscrupulous hypocrites and mystifiers the French and American bourgeoisies are! They are no more than masked defenders of their own imperialist interests. As if France was not already involved in the conflict though its support for the Chad regime, the adversary of the ‘genocidal’ Sudanese regime. And this makes it easier to grasp the real aims of the ‘humanitarian’ lobbies who are calling openly for an intervention by the French army in order to create a ‘humanitarian corridor’ in the combat zones. And it’s no accident that China in particular is being denounced as the main supporter of Khartoum. “States such as China, the US and France are working in the shadows to aid their local and regional clients. For a long time Paris has protected Khartoum from ‘Anglo-Saxon’ hostility but this has not earned it any gratitude from the Islamic regime. The oil franchise for Total in the south of Sudan has been blocked for a long time by legal squabbles, and the regime’s militias are being used from their base in Darfur to destabilise the allies of France: Chad’s president Idris Deby and his Central African equivalent, Francois Bozize” (Le Monde Diplomatique, March 2007)

And to conclude, certain sectors of the French bourgeoisie are asking openly whether, by equipping the Khartoum-backed militias, who have got as far as the outskirts of N’Djamena, Beijing is trying to overthrow the pro-French regimes in the region of central Africa. And there’s no doubt that Beijing is today Sudan’s top arms supplier and the main customer for its oil. We can see why China didn’t want to vote for UN resolutions, claiming that it didn’t “respect Sudanese national sovereignty”.

This is a real worry for French imperialism and it explains the real goal of the well-publicised ‘protests’, which are essentially aimed at France’s imperialist rivals, China and the US. It’s true that the latter is no slouch when it comes to outrageous hypocrisy. Thus, on 18 April, Bush gave the Sudanese government ‘a last warning to put an end to the genocide in Darfur’. And on 27 April Blair has joined in the hypocritical chorus by calling for a new UN resolution.

In fact, we know that Washington has turned a blind eye to the atrocities committed by cliques acting on behalf of Khartoum, which has long been a devoted ally in its ‘war on terror’. Behind the threats, there is actually an attempt to strengthen the alliance with Khartoum.

While the body count increases day by day, these imperialist crooks will continue to pursue their sordid interests behind a mask of peace and humanitarianism. Amina (updated 5/5/07)

This article, contributed by a close sympathiser of the ICC, is the second part in a series on the history of the workers’ movement in Britain. The first part ‘The struggle of the working class to organise itself [36] ’ appeared in WR 301.

Introduction

The period between the Great French Revolution of 1789 and the 1848 revolutions in continental Europe saw great advances in the struggle of the proletariat in Britain to organise itself as a class conscious of its own historic goals and interests. The high point of this struggle was Chartism, later described by Lenin as “the first broad, truly mass, and politically organised proletarian revolutionary movement” (‘The Third International and its place in history’).

In this period the British workers unleashed unprecedented waves of struggles against capitalism, which more than once appeared to tremble on the brink of revolution. The high point of these struggles was 1842:

“…the year in which more energy was hurled against the authorities than in any other of the nineteenth century. More people were arrested and sentenced for offences concerned with speaking, agitating, rioting and demonstrating than in any other year, and more people were out in the streets during August 1842 than at any other time... It was the nearest thing to a general strike that the century saw.” (Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists)

This article looks at the relationship between the campaign of the Chartists for democratic rights and the workers’ struggles in the factories against the attacks of capital, focusing on the debates which took place in the workers’ movement at the time about how to win lasting reforms from capitalism, and about the most effective strategy and tactics to advance the workers’ class interests. (An article on the broader historical significance of Chartism appeared in WR 214.).

The working class builds a mass party

After the collapse of attempts to create a national union organisation in 1834, and the subsequent employers’ offensive against trade union membership, the working class turned towards the political struggle for the vote, which had been deliberately withheld by the British bourgeoisie as part of the 1832 Reform Act.

In 1838 the London Working Men’s Association [37], which was linked to Owenite [38] socialism and the movement for working class education [39], formed a committee with radical MPs which drafted the People’s Charter of democratic demands. Chartism was officially launched at a mass meeting in Birmingham and the movement rapidly gained support among the working class with 150 affiliated societies nationwide.

From the start there was disagreement on how to obtain the Charter’s demands. The LWMA and the Chartist leadership, expressing the viewpoint of the skilled workers and artisans and their middle class supporters, argued for the use of ‘moral force’ only, while others, drawing their support from the unskilled and industrial workers of the North and Wales, criticised the Charter as too moderate and argued for the use of physical force methods to bring about change in the political system.

There were also important differences within this left or physical force wing; some like George Harney had become convinced of the need for mass action by the workers in the factories, and Thomas Benbow developed a theory of the ‘grand national holiday’, a proto-syndicalist vision of a month-long general strike in which the working class would peacefully take power, draw up a new constitution and “legislate for all mankind…” Other radicals like Feargus O’Connor and Bronterrre O’Brien opposed anything they saw as a diversion from the political struggle for the Charter.

When the first Chartist convention met in February 1839 to prepare the presentation of the Charter, there was a major debate about what strategy to adopt if parliament rejected their demands. A compromise slogan of “peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must” was agreed, but against O’Connor’s opposition the left also convinced delegates to support the call for a general strike. Following the convention, Harney and Benbow toured the country holding mass meetings to win support among the industrial workers, and the Chartist movement began to take up struggles against wage cuts and the brutal New Poor Law workhouse system.

After the Chartist leaders were arrested the strike had to be called off, and when in June 1839 [40] the Charter was finally presented to parliament, the bourgeoisie refused to even look at it. This not surprisingly threw the movement into disarray, and many Chartists now advocated force as the only means of achieving their aims. There were violent clashes leading to further arrests, the most important of which was the Newport Rising in November 1839, which was to have been the signal for a national uprising but ended in a brief, violent, and bloody battle.

Despite all these setbacks the Chartists managed to regroup their scattered forces, and at a conference in 1840 delegates voted to merge their local groups into a National Charter Association, which effectively established itself as an organised mass working class party – the first in the world. Under O’Connor’s autocratic and increasingly erratic leadership, the Association prevented a takeover by middle class radicals, with many ‘moral force’ supporters splitting away to advocate non-violent methods of advancing working class interests like education.

The working class launches mass strikes

A further petition submitted in 1842 was again rejected by parliament. The industrial workers themselves now provided the way forward, through a revival of the class struggle in response to the economic slump of 1841-2. In May strikes started spontaneously among coal miners in Staffordshire against wage cuts. From the start the workers showed a high level of self-organisation by forming a central committee to co-ordinate the strikes and sending pickets to bring out other miners. Over the summer the strike wave spread to the cotton industry in Lancashire, which now became the storm centre of the movement, and as far as Glasgow and South Wales, with mass pickets marching from town to town to bring out other workers, and in some cases knocking out boiler plugs to prevent mills from working, achieving almost complete solidarity. As the strikes went on, the workers effectively took control and factories were permitted to operate only with the permission of ‘committees of public safety’ that emerged to co-ordinate action.

At its height, the 1842 strike wave, which lasted from May through to September, involved around half a million workers and spread as far as Scotland, South Wales and Cornwall; it was “the most massive industrial action to take place in Britain - and probably anywhere - in the nineteenth century” (Mick Jenkins, The general strike of 1842). In fact in some of its key features it more closely resembled the mass strikes of 1905-6 in Russia, as described by Rosa Luxemburg, rather than a ‘classic’, trade union-organised general strike of the 19th Century; particularly in its spontaneous character, the high level of workers’ self-organisation, and the way in which the struggles around economic demands then became the ‘transmitter’ for a political struggle for the Charter’s demands, which in turn fertilised the soil for the economic struggle.

For Chartism, the strike posed point blank the question of its attitude to the class struggle. One Chartist militant vividly described the arrival by train of Chartist delegates for a conference in Manchester, ‘the city of long chimneys’, at the height of the wave, and one, upon seeing every chimney smokeless, exclaiming with an oath: “Not a single mill at work! Something must come out of this and something serious too!” (The life of Thomas Cooper written by himself). The delegates, after reporting on the state of their districts, quickly called for the strike to be supported and extended with the aim of becoming an insurrection, and the executive issued a manifesto declaring in favour of a general strike as the best weapon for winning the Charter.

But divisions in the leadership also reappeared, with the majority of nationally known leaders strongly opposed to the strike; O’Connor repeated his belief that it had been provoked by the manufacturing bourgeoisie, while others like Harney opposed a general strike believing – correctly in the circumstances – that the working class was not prepared for the direct confrontation with the state that would follow. The bourgeoisie deployed troops to deal with the strikers (although some soldiers refused to fight), and several Chartist leaders, including O’Connor, Harney and Cooper, were arrested along with nearly 1,500 others. Some wage demands were met, but hopes of gaining the Charter faded. This was the zenith of Chartism as a mass movement.

Chartists, trade unionists and the general strike

Some historians of trade unionism (like Henry Pelling in A History of British Trade Unionism), have treated Chartism as a separate, unconnected phenomenon. In fact Chartism and trade unionism were intimately connected within the working class, especially at the height of the strike wave.

It’s true that after the defeats of 1834 the trade unions were extremely cautious about any involvement in political action. Some unions ruled that the discussion of politics in their meetings was out of order, and even refused to pay benefits to workers participating in political strikes. The period did see the slow but steady growth of trade union organisation at the local level, especially among skilled workers and craftsmen, but in times of slump, like 1838-42, the tendency was for a growth of interest in political action.

From the beginning Chartists attempted to organise within the trade unions, although due to the unions’ caution they were eventually forced to build separate trades associations. Chartist organisers were active in workers’ struggles against wage cuts to build support, and to link demands for shorter hours and better pay with calls for the adoption of the Charter. During the 1842 general strike, the strike leadership in Lancashire, the ‘storm centre’ of the movement, was in the hands of Chartist supporters who were also trade unionists, and among the workers themselves there was strong support for the Charter. Delegates in Manchester at the height of the wave defeated attempts to separate wage demands from the Charter, calling on workers to cease work until the People’s Charter was adopted; and the state was certainly aware of the threat posed by an alliance of Chartism and the trade unions, the then Home Secretary warning that: “It is quite clear that these delegates are the directing body; they form the link between the trade unions and the Chartists, and a blow struck at this confederacy goes to the heart of the evil..”’ (John Charlton, The Chartists: The First National Workers’ Movement).

Chartism and the 1848 revolutions

After the defeat of the general strike Chartism continued its struggle for political reform but was increasingly fragmented. With the revival of trade in 1843 there was also a growth of trade union activity among industrial workers, and at a trade union conference in 1845 – the first to be held since 1834 – a new national organisation was launched to unite local societies to resist wage cuts and improve conditions, although this proved short-lived in the slump of 1846-7. Workers also directed their energies into agitation to repeal the Corn Laws and limit working hours in the textile mills. (There were debates at this time on the creation of a trade union political party, some arguing that only political action would enable the workers to gain lasting improvements from capitalism. This project was abandoned but later revived by Ernest Jones in attempts to revive the Chartist movement in the early 1850s.)

The bourgeoisie itself, thoroughly rattled by the general strike, with its nightmare vision of well-organised mass strikes led by a politically conscious working class, was now prepared to make some accommodation with the workers’ demands. The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1845 opened the way for rises in real wages and a massive expansion of the economy, while in 1847 an unholy alliance of landowning and ultra-radical MPs pushed through the Ten Hours Act to restrict working times. There was also some softening of the hated Poor Law. So by the time of the last mass Chartist mobilisation in 1848, the threat of another major confrontation had effectively been defused.

This last revival of Chartism coincided with a further deep trade depression, but it also needs to be seen in the context of the wave of popular insurrections which swept across continental Europe that year. Chartists in Britain followed the events of 1848 with enthusiasm, and there was rioting in the streets of London and Glasgow and pitched battles in the North, as well as a failed nationalist uprising in Ireland at this time. But the bourgeoisie’s show of force (the capital was flooded with troops and police) was effective in intimidating the workers, who had no serious plans for an insurrection.

Conclusions

Chartism was definitely a high point in the history of the struggle of the international working class to organise itself, as Lenin later recognised: a nationally organised mass working class party to fight for basic political rights. At the height of its influence Chartism was the workers’ movement in Britain, and its meetings witnessed historic debates for the whole proletariat on its goals as a class and the most effective means of achieving them. At the height of the 1842 general strike in particular, the debates of the Chartists and workers’ delegates in Manchester were an important moment for clarification of the relationship between the struggle in the factories for immediate demands and the longer-term struggle for political rights as a class. With hindsight of course we can see that these debates took place in historically unfavourable circumstances: as a mass movement Chartism collapsed only months before the publication of the Communist Manifesto (the first English translation appeared in Harney’s Red Republican in 1850), and almost two decades before the formation of the First International which was able to provide a programmatic and practical internationalist direction to the workers’ struggles.

As the first industrial proletariat, the British working class was a pioneer, whose first mass struggles came before the full emergence of the European proletariat onto the historical scene. Its formative struggles inevitably suffered from inexperience, isolation and the absence of a coherent political theory. But it was, as Lenin recognised over seventy years later, a vital link in the chain that led to the creation of the revolutionary world party of the proletariat.

MH, April '07.

Introduction

What was the ‘Spanish civil war’ of 1936-39?

Most official histories, excluding those of the extreme right, present the Spanish civil war as a heroic defence of a democratically elected government against the mounting threat of fascism. More critical versions, such as those by the Trotskyists, argue that the Civil War was in fact the Spanish Revolution. While agreeing that it was necessary to fight for the Republic against Franco (Trotsky told his followers to be “the best soldiers for the Republic”), they argued that this was also compatible with the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism and the installation of a true workers’ republic. The anarchists, for the most part, even claim that the ‘collectivisation’ of the factories and farms under the control of the anarchist trade union, the CNT, was the highest point ever reached in the fight for a communist society.

The Italian communist left, which published the review Bilan in the 1930s, had a very different view. For it, democracy and fascism were two wings of capitalism, equally reactionary and anti-working class. They analysed the period of the thirties as one of profound defeat for the working class, opening the path to a second imperialist world war. Both fascist and democratic ideologies played their part in mobilising the workers for the approaching war, and the carnage in Spain was a preparation for the bigger massacre on the horizon.

This did not mean that Bilan did not see the existence of a real class struggle in Spain. They hailed the spontaneous strike and uprising of the workers of Barcelona against the Francoist putsch of July 1936, which showed the ability of the working class to defend itself when it fights with its own methods. But they also saw that this initial class movement had almost immediately been derailed into an inter-capitalist war, indeed an inter-imperialist war as the great powers became drawn into the conflict on both sides, most directly ‘Soviet’ Russia and Germany. And the political forces most crucially involved in taking the working class away from the fight for their own class interests were the forces of the ‘left’, including the anarchist CNT, who turned the armed workers’ militias of July 36 into the nucleus of the Republican army, and the factory occupations into ‘self-managed’ enterprises working flat out for the war economy.

Not that this transformation was achieved without resistance from the working class. And in May 1937, the real class conflict within the ‘anti-fascist’ camp came to a head, when the Stalinist-run police force attempted to take control of the occupied Barcelona telephone exchange and ‘clean out’ all those seen as an internal obstacle to the Republican war machine. This action provoked barricades and a new general strike, this time pitting the workers not against Franco but against the repressive apparatus of the democratic Republic. And this open class divide also drew a line between those anarchists who had become part of that apparatus (in effect, the official CNT) and those who stood on the proletarian side of the barricades, like the Italian Camillo Berneri or the Friends of Durruti group, along with some elements in the Trotskyist movement.

The Italian left fraction, along with the newly formed Belgian fraction, issued the manifesto on the Barcelona events in May-June 1937 which we are reprinting below. Seventy years on, it stands out for its political clarity and its unshakeable loyalty to internationalism and proletarian autonomy. Even if certain of its formulations are no longer ours (for example, the idea of the party as the “brain” of the class), the manifesto’s insistence on the absolute necessity for the communist political organisation as the best advocate of working class independence is as valid today as it was then.

World Revolution, 5/5/07.

BULLETS, MACHINE GUNS, PRISONS: this is the reply of the Popular Front to the workers of Barcelona who dared to resist the capitalist offensive

WORKERS!

July 19 1936 - the workers of Barcelona, BAREHANDED, crushed the attack of Franco’s battalions which were fully armed to the teeth.

May 4 1937 - the same workers, NOW EQUIPPED WITH ARMS, left many more dead on the streets than in July when they had to fight back against Franco. This time it is the anti-fascist government - including the anarchists and receiving the indirect solidarity of the POUM - which unleashes the scum of the forces of repression against the workers.

On 19 July the workers of Barcelona were an invincible force. Their class struggle, free from any ties with the bourgeois state, echoed inside Franco’s regiments and caused them to decompose by awakening the soldiers’ class instincts. It was the strike that snatched the rifles and cannons from Franco and shattered his offensive.

History only records a few brief moments during which the proletariat can become completely autonomous from the capitalist state. A few days after 19 July, the Catalan proletariat reached the cross-roads. Either it would enter into a HIGHER STAGE of struggle and destroy the bourgeois state, or capitalism would re-forge the links in its chain of power. At this stage in the struggle, when class instinct is not enough and CONSCIOUSNESS becomes the decisive factor, the proletariat can only win through if it has at its disposal theoretical capital accumulated patiently by its left fractions, transformed by the explosion of events into parties. If the Spanish proletariat today is living through such a stark tragedy, this is the result of its lack of maturity in being unable to forge its class party: the brain which, ALONE, can give life to the class.

From 19 July in Catalonia the workers created, spontaneously and on their own class terrain, the autonomous organs of their struggle. But immediately the anguishing dilemma arose: either fight to the end the POLITICAL BATTLE for the total destruction of the capitalist state and thus bring to perfection the economic and military successes, or leave the enemy’s machinery of oppression standing and thereby allow it to deform and liquidate the workers’ other conquests.

Classes struggle with the means imposed on them by the situation and by the level of social tension. Confronted with class con­flagration, capitalism cannot even dream of resorting to the classical methods of legality. What threatens capitalism is the INDEPENDENCE of the proletarian struggle, since that provides the condition for the class to go on to the revolutionary stage of posing the question of destroying bourg­eois power. Capitalism must therefore renew the bonds of its control over the exploited masses. These bonds, previously represented by the magistrates, the police, and prisons, have in the extreme conditions which reign in Barcelona taken the form of the Committee of Militias, the socialized industries, the workers’ unions managing the key sectors of the economy, the vigi­lante patrols, etc.

And so in Spain today, history once again poses the problem resolved in Italy and Germany by the crushing of the proletariat: the workers manage to keep their own class weapons that they have themselves created in the heat of struggle, only as long as they use them against the bourgeois state. The workers arm their future executioners if, lacking the strength to smash their class enemy, they allow themselves to be caught in the net of the bourgeoisie’s apparatus of power.

The workers’ militia of 19 July was an organ of the proletariat. The ‘proletarian militia’ of the following week was a capitalist organ adapted to the needs of the moment. And in the implementation of its counter-revolutionary strategy, the bourgeoisie was able to call upon the centrists (the Stalinists), the CNT, the FAI, and the POUM to convince the workers that THE STATE CHANGES ITS NATURE WHEN ITS MANAGING PERSONNEL CHANGES COLOUR. Disguising itself behind a red flag, capitalism patiently set about sharpening the sword of its repression which by May 4 was made ready for use by all the forces that had since 19 July broken the class backbone of the Spanish proletariat.

The son of Noske and the Weimar Constitution was Hitler; the son of Giolitti and the ‘workers’ was Mussolini; the son of the Spanish anti-fascist Front, the ‘socialisa­tions’, and the ‘proletarian’ militias was the carnage in Barcelona on 4 May 1937.

AND ONLY THE RUSSIAN PROLETARIAT RESPONDED TO THE FALL OF CZARISM WITH OCTOBER 1917 BECAUSE IT ALONE HAD MANAGED TO BUILD ITS CLASS PARTY THROUGH THE WORK OF THE LEFT FRACTIONS.

WORKERS!

Franco was able to prepare his attack under the wing of the Popular Front government. In a spirit of conciliation Barrio tried to form on 19 July a united government capable of carrying out the programme of Spanish capitalism as a whole, either under the leadership of Franco, or under the mixed leadership of a fraternally united left and right. But the workers’ revolts in Barcelona, Madrid and the Asturias forced capitalism to divide its government in half, to share out the tasks between its Repub­lican and military agents, who were joined together by indivisible class solidarity.

Where Franco was unable to achieve an imme­diate victory, capitalism called the workers into its services in order to ‘fight fascism’. This was a bloody trap in which thousands of workers died, believing that under the leadership of the Republican government they could crush the legitimate heir of capitalism - fascism. And so they went off to the passes of Aragon, to the mountains of Guadarrama, to the Asturias, to fight for the victory of the anti-fascist war.

Once again, as in l9l4, history has underlined in blood, over the mass graves of the workers, the irreconcilable opposition existing between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Are the military fronts a necessity imposed by the current situation? No! They are a necessity for capitalism if it is to contain and crush the workers! May 4 1937 is stark proof of the fact that after July 19 1936 the proletariat had to fight Companys and Giral just as much as Franco. The military fronts can only dig a grave for the workers because they represent the fronts of capi­talism’s war against the proletariat. The only answer the Spanish workers can give to this war is the one given by their Russian brothers in 1917: revolutionary defeatism in both camps of the bourgeoisie, the Republican as well as the ‘fascist’; the transformation of the capitalist war into a civil war for the total destruction of the bourgeois state.

The Italian Left Fraction has solely been supported in its tragic isolation by the solidarity of a current of the International Communist League in Belgium, which has just founded the Belgian Fraction of the International Communist Left. These two currents alone have rung the alarm bells while everyone else has been proclaiming the necessity to safeguard the conquests of the revolution, to smash Franco so as to be able to smash Caballero thereafter.

The recent events in Barcelona are a gloomy confirmation of our initial thesis. They showed how the Popular Front, flanked by the anarchists and the POUM, turned on the insurgent workers on the 4 of May with a cruelty equal to that of Franco.

The vicissitudes of the military battles were so many occasions for the Republican government to regain its grip over the masses. In the absence of a proletarian policy of revolutionary defeatism, both the military successes and failures of the Republican army were simply steps in the bloody defeat of the working class. At Badajoz, Irún, and San Sebastián, the Popular Front contributed to the deliberate massacre of the proletariat while strengthening the bonds of the Union Sacrée, since in order to win the anti-fascist war, there had to be a disciplined and centralised army. The resistance in Madrid, on the other hand, facilitated the offensive of the Popular Front which could now rid itself of its former lackey, the POUM, and prepare the attack of 4th May. The fall of Malaga re-forged the bloody chains of the Union Sacrée, while the military victory at Guadalajara opened the period which culminated in the massacre in Barcelona. The attack of 4 May thus germinated and blossomed in an atmosphere of war fever.

Parallel to this, all over the world, Spanish capital’s war of extermination gave life to the forces of international bourgeois repression: the fascist and ‘anti-fascist’ deaths in Spain were accom­panied by the murders in Moscow and the machine-gunnings in Clichy. And it was on the bloody altar of anti-fascism that the traitors mobilised the workers of Brussels around the democratic wing of Belgian capitalism in the elections of April 11 1937. ‘ARMS FOR SPAIN’: this was the great slogan drummed into the ears of the workers. And these arms have been used to shoot their brothers in Barcelona. Soviet Russia, by co-operating in the arming of the anti-fascist war, has also demonstrated itself to be part of the capitalist system in this carnage. On the order of Stalin - who exposed his anti-communist violence on 3 March 1937 - the PSUC of Catalonia took the initiative in the massacre.

Once again, as in 1914, the workers are using their arms to kill each other instead of using them to destroy the regime of capitalist oppression.

WORKERS!

On May 4 1937 the workers of Barcelona returned to the path they had taken up on 19 July. The path capitalism had been able to divert them from with the help of all the forces composing the Popular Front. By launching the general strike, even within the sectors presented as CONQUESTS OF THE REVOLUTION, they formed a class front against the Republican-Fascist bloc of capital. And the Republican government responded with the same savagery that Franco displayed at Badajoz and Irún. If the Salamanca government did not take advantage of this conflagration behind the Aragon Front to go onto the offensive, it was merely because it knew that its accom­plices on the left would admirably carry out their role as executioners of the proletariat.

Exhausted by ten months of war, by class collaboration by the CNT, by the FAI, and by the POUM, the Catalan proletariat just suffered a terrible defeat. But this defeat is also a step towards the victory of tomorrow, a moment in the emancipation of the proletariat, because it signifies the death of all those ideologies which enabled capitalism to maintain its rule in spite of the gigantic shock of 19 July.

No, the proletarians who fell on 4 May cannot be laid claim to by any of the political currents who on 19 July led them off their own class terrain into the jaws of anti-fascism. The fallen workers belong to the proletariat and to the proletariat alone. They represent the raw stuff of the brain of the world working class: the class party of the communist revolution.

The workers of the whole world bow before the entire dead and lay claim to their corpses against all the traitors: the traitors of yesterday and of today. The proletariat of the whole world salutes Berneri as one of its own, and his martyrdom for the ideal of anarchism is yet another protest against a political school which has met its downfall during these events in Spain. It was under the direction of a government in which the anarchists participated that the police have done to the body of Berneri what Mussolini did to the body of Matteotti!

WORKERS!

The carnage of Barcelona is the harbinger of even more bloody repression against the workers of Spain and the rest of the world. But it is even more a fore-runner of the social tempests which, tomorrow, will sweep across the capitalist world.

In a mere ten months capitalism has had to use up all the political resources it had been hoping to use in order to demolish the proletariat, in order to prevent the class from completing the task of forming the party, the weapon of its emancipation, and creating the communist society. Centrism and anarchism, by rejoining the ranks of Social Democracy, have reached in Spain the end of their evolution, as was the case in 1914 when the war reduced the Second International to a corpse. In Spain capitalism has un­leashed a battle of international importance: the battle between fascism and anti-fascism. In the extreme form of armed confrontation, it demonstrates the acute tension between the classes on the international arena.

The deaths in Barcelona have cleared the ground for the construction of the party of the working class. All those political forces that called upon the workers to fight for the revolution while mobilising them into a capitalist war have passed to the other side of the barricade. Before the workers of the whole world a bright horizon is opening up: a horizon in which the workers of Barcelona have emblazoned with their own blood the class lessons already sketched in the blood of the dead of 1914-18. THE WORKERS’ STRUGGLE IS A PROLETARIAN STRUGGLE ONLY IF IT IS DIRECTED AGAINST CAPITALISM AND ITS STATE: IT SERVES THE INTERESTS OF THE ENEMY IF IT IS NOT DIRECTED AGAINST BOTH, AT EVERY INSTANT, IN EVERY SPHERE, IN ALL THE PROLETARIAN ORGANISATIONS THE SITUATION ENGENDERS.

The world proletariat must fight against capitalism even when the latter begins to repress its erstwhile lackeys. It is the working class, not its class enemies, which has the responsibility of settling its debts with those forces which were once part of its own development as a class, which were a moment in its struggle for emancipation from capitalist slavery.

The international battle which Spanish capi­talism has launched against the proletariat has opened up a new chapter in the life of the fractions in different countries. The world proletariat, which must continue to fight against the ‘builders’ of artificial Internationals, knows that it can only build the proletarian International in a situation where a profound transformation of class forces on a world scale has opened up the way to the communist revolution. In the face of the war in Spain, itself a sign of the development of revolutionary ferment in other countries, the world proletariat feels that the time has come to forge the first international links between the fractions of the communist left.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD!

Your class is invincible; it is the motor force of historical evolution. The events in Spain are proof of this, because it is your class ALONE which is the stake in the battle shaking the whole world!

This defeat must not discourage you; you must draw from this defeat the lessons for tomorrow’s victory!

On your own class basis, re-forge your class unity, beyond all frontiers, against all the mystifications of the capitalist enemy!

In Spain, against any attempt at a compromise aimed at the establishment of peace based on capitalist exploitation, fight back with fraternisation between the exploited of both armies and a simultaneous struggle against capitalism!

On your feet for the revolutionary struggle in all countries!

Long live the workers of Barcelona who have turned a new and bloody page in the history of the world revolution!

Forward to the construction of an Inter­national Bureau to accelerate the formation of left fractions in every country!

Let us raise the standard of the communist revolution which the fascist and anti-fascist murderers are preventing the defeated workers from passing on to their class heirs.

Let us be worthy of our brothers who have fallen!

Long live the world communist revolution!

The Belgian and Italian Fractions of the International Communist Left (Bilan, no.41, June 1937).

A discussion in March on ‘Defending the NHS [43] ’ on the libertarian internet discussion forum libcom.org posed some very important issues about how workers in the NHS can defend themselves, and how we as a class can struggle against hospital closures and cuts in services. All agreed that the NHS is an expression of state capitalism, no one held that it is a wonderful reform and the envy of the world as we used to hear in the 1970s and 1980s. This is a forum where we find people questioning what capitalism has to offer us, and of course, 40 years of cuts and shake-ups have inevitably removed a lot of illusions.

But we need healthcare, we need it even if we cannot afford to pay for a hip replacement, a stay on coronary care, or even a prescription charge. However bad it is, however long the wait for an appointment or treatment, however that treatment is restricted by lack of resources or NICE guidelines, the fact that we can get to see a doctor without paying upfront is valued and relied on by workers in Britain as an essential part of the social wage. This is particularly so when we contrast it with the situation in the USA described by contibutor Booeyschewy where something like 50% of workers have no health insurance, essentially no access to healthcare.

Does fighting for access to health services, or even for the pay and conditions of workers in the NHS, involve defending the NHS against privatisation? Several arguments were raised in favour of supporting the NHS in order to defend our social wage: that private healthcare is not inclusive; that privatisation and the internal market are the means by which the government is attacking our health service provision; and that we defend our wages even though we want to see the end of capitalism and wage labour.

For Joseph K “… ‘market provision does not mean bad care’ for those who can pay, whereas in principle and with waiting lists, the NHS treats the poorest workers too” and for Magnifico “the question is whether or not it represents an increase in the social wage in comparison to the free market healthcare system we are moving towards”. We all know that there are many countries in the world, including the USA, where healthcare is only for those who can pay, but various examples were given of private or partly private systems which are equally inclusive, such as those in France and Germany. In fact when the Labour government was trumpeting its commitment to the NHS, it was promising to raise spending to match the levels in those two countries. As Ernie (for the ICC) pointed out “the discussion has already shown that the NHS has not marked a real improvement in workers’ health beyond the state’s provision of the most basic care … This provision is determined not by some ideological concern for the health of the working class as expressed through the NHS, but by the ability of the state to pay. This is the nub of the question and it is the same everywhere no matter what form healthcare takes. Throughout Western Europe healthcare is being cut back for the working class and it has been doing so for several decades” and went on to show that health services in Europe have made no difference to health inequalities. An ICC sympathiser, Demogorgon, pointed out that the NHS has always been partly private since GPs, the great gatekeepers of the service, were always private businesses. We could add that this does not stop that part of the NHS being completely integrated into state capitalism: GPs are financed and essentially set up in business with a franchise from the state.

Nevertheless, every attack is couched in terms of privatisation, budgets, market forces, so how can we defend against hospital closures etc without defending the NHS against privatisation? Magnifico takes the view that “it is national-level marketisation reforms which are the method the government are using to shut down hospitals and A&E departments - they make them responsible for their own finances, then don’t provide enough money for them to function, then put their closure down to abstract ‘market forces’ so it’s not really anyone’s fault. If the NHS was integrated as it is in Scotland and was in the rest of the UK pre-Thatcher then this would be much more difficult”. Another contribution put even more strongly the view that the privatisation of the NHS makes it even harder to defend ourselves: “But once the NHS is completely broken up and privatised, as the government plans for it to be in a few years time, of whom will we make the demands for this increase in the social wage?” These contributors show the main interest that governments, all governments, have in ‘privatisation’. The first is to remove the protection of state subsidy, which can no longer be afforded: this applied to British Steel and British Coal in the 1970s and 1980s, it applies to the nationalised industries that have been allowed to go bust in Eastern Europe, India, China, as much as to the NHS. The second is to disguise the role of the state in driving the attacks, to make the attack the responsibility of this or that trust, rather than government policy – and to the extent that the role of the state cannot be hidden, which it can’t, we can be misled into defending state control and weakening our struggle. As Demogorgon points out “The use of ‘privatisation’ is part of the local ideological cover for this universal attack. It’s no different to the way workers are always laid off when one company takes over another or even when a company is nationalised.”

So, when we all agree on the need for workers in the NHS to defend their pay and conditions, and the need to defend ourselves against cuts in services, is the question of defending the NHS just like the question of defending wages? For example “defensive struggles over healthcare in the UK, take the de facto form of ‘defending the NHS’ - even if we should reject that as a slogan for the raft of reasons discussed?” As Joseph K puts it “I mean we may be in fact defending workers’ conditions and our social wage, but while our struggle remains defensive, surely this is inseparable from the form in which it is administered, as the attacks are in the form of privatisation/marketisation? I mean, here by ‘de facto form’ I’m talking of practice, whereas you’re talking of an ‘ideological prison’ - so is what is at stake our propaganda as much as our praxis? I mean, leftists may support healthcare workers striking from a ‘defend the NHS’ viewpoint - we’d do so from a class viewpoint, stressing that the NHS per se is not what’s important”. Joseph K is quite right to emphasise that we need to support a struggle on a working class basis even if it is imprisoned behind the unions or workers find themselves marching behind bourgeois slogans. If we believe that the unions or leftists are leading a struggle into a dead end, to defeat, it is our responsibility to say so. The question raised here is what is the role of the ‘defend the NHS’ slogan in a struggle? If we take the analogy of a struggle for wages, that struggle does not depend on supporting the notion of ‘a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work’ – which we know is impossible. If we take Demogorgon’s analogy of a company takeover, how may times have we seen workers asked to put their trust in this or that takeover bid, to accept substantial redundancies and other attacks so that the company can continue? Isn’t this always done with the illusion in defending the local or national economy? This has been the case with the various incarnations of British Leyland in the Midlands, and is the case for workers at Airbus today. We would argue that the slogan ‘defend the NHS’ has an equally negative effect on workers struggling to defend themselves when it comes to the NHS, as Ernie shows: “… to drown struggles in struggles to defend the NHS or to support health workers i.e., to keep a struggle separated from wider struggles. These are real dangers and make the waging of effective struggles difficult for health workers. A very informative example of this was the wildcat health workers’ strike in February 1988. This struggle was potentially a very explosive struggle and one which drew on the lessons of the miners’ strike. It began when the government started to test out the waters about cutting unsocial hours payments. Workers at one of the main Leeds hospitals heard about this and walked out on unofficial strike. This struggle spread to other hospitals and areas like wildfire. We heard of nurses going to car plants and pits to call out workers. The unions were left speechless for a while (the true nature of the struggle was hidden in the media). Finally the union got a hold of the situation and called a demonstration in London and called on workers to return to work, the government also dropped the idea of cutting unsocial hours like a hot potato… However, the movement had passed its peak by the time of the demonstration and the union had put a stop to the efforts to call out other workers.
… In many ways it is a question of health workers rejecting the idea of being a special case, of having to link their struggle with the defence of the NHS -something the unions are endlessly pushing- and seeing the attacks they are under as part of the wider attacks that will be crucial to the development of the struggle.”

Magnifico takes the opposite view: “linking defence of health workers’ jobs with defence of the NHS does make it part of a struggle for the interests of the wider working class.” This view does not recognise the pressure on workers in the NHS to see themselves as primarily giving a service, rather than being workers earning a living. How for example are midwives in East London to react right now: faced with a crisis in maternity services, they are being asked to work 6pm – 9pm to catch up a backlog of antenatal care. Are they to defend the NHS and the service given or are they to react as workers and resist the attack? The health workers described by Ernie in 1988 reacted as workers, with a strike and an attempt to spread the struggle. That made their struggle stronger. Alex 5.5.07

In WR 302 we reported on the wave of strikes which swept numerous sectors in Egypt [44] at the beginning of the year: in cement and poultry plants, in mines, on the buses and on the railways, in the sanitation sector, and above all in the textile industry, workers have been out on a series of illegal strikes against rapidly declining real wages and cuts in benefits. The militant, spontaneous character of these struggles can be glimpsed in this description of how, in December last year, the struggle broke out at the big Mahalla al-Kubra’s Misr Spinning and Weaving complex north of Cairo, which was the epicentre of the movement. The extract is from ‘Egyptian textile workers confront the new economic order [45] ’ by Joel Beinin and Hossam el-Hamalawy, published in Middle East Report Online and libcom.org, and based on interviews with two workers at the plant, Muhammed ‘Attar and Sayyid Habib.

“The 24,000 workers at Mahalla al-Kubra’s Misr Spinning and Weaving complex were thrilled to receive news on March 3, 2006 that Prime Minister Ahmad Nazif had decreed an increase in the annual bonus given to all public-sector manufacturing workers, from a constant 100 Egyptian pounds ($17) to a two-month salary bonus. The last time annual bonuses were raised was in 1984 -- from 75 to 100 pounds.

"We read the decree, and started spreading awareness about it in the factory,” said ‘Attar. ‘Ironically, even the pro-government labour union officials were also publicizing the news as one of their achievements’. He continued: ‘December [when annual bonuses are paid] came, and everyone was anxious. We discovered we’d been ripped off. They only offered us the same old 100 pounds. Actually, 89 pounds, to be more precise, since there are deductions [for taxes].’

A fighting spirit was in the air. Over the following two days, groups of workers refused to accept their salaries in protest. Then, on December 7, thousands of workers from the morning shift started assembling in Mahalla’s Tal‘at Harb Square, facing the entrance to the mill. The pace of factory work was already slowing, but production ground to a halt when around 3,000 female garment workers left their stations, and marched over to the spinning and weaving sections, where their male colleagues had not yet stopped their machines. The female workers stormed in chanting: ‘Where are the men? Here are the women!’ Ashamed, the men joined the strike.

Around 10,000 workers gathered in the square, shouting ‘Two months! Two months!’ to assert their claim to the bonuses they had been promised. Black-clad riot police were quickly deployed around the factory and throughout the town, but they did not act to quell the protest. ‘They were shocked by our numbers’, ‘Attar said. ‘They were hoping we’d fizzle out by the night or the following day’. With the encouragement of state security, management offered a bonus of 21 days’ pay. But, as ‘Attar laughingly recalled, ‘The women [workers] almost tore apart every representative from the management who came to negotiate’.

As night fell, said Sayyid Habib, the men found it ‘very difficult to convince the women to go home. They wanted to stay and sleep over. It took us hours to convince them to go home to their families, and return the following day’. Grinning broadly, ‘Attar added, ‘The women were more militant than the men. They were subject to security intimidation and threats, but they held out’.

Before dawn prayers, riot police rushed in the mill compound’s gates. Seventy workers, including ‘Attar and Habib, were sleeping inside the mill, where they had locked themselves in. ‘The state security officers told us we were few, and had better get out’, said ‘Attar. ‘But they did not know how many of us were inside. We lied and told them we were thousands’. ‘Attar and Habib hastily wakened their comrades and together the workers began banging loudly on iron barrels. ‘We woke up everyone in the company and town. Our mobile phones ran out of credit as we were calling our families and friends outside, asking them to open their windows and let security know they were watching. We called all the workers we knew to tell them to hurry up to the factory’.

By then, police had cut off water and power to the mill. State agents scurried to the train stations to tell workers coming from out of town that the factory had been closed down due to an electrical malfunction. The ruse failed.

‘More than 20,000 workers showed up’, said ‘Attar. ‘We had a massive demonstration, and staged mock funerals for our bosses. The women brought us food and cigarettes and joined the march. Security did not dare to step in. Elementary school pupils and students from the nearby high schools took to the streets in support of the strikers’. On the fourth day of the mill occupation, panicking government officials offered a 45-day bonus and gave assurances the company would not be privatized. The strike was suspended, with the government-controlled trade union federation humiliated by the success of the Misr Spinning and Weaving workers’ unauthorized action”.

The victory at Mahalla inspired a number of other sectors to enter into struggle, and the movement has far from abated. In April the conflict between the Mahalla workers and the state again came to the surface. The workers decided to send a large delegation to Cairo to negotiate (!) with the head of the General Federation of Trade Unions over wage demands and to proceed with the impeachment of the Mahalla factory union committee for supporting the bosses during the December strike. The response of the state security forces was to put the factory under siege. In turn, the workers went on strike in protest and two other large textile factories declared their solidarity with Mahalla– Ghazl Shebeen and Kafr el-Dawwar. The statement from the latter was particularly lucid:

Kafr el-Dawwar workers are in the same trench as Ghazl el-Mahalla

“We the textile workers of Kafr el-Dawwar declare our full solidarity with you, to achieve your just demands, which are the same as ours. We strongly denounce the security crackdown which prevented the (Mahalla) workers delegation from travelling to stage a sit-in at the General Federation of Trade Unions’ HQ in Cairo. We also condemn Said el-Gohary’s statement to Al-Masry Al-Youm last Sunday, where he described your move as ‘nonsense’. We follow with concern what is happening to you, and declare our solidarity with the garment-making workers’ strike the day before yesterday, and with the partial strike in the silk factory.

We like to you know, we the workers of Kafr el-Dawwar and you the workers of Mahalla are walking on the same path, and have one enemy. We support your movement, because we have the same demands. Since the end of our strike in the first week of February, our Factory Union Committee has not moved to achieve our demands that instigated our strike. Our Factory Union Committee has harmed our interests … We express our support for your demand to reform the salaries. We, just like you, await the end of April to see if the Minister of Labour will implement our demands in that regards or not. We do not put much hope on the Minister, though, as we haven’t seen any move by her or the Factory Union Committee. We will depend only on our selves to achieve our demands.

Thus, we stress that:

1. We are sailing with you on the same boat, and will embark together on the same journey

2. We are declaring our full solidarity with your demands, and assert that we are ready to stage solidarity action, if you decide to take industrial action.

3. We will move to inform the workers of Artificial Silk, El-Beida Dyes, and Misr Chemicals of your struggle, and create bridges to expand the solidarity front. All workers are brothers during times of struggle.

4. We have to create a wide front to settle our battle with the government unions. We have to overthrow those unions now, not tomorrow”. (Translation from the Arabawy website and first published in English on libcom.org [46] )

This is an exemplary statement because it shows the fundamental basis of all genuine class solidarity across divisions of trade and enterprise – awareness of belonging to the same class and of fighting the same enemy. It is also strikingly clear about the need to struggle against the state unions.

Struggles also broke out elsewhere during this period: rubbish collectors in Giza stormed company offices in protest at non-payment of wages; 2,700 textile workers in Monofiya occupied a textile mill; 4,000 textile workers in Alexandria came out on strike for a second time after management tried to deduct pay for the previous strike. These were also illegal, unofficial strikes.

There have also been other attempts to crush the movement by force. Security police closed down or threatened to close down the ‘Centres for Trade Unions and Workers Services’ in Nagas Hammadi, Helwan and Mahalla. The centres are accused of fomenting “a culture of strikes”.

The existence of these centres indicates that are clearly efforts going on to build new unions. Inevitably, in a country like Egypt, where workers have only experienced trade unions that act openly as shopfloor police, the most militant workers will be susceptible to the idea that the answer to their problems lies in the creation of truly ‘independent’ unions, in a similar way to the Polish workers in 1980-81. But what emerges very clearly from the way the strike was organised at Mahalla (through spontaneous marches, massive delegations and meetings at the factory gates), is the fact that the workers are strongest when they take directly matters into their own hands rather than handing over their power to a new union apparatus.

In Egypt, the germs of the mass strike can already be detected – not only in the workers’ capacity for mass, spontaneous action, but also in the high level of class awareness expressed in the Kafr el-Dawwar statement.

As yet there is no conscious connection between these events and other struggles in different parts of the imperialist divide in the Middle East: in Israel among dockers, public employees, and, most recently, among school teachers striking for wage rises, and students who have been confronting the police in demonstrations against hikes in tuition fees; in Iran where on May Day thousands of workers disrupted official government rallies by chanting anti-government slogans or took part in unauthorised rallies and faced severe police repression. But the simultaneity of these movements spring from the same source – capital’s drive to reduce the working class to poverty all over the world. In this sense they contain the germs of the future internationalist unity of the working class across the walls of nationalism, religion, and imperialist war. Amos, 1/5/7

Things are looking good for working people, according to the government. Wages have risen, unemployment remains low, poverty is falling, waiting lists for hospital treatment are down, there are more doctors and nurses and standards of education keep on rising. Yes, they admit, there are social problems with unruly children, street crime and immigration, but overall things did get better under New Labour. However, if you step back from the hailstorm of statistics, all is not what it seems.

The NHS: not as healthy as it looks

Health is a good place to start because the government has trumpeted this as its big success. The statistics look impressive: between 1994 and 2004 we got 42% more doctors and 24% more nurses (Staffing and Human resources in the NHS, Reform, 2006), and waiting times for many operations are now counted in weeks rather than months or years. Yet increasingly there are stories of nurses being unable to find jobs, of hospitals asking nurses to work for a day without pay or to accept pay below the minimum wage. The reorganisation of pay scales over the last few years, far from standardising responsibilities and pay nationally as it was purported to do, has led to further inequality and confusion. Recent surveys have found that in work nurses are experiencing such high levels of stress that they are forced out of work or end up suffering from physical or mental ill-health, while outside growing numbers have to rely on charity handouts to get by. It is now suggested that over the next few years improvements in productivity will lead to a 10% reduction in the NHS workforce with pay increasingly being linked to ‘results’ (ibid). It is hardly surprising then that the plan to hold public sector pay increases down to 2% has not gone down too well.

Poverty and wages

A second area where Labour claims success is in reducing child poverty. Again the figures look good: 700,000 children have been lifted out of poverty since 1996/7. However, not only does this mean that some 2.4 million, or 19% of children still live in poverty; it also only takes the situation back to where it was in the mid-1980s, which itself was above the level seen in the 1960s and 70s (Office for National Statistics). Many of those ‘lifted out of poverty’ have gone from being just under the poverty line to just over it: the statistics look good but real life is much the same for those enduring poverty or near-poverty (Poverty: the facts, Child Poverty Action Group, 2001).

Similarly, for all the rhetoric of social justice, wage inequality has risen under Labour (after falling under John Major’s Tory administration). There is a particular gap between skilled and unskilled workers. This means that the latest figure for wage rises of 4.5% does not give the whole picture. In the first place, it includes bonuses, which very many workers never get a hint of. This brings the overall level down to 3.7%, with the private sector at 3.8% and the public sector at 3.1%, which is below the current rate of inflation. Secondly, the figures are skewed because they include salaries and bonuses paid to the very rich. The average weekly income stands at £445 but half of the population lives on £363 or less (Poverty and Inequality in the UK 2007, Institute for Fiscal Studies).

Rising exploitation…

This picture is itself only part of a global picture that has seen workers’ pay fall significantly as a percentage of national income over the last 30 years while profits have increased. This is starkly evident in the US where their pay has fallen by 4% since 2001, while businesses have all but doubled their share of the national income from 7% to 13%. At the same time productivity has increased by 15% (Economist 14/9/06).

In Britain, while there does not seem to have been the same direct fall in wages, the number of hours worked has been rising since the mid-1980s. At the same time, work has become less secure in Britain and America, as short-term and temporary jobs replace permanent ones. In both countries it is the working class that is paying for the apparent economic prosperity. In short, New Labour’s rosy picture is based on the increased exploitation of the working class, many of whom now face years more in work only to be followed by a retirement into poverty. Coupled with the continued growth of personal debt, this results in a growing sense of insecurity and the loss of any vision that things could be different.

…and growing anger

The working class is assailed from all sides by claims of things getting better and better. Its experience to the contrary is simply dismissed as a failure of understanding or a mistaken perception. Indeed, the ruling class always complains that the exploited are not suitably grateful for the generous and selfless efforts made on their behalf. It can be difficult to resist this nonsense since it rains down on us day and night. However, over the last few years there have been signs of growing anger and of a refusal to passively accept things as they are. This is reflected in the increasingly frequent warnings of industrial action, even though these are largely confined to one day strikes and threats of what might happen.

At the end of March, for example, defence and passport workers staged a one-day strike while other civil servants voted to take action short of a strike. A few weeks later 95% of the representatives of the Royal College of Nurses voted in support of the principle of taking industrial action, overturning its longstanding no-strike principle. At the end of April, college lecturers in Northern Ireland took action while 113,000 civil servants staged a one-day strike. At the end of May the Royal College of Midwives followed the RCN in voting to consider balloting for industrial action, while the National Union of Teachers called for a 10% pay rise. The postal workers’ union has held a ballot which resulted in a large majority in favour of industrial action over pay, and Mark Serwotka, leader of the Public and Commercial Services union, warned of a “summer of discontent” (Guardian, 17/5/07).

Last year saw the third greatest number of days lost in industrial action over the last decade: 754,500 days in all, involving 713,000 workers in 158 disputes. The number involved was the second largest of the last decade although this is still nowhere near the level seen in the 70s and 80s, and the actions that have taken place mainly remain firmly within the framework set by the unions.

However, now and again the anger breaks out and ignites in struggles run by the workers with the unions left behind calling for restraint. This was the case with the initial response to the redundancies at Airbus (see the April issue of World Revolution) and with the strike at Heathrow in support of the workers at Gate Gourmet in 2005 (see WR 287). A particularly important feature of some struggles is the support between groups of workers, overcoming racial divisions as at Heathrow or religious ones, as was the case with the postal workers of Northern Ireland some time ago.

We do not fool ourselves that such actions are enough to turn the tide and stop the attacks of the ruling class, but what they do is set out another vision of the world, a vision of unity, solidarity and support that runs completely counter to the division, isolation and selfishness that the ruling class gives us. What the working class offers in these struggles is a different view of the world; a different perception. But it is more than a perception: it is a potential that the working class is capable of making real. It is this that really frightens the ruling class. For us it is a cause for hope. WR 9/6/07

This article is available as a leaflet here to download and distribute:

https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/postal-leaflet.pdf [49]

The result of the ballot held by the Communication Workers Union – over 77% in favour of industrial action in a two-thirds turn-out – is an indication that there is a great deal of anger amongst postal workers about the latest attack on their pay and conditions: a 2.5% pay offer which is well under the rate of inflation, and plans for ‘modernising’ Royal Mail which will mean job cuts and deteriorating conditions at work.

Despite top level negotiations, the first one-day national strike has now been called.

Many militant workers feel that a series of one-day strikes is a not going to be very effective and that the best alternative is to demand an all-out, indefinite strike. But the tactics and methods of the struggle is something that workers themselves need to debate. The ballot system, in fact the whole hierarchical union structure, does not allow such a debate to take place, still less does it enable the workers to make and carry out their own decisions. In virtually every struggle in the post office in recent years, workers have ignored the official union procedures and voted in mass meetings to come out on strike. Such mass meetings need to be held again now, to discuss the best means for waging this struggle, and to coordinate directly with other workplaces.

Obviously any action in the Royal Mail needs to involve as many postal workers as possible, regardless of workplace or category. But the strength of any movement of the working class does not reside in its ability to hold out for as long as possible against the bosses, who will always have the support of the rest of the ruling class, their media and their state. It resides above all in the ability of the struggle to spread, to become a mass struggle that builds a balance of forces against the bosses and the state.

It is not only postal workers who face attacks on their pay and conditions. There is growing discontent in the NHS, in the civil service, in education, in the Airbus factories, in transport and many other sectors. Postal workers discussing industrial action should also discuss how to make links with other sectors, how to win their solidarity, how to act together. And here again they cannot rely on the unions. They need to go directly to other workplaces and sectors, sending delegations to the nearest factory, hospital or school, holding joint meetings, raising common demands. These are the methods of struggle that alone can make our exploiters think twice about exploiting us even harder than they are already. And they are also the methods that allow us to seriously pose the question of how we can do away with exploitation altogether, and reorganise society in the interests of the vast majority of humanity.

World Revolution 24/6/7

The growing tensions between Russia and the US have come out into the open. The media talk is of a new Cold War, with Putin responding to US ‘Star Wars’ plans by threatening to point his nuclear missiles at the heart of Europe. But if anything, the situation is more dangerous than it was in the period between 1945 and 1989 when the two superpowers held us in the shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction.

‘Communism’ collapses; imperialism continues

According to the official ideology of the old US bloc, the world was a dangerous place in the Cold War period because the Soviet Union was an aggressive power aiming to spread the tyranny of ‘Communism’ across the globe. It was thus reasoned that when the USSR and its bloc imploded at the end of the 1980s, we would automatically enter a new era of peace, and Russia could join the fold of the democratic nations, enjoying the fruits of free enterprise and free elections.

It is hardly necessary to argue that the ‘New World Order’ promised by Bush Senior at that time has been exposed as a total and utter lie. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the world has been more unstable, more chaotic, more infected by war and genocide than at any time since the 1939-45 World War.

One prediction that did, at first, appear to have some substance was the idea that the new ‘post-Communist’ Russia could become a reliable ally of the USA. Even before the USSR was officially disbanded, it made little or no attempt to stand in the way of the USA’s first great military adventure of the new period, the Gulf War of 1991. And when the fraction around Boris Yeltsin came to power in the newly-formed Russian Federation, it seemed to be in indecent haste to open Russia up to foreign investment by selling off whole chunks of the state-owned sector to ‘private’ investors. Many of these were home-based cronies of Yeltsin and Co – this was the period which saw the rise of the Russian oligarchs (like Roman Abramovitch) who made vast fortunes by getting their hands on Russia’s potentially lucrative energy industries. But Russia’s gates were also opened to a mass of foreign investment vultures, and the ensuing wholesale pillaging of Russia’s economy led to mass unemployment, a drastic plunge in living standards and a dangerously fragile national economy, as revealed in the collapse of the Russian currency in 1998.

These developments threatened to totally undermine Russia’s status as an imperialist power, which had already been knocked down several pegs by the collapse of the USSR and its bloc. This is something that no bourgeoisie can accept. Russia made this clear with its brutal campaigns in Chechnya after 1994: by crushing the Chechen independence movement with such overwhelming force, it was issuing a clear statement that it was not prepared to tolerate any further fragmentation of the Russian Federation. The ‘western’ powers largely turned a blind eye to the devastation of Grozny and other atrocious massacres in Chechnya, because they saw little benefit in the entire Russian Federation, with its intact arsenal of nuclear weapons, fragmenting into a patchwork of unviable fiefdoms. But an imperialist power can never be content with ensuring order within its own borders. Russia’s long-standing alliance with Serbia led to confrontation with other imperialist powers during the series of wars in ex-Yugoslavia – with Germany which backed Croatia, and with the US which switched its patronage to Bosnia and then used NATO to push ahead with the bombing of Serbia. ‘Post-Communist’ Russia thus showed that it was pursuing the same imperialist policies in the Balkans as Czarist and ‘Communist’ Russia.

The accession to power of ex-KGB leader Putin in 2000 marked a significant turning point, both in domestic and foreign policy. At home it marked a return to a much more centralised direction of the economy accompanied by an increasingly ruthless attitude towards internal political opposition. The assassination of former spy Litvinenko in Britain was only one in a series of politically motivated murders that have in all probability been carried out on behalf of the Putin regime. At the economic level, curbs were put on the power of the oligarchs (symbolised by the imprisoning of oil billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky for fraud and tax evasion, and the exile of Boris Berezovsky, who gained fame by apparently calling for the revolutionary overthrow of the Putin government) and the vital energy industries were restored to state direction.

Centralised control over the oil and gas industries were essential not just to protect the Russian economy from international competition but also to put a formidable weapon in the hands of the state in its relation with other powers. This was demonstrated very graphically in 2006 when Russia sought to put pressure on Ukraine by cutting off its supplies of gas, and the same threat can be brandished at western European countries which have become increasingly dependent on Russian energy supplies (and indeed were already affected when Russia shut off the gas to Ukraine).

Towards new confrontations

All this demonstrates, once again, Rosa Luxemburg’s thesis that imperialism is not the policy of any particular state, but the necessary mode of survival of every state in the present epoch. It is not determined by ideology, but by the fundamental economic and strategic interests of national capitalisms engaged in a life or death struggle on the world arena.

Putin’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy is thus the inevitable product of the needs of Russian capitalism. But it is determined as much by the aggressive policies of its rivals as by its own internal dynamic. The increasingly bellicose stance of US imperialism in recent years, above all since the announcement of the ‘war on terror’ in 2001, has further aggravated Russia’s tendency to throw its weight around in foreign affairs. The USA’s attempt to impose its hegemony in the Middle East was seen, rightly, as part of a strategy to encircle Europe and Russia through its control of this key geo-strategic region; and Russia’s fears of encirclement were made even more concrete when a number of Russia’s former satellite states were admitted into NATO. They are now to be used as bases for the USA’s anti-missile defence system, with the ludicrous justification that this has been established on Russia’s borders to counter the threat from rogue states like North Korea and Iran.

In The Guardian recently there have been some anguished comment articles in the centre pages, by Martin Jacques and Simon Jenkins, lamenting the fact that the Russians are being pushed into a corner by the belligerent behaviour of the west and the White House in particular. Jenkins worries that the revival of the open conflict with Russia is a growing danger to the future of the world, and that it is almost being hidden by the smoke and dust generated by the ‘war on terror’. Jacques, while accepting that Russia is not entirely innocent either, sagely warns that “Russia is not about to change, and we must find a Modus Vivendi that respects what it is and recognises its legitimate interests” (5/6/07).

There is no doubt that the sharpening conflict between Russia and the US (and with Britain, which has used the Litvinenko affair to yap at Putin’s ‘authoritarian’ regime) is a very dangerous development. In many ways it is more dangerous than the Cold War because the overall line-up of imperialist forces is much less stable and containable than it was during the period of the two blocs. Alliances are forged on a temporary basis – such as between Russia, France and Germany over the invasion of Iraq, or between Russia and China as a counter-weight to the US and Japan – but they can easily disintegrate into open hostility between the allies of the day before. Without the discipline of the old bloc system, these hostilities can much more easily spin out of control.

Martin Jacques, a former guru of the so-called Communist Party, offers his expert advice to the bourgeoisie: why don’t we all try to get along. This is pure mystification, pretending that it is possible for imperialist cut-throats the world over to be reasonable and considerate towards each other. Above all, it is posed entirely as a problem for the ruling class. From the proletarian standpoint, all states and all ruling classes, east and west, are the enemy. The only Modus Vivendi we are interested in discovering is the one with the workers of Russia, who have the same class interests as we do, the same need to struggle against the capitalist drive towards war. Amos 8/6/7

It is now 40 years since the Six Day War of 1967, in which Israel gained a great deal of territory. The media coverage of this anniversary has had little choice but to register the almost unending conflicts that have come in the wake of that war. Indeed, these conflicts had already been sustained for 20 or 30 years before then, and have continued ever since. Sometimes the focus has been Lebanon, the theatre of conflict between Israel and Syria, as well as the US and France. Most prominently Iraq has had wars with Iran and the US. And in Israel/Palestine there has been no let-up in the combat between Israel and the Palestinian factions, with all their various backers.

What is significant about the current situation, however, is that there are a number of areas simultaneously in a state of armed conflict, an accelerating decline into chaos across the region.

Iraq and Turkey

In Iraq a report last month from Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs) was not the first body to warn that “Iraq faces the distinct possibility of collapse and fragmentation”, that “the Iraqi government is now largely powerless and irrelevant in large parts of the country, as a range of local civil wars and insurgencies are fought” (BBC 17 May).The BBC described the report as “unremittingly bleak”. The report accuses each of Iraq’s major neighbouring states - Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey - of having reasons “for seeing the instability there continue, and each uses different methods to influence developments”.

It is not unusual to see the names of Iran and Saudi Arabia as regional backers of factions throughout the Middle East, but the name of Turkey is often omitted from the imperialist powers that have interests in the area, interests they are prepared to defend by the most brutal military means. Recently there has been a build up of armed forces (tanks, aircraft and troops) on Turkey’s border with Iraq. There is growing speculation that they might be about to invade Iraq, under the pretext of attacking the Kurdish separatists operating across the border. The US was concerned enough to send fighter planes into Turkish airspace as a means of warning against any action. At the time of writing the BBC was reporting the shelling of areas of northern Iraq by the Turkish army.

The US is obviously worried about every aspect of the situation in Iraq. 30,000 extra US troops will be arriving in June; Bush has signed off an additional $100bn for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (on top of the estimated cost per day to the US of $300m); and the situation only gets worse, with the killings, the massive displacement of people (including 2 million refugees who’ve fled the country) and the continuing damage to the infrastructure. With a new atrocity everyday it’s understandable that polls in the US show massive majorities thinking that things are going badly and that the US should have stayed out of Iraq.

Gaza and the West Bank

In Gaza, the Mecca ‘peace’ accords between Hamas and Fatah, which gave both factions a share in running the Palestinian Authority, has already been disrupted by a renewal of armed clashes between the two gangs. Meanwhile Israel has been conducting a campaign of airstrikes, threatening all Hamas members as legitimate targets. This is a foretaste of any future ‘two states’ ‘solution’. For the Palestinian factions such an outcome would be an opportunity to run a state that, with the backing of outside powers, can challenge Israel. For Israel it would only be acceptable if it guaranteed its effective domination over Gaza and the West Bank. In all these confrontations, the Palestinian and Israeli populations are just pawns in others’ vicious games.

Lebanon

The situation in the Lebanon has always been complex. Or rather, regardless of the complexities, there is always suffering for the exploited and oppressed, regardless of where they live. The Lebanese government is currently cracking down on Fatah al Islam, a small al-Qaida type group based in the Nahr al Bared refugee camp near Tripoli. It has said quite bluntly that the group of 150 to 200 militants should surrender or be crushed. This incident is part of a much wider inter-imperialist conflict ravaging the country. If you look at the Israeli attack on Lebanon last year, the massive Saudi financial support to the Lebanese central banks and the education sector, the money from Iran channelled through Hizbollah into ‘aid’ schemes in the Lebanon, the ambitions of Syria, which has been ejected from Lebanon but has not renounced its interests in it, then it becomes clear that the situation in the Lebanon is being aggravated by the same regional powers that are trying to influence the situation in Iraq.

The Lebanese government has said that Fatah al Islam is backed by Syria, and its origins do seem to lie in a more openly pro-Syrian group, Hamas Intifada. There are, however, also coherent arguments that it is one of the local creations of the US secret services, since the latter could benefit from the emergence of a Sunni brand of terrorism to counter the Shiite Hezbollah and its Iranian backers.

Whatever the truth, the situation in the Lebanon is only pointing one way. Yet again the Lebanese government will be shown to be not up to the basic tasks required of a state, and outside intervention will be ‘justified’. Already both the US and France have rushed to offer their support for the government in its fight against terrorism. But these two great powers, both currently involved in the UN ‘Peacekeeping’ force in the Lebanon, only appear to be on the same side. In reality their interests are fundamentally antagonistic: the US succeeded in kicking France out of the Lebanon during the wars of the 70s and 80s, and France is doing everything it can to worm its way back, which will certainly involve undermining US attempts to stabilise Lebanon under its hegemony. As with Iraq, the West Bank and Gaza, the only prospect is an increasingly militarised, chaotic situation, and the global ‘Peacekeepers’ are more responsible for this than anyone. Car 9/6/7

Between 1850 and 1880 British workers fought for, and won, real gains from the capitalist system: rises in real earnings, improvements in working conditions, reductions in the working day, and electoral and trade union rights. But these gains were won at a price; whereas in the previous period reforms had been wrested from the bourgeoisie only on the threat of violent insurrection, now these improvements were won largely through peaceful struggles led by the trade unions and political alliances with parliamentary factions of the bourgeoisie, which encouraged illusions in the eternal correctness of such methods and the absence of a need for a revolutionary struggle in Britain. The leadership which emerged in this period was deeply penetrated by bourgeois notions of legality and peaceful change, and pursued policies of conciliation and class collaboration which were to become characteristic of British trade unionism long before capitalism finally entered into its decadence at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The revival of class struggle and the growth of trade unionism

Except for two brief intervals, the whole period from 1850 to 1870 was one of continuous growth for British capital and this enormous economic power enabled the bourgeoisie to grant substantial concessions to the working class.

The working class emerged from the defeat of Chartism and again began to advance its own class interests, and after a relatively short reflux, the 1860s saw a revival of struggles, with many hard-fought strikes and protracted lock-outs in the cotton, engineering, building and mining industries over higher wages, shorter hours and the right to organise. There was an enormous growth of trade union organisation in this period, leading up to the formation of the national Trades Union Congress in 1868. The ‘New Model’ trade unions, which represented the skilled sectors of the working class, not only engaged in struggles for limits to the length of the working day and improvements in conditions, but also became active in political campaigns to extend the vote to the working class.

But the leadership that emerged from these political struggles preferred to win influence in the corridors of bourgeois power and support for strikes and political agitation was sacrificed for fear of alienating ‘public opinion’, in favour of conciliatory policies towards industrial struggles and collaboration with the bourgeoisie.

The nature of the trade unions as permanent mass organisations within bourgeois society, created bureaucratic tendencies right from the beginning. As early as 1850, British trade unions were establishing their own national headquarters with full-time staff, and the dues of the relatively well-paid skilled workers created substantial funds which appeared to justify a cautious approach by the leadership, as William Allen of the engineers explained in evidence to the 1867 Royal Commission on Trade Unions:

“...I should say that the members are generally are decidedly opposed to strikes, and that the fact of our having a large accumulated fund tends to encourage that feeling amongst them. They wish to conserve what they have got...the man who has not got a shilling in his pocket has not much to be afraid of, but with a large fund such as we possess, we are led to be exceedingly careful not to expend it wastefully, and we believe that all strikes are a complete waste of money, not only in relation to the workmen but also the employers.” (Frow and Katanka, 1868: Year of the unions).

It was obviously in the bourgeoisie’s interests to encourage the growth of such ideas as an effective means of tying the working class to the interests of the national capital, and Engels himself remarked that, after the failure of Chartism and the victory of free trade policies:

“Trades Unions, hitherto considered inventions of the devil himself, were now petted and patronised as perfectly legitimate institutions, and as useful means of spreading sound economic doctrines amongst the workers. Even strikes, than which nothing had been more nefarious up to 1848, were now gradually found out to be occasionally very useful, especially when provoked by the masters themselves, at their own time.” (Engels, Condition of the working class in England).

Once the British bourgeoisie had learned the basic lesson that granting reforms would not lead to the immediate collapse of production (on the contrary, rises in workers’ wages could actually provide a stimulus to further growth), it began to adopt a more sophisticated strategy, judiciously granting economic and political reforms (including most of the radical aims of Chartism) to avert potentially dangerous class explosions and, more subtly, encouraging the emergence of a ‘respectable’ leadership from the skilled, trade-unionised working class which could safely be incorporated into bourgeois society while the great mass of the proletariat - the so-called ‘dangerous class’ of the unskilled, unorganised and unemployed - was kept in social quarantine.

The consolidation of reformist ideology in the leadership of the trade unions is clearly shown in the creation of a national organisation around the London Trades Council. This was a co-ordinating body which had its origins in the London builders’ strikes of the 1860s, but became dominated by a small bureaucratic clique of craft trade union leaders - later nicknamed the ‘Junta’ - who soon assumed leadership of the whole movement. The ‘Junta’ bought its seat at the bourgeoisie’s table by convincing the Royal Commission on Trades Unions that trade unions were not at all intended as weapons to wage the class war, and that, on the contrary, their leaders were the firmest opponents of militant class struggle. Robert Applegarth, for example, disarmingly described the carpenters’ union as a mere friendly society for the mutual support of its members and boasted how the leadership had refused to support workers in Manchester who in 1866 struck (successfully, as it happens) for higher wages and shorter hours (Frow and Katanka).

Nor was the ‘Junta’ by any means an isolated phenomenon; in many ways the reformist leadership was personified by Alexander MacDonald of the miners’ union, who was leader of the faction which favoured influencing parliament and public opinion rather than supporting the class struggle. MacDonald encouraged a policy of conciliation, which in 1874 led his union to accept wage reductions after an unofficial strike in Durham. He was a leading figure in the early trade union movement, sitting on the Parliamentary Committee of the TUC, and in 1874 he became one of the first two working class ‘Lib-Lab’ MPs, taking his seat in parliament as a Liberal.

Reactions against reformism

But there were those within the workers’ movement who opposed these conservative and sometimes openly reactionary policies: the ‘Junta’ faced open opposition from many provincial union leaders, and from a militant section led by George Potter of the London building trades which called for tactics of active solidarity and direct action. In 1866 Potter also formed the London Working Men’s Association, which included former Chartists, to fight for working class representation in Parliament along more militant lines.

More significantly, this period also saw the first reactions by the union ‘rank and file’ against the policies of their leaders. In 1871, the opposition of the engineering union to a five month-long struggle of engineers and miners for wage increases and a nine-hour working day resulted in the formation of dissident trade unions.

The reformist trade union leadership was able to consolidate its control over the organised working class in this period, primarily due to the apparent success of their methods in securing real economic and political benefits; extension of the franchise, legalisation of trade unions, as well as real wage rises for at least the skilled workers. This, in a period of relative prosperity, made it very difficult for the few, isolated revolutionaries to develop an influence in the working class, let alone build an alternative leadership.

The bourgeoisie, of course, did what it could to encourage this state of affairs. Certainly the Royal Commission on Trade Unions (1867) was an important mechanism in establishing the influence of the reformist trade union leaders within the state apparatus. In fact the whole campaign over legal recognition for the trade unions was used as a cover to further isolate those workers prepared to take violent action in defence of their interests, and to consolidate the position of the most respectable and pacifist faction in the leadership of the movement. The Commission itself was originally set up to investigate acts of sabotage against non-union workers - acts which the trade union leadership were keen to condemn in order to prove their respectable credentials. By the late 1860s, as we have seen, the whole question of legal recognition for the unions was very much a formality; but just as legislation was being proposed, various legal threats suddenly appeared which had the effect of rallying all of the opposing factions in the trade unions behind the existing leadership. Potter, for example, dropped his opposition and called for conciliation with the Junta. Legal recognition of the trade unions did not therefore represent an unequivocal victory for the working class; it also signified a consolidation of reformism in the workers’ movement.

Conclusions

The economic ‘take-off’ of British capital in the middle of the nineteenth century provided fertile ground for the growth of reformist ideas and methods of struggle in the working class. The early rise of reformism was also facilitated by the perceived failure of five decades of violent, semi-insurrectionary struggles to win any immediate gains.

The appearance of tendencies even in the 1850s for the trade unions to become politically conservative, bureaucratic organisations, with leaders who (all too literally in some cases) ‘sold out’ to the bourgeoisie, served as a warning to the entire proletariat of the dangers posed by reformism and opportunism.

Reformism represents the influence of bourgeois ideology within the working class; an abandonment of long-term revolutionary goals in return for short-term advantage; an accommodation to the laws of capital. It was an ever-present danger in a period when capitalism was still clearly capable of granting reforms, and where revolution was not yet on the historical agenda. The trade unions, established as permanent organs of the class, and engaged in day to day negotiations with capital about the price of labour power and amelioration in the workers’ conditions, inevitably risked acting as transmission belts for bourgeois ideology in general and reformist ideas in particular. The narrow craft base of the ‘New Model’ unions, and the ability of the skilled workers to make real gains in a period of growth, made all these tendencies particularly acute.

However, it is important to keep these tendencies in a proper historical context. First of all, the gains made by the working class in this period were not granted willingly but fought for every inch of the way: “...only against its will, and under the pressure of the masses, did the English parliament give up the laws against strikes and trade unions.” (Marx, Capital, Vol. 1). Secondly, the benefits of any improvements obtained were offset by the influx of unemployed, immigration from the country and new machinery replacing jobs. Fewer slumps meant more steady employment, with shorter hours and better conditions, but this was not reflected in higher real wages and it was not until the early 1870s that there was any large general advance in wage rates, measured in purchasing power, and this was enjoyed for but a few years before the coming of the great depression. Thirdly, many of the improvements tended to be restricted to the minority of skilled workers: “...even under the unparalleled commercial and industrial expansion, from 1848 to 1868”, the working class underwent “great misery”; “the great bulk” at best experiencing only a temporary improvement in their conditions (Engels, op. cit.).

In this historical period, given the condition of the great mass of the working class, it was still absolutely necessary to struggle for reforms such as the limitation of the working day, as a precondition for the further development of the class struggle. It is also important to remember that even after the legal recognition of trade unions in the early 1870s, trade unionised workers were only a small minority of the class in Britain - around half a million in 1873 out of at least 18 million manual workers. Vast sectors of the working class were still virtually unorganised. On the political terrain, the working class in Britain won only partial suffrage in 1867.

The necessity for the working class to struggle for reforms did not imply a struggle to reform the capitalist system. It was not an end in itself, but a means of building the proletariat’s forces, in preparation for its final overthrow of capitalism. With the First International, Marx argued strongly that it was necessary for the trade unions to become organising centres for the day to day struggle between capital and labour, and to aid any social movement tending towards the emancipation of the working class, while on the parliamentary terrain, it was the duty of the class to struggle for universal suffrage and to use its vast majority in the population to turn the institutions of parliamentary democracy against the bourgeoisie.

It’s true that such formulations contain ambiguities about the possibility of the proletariat winning power through parliament. It’s also true that Marx sometimes exaggerated the revolutionary potentialities of the trade unions. But Marx never ceased to emphasise that the emancipation of the working class “...can only proceed from a revolutionary action of the class of producers - the proletariat - organised in an independent political party.” (“Introduction to the programme of the French Workers’ Party”, The First International and After).

Above all, the struggle of the working class in the era of reforms was a struggle to organise itself as a class, independently of the bourgeoisie. This was the struggle Marx fought in the First International. But despite all the theoretical and organisational advances made by the International, the working class in the most powerful country of capitalism remained under the sway of reformists in its trade unions. An independent party - a revolutionary leadership capable of intervening in the workers’ everyday struggles - remained to be built. MH 06/07

The other articles in this series can be found here [9] .

Revelations that Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan received £30 million a quarter from BAE over a ten year period (that’s more than £1 billion coughed up by the British taxpayer), with the full knowledge of the Ministry of Defence, didn’t cause Tony Blair any ethical problems. Last year he suspended an inquiry by the Serious Fraud Office into the Tornado aircraft deal on the grounds that Saudi Arabia could end co-operation on intelligence and security matters. This time round he says “I don’t believe the investigation would have led to anywhere except the complete wreckage of a vital interest to our country”, the loss of jobs from a business that employs 37,000 people and generates £13 billion in sales.

Whatever it takes the arms trade must go on, as no capitalist state will ever hesitate to use military force against its rivals or its citizens. Whether it needs Export Credit Guarantees to help poorer countries get the weapons they want, or bungs to princes in oil-rich kingdoms, nothing will get in the way of the arms dealers’ industry of mass destruction. Blair’s blatant defence of the bribery and corruption of BAE, already under investigation in six countries, is a fitting symbol of the last ten years of Labour rule. Car 9.6.07

It’s back to harsh reality for the working class after months of an intense barrage of propaganda pushing them towards the ballot box, with glittering illusions about ‘a change’, ‘a break’ through the election. And for what? The Sarkozy government has taken office and set to work, and the bourgeoisie does not even need to wait for the legislature to announce the future which they have in store for workers: attacks and ever more attacks. It’s not only the programme of the ‘uncomplicated right’, it is the defence of the interests, pure and simple, of the whole national bourgeoisie, which the PS (Parti Socialiste) candidate would also have applied. The presence of renegades from the left and the centre within the governing team shows that there is really nothing substantial between their different programmes, all defend the interests of the national capital.

The ruling class has a real advantage in this situation with an overtly rightwing government, benefiting from a large majority at all levels of the state apparatus, able to use the language of truth without any detours or rhetorical flourishes.

A deluge of massive attacks against the working class

So the government can increase the speed and severity of its attacks. It has already announced an informative calendar of them:

· Introducing the non reimbursement for acts of medical care by social services until the end of the year. Furthermore, it has already announced that it is necessary to prepare for “other sacrifices” to fill the 2 billion Euro “hole” in the social security budget.

· Encouragement to take out mortgages with tax relief on the interest will push households further into debt and push the price of construction and interest rates higher still, making the housing problem more dramatic. A larger and larger part of the working class will be thrown into the streets or not be able to find decent housing.

· The third attack front is the single work contract (contrat de travail unique) known as “flexisecurity”. This allows the simplification of redundancy procedures making it easier to impose extra work on proletarians, with extra hours paid as normal time as much as possible. In any case, this overtime will not count for redundancy nor for pensions. This contract will also allow a growing blackmail of all workers, constrained not only to go from one workplace to another but also from one job to another at less pay, under the threat of redundancy. The growth in working hours, in productivity, an enormous pressure on wages, the permanent threat of redundancy – this is what is in store for the working class in the coming months.

· The objective is also to reduce the official unemployment statistics to 5% with part time, precarious work, as well as imposing compulsory work in order to continue to obtain dole money, with the right to it lost in case of refusal.

· The government has clearly announced its intention to make cuts in the civil service. Plans for redundancies and job losses will continue to rain down.

· The maintenance of ‘minimum service’ in transport until the end of the year aims to prevent a massive strike in this key sector such as that by rail workers which frightened the bourgeoisie in the winter of 1986/87. The most obvious aim of this project is to pass the law just before the end of the special retirement arrangements due in early 2008, which is particularly targeting the SNCF and RATP (French railways). It is a question of diffusing the most militant sectors which were also the spearhead of the strikes and demonstrations in the public services in 1995 against the Juppé plan which had exactly the same aim of stopping the special pension arrangements.

This is just a prelude to the attack on the retirement age for all which will be “reviewed” and corrected as a whole with the aim of raising it to 67 as is proposed in Britain and Germany.

All this is, not surprisingly, accompanied by the immediate reinforcement of the state’s repressive apparatus: immediately after the election the deportation of illegal immigrants was taken up with great zeal; one of the first measures of the new parliament will be to fix minimum penalties for repeat offenders.

The ‘Sarkozy era’ is being prepared for the great growth in social inequality that was already apparent in the policies of Reagan in the US or even more in those of Thatcher in Britain during the 1980s.

The response to government attacks is not the vote but the development of the class struggle

Workers, and in particular the younger generation, have recently been influenced by the ideological barrage from the left and the extreme left exploiting their fear of Sarkozy (since he crystallises their anxiety about the future) to swamp them in illusions about the elections and the democratic mystification. But they must not panic in the face of the loss of these illusions. Their conviction that capitalism has no future to offer them can only be strengthened.

The young generations of workers have already shown their capacity to oppose the bourgeoisie’s attacks effectively and get them withdrawn, with the struggle against the CPE in France last year. They made clear that this attack was an attack against all proletarians. They sought to bring to life truly proletarian methods of struggle in the universities, although not always fully conscious of this: general assemblies that were open, not only to their teachers and education employees but to workers, employed and unemployed; nomination of elected delegates who could be recalled at any time by the assemblies; interventions or leaflets calling on paid workers to join their struggle. Proletarians must take up this experience again which shows that the development of the class struggle is the only realistic response to the attacks of this system which condemns all workers to increasing exploitation and poverty. The development of these struggles depends on the capacity to affirm the unity and solidarity of all workers beyond the factory, the enterprise, the sector or national frontiers.

Unions are key to the bourgeoisie’s sabotage of the development of the workers’ fight-back

The government is preparing the blows it has in store for us by engaging in a broad “preliminary policy of social dialogue” with the unions. What does this mean? That the latter are closely associated with the government in order to make us take the medicine. We can already see how this has been started. All the union leaders (Le Duigou or Maryse Dumas for the CGT, Mailly for FO and Chereque for the CFDT) have appeared on the TV to declare “we are ready for dialogue and negotiation”. On leaving the Elysée Palace they have welcomed the government’s ‘positive climate for cooperation’ – and with good reason!. While they proclaim their ‘intransigence’ in respect of the ‘principle’ of the ‘right to strike’, they are already driving home the idea that in practice, for instance over the ‘service minimum’, ‘problems should be examined case by case, branch by branch’. They are well and truly on the same wavelength as the Sarkozy government which is only engaging in this parody of ‘dialogue’ in order to prevent a united mobilisation of all those faced with its attacks and so to allow the unions to divide workers sector by sector.

The bourgeoisie fears workers’ reaction to all these attacks. In fact it is hitting the whole working class. The question of the development of the greatest unity and active solidarity in its response is posed more clearly than ever.

This is why the unions are called on to play such an important and prominent role, assigned to them by the whole bourgeoisie, in order to sabotage the struggles.

Government and unions have a division of labour to prevent the workers’ mobilisation that, if it gives rise to a struggle might, for example, draw other workers and other sectors to follow this example.

Faced with struggles the state can count on the unions to do everything, to carry out their manoeuvres, to empty them of any expression of workers’ solidarity by keeping their reactions within the confines of the corporatist framework of the enterprise, as at Alcatel, Airbus or in the car industry.

We should remember how, in 2003, the unions brought about the defeat of the general mobilisation against the ‘pensions reform’ by organising the isolation of the education sector.

In the months to come we will see how the ‘iron man’ Sarkozy is not the only enemy of the working class. There is no doubt that his role is to attack the working class in the overt defence of the interests of the national capital. The more dangerous enemies are the false friends, the unions, who permanently sabotage our struggles and lead us to defeat in order to allow the government and bosses to push through their attacks. W 1.6.07 (from Revolution Internationale no 380)

Suddenly everyone wants us to have an extra holiday. In January last year Gordon Brown proposed a day for Britain to celebrate its national identity when everyone could express a “united shared sense of purpose” and “embrace the Union flag”. Indeed “All the United Kingdom should honour it. Not ignore it. We should assert that the Union flag is a flag for tolerance and inclusion”. A national day would commemorate Britishness and show Labour as a modern patriotic party. Left wing singer Billy Bragg said that “the thing that binds us together is our civic identity which is Britishness”.

More recently TUC boss Brendan Barber proposed a Community Day to be held at the end of October, “to celebrate our shared values as a nation”. This was followed by Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly and Immigration Minister Liam Byrne who want a day to “celebrate what we’re proudest of in this country” in a “citizenship revolution”. Immigrants will have to earn points before they can become citizens, young people will get citizens’ packs when they hit 18 telling them what is expected of adults. We are all encouraged to celebrate civic values and our British heritage, show a debt of gratitude to war veterans who helped defend The British Empire, and be prepared for an annual State of the Nation speech from the Prime Minister, like those delivered by the President in the US.

This orgy of nationalism is also sustained in Gordon Brown’s demand for “British workers for British jobs” and Margaret Hodge’s call for council homes to be given to indigenous Brits before immigrants. These Labour bigwigs say that they don’t want to be outflanked by the arguments of the British National Party and need to show that they are as patriotic as anyone else, and have a tough approach on immigration.

No one should have any doubt about Labour’s nationalist credentials. In the world wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45 Labour rallied to the flag and, with the help of the unions, played an essential part in recruiting for the war effort and in maintaining social order at home. The Blair government, like every other Labour government since the first in 1924, has made the national interests of British capitalism its priority at every turn. Figures like Churchill and Thatcher might have been more obviously belligerent and jingoistic, but Labour has deployed a whole range of rhetoric devoted to exactly the same national cause, using humanitarianism, anti-totalitarianism and the defence of democracy in its intervention in ex-Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Take all the talk of ‘community’ and ‘shared values’. Its constant repetition is designed to instil the idea that somehow, we’re all, whether poor or rich, unemployed or millionaire, homeless or stately home owner, still linked by some common thread, by some inscrutable Britishness. It would certainly suit the ruling class if workers bought into this idea wholesale, if they accepted the nation as the fundamental unit of society. However, when workers enter into struggle they find that their interests are in conflict with their exploiters, with the capitalist state, and that there are no ‘shared values’ when police are attacking a picket line or demonstration. On the contrary, far from there being some mysterious British identity, when workers begin to develop a sense of class identity they begin to appreciate that they are part of an international class that can ultimately only defend its interests on an international level. Where the capitalist class values anything that will assist it in its endless competition of each against all, workers value anything that can contribute to the development of consciousness, organisation and solidarity. Nationalism, whether from the left or right, is a virulent enemy of the working class. Car 8/6/7

So the generosity of the G8 countries has not lived up to the commitments made at Gleneagles, but the promises to double aid to Africa by 2010 have been reiterated. Real money was promised for tackling HIV, TB and malaria, but this is not just for Africa and there is no evidence that this is new money. Promises cost nothing, but they are good spin. It is no wonder that celebrity campaigners like Sir Bob Geldof and Bono are making a fuss.

Can aid from the richest capitalist nations answer the needs of some of the world’s poorest populations in Africa and elsewhere? Can capitalism, through aid, trade or any other measure, actually solve the problems of starvation, disease and poverty? To listen to the G8, Geldof and Bono you would think so. But to answer this question we need to understand how Africa got into the state it is in today, to look at how capitalism has destroyed the pre-capitalist systems as it came in contact with them.

When the capitalist nations of Europe engaged in the scramble for Africa they were not looking to give aid, but to make a profit. And the populations they found there were not waiting for a food handout, nor for a charity to teach them to fish or farm or hunt, but producing for themselves according to the development of their economies and cultures at the time. These were destroyed by new settlements, by force, but above all by trade, by cheap mass produced goods that put many small scale producers out of business.

However, the destruction of traditional subsistence economies has accelerated from the middle of the 20th Century, sometimes through imposing single cash crops (ground nuts in Ghana, cotton, coffee…), sometimes through imperialist war or disease, sometimes through development aid which becomes an enormous debt that the population has to repay (and that will only be written off when it is clear it can never be paid back). But behind all these destructive influences is capitalism’s ruthless need to exploit every last market and source of raw materials, and to carve up the world into spheres of strategic interest.

As a result millions have been forced off the land, into shanty towns, into refugee camps and feeding stations, into fleeing to the more industrialised countries of Europe. Starvation and disease are the results of capitalist development in Africa today. Aid, even if it can help a few individuals, cannot reverse this tide.

Capitalism, as a system for producing and distributing the means of existence, has long since ceased to be of any positive benefit to humanity. This is why a revolution is needed, the fundamental reorganisation of society in accordance with human need, not the inhuman needs of the market. Alex 9.6.07

There are increasing signs of a world-wide revival of the class struggle. In the last issue of World Revolution we wrote about the wave of strikes that has swept across Egypt in recent months, where workers have shown a very high level of class solidarity. In May/June we have seen, among other things: Buenos Aires metro workers holding general assemblies and organising a strike against a pay deal agreed by their own union; new spontaneous walk-outs in three Airbus plants in Germany against the threatened job cuts (these follow similar strikes at Airbus France); further wildcats by Italian airport workers, Canadian transport workers, and a whole number of sectors in Zimbabwe, where workers are demanding pay rises in the face of a level of inflation that means nothing short of starvation.

Here we are publishing accounts of recent strikes by miners in Peru, written by an ICC sympathiser there, and of the air traffic controllers’ strike in Brazil, which also reveals significant developments in class consciousness. And although this strike seems to have been defeated, it is now being followed by a major wave of strikes and occupations, the biggest since 1986, involving metal workers, public sector workers, universities and other sectors. To keep up with the situation we have begun a blog on our Portuguese site (enter via https://en.internationalism.org/node/2162 [53] ). We will do our best to keep our English language readers informed about these developments.

"We have reached the limits of human endurance, we are in no fit condition to maintain this service, which is of great importance to this country, given the way we are managed and treated. WE HAVE NO CONFIDENCE IN OUR EQUIPMENT, OR IN THOSE WHO MANAGE US! We are working with rifles pointed at us.." This is how the air traffic controllers([1]) of Brasilia, Curitiba, Manaos and Salvador, dramatically expressed themselves in a Manifesto([2]), before paralysing the services from midday Friday 30 March, by calling a hunger strike and shutting themselves into their workplaces, in order to put pressure on the Aeronautical Command, the military organ responsible for air traffic control in Brazil. At 14.00, at the end of the morning shift at CINDACTA-1 (Centro Integrado de Defense Aérea y Control de Tráfico Aéreo) in Brasilia, which controls 80% of air traffic in the country and employs 120 controllers, the controllers decided to occupy their workplaces in order to continue their movement. Faced with the repressive measures of Aeronautical Command, which ordered the arrest of 16 controllers and threatened "to apply regulations" and imprison the "mutineers", at 18.50 the controllers decided to spread the movement to other control centres. This paralysed 49 of the 67 airports in the country. At 0.30 on Saturday 31st the strike was suspended, after the government revoked the orders to imprison the strikers and agreed to meet their demands; principally taking the air traffic control service out of military control.

Solidarity is the foundation of the struggle

Following the collision of two planes at Mato Grosso, in western central Brazil on 29 September, which left 154 dead, the controllers have carried out various "folded arms" actions against the accusations of the government and military authorities which tried to make them take the blame.

In their Manifesto, the workers defend themselves against these lies: "Six months after the collision there have been no positive signs about the difficulties faced by the air traffic controllers. On the contrary, they have got worse. As if these technical-work difficulties are not bad enough, we are also accused of being saboteurs, in order to try to cover up the faults in the management of the system...".

The strike expressed the air traffic controllers' indignation faced with the response of the government and the High Command; "the repression of the military high command against the Sergeant air traffic controllers has generated such a dissatisfaction that we are not going to remain silent faced with such injustice and the impunity of those truly responsible for this chaos".

This strike has exposed the hypocrisy of the whole of the Brazilian bourgeoisie and its involvement in the crisis of air transport: this applies to today's left 2government as well as to those of the right. They denounce the incapacity of the Lula government and its efforts to hide the long-term deterioration of the air traffic control system - which began before it came to power - and the uncontrollable growth of competition between the airlines, the policy of cutting costs, the over selling of tickets and the increase in the number of flights, leading to the air traffic control system working in extreme conditions. As for Lula he is also responsible, since he has not put in place the necessary operational measures that would benefit the whole of the system. Instead he has given priority to investing in the Grupo Transportes Especiales (GTE), which deals with the Presidential Airbus and flights for the highest reaches of the government, civil and military hierarchy.

The workers' action has put the cat amongst the pigeons. It has made public a situation that has been either hidden or distorted in order that workers in this sector, passengers and the general population did not know what was happening. In this way this strike, short but with a wide impact, is an expression of the air traffic controllers' solidarity with other workers of the sector and with the population which could be affected by air accidents. It shows that the proletariat, through its conscious, political and organised combats, has the capacity to carry out struggles against capital in favour of labour and the whole of society, that it has the means to overcome the impotence and frustration that the bourgeoisie condemns us to.

Government and unions surprised by workers' action

The government and unions were surprised and overwhelmed by these events. The aeronautics authorities believed that the controllers would back down faced with the threat of imprisonment and the application of military discipline. However, these measures only served to radicalise the movement. Faced with the radicalisation of a movement that could have had unpredictable consequences, Lula himself had to intervene (he was on his comfortable Airbus going to meet his colleague Bush), making full use of his past experience as the ‘social fireman' of the workers' struggles, an expertise eagerly gained as a union leader in the ABC of Sao Paulo. It was not because of his democratic credentials or being a ‘worker president' that Lula was able to force the High Command of the Brazilian Air force to negotiate with the strikers, but because of his profound experience as a trade unionist, that is as an agent of the capitalist state amongst the workers. He understood that the workers were determined to take the struggle to its ultimate consequences; that this expression of workers' anger could spread like wildfire. Thus it was vital to undermine this movement.

The unions and associations did nothing to sustain the struggling workers. The Sindicato Nacional dos Tabalhadores de Proteção ao Vôo (SNTPV) which organised the civilian controllers, was forced to publish the Manifesto on its website. It's President Jorge Botelho tried to divide the controllers by declaring that "the Manifesto has only been signed by the military controllers", therefore the civilian controllers joined the strike despite the opposition of the union. As for the other unions in this sector, controlled by the PT (Workers' Party), they were careful not to make any statements that could have made things difficult for their supreme leader on his trip to Washington.

The movement however did come up against illusions and traps. The Manifesto expressed certain illusions that the workers had about the government's ‘democratic opening' and ‘transparency': "Brazil is living through hitherto unknown moments of democracy and transparency with the recovery of ethical values and respect in public life". The workers are still dazzled by the Left's beautiful words. This is the Left of capital, and as such makes use of the hypocrisy of the capitalist class; as well as sustaining the political and ideological machinery of bourgeois democracy though which the bourgeoisie maintains the dictatorship of capital against labour.

Lost illusions

A few days after the strike, the government denied the validity of the agreement signed by its representatives and the strikers, which accepted their demands. In a furious press and public announcement President Lula accused the controllers of being "irresponsible" and "traitors" for not having shown respect for institutions and the military hierarchy: "People have to know that in a democratic regimen, it is fundamental to respect institutions and the hierarchy" (Folha Online, 5/4/07). This announcement opened the way to open repression, reinforcing the bourgeoisie's military's intentions to punish and incarcerate the most combative elements (those who at the beginning of the movement had reacted to the imprisoning of 18 controllers). The negotiations that Lula had demanded were only a ruse to exhaust the movement and win time.

We should not be in the least surprised because governments, whether of the right or left, along with the unions, are nothing but tools used by the bourgeoisie to serve the interests of the ruling class. The proletariat, in Brazil as well as elsewhere, have learnt to their cost that having trust in so-called civil liberties, the promises of the bosses and governments, allows the bourgeoisie not only to combat their struggles, and leaves them disarmed faced with the state's offensives and the whole panoply of repression, reprisals, lay-offs and violence.

Perspectives

The explosion of the controllers struggle has shown that neither bayonets nor the unions (whether controlled by the right or the left) can prevent proletarian struggle. This struggle demonstrated that if the left, under orders from Lula, has been able to contain the workers struggles, they have not disappeared. Despite the anti-working class actions of the PT and the CUT, the Brazilian proletariat is still alive and kicking. In this situation the labour ‘reforms' put forwards by the Lula government cannot fail to provoke reactions from the Brazilian proletariat[3].

In order to gain its real aims, the proletariat has to draw the lessons of its struggles, of the struggles of the whole class. It must criticise its illusions about the capacity of class society to offer a way out of the degradation of its living conditions The air traffic controllers strike has demonstrated that the strength of the proletariat is not only quantitative but also qualitative. The controllers, despite numbering no more than 3,000, have been able to confront the largest state in Latin America thanks to their high level of solidarity, to their organisation and their politicisation, and because they had the implicit support of important sectors of the working class. ICC 04/04/07

[1] The great majority of Brazilian air traffic are military personal with the rank of sergeant. Of 2289 controllers, only 154 are civilians.

[2] The complete text of the controllers manifesto can be read on the website of the "Sincicato Nacional dos Trabalhadores de Proteção ao Vôo" (SNTPV), which organises only the civilian air traffic controllers. The union, despite not offering support for the struggle, was forced to publish the manifesto due to the movement's strength.

[3] The government has ‘reformed' legislation in relation to labour and the unions, under the pretext of ‘jobs creation'. These ‘reforms' do nothing but make work more flexible, and increase the casualisation of the Brazilian proletariat in order to greatly benefit national capital.

The miner’s strike in Peru is a fact. The miners that work for the Chinese company Shougang began their strike three weeks ago. The struggle has spread to all the mining centres in the country. Inevitably, for the moment, the unions have carried out their reactionary role, especially the union at the countries largest mine: Yanacocha (a gold mine in Cajaqmarca in the North of Peru, which generates $800 to $1000 million a year). This union held isolated discussions with the company and did not call a strike. Similarly, at Oroya the unions were denounced by the press for working. It clearly wanted to break the minimum unity since the Mining Federation had said that 33 union sites were on strike.

At Chimbote, where the peasant and unemployed struggle had been going for some weeks, the Sider Peru company was totally paralysed. Wives marched with the miners, along with much of the city’s population. In the city of Ilo streets were blockaded, in Cerro de Pasco 15 miners were arrested for stoning the local headquarters of the regional government.

The press carried out its reactionary role by saying that the strike was a failure. Acting as the mouthpiece of the state, the means of disinformation, along with the Minister of Mines (Pinilla) said that only 5,700 miners out of a total of 120,000 were on strike. The Mining Federation said that 22,000 were on strike.

At the Casapalca mine, on the Sierra de Lima, the miners detained the mining engineers who had threatened to sack them if they abandoned their posts. The Minister Pinilla declared the strike illegal because it had been called four days before it began, rather than the 5 that the law called for. There are a lot of temporary workers in the mines and the minister warned that those miners who did not return to work on the Thursday would be made unemployed.

Another aspect of this struggle was the involvement of the miners employed by sub-contracting companies. A miner employed directly by a company earns $23 a day, whilst a miner subcontracted to the mines, by one of these companies, earns $9 a day. An advertisement by a miner’s wife pointed out that President Alan García had promised in his election speeches to get rid of the sub-contractors.

On the other hand, a news programme showed a demoralised Shougang miner saying that three weeks had passed and he was not able to eat. The tears of the miner telling of his misery and that of his family which had to stay in the provinces could demoralise other miners on strike. Some students of the University of San Marcos in Lima showed solidarity with the miners and took some food for the ‘communal kitchens’, the latter is a common practice in all strikes (teachers, nurses, workers etc). Food is shared amongst families there, whilst exchanging experiences and evaluating the day’s struggle.

On the other hand, the government presented the privatisation of the Michiquillay mine in Cajamarca, whose initial price was $47 million but ended up being sold off for more than $400 million, as another demoralising blow.

This indefinite national strike, the first in 20 years, has not paralysed this sector.

A comrade in Lima 30/04/07.

The events of July 1917 in Petrograd, known as the ‘July days’, represent one of the most striking episodes of the Russian revolution. In a situation of particular ferment among the working class, it fell to the Bolshevik party to see how to prevent the revolutionary process ending in a tragic defeat as the result of a premature confrontation provoked by the bourgeoisie. The lessons of these events re­main vital for the proletariat to this day.

The February insurrection had led to a situation of dual power: on the one hand the working class, organised in soviets of work­ers’ and soldiers’ deputies, and on the other hand, the bourgeoisie, represented by the Provisional Government and supported by the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary ‘con­ciliators’, particularly within the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. The more the revolution developed, the more untenable this situation became.

The ascent of the revolution

At the beginning of the revolutionary process, the workers had been full of illusions about the false promises of the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary demagogues: ‘peace’, ‘solv­ing the agrarian problem’, the 8-hour day etc. But soon, especially in Petrograd, they began to see that the Soviet Executive Committee was not responding to their demands at all. On the contrary, it was becoming clear that it was acting as a shield for the objectives of the Provisional Government, which were first and foremost the re-establishment of order at the front and at the rear in order to be able to carry on the imperialist war. In its most radical bastion of Petrograd, the working class began to feel more and more that it had been duped and betrayed by the very people it had entrusted with the leadership of its councils. In a confused manner, the more advanced workers began to pose the real question: who is really exerting power, the bourgeoisie or the proletariat?

The radicalisation of the workers, their growing awareness of what was at stake, got underway in mid-April, following a provocative note by the liberal minister Miliukov which reaffirmed Russia’s commitment to continuing the war. Already exasperated by all sorts of deprivations, the workers and soldiers responded immediately with spontaneous demonstrations and massive assemblies in the neighbourhoods and the factories. On 20 April, a gigantic demonstration forced Miliukov to resign. The bourgeoisie was forced to take a temporary step backwards in its war plans. The Bolsheviks were very active within this proletarian upsurge and their influence on the workers was growing. The radicalisation of the proletariat was taking place around the slogan put forward by Lenin in his April Theses: “All power to the soviets”. Throughout May, this slogan inspired more and more workers, while the Bolshevik party came to be seen more and more as the only party that was really on the side of the working class. All over Russia, the revolutionary fer­ment was expressed in a frenetic development of working class organisation. In Petrograd the factory committees were already domi­nated by the Bolsheviks. In June, the political agitation continued, culminating in a giant demonstration on the 18th. Originally called by the Mensheviks and the Soviet Executive to support the Provisional Government, who were just about to launch a new military offensive, it rebounded on the ‘conciliators’. The immense majority of the demonstration followed Bolshevik slogans: “Down with the offensive!”, “Down with the capitalist minis­ters!”, “All power to the soviets!”

The Bolsheviks avoid the trap of a premature confrontation

When the news of the failure of the military offensive reached the capital, it fanned the revolutionary flames, but the news had not yet reached the rest of this huge country. In order to deal with this very taut situation, the bour­geoisie attempted to provoke a premature revolt in Petrograd, to crush the workers and the Bolsheviks, and then to blame the failure of the military offensive on the proletariat of the capital, claiming that it had given a ‘stab in the back’ to the frontline troops.

Such a manoeuvre was made possible by the fact that the conditions for revolution had not yet fully matured. Although discontent was rising among workers and soldiers all over the country, it had not yet reached the same depth as it had in Petrograd. The peasants still had confidence in the Provisional Government. Among the workers themselves, including those in Petrograd, the most widespread idea was not that the workers would take power themselves, but would compel the ‘socialist’ leaders to ‘really take power’ into their hands. It was certain that if the revolution and the Bolshevik party had been crushed in Petrograd, the proletariat in the whole of Russia would soon have been defeated.

Petrograd was in a state of extreme turbulence. The machine-gunners, who alongside the Kronstadt sailors were the advanced guard of the revolution within the armed forces, wanted to act immediately. Striking workers were going to all the regiments calling on them to hold meetings and come out onto the streets. In this context, the bourgeoisie carried out a certain number of well-timed measures aimed at provoking revolt in the capital. The Cadet party decided to withdraw its four ministers from the government, in order to push the workers and soldiers to call for an immediate transfer of power to the soviets: the refusal of the Mensheviks and SRs to support the slogan “all power to the soviets” had been justified by the ‘need’ to collaborate with the ‘demo­cratic bourgeoisie’, but now this excuse no longer had any sense. At the same time, the government threatened to send the most revolutionary regiments of the capital to the front. In a few hours, the proletariat of Petrograd rose up, armed itself and rallied around the slogan “all power to the soviets”. However, at the 18 June demonstration the Bolsheviks had already warned the workers against any premature action. Considering that it was not possible to stop this new movement, they decided to put themselves at its head, supporting it, but arguing that the armed demonstration of 500,000 armed work­ers and soldiers should have an “organised and peaceful character”. That very evening, the workers understood that the momentary impasse they were in made it impossible to take power straight away. The next day, following the directives of the Bolsheviks, they stayed at home. At this point ‘fresh’ troops arrived in Petrograd to prop up the government and its Menshevik and SR aco­lytes. In order to vaccinate them against Bolshevism, they were welcomed by rifle fire. This was the work of provocateurs armed by the bourgeoisie but it was attributed to the Bolsheviks. The repression then began. The hunt for Bolsheviks was underway. It was accompanied by a campaign accusing the Bolsheviks of being agents of Germany. Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders had to go into hiding, Trotsky and others were arrested. “The blow struck at the masses and the party in July was very considerable, but it was not a decisive blow. The victims were counted by tens and not by tens of thousands. The working class issued from this trial, not headless and not bled to death. It fully preserved its fighting cadres, and these cadres had learned much” (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, ‘Could the Bolsheviks have seized the power in July?’ [56]).

The lessons of July 1917

The events of July are a ringing refutation of the bourgeoisie’s current ideological cam­paigns which present the October revolution as a Bolshevik plot against the ‘young democ­racy’ installed by the February uprising, and against the ‘democratic’ parties the latter had put in power - Cadets, Mensheviks, and SRs. In the July Days, the real plotters were these same ‘democratic’ parties, who had con­spired to the hilt with the most reactionary sectors of the Russian bourgeoisie, and with the bourgeoisie of other imperialist countries, in an attempt to inflict a decisive and bloody defeat on the working class.

July 1917 thus proves that the working class must overcome all its illusions in those former workers’ parties who have gone over to the enemy. Such illusions weighed heavily on the class during the July Days. But this experience also definitively showed that the Mensheviks and the SRs had gone over to the counter­revolution. In mid-July, Lenin was already clearly drawing this lesson: “After July 4, the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie, working hand in glove with the monarchists and the Black Hundreds, secured the support of the petty-bourgeois Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, partly by intimidating them, and handed over real state power to the Cavaignacs, the military gang, who are shooting insubordi­nate soldiers at the front and smashing the Bolsheviks in Petrograd.” (‘On Slogans’ [57]).

History shows that the provocation of prema­ture confrontations is a tried and tested part of the bourgeoisie’s arsenal against the working class. In 1919 and 1921 in Germany, this tactic led to bloody repression against the proletariat. If the Russian revolution is the only real example of a case where the working class has been able to avoid such a trap, it was above all because the Bolshevik party was able to play a decisive role as the political leadership of the class.

The Bolshevik party was convinced that it had the responsibility of permanently analys­ing the balance of forces between the two opposing classes, as a basis for intervening correctly at every moment in the development of the struggle. It knew that it was vital to study the nature, the strategy and tactics of the enemy class if it was to be able to understand and deal with its manoeuvres. It was impregnated with the marxist understanding that the revolution­ary seizure of power is a kind of art or science and it was perfectly aware that an inopportune insurrection would be just as fatal as the failure of a seizure of power carried out at the right moment. The party’s profound confidence in the proletariat and in marxism, its ability to base itself on their historic strength, allowed it to make a firm stand against the illusions of the workers. These capacities also allowed it to resist the pressure of the anarchists and what Trotsky called “the occasional interpreters of the indignation of the masses” who, guided by their petty bourgeois impatience, were agitating for immediate action.

But what was also decisive in the July Days was the profound confidence of the workers themselves in their class party, since this made it possible for the latter to intervene and act as a political leadership even when it was clear that it did not share the masses illusions or immediate aims.

The Bolsheviks faced up to the repression which followed these events without falling into any illusions in democracy, and while fighting tooth and nail against the slanders aimed at them. Today, 90 years on, the bourgeoisie hasn’t changed its nature - on the contrary it has become even more experienced and cynical. The current campaigns against the communist left are based on the same logic as those launched in July 1917 against the Bolsheviks. Then, the bourgeoisie tried to get workers to believe that since the Bolsheviks refused to support the Entente, they must be on the side of Germany. Today, it is trying to give credit to the idea that since the communist left refused to support the ‘anti-fascist’ imperialist camp in the Second World War, it is because it and its present successors are pro-Nazi. Today’s revolutionaries, who tend to underestimate the significance of such campaigns, have to understand that they are designed to prepare future pogroms. They have much to learn from the experience of the Bolsheviks who, after the July Days, moved heaven and earth to defend their reputation within the working class.

During these decisive days, the action of the Bolshevik party allowed the ascending revolution to overcome the traps laid by the bourgeoisie. Only three months before, the party had been in profound disarray concerning the tasks facing the working class. But, by re-appropriating the marxist method, by learning from its own experience and the experience of the class in movement, it was more and more able to play the role of political leadership demanded of it. Thus, the July Days prepared the class and its party for the insurrection of October.

KB

(First published in WR 206. One of a series of articles on the Russian Revolution, the previous one, on the April Theses was in WR 303 [58] )

This book can be purchased directly from the ICC [59] or on Amazon.co.uk [60]

The article that follows is based on the presentations given to ICC public forums in London and Birmingham

The ICC has just published a new book. Communism, not a nice idea but a material necessity. It’s the first volume of a collection of articles that we started publishing as a series in the early 1990s.

Responding to the barrage on the ‘death of communism’

At that time, and for some time after, you couldn’t move without coming across another book, article or TV programme on the ‘death of communism’. As communists we had two important things to explain. Firstly there was the basic question: what sort of societies had existed in Russia and the rest of Eastern Europe. In the west they were called communist, in the east socialist, and most of the leftists said they were some variety of workers’ state. This was a fairly straightforward thing to explain. It was clear that the regimes in Eastern Europe were repressive and militarised – western propaganda not only said that all the time, it happened to be true. What the ICC and other groups of the communist left were able to show was that the ruling class in every country in the eastern bloc exploited the working class, based itself on the value created by the working class, that the states in the east were capitalist, were apparatuses used by a capitalist class, just as throughout the rest of the world. It was also necessary to show that these states were imperialist in their appetites, as was shown in the Second World War, in Korea and Vietnam where the USSR backed the regimes in the north, in the Warsaw pact interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, throughout the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere in the world. In the words of the old Solidarity group, the free world wasn’t free and the communist not communist.

That was the easy thing to show – but it still left something else to explain. If what existed in Eastern Europe wasn’t communism then what was communism? The basic refrain was that communism was a nice idea but it wouldn’t work in practice, it went against selfish human nature – Russia proved that. The series of articles on communism has tried to trace the history of the debates within the workers’ movement about the meaning of communism and the means to achieve it. The first volume is mainly devoted to the 19th century. A second volume will deal with the period from the mass strikes of 1905 to the end of the revolutionary wave after the First World War. A third volume is underway.

From primitive communism to class society

The first thing to recognise is that for most of human history - however far back you measure it - there has not been exploitation, there has not been class society. There have been small bands of hunter-gatherers without property and therefore no basis for the establishment of classes based on property. Not only that. If you look at humanity’s emergence from the animal world it was not based on being physically powerful or a natural predator – the earliest hominids were probably just scavengers. But how did they not only survive, but actually succeed so dramatically? It was as a social animal, working together, in hunting, foraging, exploring, in tool making, in the development of language and above all of consciousness. Emerging humanity was a social creature, absolutely dependent – in a life or death sense – on being able to rely on others, on maintaining relations of trust, of solidarity, of communication within small communities. By considering such questions, the book on communism touches on what it is to be human, anticipating a number of the themes currently being discussed in the ICC around the question of ethics (see the orientation text in International Reviews 127 and 128). In particular, the book devotes a lot of space to the problem of man’s alienation and thus to how alienation can be overcome in a truly human society.

The period before the emergence of inequality and exploitation is known as primitive communism by marxists, and its basic characteristics are recognised by all serious paleo-anthropologists. We don’t idolise this period, seeing clearly its limitations. We can also see the advances made with the development of agriculture, the beginnings of a social surplus and the gains – both material and theoretical – made in class societies – whether Asiatic, slave or feudal. Class society is, therefore – in terms of the history of humanity – relatively recent. If agriculture is only ten thousand years old, class society later and the first states not appearing until maybe five thousand years ago in Mesopotamia and then Egypt and China – it’s clear that a lot of the things we are told are innate in human nature are actually the product of particular phases of historic development. To this we can add that as far as we are aware from written history, there have also been those who imagined an end to class society, an end to the state, throughout much of the history of class society. However, typically this took religious forms, or was at the level of a dream with no real conception of how society could actually change.

It’s in the beginning of capitalist production and the emergence of the proletariat that we begin to see critiques which link the suffering within class society with the possibilities of a future classless society. In the peasant wars in Germany in the early 16th century, with Winstanley and the Diggers and similar groups in the English Revolution in the 17th century, with Babeuf and the Conspiracy of Equals in the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century, we see the beginnings of ideas that link social revolt with the possibilities of a new society not based on property.

But it’s with the increasing dominance of capitalist society in the 19th century that we see the contributions of those who – although described as ‘utopian’ – had insights which subsequent revolutionaries were able to build on. Saint-Simon saw the French Revolution as a war between classes. Fourier was a trenchant critic of bourgeois hypocrisy, who also described periods of historical development, and who saw a future society where labour had become passionate enjoyment. Robert Owen looked for an alternative to capitalist exploitation, and participated in the early attempts of the working class to organise itself. However, the one thing that these critics lacked was any sense of the significance of the working class and its struggles. This is where the contributions of Marx and Engels have their unique importance.

The emergence of marxist communism

The word socialism dates from the 1830s, communism from the early 1840s. The reason these terms emerged and became known rapidly in a number of languages was because there were people posing the possibility of a new society. What made Marx distinct in a milieu that was alive with various forms of social criticism? It’s certainly right to see French politics, German philosophy and English economics as important elements in the marxist theory of communist revolution. French politics, in terms of the view of society as made up of conflicting classes. German philosophy, in building on the method of Hegel. English economics, with some of the understanding of how the capitalist economy functions, in particular the central role of the working class in the creation of value. All these are important aspects in the development of marxism. But what’s most important is the link between the working class and the possibility of communism. Marx identified the working class as the only revolutionary class within capitalism, but it is also an exploited class. At the heart of the capitalist economy, the working class is the only class capable of overthrowing the exploiting bourgeoisie, but because it is an exploited class it has no new exploitative relations of production to introduce. A society created by the working class is going to be based on the relations of association, the links of solidarity that are intrinsic to the proletariat, a class whose only weapons are its consciousness and its self-organisation.

So although there were in the 19th century many socialist, communist, anarchist, mutualist, collectivist currents, it was only marxism that was really able to pose fundamental questions and also give coherent answers.

Lessons of the class struggle

In 1848 there were revolts across Europe. More radical or democratic factions came to power or at least influence. But instead of proving to be allies of the working class they turned out to be just another face of bourgeois order, intent on imposing order on the working class as soon as they became part of the state. This showed that the working class had to fight for its independence, to struggle for its own demands, developing its own political programme and organisations and never surrendering its weapons to capitalist governments. The basic question of class autonomy is relevant to the immediate defensive struggles of the working class as well as the historic struggle for communism.

With the defeat of the working class after 1848 Marx identified the importance of the material situation in which workers found themselves. If capitalism was still developing, growing, flourishing, then revolution was not on the agenda. Workers could expect decades of defeat. However, he anticipated the eventual permanent crisis of the capitalist system, and with that crisis the potentially revolutionary struggle of the working class. It’s only with the decadence of the capitalist mode of production that revolution becomes a real material possibility. In this context, the book looks at Marx’s differences with the anarchists and others, who saw revolution primarily a question of will, possible at any moment regardless of the objective conditions.

Another key area in which marxism made a vital contribution was in the study of capital. This might seem a very dry or obscure subject but it provides essential theoretical underpinnings in the struggle for communism. For a start, the understanding of the ascendance and decadence of past modes of production is easy to identify historically, but understanding capitalism’s development and the contradictions that it can’t overcome is vital if the working class is to be fully conscious of the system it has to destroy. But also in examining commodity production, and, in particular, understanding the labour theory of value, it’s possible to see both the nature of the current society and the potential and essential characteristics of a future society not based on exploitation, competition and the struggle of each against all.

But of all the events in the 19th century that helped in the development of the theory of the communist revolution the Paris Commune of 1871 was probably the most important. Precisely because of the way that the false view of communism identifies it with the power of the state, Marx’s understanding of what happened with the first workers’ government can’t be underestimated. Far from being a movement for state control Marx saw that workers couldn’t just take over the existing state but had to destroy it. Not only that, they had to organise to ensure their domination over society, to stop the organisation of counter-revolutionary forces, to establish, in the phrase most characteristic of marxism, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx and Engels also developed an understanding, taken up by others later, of the distinction between reform and revolution. They lived in a time when the bourgeoisie could concede lasting reforms, but Marx and Engels never lost sight of the nature of the state or the revolutionary goal.

The social democratic parties and the Second International contained many revolutionary currents and their contributions on the meaning of socialism, and in particular the views of militants like William Morris and August Bebel on general social questions such as the oppression of women, the environment and the transformation of work are examined in the book. But the tragedy of social democracy was that it increasingly fell under the influence of those who came to see reforms and a place in parliament as being just about the sum total of the socialist movement. All this is dealt with in the book.

This volume covers the period prior to the 1905 revolution in Russia. It shows theoretical developments in the 19th century, in the light of social change, in the light of the experience of the working class. It tries to get to the core of the marxist contribution to the workers’ movement.

It’s worth saying at this stage that there are of course other currents that have a different approach to the marxist contributions from the 19th century. The Bordigist groups of the Italian Left claim that marxism has been unvarying since the Communist Manifesto of 1848. They completely deny the profound developments made by the workers’ movement since and also the change in capitalism from a developing mode of production to a system in decay. As a footnote the Socialist Party of Great Britain claim to be a long-term thorough-going marxist current, but they deny point blank that the working class has to destroy the state and say the tools of capitalist oppression can be used by socialists

This book, like those we have published on the Italian, German-Dutch, Russian and British Communist Left, and like the two volumes to come, is a contribution to discussion within the workers’ movement, among those who want to participate in a class movement that can destroy capitalism. That discussion can take place in the pages of journals, in online forums, but also right here. Barrow 12/5/7

Two Mercedes packed with petrol, gas cylinders and nails parked in London’s West End and ready to be detonated. A jeep with gas cylinders crashes into a terminal at Glasgow airport. The targets? Clubbers with no ambitions beyond having a good night out, and holiday makers looking forward to flying away for a glimpse of the sun. Whoever planned the attacks is fully in tune with the ways of modern warfare, which makes its offensive on concentrations of civilians, whether in Dresden, Hiroshima, Baghdad or the Tiger Tiger club. In disregarding the likelihood of retaliation they’ve also shown their contempt for the effects on Muslim or immigrant communities.

One of those who were arrested in connection with the failed bombings was said by a friend to be “very angry about the West”. But creating spectacular carnage in crowded places is every bit an expression of imperialist conflict and has nothing to do with the struggle against the system that gives rise to war. On the contrary, the whole ideology of jihadism takes real anger and discontent and channels thembrown into militarism, imperialist war and suicidal self-destruction. Politicians and the media rant about extreme political Islam being a threat to ‘our values’, when in fact the individual bomber and the state air force share the same goals and the same means of terror.

All change with Brown?

With the attempted London bombings coming within hours of Gordon Brown’s appointment of his first cabinet, there was a prime opportunity for the new government to show that it was committed to the reinforcement of the British state. In contrast to Blair’s familiar rush to introduce emergency legislation, Brown was praised by the likes of Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti, because “He has not played politics with the terror threat”.

In fact there is already planned legislation that will be introduced before the end of the year and will possibly include: an extension of the time available for detention from 28 to 90 days, the use of phone tap evidence, longer sentences for ‘terrorist’ offences, the power to seize passports and carry on interrogations after charging, among a number a number of other measures. No new measures have been instantly proposed partly because previous governments have been so enthusiastic in strengthening the legislative and technological aspects of their repressive arsenals. From the record number of CCTVs installed, to the reinforcement of the security forces, to the fact that, in law, almost anything can be interpreted as ‘glorifying’ terrorism, the state has a very wide range of powers at its disposal, while still selling the myth of British democracy and its inherent sense of ‘fair play’.

But it’s not wrong to notice a slightly different emphasis in Brown’s approach. It’s not just that the new Home Secretary is allowed to say a few words, but that no one in government will be using the expression ‘war on terror’, and it will focus on specific groups such as al Qaida rather than unidentified ‘Muslim extremists’, while trying to win the battle for ‘hearts and minds’. Brown said “security measures have to be increased” and people should be prepared to accept a greater police presence. But he also said there should be an ideological campaign, similar to that throughout the period of the Cold War, aimed at defeating Islamic fundamentalism and bringing everyone into line with the values of British democracy.

This is always a priority for the ruling class. The attempt to unite the population behind the needs of their exploiters is a constant for every government, whether of left or right. Since the advent of Brown there has already been some movement from those who had previously been reluctant to openly side with Blair. For example, full page advertisements appeared in many papers on 6 July from ‘Muslims United!’, in which you could read that “We are united with the rest of the country at this critical time and are determined to work together to avert any such attacks targeting our fellow citizens, property and country” before going on to “commend the government for its efforts to respond to this crisis calmly and proportionately”.

The idea that we should all be united in defence of ‘our country’ is at the core of nationalism and against any emerging understanding that we live in a society divided into classes with antagonistic interests. Whether that nationalism is expressed by Gordon Brown demanding more opportunities to hoist the Union flag and crying ‘British workers for British jobs’, or by Iraqi insurgents trying to drive out the foreign infidel for the benefit of a home-grown ruling class, or by car bombers bringing the war to Britain, it is always an ideology of the ruling class.

Loyal opposition

In the face of terrorist attacks the main parties of the bourgeoisie tend to adopt a united front. The latest, if failed, attacks have provided the perfect ammunition for the ruling class’s continual campaign to rally citizens to the state. In that sense, the main beneficiary of the recent attempted bombings is the British state.

However, there are some groups that appear to dissent from the consensus over terrorism. The Socialist Workers Party, for example, was not wrong to observe that “Brown repeated Tony Blair’s claim that bombs in Britain are not a product of the carnage in the Middle East” (Socialist Worker 7/7/7). There is indeed a connection, a link between two theatres in an imperialist war. But when leading SWP member and Stop the War Coalition convenor Lindsey German declared that “What Britain needs is not more terror laws but a change in foreign policy” she is promoting a serious illusion, the idea that capitalist governments can adopt a friendly or ‘ethical’ foreign policy. British imperialism pursues a foreign policy that is enforced with military weight and resources from every part of the state because that is what every capitalist state is forced to do in defence of its interests. And at home every state has to deploy every means not only against foreign threats but against the menace of the class struggle, the struggle of a working class which has no shared interests with its exploiters.

WR 7/7/7.

On Friday 13 July postal workers throughout Britain will be engaged in the second national strike against the Royal Mail’s derisory wage offer of 2.5% with strings. The first strike showed that the vast majority of postal workers are resolved to fight against the RM offer. Throughout the whole industry the strike was solid with a maximum number of workers on strike, contrary to RM’s initial claims. Workers showed scant regards for legal guidelines about numbers of pickets as scores of workers joined the picket line, in some cases reinforced by other public sector workers coming to show solidarity.

Next Friday’s strike will, in all likelihood be the same. But RM is counting on this willingness to fight fading over time, and there is a real danger of this strike being isolated and ground down. There are already signs of this happening. Royal Mail are adamant about sticking to their ‘plan’ for modernising the Post Office, and following the breakdown of the last round of negotiations it would seem that they are not moving an inch. This scotches the idea put forward by the CWU that strikes would bring RM to the negotiating table with a better offer, and RM has said that it is ready to deal with a long strike. The CWU have from the onset of this dispute refused to say exactly what the demands of the postal workers are. All they are doing is to oppose the 2.5% offered by RM. But we can get an idea of what the CWU really expects from the strike when we look at the statement by Dennis Kilagriff, CWU’s South Central Divisional Representative, published (without any criticism) in Socialist Worker of 7.7.07. “The CWU calls for:

* Royal Mail to enter meaningful talks with the union on resolving pay and major change, and to honour agreements that committed both parties to agree a joint approach on pay and modernisation.

* An urgent government review of the damaging impact of competition on Royal Mail to date, in line with Labour’s manifesto commitment.

*An immediate change to Postcomm’s competition rules and a fairer pricing and access regime that gives Royal Mail the revenues it needs to support the universal postal service and post office network.”

In short: all the CWU are calling for is for Royal Mail to have a bigger slice of the pie, calling for the rules of capitalist competition to be rewritten in its favour. The main concern of the CWU is therefore not the class interests of the workers but the efficiency of their boss – the Post Office. In particular, the CWU are not against ‘modernisation’ which will mean automatic redundancies - all they are doing is haggling over the numbers. The fact that postal workers are striking because they are effectively facing pay-cuts and redundancies does not come into the equation.

The postal workers have a massive will to fight but they are not in control of this struggle – its demands or its methods. Workers who have time and time again thrown away the union rule-book and come out on strike after holding on the spot mass meetings understandably hesitate about taking things into their hands when it comes to a large national strike. This hesitation is giving a free hand for the CWU to run the strike – and to ‘sell it out’ at the end.

Against the union’s attempts to make ‘negotiation’ the goal of the struggle, postal workers need to find the real sources of their strength:

• organising their own struggle through mass meetings open to all workers. Mass meetings need to decide when to strike, how to strike and what demands to raise
• seeking the active support and solidarity of other workers. Immediately by linking up directly with the Crown Post Office workers who are facing the same rotten deal. But other workers in the public sector are facing exactly the same attacks. In fact the postal workers are being set up as a test case in order that these attacks can go forward. No sector of workers can gain from struggling in isolation. Real solidarity means waging a common struggle.

The wider the resistance, the less the chance of the ruling class picking us off one by one.

WR 7/07/07.

As he stood outside the door of Number 10 on the day he became Prime Minister, Gordon Brown declared his commitment to change: "Change in our NHS, change in our schools, change with affordable housing, change to build trust in government, change to extend and protect the British way of life." He declared he had "listened and...learnt from the British people" and pledged to lead "a new government with new priorities" and "to reach out beyond narrow party interest." In his new government he brought in new ministers and advisers, some of who were critics of the war in Iraq, others from the Liberal Democrats and others again from outside party politics altogether. He was welcomed by many leader writers and commentators and within a few days Labour moved ahead in the polls for the first time since Cameron was elected Tory leader. Brown's response to the attempted bombings in London and Glasgow underscored the change. Where Blair had thrust himself into the limelight, Brown allowed the new Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, to take the lead. Where Blair echoed Bush's rhetoric about the ‘war on terror', Brown banned the use of the term and instead talked about ‘winning hearts and minds' in our ‘communities'. He was rewarded by the greater willingness of the official Muslim organisations to denounce the latest attacks and call for cooperation with the police.

Is this all just window dressing? In one sense, yes, since there will be no change of substance: the working class will still be exploited; foreign policy will still amount to war and imperialist manoeuvres; the government will still defend the interests of the ruling class. In another sense, no: the ruling class does need to make changes to maintain its control over society and to keep exploiting the working class. This is one of the features of bourgeois politics. At every election we are promised a new start, a fresh beginning, a change from the worn out policies and people of yesterday. This was true of Labour in 1945, the Tories in 1979 and New Labour in 1997. Parties transform themselves as Labour did under Blair and as the Tories are trying to do under Cameron. The idea of real change and real alternatives, where the masses make the choice, is fundamental to the working of a political system that actually defends the interests of a minority. At the same time real change does happen, but it is change that secures the position of the ruling class. Thus in 1945 Labour was swept to power to mark the change from war to peace and pledged to make good on all the promises of a better tomorrow that had been used to get the working class to accept the sacrifices of war. The ruling class still remembered what happened after the First World War in Russia and Germany. In 1979 the Tories under Thatcher replaced Labour in order to accelerate the economic attacks that were necessary to keep British capitalism going, leaving Labour free to mop up the anger amongst working people that resulted. In 1997 this arrangement was no longer necessary as the collapse of the eastern bloc had led to a retreat in the class struggle, so New Labour could come to power on the back of the hatred of the Tories while continuing the same policies. They were also better placed to defend Britain's imperialist interests in the post cold-war period that required a path to be found between Europe and the US.

Renewal in power

So why the need for change now? Blair had said he would stay until the end of the third term, now he has been pushed from office three years early. In the management of the economy and in containing the working class he has done what was asked of him, but there were two reasons why he had to go. Firstly, in foreign policy he moved too close to the US, tied Britain up in two wars that seem to have no end and reduced Britain's power and position in the world further than ever. "The full extent of the weakening of British imperialism was exposed by the conflict in the Lebanon...the fundamental significance...was that it confronted it with the reality of its status as an imperialist power and marked another stage in the historic decline of British imperialism" (‘Resolution on the British situation [62] ', WR 302).

The second reason was that he undermined the internal life of the British ruling class by replacing its traditional structures and ways of working with his own faction. This is a feature of the current period of capitalism where the absence of any sense of perspective for the ruling class has led to a loss of discipline that in some countries has threatened its capacity to rule. This is not the case in Britain, but the very fact that it has been affected by this tendency is a serious danger that the British ruling class knows it has to combat.

Initially pressure was put on Blair to mend his ways, but when it became clear that this was not going to happen the ‘loans for peerages' scandal was stepped up with the arrest of some of his close allies and the interviewing of Blair himself by the police. After the attempted coup by Brown's supporters last September, Blair was forced to announce he would leave within the year. The ruling class accepted this delay partly because he had served them well in many ways, but more because it was important to engineer an ‘orderly handover' to avoid any sense of crisis or panic. Three weeks before he left office Blair was interviewed by the police for a third time just to make sure he had got the message.

But, if this is the case, why were the Tories not put into power? There are two reasons. In the first place, for all the changes that Cameron has made, which have been reflected in the Tories' rise in the polls, they are not ready for office yet, as the recent gaffes over policy suggest (e.g. divisions over grammar schools). The stage-managed defection of Tory MP Quentin Davies on the eve of Brown's assumption of power harshly underlined this. In the second place, New Labour has served the ruling class well, so there is no real need to bring the Tories in now. It is far better for the ruling class to keep its powder dry now in case the situation is quite different in a couple of years

Changes to strengthen the ruling class

In his first actions Brown signalled that he would address the concerns of the ruling class, that here at least there would be change. He stated that there will be no sofa politics under his leadership, overturned Blair's ruling that allowed Labour appointed officials to give orders to civil servants, held three cabinet meetings in his first week and declared his intention to return to the tradition of making major announcements to parliament rather than the press. In his first speech Brown informed the House of Commons that he would end or modify the executive's power to make decisions without recourse to parliament and suggested that this might include the power to declare war.

The shift in foreign policy was announced by appointing David Milliband as Foreign Secretary, by bringing in Shirley Williams as an advisor and Sir Mark Mallach Brown, a former deputy secretary-general of the UN, as minister for Africa, Asia and the UN, and offering a place to Paddy Ashdown who is known to be pro-European. Milliband criticised Blair's position over the war in the Lebanon last year, Williams opposed the war in Iraq and Mallach Brown has been an open critic of Bush and Blair. This last appointment has already been criticised by John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the UN as "inauspicious" while being hailed as "a statement of independence" by a former head of the United Nations Association (Guardian 29/6/07). Brown himself has been careful to avoid being contaminated by Blair's military adventures, only beginning to travel abroad during Blair's final days and even then keeping the focus on such ‘good news' stories as his efforts to relieve poverty in Africa.

The limits of change

However, while the bourgeoisie may be able to nuance its foreign policy and rein back some of the manifestations of the disorder within their own class, they cannot overcome the fundamental problems that confront them. What Blair was punished for cannot be solved by a simple act of will.

Britain's imperialist policy is a consequence of its history and its current position. Since 1989 this has meant steering a path between the US and Europe. However, it has been unable to play one off against the other so Blair gambled on moving closer to US and lost. Even though Blair has gone it is not possible to put the clock back. Britain's weakened power has been exposed and there is no basis yet for overcoming the divisions this produced in the bourgeoisie. Certainly the ruling class will try to respond to this situation and there may be some shifts in policy ahead of us but there is no way back to Britain's former standing.

Similarly, the pressures that push the various clans in the ruling class to pursue their factional interests may be ameliorated but they cannot be eradicated. They arise from the very foundation of capitalist society in its phase of decomposition, from the absence of any sense of a future beyond mere survival and looking after number one. One example of this was the way that the attempt to bring Blair back into line used methods that themselves fuelled the loss of discipline: "Thus, during the Butler inquiry the security service set up a website and published confidential documents that contradicted the government's claims about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction" (‘Resolution on the British situation', op cit).

Even in the areas where Blair was praised there are serious difficulties. The economy, the basis of Brown's own claim to success, has only grown at the cost of the working class. The latest report from the IMF in March this year showed that personal spending remains the main factor in the growth of the economy and that, as a consequence personal debt has continued to rise, and that the current account is projected to remain in deficit over the next few years. The housing market, which has financed much of the increased personal spending, has begun to accelerate again, increasing the possibility of a sharp readjustment that could have a severe impact on growth.

Finally, for all of its ability to control the class struggle, the necessity to continue to make the working class pay for the economy through debt, low pay and long hours only increases the possibility of anger turning to resistance and of defence turning to attack. This at last would be a change that benefits the working class.

North 4/7/7.

Gang violence has always been a feature of class society, but with onset of decomposition, the final phase of the decadence of capitalism, it has reached new heights of irrational barbarity. The recent epidemic of violence amongst young people in Britain is just another depressing example of this phenomenon. Over a period of eight days in June this year eight young people, all under the age of 25, were murdered in London. All victims of London’s ‘gang culture’. This trend, which is already a part of life in the US and many countries on the periphery of capitalism, is being repeated in cities across the country.

These teenagers were not stabbed and shot in botched robberies. This outbreak of violence cannot be explained in the same way as the violence that occurred, say in the Eighteenth Century, when London was arguably more dangerous than it is today. Today’s gangs, teenagers themselves, often kill to defend their neighborhoods and their honour. ‘Respect’ is everything. Just looking at someone in the wrong way can result in a beating. This is the ‘rationale’ behind many of these crimes – or rather, the irrationale.

Whether from the left or the right, the bourgeoisie, especially in the guise of self-appointed ‘community leaders’, has used these events to promote their own solutions to the problem. Given the state of the prison system they can’t just ‘lock em up’, so the advertised solutions usually involve increased funding for specific ‘communities’ or pet ‘community projects’ or ‘police initiatives’. But teaching teenagers about citizenship, providing more youth clubs and pretending that every teenager can make it big in the music industry will not stop, or help us understand, this violence.

Teenagers may be brutalised by the gang mentality, and its negative impulses can be reinforced by the influence of cultural expressions like grime and gangsta rap, but none of this exists in a vacuum. Behind all this brutalisation there lies a greater social force. Whether in Brixton or Buenos Aires, from birth we are forced to deal with the logic imposed by capitalism: competition and the pursuit of profit at any cost. In the period of decomposition, with the bourgeoisie unable to provide any sort of perspective for the future, this logic is taken to its natural conclusion: ‘every man for himself’, ‘every nation for itself’. Young people today grow up in a world where this ideology infects their every move. Faced with a grim present and an uncertain future, defending your family, your street and your estate appear to some teenagers to be the only action worth taking. The ideology of ‘reppin your end’ ultimately obeys the same logic as that of imperialist powers defending their spheres of influence, and the insane violence of gun and knife ‘culture’ is only the reflection of a world system permanently at war.

Of course, there is a solution to this problem that the bourgeoisie won’t mention. This solution was offered by young people in France last year in their struggle against the CPE. Through their use of general assemblies and collective action they were able to win a partial victory against the French bourgeoisie. Rather than being dragged into pointless violent confrontations, these young people brought disaffected youth across France together to fight the bosses’ attacks. Young people in Britain and across the world need to do the same. Stop fighting each other and unite to fight the system that turns you into atomised individuals.

Williams, 5/4/7.

In June a four week strike in South Africa involving between 600,000 and a million workers closed most schools, reduced hospitals to a skeleton run by army medics and had an impact on much public transport and many offices. It clearly demonstrated which side the ANC government was on. While it was definitely the biggest strike since the end of apartheid in 1994, the COSATU unions’ insistence that it was a “historic turning point in the lives of public-sector workers” and that “This combination of unity and militancy means that never again will the employer dare to treat us with the callous indifference they have displayed in the past and during this dispute, until they were forced to compromise when confronted by the militancy and determination of their workforce” were exaggerations that hid the real significance of the strike.

Unions can’t be both friend and foe

In late May, a week before the strike started, there were demonstrations in towns and cities across South Africa, demanding an increased offer from the government in the deadlocked talks between government and unions.

The government initially offered the public sector a 6% wage increase while COSATU asked for 12%. COSATU went down to 9% and then 8%, before accepting 7.5%. Two weeks into the strike COSATU said that 7.25% was a completely unacceptable compromise, taking another two weeks to find the extra quarter of a per cent a ‘historic compromise’.

It’s not that COSATU is a weak or treacherous union; it’s actually a partner in the South African government! So every remark they made during and before the strike showed them as either explicitly an ally of the state employer or pretending to be a friend of the working class. The same goes for the South African Communist Party (SACP).

For example, troops were deployed against pickets on a number of occasions, using rubber bullets and tear gas. Pickets were denounced by the government as ‘violent’ and examples of ‘intimidation’, The action of police and troops were justified because of, in the words of Thabo Mbeki, “the unions’ message of selfish own interest”. The head of the police is SACP national chairperson Charles Nqakula.

Or again, when the government started sacking nurses who were on strike, public services minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi said that those who didn’t return to work were “being sacked in the interests of the patients and the country”. Fraser-Moleketi is one of three SACP members in the cabinet.

At one point the unions threatened a ‘solidarity strike’ which would have involved the crucial mining and manufacturing sector. Even this nominal action, involving ‘sympathy’ rather than extension to other sectors of workers, appears to have come to nothing. Similarly, the three unions at the national power utility Eskom, employing 31,000 workers, at one point said that a strike that could cause massive power cuts was imminent. It was planned for 4 July … a week after the public sector strike had been called off. It was then called off itself. Unions have given notice to 150 employers that workers in the metal and engineering industry will strike from 9 July. How long this strike will be depends on how union/employer ‘negotiations’ proceed.

Watch out for the left

Living and working conditions in South Africa have been declining over a long period for the vast majority of the population. Life expectancy, literacy, access to improved sanitation have all been declining, while South Africa now has 5.5 million HIV/AIDs patients, the highest number in the world, and every day there are 50 murders and 150 women are raped.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in an interview in the Financial Times (29/6/7) said that most people “are languishing in the wilderness” as he criticised the slow pace of wealth redistribution since the end of apartheid. “I’m really very surprised by the remarkable patience of people” Tutu said, adding that most of the people living in shacks under white rule were still doing so today. He said it was hard “to explain why they don’t say to hell with Tutu, Mandela and the rest and go on the rampage.”

One of the reasons that people have not gone ‘on the rampage’ is because they still have illusions in the unions, the ANC and capitalist democracy.

A Reuters report (28/6/7) said that “Unions accuse President Thabo Mbeki of abandoning the poor through his pro-business policies” and that the strike “focused attention on growing labour discontent over his strategy, which has helped turn South Africa into an economic powerhouse but failed to conquer widespread poverty and high unemployment left by apartheid.” A statement by a COSATU branch declared that “This crop of politicians have shown themselves to be unfit to lead our government in the interest of the poor. The ANC needs to replace them before it is contaminated with the greed that drives many public officials”.

But it’s not because of greed or particular economic policies that the ANC/SACP/COSATU government attacks the conditions of life of workers and other non-exploiting strata in South Africa. A capitalist government can’t be anything except ‘pro-business’ and therefore anti-working class. The only ‘liberation’ that happened in 1994 was for a small number of black political activists to take a more prominent position in the political apparatus of the ruling class. The elections that have occurred since have reinforced the idea that something fundamental has changed in South African society with the advent of a wider democracy. Socialist Worker (9/6/7) reported a worker on a march in Pretoria as saying “We thought the government would feel for us workers because we put them into power, but it’s like they have forgotten about us.” This kind of illusion is constantly being fed by the unions and leftists, who are happy to talk about the ANC’s capitulations to neo-liberalism but never to openly brand it as part of the class enemy.

Prospects for future struggle

In South Africa some commentators have seen the recent strike as a sign that the unions are going to play a more independent role and this will encourage workers to take future actions. In reality it is because of the growing discontent in the working class that unions try to distance themselves from the government. In Socialist Worker (23/6/7) there is the suggestion that the “mood is opening the door to a rebirth of self-activity during strikes.” It’s not clear exactly what is meant by this (written by Claire Ceruti of South Africa’s Keep Left organisation), but all the advocates of union action will be standing against the emergence of workers’ self-activity. Autonomous struggle can only mean that workers have taken charge of their struggle and have control of the direction it takes.

In many ways the most significant aspect of the recent struggles is their location. South African capitalism is the strongest in the continent and has the longest history as an industrialised country. And the history of the workers’ movement goes back into the 19th century.

The recent strike, although significant, is by no means unique in the period since 1994. In August 2005, 100,000 gold miners were on strike over pay. In September 2004 there was the biggest one day strike in South African history, involving either 800,000 workers or 250,000, depending if you believe unions or government. Teachers were particularly angry as they had had no pay review since 1996. In July 2001 there was a wave of strikes in the mining and power industries. In August 2001 there was a three week strike involving 20,000 workers in the car industry. In May 2000 strikes in the mining industry extended into the public sector. In the summer of 1999 there was a wave of strikes involving post office workers, gold miners and public sector workers including teachers, health care workers and others (see WR 227 ‘Workers strike against ANC austerity [63] ’ on our website). Implicitly all these struggles lead workers to come up against the ANC and the South African state. But the working class is only beginning to be aware of the nature of its enemy and the global significance of its struggles. This only emphasises the need for the development of a real revolutionary current in South Africa, capable of denouncing the traps laid down by the bourgeoisie, and of providing a clear orientation for future struggles.

Car 3/7/7.

Can Tony Blair follow the achievement of ‘peace' in Northern Ireland with peace in the Middle East? His retirement as PM and appointment as Middle East envoy for the ‘quartet' of the US, Russia, the EU and the UN, has been accompanied by this idea. Spin, pure spin!

First of all, there is no international community of the great and the good ready to stand as honest brokers for peace, only various imperialist powers out to defend their national interests in the area. The US has been an ally of Israel from way back in the period of the cold war, when the western imperialist bloc was confronted by the Russia imperialist bloc, with the latter using the PLO to harass their rivals in the Middle East. So the collapse of the Russian bloc brought about an important change in the balance of power in the region. The EU and UN both contain various nations with conflicting interests and alliances, but that does not mean they can stand for peace, only that they become an arena for conflicts to be played out diplomatically without for one moment ending the fighting on the ground. For example, in the EU, Britain took the opposite line to France and Germany on the invasion of Iraq in 2003; and in the 1990s Germany backed Croatia and Britain and France backed Serbia in the break up of Yugoslavia.

Secondly, Blair is not seen as any kind of neutral peace-maker. He is liked by Israel, because he is seen as being on their side, and distrusted by Palestinians for the same reason. His refusal to call for a ceasefire last year when Israel invaded Lebanon last year, and his role in the Iraq war, are reason enough for this.

In these aspects we can see a certain similarity with ‘peace-making' in Northern Ireland. The British government, under Blair or anyone else, is not a neutral observer, but defends British interests against the claims for Irish unity for instance. At the moment there is no power with a realistic immediate interest in backing violence at present - for instance as the USA did to punish Britain for taking a more independent foreign policy line - but the underlying conflicts have not gone away (see ‘Ireland: power sharing will not end imperialist conflicts' in WR 303 and ICC website).

Finally, the job of Middle East envoy is very limited and Blair's predecessor, James Wolfensohn, former President of the World bank, resigned from the post in frustration as no progress could be made. This is hardly surprising when the ‘quartet' is made up of powers with conflicting imperialist interests in the region. The brief includes Palestinian governance, economics and security. Nothing about the conflict between Israel and Palestine, so even his official mandate does not include ‘peace-making'.

Alex, 7/7/07

While Tony Blair lends his smile to the job of envoy, the situation in the Middle East has become increasingly complicated with the divisions between Hamas and Fatah in Palestine. Fighting between them has paused since Hamas took control of Gaza and Fatah consolidated in the West Bank. Palestine is now divided politically as well as geographically.

Gaza remains blockaded by Israel, resulting in the closure of 75% of its factories. Cross border fighting continues, with rocket attacks on Israel and military responses from the latter. At the time of writing we are hearing that there has been another Israeli raid on Gaza. By contrast, the government of Mahmoud Abbas, which controls the West Bank, has been rewarded by Israel for replacing the Hamas prime minister. Palestinian duties collected by Israel have now been released, and this has allowed the payment of Palestinian Authority employees for the first time in 16 months. Hamas supporters are not included. Abbas and Fatah are being encouraged, subsidised – and armed – as the alternative to Hamas that the ‘west’ can rely on in Palestine. The prospects of a two-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict could hardly look more absurd when the Palestinian would-be state is so divided.

Hamas is hoping that the kudos it has gained from the release of BBC journalist Alan Johnston will improve its position diplomatically. It has, after all shown that it has control of Gaza and is a force for ‘law and order’ against random kidnappers – as well as winning last year’s Palestinian election. Enemies of Hamas will point to many reasons why it should still be seen as a terrorist organisation. But yesterday’s terrorist is often today’s statesman and the real reason for unease about Hamas lies in the wider conflicts in the Middle East. Hamas is backed by Iran, and therefore by the ‘axis of evil’. Iran is, of course, run by a repressive theocracy and it is trying to develop nuclear weapons. But the US and Britain have backed many repressive regimes and in fact supported Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, when they used his regime to weaken Iran in a ten year war. Their real objection to Iran is that it is has the potential to rival Israel as the dominant regional power in the Middle East, and it is already causing problems for the USA and Britain in their occupation of Iraq through backing Shia gangs like the Mahdi Army of Al Sadr. The Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon last summer was aimed against another Iranian pawn, Hezbollah, and had the tacit support of the USA. The Blair government backed it by refusing to call for a ceasefire.

Iran has been increasing its influence very effectively through aid to Hezbollah and Hamas. However, the main stimulus to its rise came from the weakening of the USA. Although still the world’s only superpower, with massive military advantages over any other country, or even over any other group of countries, it has seen its position gradually weaken. Getting bogged down in Iraq has dramatically worsened this tendency. The US military is now too stretched to contemplate another war on the same scale. Not only that, by effectively knocking Iraq out of the equation it has freed Iran from a major rival and fed its ambitions to rival or even supplant Israel as the most important regional power. Hence the great enmity between them: Iran’s bloodcurdling threats against Israel, and the latter’s attacks on Iran’s pawns in Lebanon and Gaza. So the invasion of Iraq has not only created appalling chaos there, but is greatly intensifying imperialist tensions throughout the region: not only in Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon, but also in Afghanistan where it has stimulated Taliban activity, in Pakistan where the army is involved in more and more clashes with Islamists and in Turkey which is threatening to make a major incursion into Northern Iraq to crush the Kurdish separatists (see ICC Online, ‘Problems of Decadent Capitalism in Turkey’).

Caught in the middle of these imperialist conflicts the populations of the Middle East, in Gaza, Israel and Lebanon as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan, can only expect a worsening of their situation, more raids, more bombs of the aerial or suicide variety. Neither the ‘Road Map’ nor the newly appointed ‘Middle East envoy’ offers any alternative. The only hope lies in the development of the struggle of the working class internationally. This is the only way workers in the ‘west’ can show their solidarity, by defending their own interests against the demands of the national interest. Class struggle is also developing in the Middle East in spite of permanent war and the incessant demands for national unity (see ‘Egypt: germs of the mass strike [65] ’ in WR 304, ‘Middle East: despite war, class struggle continues [44] ’ in WR 302 and ‘Israel/Palestine the proletarian alternative [20] ’ in WR 300, and ICC Online).

Alex 7/7/07.

Continuing our series of articles commemorating the 90th anniversary of the Russian revolution, we are re-publishing an article that first appeared in World Revolution number 13, in August 1977.

Few events in the history of the Russian Revolution have been so falsified by the counter-revolution as the Bolsheviks' sup­posed ‘alliance' with Kerensky's Provisional Government against General Kornilov's insurrection of August 1917.

Kornilov was the commander-in-chief of the Russian Army's South-Western front. As such he was under the command of Kerensky's Provisional Government, the regime which was the product of the February Revolution. Under the growing threat of the Soviets and the Bolshevik Party, Kerensky and Kornilov conspired to forcibly overthrow the Soviets in August. Kornilov, however, decided that Kerensky's democratic government had vaci­llated too much in respect to the Soviets, and had therefore played itself out. As a result Kornilov revised his plans and aimed to overthrow Kerensky in the process of crushing the Soviets.

Purely out of an instinct for survival, yet unable to sense fully the fundamental threat to bourgeois order represented by the Soviets, Kerensky pleaded for their all-out support once he had discovered Kornilov's duplicity. The Provisional Government placed itself in practice at the mercy of the Soviets in Petrograd as a protection against Kornilov. The Soviets dissolved Kornilov's detachment from within in the space of four days. In doing so, the awareness of its own strength, gained by this mass movement of the Soviets against Kornilov's coup, provided the Russian working class with the assurance it needed to smash the Provisional Government itself a few weeks later in October.

Very soon, the Kerenskys of this world, and , when it came to it, the entire world bour­geoisie, were to understand the enormity of the error committed by Kerensky when he opposed Kornilov's coup. He provided the Soviets with the unique opportunity to gain the upper hand in the balance of class forces in Russia by means of their struggle against Kornilov. Never again would factions of the democratic bourgeoisie commit such a blunder in their struggle against the proletariat. That this situation presented itself in such a uniquely favourable manner to the proletariat was partly due to the period (capitalism had just entered its period of permanent crisis in 1914), and partly to the ignorance of the bourgeoisie as to the real danger represented by the armed proletariat. After all, with the exception of the localised case of the Paris Commune in 1871, the workers had never destroyed the bourgeois state before. October 1917 marks also the first time that the prole­tariat held power on a national scale in this period of capitalist decadence.

The extreme left-wing of capital, especially the Trotskyists, have falsified the tactics of Bolshevism during this episode. To some of them like the International Spartacist Tendency, the alleged ‘military support' that Bolshevism is supposed to have given Kerensky against Kornilov's reactionary insurrection' is the single most important ‘lesson' of the Russian Revolution. In its future road to what the Spartacists consider to be working class revolution, if only the proletariat learns how to ‘militarily' support a faction of its class enemy, its own success is assured. Failure to follow this ‘lesson', the proletariat is warned, must result in fascism and rightist repres­sion. The proletariat must at all costs abandon its own class terrain, its own goals, and place itself at the disposal (momentarily of course) of its democratic, leftist executioners because it isn't ‘strong enough' at that point to overthrow them. This counter-revolutionary sophistry, this myth about the ‘alliance' of Bolshevism with Kerensky, is a complete distortion of what actually took place. In effect, this distortion has been the basis for a whole series of mystifications, which have helped defeat the proletariat in the last fifty years of its history.

The tactics of the ‘united front' formulated by the Comintern in 1920-21 under Bolshevik influence depart in many ways from the basic distortions of this experience. Trotsky's writings on Germany (in 1930-34) use the ‘lessons' of the Kornilov coup time and time again to justify his policy of the united front between the two supposed workers' parties in Germany at that time, the Social Democracy and the Stalinists, against Hitler. In Spain in 1936-38, Trot­sky again relies on the same arguments to defend, albeit ‘critically', those twin bastions of the ‘counter-revolution': the Stalinists and the Republic, against Franco,

"The Stalin-Negrin government is a quasi-democratic obstacle on the road to socialism; but it is also an obstacle, not a very reliable or durable one, but an obstacle nonetheless, on the road to fascism" (Trotsky).

He went on to say that if the proletariat ‘aided' in the destruction of the Negrin government, it would only be serving the fascists by doing so. It was necessary instead, Trotsky argued, for the proletar­iat to "find a correct attitude" toward the "hybrid struggle" between the Republic and Franco "in order to transform it from within [!] into a struggle for the prole­tarian dictatorship." In 1939-45, the Trotskyists followed in the footsteps of their mentor to use the same ‘anti-fascist' logic contained in this mystification to rally ‘military support from within' to Allied imperialism for its war effort against the fascist imperialisms.

In other words, the experience of the Kornilov coup has been distorted in such a way as to allow the left of capital to gag the proletariat on innumerable occasions. Today, when the present resurgence of the world proletariat threatens the capitalist order once more, this mysti­fication of the ‘lesser evil' has again come into its own. The events in Chile and Portugal in this decade are a tragic testimony to its effectiveness as a weapon in the bourgeoisie's political arsenal. It is vital, therefore, to examine critically what happened during Kornilov's coup. Did the Bolsheviks really give ‘military' or any other kind of support to Kerensky?

The fundamental issue which is at stake for the proletariat in its examination of this event is the following: can the working class carry out any sort of common action with factions of the bourgeoisie in this epoch of the decay of capitalism? Our answer is a definite NO! "Wherever the proletariat comes out independently the bourgeoisie ceases to be a revolutionary class", Lenin wrote (www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1906/dec/20.htm [66].) If anything confirmed this forever for the proletariat, it was the experience of the Russian Revolution. In order to show how the proletariat did not subordinate its struggle to any alliance with bourgeois democracy, we should first examine in detail the conditions of that period.

Class consciousness and democracy in 1917

The suddenness of the first imperialist war which plunged capitalism into its permanent epoch of decay caused immense confusion in the camp of the proletariat. The sudden passage of the 2nd International to the camp of imperialism in 1914 did not mean that the proletariat abandoned many of the illusions produced in the previous period of reformist struggle. In Russia, these illusions came to the fore immediately after the February 1917 Revolution. To take one example - for years the majority of the Russian revolutionaries thought that Russia would have to pass through a bourgeois democratic stage prior to the socialist revolution. The downfall of Czarism and the eventual coming to power of Kerensky's Provisional Government made many people believe that the ‘bourgeois revolution' was actually taking place. Soviets, stronger and more generalised than those which appeared in 1905, developed side by side with this liberal regime, but many workers still conceived the Soviets to be merely organs of support for it.

The Bolsheviks' call for the establishment of a Constituent Assembly also expressed the very real hesitations and confusions in the workers' movement at that time as to what was on the historical agenda for the working class. That the bourgeois democra­tic stage could not solve any real problems for the workers, soldiers and peasants became more and more apparent as the Pro­visional Government continued the war effort begun by the Czar. Consequently, a deep radicalisation unfolded in Russia, especi­ally in the proletariat, as it came to understand that Kerensky had to be stopped, and that only the Soviets could lead society out of capitalist barbarism. The ‘bourg­eois democratic stage,' had not erased one bit Russia's imperialist nature, and in fact it only tied the Soviets to the war effort of Russia and the Entente imperialisms.

Lenin's April Theses illustrate in a remar­kably clear way the early conviction of the proletariat of the need to overthrow the bourgeois democratic regime. But this sharper understanding within the proletariat, including its communist fractions, was blunted by many incorrect assumptions still carried over from the past struggles of the class before the war. Some of these centred on the conception that the Provi­sional Government initially represented an inevitable stage in the revolution, but that it now had to be exposed because it was ‘betraying' and trampling on the ideals of democracy through its participation in the imperialist war and by defending the most backward strata of Russian capitalism.

The Soviets' initial support for the Pro­visional Government symbolized this confusion concerning the nature of democracy. And this confusion was deeply rooted in the minds of the Russian proletariat as it emerged from years of absolutist rule.

The Bolsheviks could not help but reflect these ambivalent conceptions; it was, after all, a completely new situation for the proletariat as it faced up to the tasks of a new epoch in its historical struggle for communism. After expecting the downfall of Czarism for years, and the establishment of a bourgeois republic, the workers were confronting in the space of weeks and months the new reality of this period. That reality was the complete bankruptcy of bourgeois democracy, and the enormous possibility for proletarian revolution internationally represented by the appearance of the workers' councils in Russia.

In a period of revolutionary upsurge, con­fusions are transcended rapidly and need not be fatal in an immediate sense. The class was, in any case, moving in its autonomous terrain, unifying itself, crea­ting and steeling its organs of struggle. The old Bolshevik slogan of the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peas­antry' was quickly superseded by the need to stress ‘All Power to the Soviets'.

At the same time, the polarisation of political parties became sharper, as they obeyed their true class nature. The final evolution of the Social Revolutionaries (SRs - a radical petty-bourgeois party based on the peasantry), and the Mensheviks, was reaching its consummation. Initially, these parties were at the helm of the Soviets, and indeed one could say that as long as they expressed the hesitations and confu­sions of the classes organized in the Soviets, these parties reflected the heterogeneity within the Soviet camp which by its very nature could only be a temporary phenomenon. By defending and propping up the Provisional Government, however, they more and more revealed which class forces they represented. But even here, their evolution was by no means final - the Left SRs were to support the October Revolution and even participate in the first Soviet government. Equally factions of the Mensheviks either joined Bolshevism prior to the revolution, or participated in the Soviets after October. Overall, the brief support these tendencies gave Soviet power expressed also the proximity of a period in which parties of the radical petty-bourgeoisie had played a progressive role in the evolution of capitalism.

When the Bolsheviks called the leaders of these parties ‘compromisers' or ‘concilia­tors' prior to October, they were ad­dressing a true moment in the life and development of these organisations. At that time, the experience of the proletariat had not given the final verdict as to the class nature of petty-bourgeois ‘conciliation'. The workers still went on seeing these parties as hesitant expressions of ‘popular' and ‘democratic' aspirations in the population at large, different in kind to the proponents of rightist counter-­revolution.

When Kornilov, expressing the impatience and wrath of the bourgeoisie at the vacillations of its ‘compromisers', attempted to crush the Soviets, the workers' and the soldiers' councils reacted as one, although for different reasons. The workers saw the coup as a direct threat to the workers' revolu­tionary goals; the soldiers saw Kornilov as the enemy of democracy, of peace and as the foe of agrarian reform. The coup was there­fore confronted as a danger to the democratic and socialist revolutions. The Bolsheviks, in their mobilization against Kornilov under­took it, not only to defend the workers' councils and the Soviets in general, but as a way to expose such democratic illusions in the Provisional Government, illusions which still held sway in the context of the Russian population as a whole. It is not that the Bolsheviks catered to the democratic illusions of the soldiers and the peasantry for ‘tactical reasons', but that these illusions in democracy revealed the proxi­mity of a bygone-era in the world, and these were lingering confusionsfrom which the Bolsheviks themselves had not escaped entirely. The experience of the proletariat had yet to show that the era of soviet power expressed the fundamental antagonism exis­ting between the soviets and bourgeois democracy, including its most ‘radical' manifestations. The Bolsheviks realised, especially after October, that bourgeois democracy was nothing but a weapon wielded by totalitarian imperialism against the working class.

Indeed, bourgeois democracy was used to the hilt in Germany and Central Europe to mercilessly crush the proletariat. The final test of democracy came for the whole proletariat in those years of 1919-23, when everywhere elections, parliaments, referendums, etc, were used to smother the workers' councils, if not to defeat them in the streets.

The ‘lesser evil' in the Kornilov coup

Among the best accounts of this episode is Trotsky's, contained in his History of the Russian Revolution. We refer the reader to that for details of the event. What we want to raise here are the two most impor­tant questions regarding Kornilov's coup:

1. Did Kerensky's ‘resistance' to the coup express a fundamental affinity of bourgeois democracy with the needs of the proletariat during this epoch? In other words, do the Kerenskys of capital offer the class some­thing which is basically better from what the Kornilovs, the Hitlers, the fascists, i.e. the right of capital, can offer?

2. Did the proletariat defend Kerensky during the coup?

To both these questions the leftists vociferously answer ‘Yes'! For us, the answer is ‘No'!

1. If the Kerenskys of this world - and that includes the unions and other capitalist gangs the Trotskyists call ‘workers parties' - offer something better to the proletariat than the right, the proletarian revolution reduces itself to playing not only the ‘seven keys in the musical scale' as Trotsky said, but an eternal symphony on the theme of the ‘lesser evil'. Given the conditions of capitalist politi­cal decomposition in the crisis, the bourgeoisie will always attempt to produce a left face in an effort to raise proletarian support for capital. This is not only to recruit proletarian cannon fodder to defeat other national capitals, but as a way to crush the proletariat mercilessly from within, and thus defeat the danger of proletarian revolution. The whole history of the proletariat over the last fifty years is a bloody proof of the role of capital's left-wing. From Ebert and Noske to Stalin, Mao and Carrillo, capital can always produce, up to the last minute of its existence, a suitable ‘lesser evil' to attempt to seduce the proletariat from its own struggle into a struggle for capital. On this issue, Lenin and Trotsky provided a profound and corrupting confusion when they dismissed the crimes of the ‘compro­misers' as things the proletariat should not take so seriously, because in Lenin's words, "... for the good of the cause the proletariat will always support not only the vacillating petty-bourgeoisie but also the big bourgeoisie..." (‘On Slogans [57]') He objected to petty-­bourgeois ‘moralising' which would deny proletarian support to the ‘compromisers' against the ‘counter-revolution'. What Lenin and Trotsky never did see clearly was that these ‘compromisers', like Kerensky and Social Democracy, were in fact becoming, if not already, the counter-revolution. They were not the ‘lackeys' of capitalism - they were an essential capitalist weapon to defeat the proletariat. In an optimistic passage in Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder describing the future of communism, Lenin mentions in passing that: "... the Russian Bolsheviks were defeated in July 1917; over 15,000 German communists were killed as a result of the wily provocation and cunning manoeuvres of Scheidemann ,and Noske, who were working hand in glove with the bour­geoisie and the monarchist generals..." He failed to see that the scales of comp­arison were absurd. The ‘defeat' of the July Days in Russia quickly turned into a strengthening of the proletariat. By the end of July the Bolsheviks had recovered their strong influence in the factories and workers' districts in Petrograd. But the German Revolution never recovered politically from its crushing defeat, represented by the loss of more than 15,000 of its best fighters, Luxemburg and Liebknecht included, in 1919. From Kerensky to Noske there had already been a fantastic progression in terms of capital's ability to learn lessons against the class. It is Noske, and later Stalinism, which express in a more finished form the incipient murderous logic of democrats such as Kerensky. It is they who took to comple­tion the job Kerensky was too impotent to do in Russia in 1917. After October, the world bourgeoisie instinctively recog­nized the need to fuse their Kerenskys and Kornilovs into one. In Germany this abominable Frankenstein, this juggernaut which splintered the proletariat and left it lying in the dust, was the German Social Democracy, Noske's party. It was first out into large-scale action with the full backing of the unions and other section of the bourgeoisie in 1918-19. This was the logic of Social Democracy's support for the imperialist war in 1914. In Russia this evolution of the ‘compromisers' became final and evident during the Russian Civil War, when the Social Revolutionaries and Menshevism definitely passed to the side of the White Armies and capitalism.

For the proletariat, relentless opposition to all its executioners isn't a question of ‘morality' or ‘revenge'. It is a question of life and death, of survival against its class enemy, against the class which stands in the way of the communist revolution. All the sophistries of Trotsky in 1932, when he ‘warns' the workers of the imminent rise of Hitler, amount to apolo­gies for the degeneration of the Comintern and those two organisers of German capital, the Social Democracy and the German Commu­nist Party. In China in 1927, as in Spain, it was the Communist Party which openly participated in the demoralisation or in the crushing of the proletariat. Compared with these insidious products of the counter­revolution, Kerensky's actions were like child's play. Never again would such vacillating tendencies appear in the camp of the bourgeoisie.

Seen from hindsight, Kerensky's role in the Russian Revolution appears as an aborted first attempt of capital to deal with the meteoric rise of the workers' councils in the first victorious proletarian revolution of this century. Since then, capital has produced better executioners, such as Stalinism. They do not need to conspire with any Kornilovs to crush the proletariat - Stalinism can itself attempt to accomplish that task with its own police forces and with a bestial cynicism that would even have shocked Kerensky.

The left of capital, including its demo­cratic wings, have proven in this century to be no less murderous than the extreme right. That the Trotskyists cannot see this is not a mistake, or another proof of their stupidity. Every reactionary cause mobilises the cadre that are necessary. Their arguments on the Kornilov question are but another confirmation that Trotskyism organically defends its class, the capital­ist class.

2. The other issue which we will deal with is the myth that the Bolsheviks actually ‘supported' Kerensky against Kornilov. This is not a question of words. The Trotskyists have muddled the whole issue and just because the workers' Red Guards, the soldiers and sailors didn't arrest Kerensky during the coup, they claim that this was ‘military support'. But in order to ‘sup­port' something there must be something there in the first place to support. All evidence shows that the main, if not all, the thrust of the resistance to the coup came from the soviets, not from the few detachments still loyal to Kerensky. De­tachments it should be noted which were intensely demoralised. The workers were not interested in defending Kerensky and the Provisional Government. They correctly saw the coup as the attempt of the counter-­revolution to crush the Soviets. Many years later Trotsky affirmed that the Bolsheviks had an ‘alliance' with the Ker­ensky troops fighting Kornilov (which troops in the vicinity of Petrograd weren't subordinated to the Soviets?). He even said that the Bolsheviks ‘accepted the official command' of Kerensky as long as they were not sufficiently strong to overthrow him (again a formal truism which in this context becomes a lie). Trotsky also asserted later that the Bolsheviks did not remain ‘neutral' between the camp of Kerensky and that of Kornilov; and that they fought ‘in the first camp' against the second. This is a flagrant lie, a sad aspect of Trotsky's own degeneration as a revolutionary. His literary acrobatics, written in the middle and late 30s, distort his own brilliant account of the episode in his History.

By insisting hysterically that workers should not ‘abstain' or be ‘neutral' during inter-bourgeois conflicts, the Trotskyists, following in their master's footsteps, terrorise the class in order to place it solidly behind the ‘first camp' of the bourgeoisie. But this never happened during Kornilov's coup. When the Soviets fought Kornilov, they were doing so from their own terrain, under the hegemony of the revolutionary proletariat. The prole­tariat was becoming convinced of the need for its own class dictatorship. This auto­nomous awareness was not blunted by the Soviets calling for the defence of ‘democracy', which reflected in that speci­fic historic conjuncture the ideological weight of other, non-capitalist classes increasingly alienated from the bourgeoisie and Kerensky.

If the Bolsheviks showed certain confusions in their formulations on whether Kerensky should be overthrown then, these confusions stem not only from agitational expediency but from the immaturity of the proletariat in that period. They did not stem from any opportunist strategy. Only later were these ambiguities ‘theorised' and made into sacred laws for the whole workers' move­ment to follow, especially from 1920 on­wards, when Soviet Russia was becoming more and more isolated from the world proletariat, and these pressures inevitably brought demoralisation and political capi­tulation to the bourgeoisie. The ‘lessons' of the Kornilov event were thus fabricated after the fact to provide a support for the Comintern's policy of united fronts, a policy of betrayal and compromises with the bourgeoisie on the world arena.

In 1917, the proletariat steeled itself during its struggle against Kornilov - it felt that the resistance against an insurgent general could be successful, whereas after the retreat of the July Days the prole­tariat was wary of the consequences of another premature confrontation with the state. To fight Kornilov was a decisive test for the proletariat and Bolshevism throughout Russia. The class passed the test splendidly and was soon to use its increased confidence in the October insurrection. But nobody spoke at the time of ‘military blocs' with Kerensky as the Trotskyists do today.

What Lenin feared was precisely the ‘theorisation' of support for Kerensky, or passivity in front of Kornilov's move against the Soviets. If Kerensky seemed to have no base at all in Petrograd during those days this didn't mean however that his power was totally spent in the country­side or the Army. The Bolsheviks sensed that although Kerensky was almost fin­ished, his role had yet to be played out inside the Soviets. By understanding this, Bolshevism, which was still in the process of winning the majority in the Soviets, used the time to build up its forces for the final confrontation. As we have said, the Soviets in fact dissolved Kornilov's attempted coup on their own. During the Kornilov coup Kerensky's regime became a caretaker government, but it was necessary for the proletariat to go through the re­ality of the experience to grasp what the situation was. The proletariat had no intentions of repeating the unplanned insurrection of the July Days. It needed the test of events to realise that the situation in the main centres had finally shifted in its favour - that the soldiers and peasants supported the transfer of power to the Soviets.

Soon after Kornilov's coup was defeated, the Russian Army suffered fresh defeats in its last offensives against Germany; for a while it appeared that the German Army could take Petrograd. In this context, it is revealing to see how even the threat of the ‘German Kornilovists' did not result in Bolshevik calls for ‘military support' for the Kerensky regime in its war effort against Germany. According to the Trotskyist logic, this should have been the case. On the contrary, Lenin never proposed to defend Kerensky even after the fall of Riga had made a German advance towards Petrograd an enormous danger. In a letter to the Central Committee (September 1917), he wrote: "We must take power now because the impending surrender of Peter will make our chances a hundred times worse."

He also stressed that while Kerensky and Co. headed the Army, it was not in the power of the Bolsheviks to prevent Petrograd's surrender. Moreover, Lenin went on to in­sist that as long as the proletariat was in power, the Bolsheviks would continue to be defeatists, not ‘defencists', even if this meant that their chances for an insurrection would be made a ‘hundred times worse'. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/aug/30.htm [67]

Conclusion

The proletariat's position of course can never be ‘neutral' when confronted with onslaughts by the bourgeoisie. It must take the offensive by generalising its struggles; it must prepare its forces to destroy all factions of capital without ever leaving its own terrain ‘militarily' or ‘technically' to support one gang of capitalist butchers against another.

The whole epoch opened up in 1917 has deepened these fundamental lessons for the proletariat. Furthermore, history will never again see the same constellation of forces that appeared in Russia in 1917. The actors have changed fundamentally - the ‘compromisers' have become capitalist executioners everywhere and the proletariat has also had ample time to reflect upon its own terrible defeat and illusions which allowed it to happen. It will no doubt in the coming revolutionary wave tend to climb to heights never seen before in the last revolutionary period, precisely because its experience in the intervening half century has taught it much about bourgeois democracy.

The mystifications about the Kornilov coup are just another pack of lies the proletar­iat will have to dispel in practice, in the merciless struggle waged by the workers' councils against all capitalist factions, left and right. This is the real lesson of the proletariat's resistance to the Kornilov coup, a lesson of intransigence and self-activity which will never be erased by the word-juggling of the counter-revolution.

Nodens (August 1977)

We would like to inform our readers about the creation of an ICC nucleus in Brazil. This will contribute significantly to the development of the political presence of our organisation in the most important country in Latin America – a country which has the biggest industrial concentrations in this region and some of the biggest internationally. There also exists in this country a milieu of proletarian political groups and of elements drawn towards revolutionary positions. We have already mentioned in our press and on our website in Portuguese about the Workers’ Opposition (OpOp), including the following events: the holding of joint public meetings and the publication of a common statement on the social situation; the publication on our Portuguese language site of an account of a debate between our two organisations on historical materialism; and texts by the OpOp which we consider to be of particular interest. As an expression of this mutual interest, OpOp also participated in the work of the 17th Congress of our section in France and the 17th International Congress.

In Sao Paulo there is also a group in formation, influenced by the positions of the communist left. We have recently established regular political relations with this group, including joint public meetings.

We obviously hope that our collaboration with these groups will be increasingly close and fruitful. This perspective is not at all in contradiction with our aim of developing the specific political presence of the ICC in Brazil. On the contrary, our permanent presence in this country will make it possible to strengthen the collaboration between our organisations, all the more so because between our nucleus and the OpOp there is already a long shared history, based on mutual respect and confidence.

The creation of our nucleus is the concretisation of work that the ICC began over 15 years ago. This work has intensified in recent years through the contacts we have made with different groups and elements, and through the holding of public meetings in different cities, some of which – those held in the universities- have been extremely well attended. For us this is not the end of a process but a significant step in the development of the positions of the communist left on the South American continent. Far from being a Brazilian exception, this event is part of the same phenomenon of the appearance of groups all over the world, which is the product of the revival of struggles on a world scale and of the tendency of the working class to give rise to revolutionary minorities.

ICC June 07.

Global warming is more and more a headline issue. In February Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) met in Paris. They announced that the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, was "very likely" the cause of global warming. Before that announcement they had been more cautious in their level of certainty. In the report published they estimated that world temperature rises would be between 2 and 4 degrees centigrade by 2100. This makes it the fastest temperature rise in so short a period that the world has seen.

Working Group II met in Brussels in April to discuss the possible implications for the planet. Unsurprisingly it wasn't great news. Floods, drought, extreme weather, species extinction were all featured in this catastrophe. The worst-case scenario could see humanity itself disappear as planetary conditions become impossible.

At the end of April, in Bangkok, the 120 national delegates of the third working group of the IPCC met to look for solutions. Ogunlade Davidson, the co-chair, promised that "solutions are possible and can be achieved at a reasonable cost". Hurrah! The world is saved in the nick of time. We are told that capitalism can save the planet and make a good profit doing it at the same time. A miracle!

What are these miraculous solutions? IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri invites us to look to the example of former US President Jimmy Carter who in the 1970s recommended everyone should lower the heating in winter and wear a pullover. He did not forget to congratulate the Japanese Prime Minister who has called on executives to forgo their ties so that air conditioning could be lowered. Mr Pachauri also recommends vegetarianism to reduce emissions from cattle. So the solution is to wear a pullover in the winter, take off your tie in the summer and become a vegetarian?

Of course the IPCC makes more "serious" suggestions, including the development of non-polluting energy sources (wind, solar), buildings becoming more energy efficient, a move from road transport to rail and waterway, collection and sequestration of CO2 etc.

There is one thing nagging the conscience of the bourgeoisie: how much will this all cost? The IPCC are eager to dispel fears, claiming that stabilisation of CO2 at today's levels by 2030 would only require a reduction of 0.1 % in annual growth. A drop in the ocean, but maybe a drop too many. Stephen Singer of the World Wide Fund for Nature said that no government would act if it felt its economy would be harmed. James Connaughton (head of the White House Council on Environment Quality) said that measures recommended at the conference "represent an extremely high cost" even "involving a recession". Jacques Chirac, even though a keen supporter of the findings, said that the cost would be "considerable".

In the capitalist world for a nation to finance the reductions in CO2 and make its economy "clean" means to be swept aside by its rivals in the world market. Who will jump first? Obviously nobody.

It can come as no surprise that the G8 meeting in Germany produced so little to solve global warming. Despite Tony Blair's optimism there was no more than a vague intent to act sometime in the future, but not now. The only "solution" that is posed is at the individual level with "what you can do to save the planet" campaigns.

As we said in the International Review issue 129:

"The constant eco-message from the governments is that "saving the planet is everyone's responsibility" when the vast majority is deprived of any political or economic power and control over production and consumption, over what and how things are produced. And the bourgeoisie, which does have power in these decisions, has even less intention than ever in satisfying human and ecological needs at the expense of profit" (‘Twin Track to Capitalist Oblivion [69] ').

Capitalism can offer humanity no solution to the problems it has caused, and this is becoming more and more evident. But this raises the question: what is the real solution? And here lies a source of hope, because the dead-end reached by the capitalist mode of production is a powerful argument in favour of destroying capitalism and installing a new mode of production, a higher form of social organisation where production is geared not towards the insane ‘growth' of capital but the rational needs of man.

Ash 6/7/7.

Planning is not just a matter of cleaning up and rebuilding, it is also a question of taking precautions against future disasters. The Sunday Times (1/7/07) reported that the government's current spending review, to be published in the autumn, envisages "our resource settlement over the next three years will be flat cash in line with our current 2007-08 baseline (a real-time reduction in funding) with any growth limited to capital investment". This would be entirely in line with the US state's failure to maintain the levees needed to protect New Orleans (see ‘Hurricane Katrina: a capitalist-made crisis', ICC Online). Ministerial denials about a cut in spending do not absolve capitalism from its responsibility for exacerbating the risk of flooding. There has been a surge in house building on flood plains since 1945, in spite of the worst flooding on record which took place in 1947 - due to the melting of thick snow on that occasion, rather than heavy rainfall. 1.7 million homes are at risk because of this. Even after the Environment Agency started objecting to house-building proposals for flood plains, 20% were still allowed and 160,000 homes are planned for the Thames estuary.

Alongside all the talk of the limiting carbon emissions and climate change, there are those who talk about the need to adapt to whatever level of global warming we face. The response to the floods in Britain today, like the response to Hurricane Katrina in the USA, or the Asian tsunami, show that capitalism cannot be trusted with that adaptation. As far as our rulers are concerned the poor and the working class can be left to rot, and the future sacrificed in the hope of short term profitability.

Alex 7/7/7.

During the summer there was no break for the class struggle. In Britain, strikes by postal workers, on the London underground and in the public sector expressed a growing discontent within the working class. In the post office 50,000 jobs have gone in recent years and now another 40,000 are threatened. On the tube, following the collapse of Metronet, there are threats to both jobs and conditions. These are the reasons workers struggle: to fight against attacks on their working and living conditions.

There will be no let up in these attacks because of the state of the capitalist economy. Its crisis is worsening and compelling the ruling class everywhere to do everything to cut costs, regardless of its impact on workers.

The economic crisis is international and so is the struggle of the working class.

In the last issue of WR, for example, we recorded how in South Africa in June the working class mounted the biggest strike there since the end of apartheid in 1994. During July and August the struggles continued. There was an unofficial strike in Durban during the building of one of the stadiums for the 2010 World Cup. There have been strikes by car workers, by miners, in a range of manufacturing industries, by health workers and metal workers. Many petrol stations were closed down as a result of a strike in the fuel sector. At two platinum mines 3250 workers were dismissed following an unofficial strike in which workers from one company came out in solidarity with those from another (the unions subsequently helping one of the companies recruit to replace those sacked). In a series of actions in July there were strikes in the six tyre-manufacturing plants of Dunlop, Goodyear, Bridgestone and Continental.

These are only some representative examples of the development of recent workers' struggles in South Africa. The scale might not be typical, but they are definitely part of the international recovery of the class struggle that has been underway since 2003.

Earlier on this year (WR 302, 304) we wrote about the wave of illegal strikes that swept a number of sectors of Egyptian industry. For a country that is supposed to be one of the economic success stories of the Middle East, there is a remarkable amount of enduring discontent and already a developing understanding of the need for class solidarity across the divisions of trade and enterprise. There were also attempts to crush the movement by force.

In Latin America struggles have also been developing. In Mexico it was reported that strikes had hit 3715 enterprises in the first 6 months of this year, the highest figure in 15 years. In Peru during the spring there was an indefinite nation-wide strike of coal miners - the first in 20 years. This was followed soon afterwards by a nation-wide teachers' strike. In Argentina during May and June, Buenos Aires metro workers held general assemblies and organised a strike against a pay ‘deal' concocted by their own union. In Brazil in March this year 120 air traffic controllers, in reaction to the dangerous state of air travel in the country and the threat to imprison 16 of their number for striking, stopped work, paralysing 49 of the country's 67 airports. This action was particularly remarkable because this sector is mostly subject to military discipline. The workers nevertheless resisted the intense pressure of the state up to and including denigration by the supposed friend of the workers - President Lula himself. The warnings by the controllers about safety in Brazilian airports were tragically confirmed in July by the disaster at Sao Paulo airport that cost nearly 200 lives.

Also in Brazil, for several weeks in June, a widespread strike movement affected the steel sector, the public sector, and universities - the most important class movement in this country since 1986.

Workers are also struggling in the richest countries

Of course a cynic might say that it's inevitable that in the ‘developing' world, where the poorest countries have lost out to the major powers of Europe, Japan and the US, it's easy to see why workers will struggle, while questioning the tendency of the struggle to develop in the countries with the strongest economies. It would be mistaken to view the situation in this way. Just a glance at the most recent examples of the class struggle in Europe gives us plenty of demonstrations of the direction things are going.

In early July at Oostakker in Belgium, there was an unofficial strike at a Volvo factory during a pay dispute, with workers walking out while the unions continued ‘negotiations' for an improved offer. Also in Belgium at the Opel plant in Antwerp there has been a whole series of strikes and protests (many of them unofficial) against the massive loss of jobs that will result from a major re-organisation.

In Spain, during April, there was a demonstration of 40,000 workers from all the enterprises in the Bay of Cadiz, expressing their solidarity in struggle with those sacked at Delphi. In May there was an even bigger movement that mobilised workers from other provinces of Andalusia. This movement of solidarity was result of the active search for support by the Delphi workers, of their families and notably their wives who organised in a collective to win the widest possible solidarity.

At about the same time spontaneous walkouts, outside of union control, took place at Airbus plants in several European countries to protest against the company's austerity plan. These strikes often involved young workers, a new generation that has already played a very active part in these struggles. In Nantes and Saint-Nazaire in France there was a real will to develop active solidarity with the striking production workers of Toulouse.

In Germany there was a series of strikes over six weeks by 50,000 Telecom workers. There have also been numerous wildcat strikes by Italian airport workers and others.

And the USA has not been immune from struggle, despite its continuing reputation for having the highest productivity in the world. As it says in a major article in Internationalism 143 (publication of our section in the US) "The working class in the US has been totally part of this resurgence. As in other countries workers in the US have been pushed by the relentless attacks on their working and living conditions by a capitalist system mired in a permanent economic crisis, to defend themselves and leave behind the period of disorientation characteristic of the decade of the 90's. As we have pointed out in our press the high point of this trend was the three-day strike by New York City transit workers over the holiday season in December 2005. However this was not an isolated incident but rather the clearest manifestation of a tendency of the class to come back to the path of the struggle as seen in the grocery worker' struggle in California in 2004 and the struggles at Boeing, North West Airlines and Philadelphia transit in 2005. This same tendency to return to the path of the struggle continued in 2006, as expressed in particular by the two-week teachers' wildcat strike in Detroit in September and the walkout by more than 12,000 workers at 16 Goodyear Tire & Rubber plants in the US and Canada in October of the same year."

The article also reminds us of the central characteristics of the current phase of the class struggle:

"The emergence of a new generation of workers facing for the first time its class enemy.

The posing of the question of class solidarity both within the class as a whole and between the generations of workers.

The recovery of the historic methods and forms of struggle of the working class - mass assemblies, the mass strike.

A growing consciousness of the stakes contained in the present historical situation."

The ruling class responds with violence, threats and lies

We cannot talk about the struggle of the working class without looking at the response of the bosses, the bourgeoisie, and the capitalist states, all intensely alive to the threat of the class struggle. And here there are some differences between the responses in different countries.

In Guinea, for example, during January and February there was a strike movement that gripped the whole country in a struggle against starvation wages and food price inflation. Against this movement there was bloody repression that left over 100 people dead. In Mozambique, in July there was an unofficial strike of 4000 cane cutters. When security guards fired on their picket line one died and others were seriously hurt. In South Africa police recently fired rubber bullets at a picket line at a platinum mine. In Korea, throughout a series of sit-ins at an E.Land hypermarket chain over several weeks, there have been a number of attacks by thousands of riot police to drag workers away, often beating them up. Repression is a basic response from the ruling class to workers' struggles.

In the face of all the propaganda about the Chinese economic ‘miracle', it is important to remember that this has been accompanied by workers' struggles and that the Chinese bourgeoisie often resorts to violence. A recent report from libcom for example reports: "800 striking miners at the Tanjiashan Coal Mine in Hubei Province fought hired security guards for two hours last week after they attempted to break a six day strike. Radio Free Asia reported that the security guards set about the workers and in the ensuing clash at least one worker and one security guard died."

Apart from straightforward violent repression, there are other ways in which the state attacks workers and their struggles. For example, in Zimbabwe, because of sky-high inflation, Mugabe's government has introduced a freeze on salaries, wages, rents, service charges, prices and school fees. According to Reuters "More than 7,500 business people have been arrested and fined for breaching price controls" and Mugabe "has accused some businesses of raising prices as part of what he calls a Western plot to oust him". So, while wages are frozen, and real inflation continues in the informal economy regardless of the official cost of commodities, Mugabe makes a show of ‘curbing' those who raise prices and says the whole thing is nothing to do with the state of the economy but is a all a plot by foreigners, thereby fuelling anti-working class nationalism.

This might sound crude, but the bourgeoisies of the most developed nations are quite capable of making direct threats or resorting to blackmail. In France, for example the election of Sarkozy has brought in a campaign for the country to change its ways and follow the ruthless approach of Anglo-American capitalism. Or, in the US, General Motors and Ford, both wanting to massively cut costs, have threatened that production could easily be moved from the US to somewhere like Mexico or Thailand, where workers are paid significantly less.

But while repression shows the true face of capitalism, and thinly veiled threats can still be quite brutal in their implications, they are not the only weapons our exploiters have at their disposal. Most dangerous of all are the slogans of the left and the unions. They speak openly of struggle, but in union campaigns. They say that we must fight, but for something like nationalisations. This summer's strikes by postal workers showed what we all have to face. The left and the unions shouted about the dangers of privatisation, yet all the attacks have been undertaken by the nationalised Royal Mail. In the event of an election they will be vehemently against the Tories getting back, which effectively means agreeing to the return of the Labour government of the last ten years. And as the crisis-ridden reality of the economy becomes impossible to hide they will all demand increasing state intervention in every aspect of social life.

When we look to the best of the struggles since 2003, we can see that the working class is only strong when it fights for its own interests, with its own methods, and for its own goals. Whether facing open state violence, or the more subtle sabotage of the left and unions inside the struggle, the necessity remains for the workers to organise themselves as a social force in its own right, independent from the unions and parties which are no more than agents of the capitalist state.

WR 6/9/7 (Based partly on an article in International Review 130)

In response to the recent postal dispute and the looming conflicts in other parts of the public sector, a number of people involved in the libcom.org discussion forum, most of them public sector workers, have produced a bulletin - Dispatch - putting forward the need for the postal workers to control the struggle and link up with other sectors. We think that this is a significant development, whatever the outcome of the postal dispute which has been ‘suspended' by the unions.

The article that follows was posted on our website in August as a contribution to the discussion about this initiative. The response from the main animators of the group was largely positive, agreeing with some of our criticisms of the bulletin, in particular the need to give greater emphasis to the call for mass meetings to control the struggle. The discussion on the bulletin can be found on this thread on libcom.org [71] (and the PDF copy of the bulletin is attached to this article). Some of the posts, although sharing most of our views on the need for independence from the trade unions, expressed the view that the ICC was reading too much into this initiative - that it was basically no more or less than an effort by a small group of politicised elements and didn't represent any wider trend towards the formation of workers' groups or struggle committees. It's true that the bulletin came out towards the end of (this phase of) the postal dispute and, as a result, its intervention in the strike was posed mainly at the level of its potential. It remains to be seen whether this kind of initiative can play a significant part in future class movements. But given that we are entering a period of revival in the class struggle, we should certainly not dismiss the possibility that an initiative like Dispatch could act as a real focus for a considerable number of elements (whether ‘politicos' or ‘militant workers'- in fact the distinction is far from absolute) who want to get together to discuss how the struggle can break through the union blockade, and to actively contribute towards this happening.

Workers' groups in the recent history of the workers' movement

During the widespread strikes and class movements of the 1970s and 1980s, one sign of a real development of class consciousness - of an awareness within the working class that it is a distinct social force that needs to struggle for its own interests against those of capitalism - was the appearance in a whole number of countries of groups of militant workers who came together to actively influence the direction of the struggle. In general, these workers' groups or ‘struggle committees' were a response to the growing realisation that the ‘official' representatives of the workers - the trade unions - were not representing them at all, and that to take the struggle forward it was necessary to organise independently.

In some cases, especially in the ‘70s, these groupings were the residue of previous movements where the workers had elected strike committees and other coordinating bodies during the course of the struggle. Very often these groupings started with the misconception that it was possible to keep these organs alive in the absence of general assemblies and the active mobilisation of the workers, and that the militant workers' group could put itself forward as a rival form of representation to the union. Invariably these efforts failed, very often ending up with the militants becoming a new kind of trade union, acting ‘on behalf' of the workers and stifling their initiative. This was the case with many of the ‘base committees' in Italy for example.[1]

In the ‘80s, on the other hand, many of the workers' groups that appeared in and across different sectors (e.g. among health workers, education and postal workers in France and the UK) avoided this error. Rather than seeing themselves as a rival trade union, they understood that they were only a minority, and that their essential role was to act on the more general class movement. Depending on whether or not that movement was latent or open, rising or retreating, they could play a positive role by:

• acting as a focus for discussion about the lessons of past struggles and the prospects for future ones,
• reating links between militant workers in different sectors,
• intervening as a group in the workplace, in mass meetings, strikes and demonstrations,
• producing leaflets and bulletins advocating the most effective methods for the struggle.

These methods can be summarised as: self-organisation and extension. Self-organisation means that struggles are controlled by the workers' themselves, primarily through general assemblies and commissions elected by and responsible to the assemblies. Extension means spreading the struggle beyond a particular workplace or sector, going directly to other workers and calling them to express their solidarity, above all by adopting common demands and joining the movement.

History moves on - forms of discussion develop

During the long retreat in class struggle in the ‘90s, there was not much sign of such struggle committees. But since around 2003, we have seen a general revival in the international class struggle, sometimes taking the form of massive protests against attacks on jobs, conditions, pensions, etc, sometimes of expressions of solidarity between different groups of workers, sometimes of wildcat strikes, sometimes of general assemblies like those last year in the anti-CPE movement in France and the steelworkers' struggle in Vigo, Spain. In these circumstances, we can expect to see the re-emergence of militant minorities of workers seeking to push the movement towards higher levels of autonomy and unity.

Another development since the ‘80s has been the spectacular growth of the internet as a means of communication. Conceived as an adjunct to the war economy, and hailed as a miraculous new opportunity for finding new commercial outlets, the internet has also brought advantages for the proletarian movement, making it possible to develop all kinds of contacts that were closed off or extremely difficult and time-consuming in the past. The appearance of internet discussion forums like libcom.org, where there is a continual discussion of themes and problems relevant to the class struggle, is a clear example[2], but its appearance obeys something more than a technological breakthrough. Rather it is one expression of a new generation of proletarians which - not unlike the ‘generation of 68' - is seeking to renew its links with the revolutionary traditions of the past and to contribute to the emerging class struggle.

‘Dispatch' opens up possibilities for a much wider intervention

Given this background, it is not surprising that we are now seeing the formation of a group, comparable to the struggle committees of the ‘80s, which has been formed by elements active in the libcom.org [72] discussion forum. During the current postal strike in Britain, we saw the first edition of a two-sided bulletin/leaflet called Dispatch, subtitled ‘Public pay dispute - information for action'[3]. It announces itself as the product of "a group of workers who are interested in discussing and co-ordinating a response to the ongoing public sector pay disputes. We believe the key to winning is to unite the disputes, fight together and for workers ourselves to control the struggle. We work in several different sectors, including the postal service, NHS, education and local government and all use the website libcom.org".

The bulletin contains a number of different short items: information and advise about the work-to-rule that is accompanying the strike; information about wildcat strikes in the postal service during the course of the ‘official' dispute; information about incipient or current struggles in the rest of the public sector as well as in the private sector; dates of the union's programme for ‘rolling strikes'; a call for workers to discuss the strike online and at mass meetings; and a longer piece by a postal worker reflecting on the prospects for the struggle.

In our opinion, the appearance of this group is a very positive and promising development. It opens up possibilities for a much wider intervention, because numerous elements who post on libcom.org, but who are not necessarily directly involved in the bulletin, have expressed support for its aims and have offered to help distribute it in their towns or sectors. It creates a focus for debate about concrete struggles and the role of militant workers within them, and also for common activity and direct physical discussion among groups and individuals who share the basic aims of the bulletin.

We would not expect a bulletin of this nature to have the same level of political coherence as a communist political organisation, and in any case if it is to function as a focus for debate it is important that it remains open to different points of view. Nonetheless we can make certain criticisms of the way the ideas in the bulletin are presented. The title Dispatch and the logo of a postal worker give the impression that this is something specifically for postal workers, when the stated aims of the bulletin are wider than that (although we have been informed that the title and logo will both change when the bulletin concentrates on other sectors). There is a small item about the need for mass meetings, but we think this is not given anything like the weight it deserves. Instead the ‘lead' article is about the work-to-rule and the need to maintain it, but as we have already seen, if workers do not pose the question of ‘who controls the struggle?', they will have little protection from the kind of union manoeuvres which resulted in the suspension of the strike by the CWU the moment it felt that the local wildcats were becoming a threat to its ‘management' of the dispute. The emphasis on the work-to-rule also serves to downplay the central importance of the struggle spreading beyond the postal sector if it is to have any real impact on the plans of the bourgeoisie.

These are offered as constructive criticisms; in any case, this is necessarily an experimental process and requires a very wide-ranging debate about the best way to present the bulletin and develop its role. This discussion will obviously continue online, but we also think it would be particularly helpful to develop the discussion through physical meetings. We think that the group could think of calling such a meeting in the near future. They are also more than welcome to make use of our next public forum in London, which will concentrate on the current struggles in Britain and elsewhere.

WR, 18/08/07.

[1] The lessons of this period were analysed in more detail in the article ‘The organisation of the proletariat outside periods of open struggle (workers' groups, nuclei, circles, committees) [73]' in International Review 21.

[2] It is also interesting to note the appearance of the royalmailchat.co.uk forum where postal workers themselves have been discussing the recent industrial action, while on YouTube they have been posting videos and songs about the dispute. See www.youtube.com/CWUposties [74]. The working class is increasingly using the internet to express its creativity.

[3] See https://libcom.org/article/dispatch-1-royal-mail-strikes-august-2007 [75]

For weeks now the financial markets have been in turmoil and equity prices have fallen steeply. Bourses across the world have taken big hits, but it's not just private equity that's been affected. All the major banks have been affected by losses and bad debts and, at the time of writing, the problems are spreading from ‘leveraged (credit based) buy-outs‘', hedge funds (obscure and complex gambling based on debt) into high-grade corporate bonds normally seen as ‘safe havens'. There is a long way for this particular phase of the economic crisis to go yet. For the last ten or twenty years, workers in all the richest capitalist countries have been told how well, how strong, how resilient the economy is. What's happening? Why have billions been wiped off stock market values? Why are the major national banks injecting hundreds of billions into their national economies (with amounts described as "unprecedented" in The Guardian)? Where have these sudden problems come from? These problems are neither sudden nor transitory but are rather systemic to a capitalism in decay and have been so for over a century now. They don't show a ‘strong economy‘', even a ‘liberal economy‘', but a crisis of the state capitalist economy.

Over a month ago, the bourgeoisie told us, with the matey economic language and personalities that they use on such occasions, that the problem was "sub-prime lending in the US housing market", that is to say, the riskier end of mortgage lending to people with poor credit ratings. Then it was that equity markets were overvalued - an element of obvious truth in both cases. Two weeks later, and the scribblers were telling us what a good thing it all was; it was ‘positive‘' that dodgy lending had been curtailed, the fall in the market was ‘a necessary correction‘' and now we can get back to normal. The International Monetary Fund, equally whistling in the dark, said last month that the crisis was "manageable" and that "the fundamentals supporting global growth remain in place"(The Guardian 15/8/7). There's nothing so stupid as a bourgeois economist[1], because they are the spokespeople of an economic system that is fundamentally irrational and fundamentally bankrupt.

Here in Britain, Gordon Brown has been elected Prime Minister on the back of a so-called ‘strong economy‘', but Britain, like all economies, is subject to the crisis of endebtment. Sub-prime borrowing in the UK has grown 28% in recent years and is measured in tens of billions of pounds. Insolvencies are up 25% and house repossessions are at an eight year high. Over the last 10 years, UK debt - mortgages, overdrafts and credit cards - has risen to up £1345 billion pounds. That figure is now sailing past GDP, and bear in mind that GDP itself is not all real production, but includes such amounts as payments for the police, prison officers, armed forces and other such parasitic elements of the unproductive sector. And also bear in mind that 85% of this amount, £1.15 trillion, of British debt is secured against property prices, which themselves are part of a fictitious bubble. Such amounts make the UKLtd. "technically bankrupt", according to Stephan Gifford, Grant Thorton's chief economist (Guardian, 23/8/7).

Sub-prime borrowing or stock markets are not the cause of this crisis - they are just particular and secondary expressions of it. They tried to tell us similar lies in the 2001/2 recession which was supposed to be due to 9/11, whereas economic activity was severely weakening a year before with the collapse of the speculative IT bubble[2]. And likewise for the five major previous recessions going back to the mid 1960s, which were all supposed to have specific, particular, external causes. But all six recessions have a common cause, as symptoms of the fundamental crisis of capitalism - its overproduction, relative to what can be purchased, its lack of solvent markets - and all six recessions have tended to be longer and deeper than the previous one (see ‘The descent into the abyss‘', International Review no. 121, Spring, 2005). In the same article we read how the US economy, the world's economic locomotive, lives on credit from the rest of the world because the countries that receive an excess of dollars from their trade surpluses with the USA invest them on the money markets. Gross US debt to the rest of the world has increased by a factor of 4 from 1980 to 2003, and the net debt of the US to the rest of the world has gone from negative in 1985 to a positive (negative for the US economy) of 40% in the same period. The expansion of credit and debt, a deliberate policy of state capitalism from the mid-eighties, has only increased the fragility and fundamental weakness of the capitalist economy overall and has become essential for the day-to-day running of capitalism. But the bourgeoisie are not omnipotent and in control of their economy; capitalism is a blind and irrational economic system. The best that the bourgeoisie can do is try to manage the deepening crisis, to attenuate its worst effects; and this is becoming increasingly difficult with vast amounts of fictitious capital washing around the system, much of it hidden from view. This task is made even more difficult as each nation state tries to protect its position at the trough or spoil it for others. Thus we have already seen tensions mounting between the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England over current ‘interventions'. Overall, this particular expression of the economic crisis, this ‘turmoil', is pointing to a new recession and the consequences for the world economy - including the ‘economic miracles' of China and India - are dire. This is not ‘the same old thing' and then ‘we can get back to normal', as the bourgeoisie tell us. On the contrary, the working class will suffer. Across the industrial world hundreds of thousands of workers and their families are already losing their homes (and still have a lifetime's debt). Pensions funds will be hard hit, factories will close and jobs will be lost, prices will rise, as will taxes, and the social wage will be cut further and faster. And everywhere, absolute pauperisation will increase.

While the last 30 years has seen a massive and unsustainable swelling of credit and debt - and this in itself shows the extension and also the weakening of state capitalism. The recourse to fictitious capital has long been a policy of capitalism in crisis. Trotsky, who himself was very clear about the decadence of the capitalist mode of production early on last century, wrote in the ‘Report on the economic crisis' to the Third Congress of the Communist International: "Capitalism as an economic system is, you know, full of contradictions. During the war years these contradictions have reached monstrous proportions. To obtain the resources required for war, the state resorted primarily to two measures: first, issuance of paper money; second, flotation of loans. Thus an ever-increasing amount of the so-called ‘valuable paper‘' (securities) entered into circulation, as the means whereby the state pumped real material values out of the country in order to destroy them in the war. The greater the sums expended by the state, i.e. the more real values it destroyed, the larger the amount of pseudo-wealth, of fictitious values accumulated in the country. State-loan paper has piled up mountain-high. Superficially it might seem that a country had grown extremely rich, but in reality the ground was being cut under the economic foundation, shaking it apart, bringing it to the verge of collapse. State debts have climbed to approximately 1,000 billion gold marks, which adds up to 62% of the present national wealth of the belligerent countries. Before the war, the world total of paper and credit money approximated 28 billion gold marks, today the amount is between 220 and 280 billion, i.e. ten times as much. And this of course, does not include Russia, for we are discussing only the capitalist world. All this applies primarily, if not exclusively, to European countries, mainly continental Europe.... Becoming encased in every-thicker layers of paper values, or what is known as fictitious capital. This fictitious capital-paper currency, treasury notes, war bonds, bank notes and so on - represent either mementoes of deceased capital or expectations of capital yet to come. But at the present time they are in no way commensurate to genuine existing capital. However, they function as capital and as money and this tends to give an incredibly distorted picture of society and modern economy as a whole. The poorer this economy becomes all the richer is the image reflected by this mirror of fictitious capital. At the same time, the creation of this fictitious capital signifies, as we shall see, that the classes share in different ways in the distribution of the gradually constricting national income and wealth. National income, too, has become constricted, but not to the same extent as the national wealth. The explanation for this is quite simple: the candle of capitalist economy was being burnt at both ends".

Trotsky's point, whatever the ups and downs of the present ‘turmoil' in the financial markets, shows the fundamental problems of the flight of decaying capitalism into debt, credit and ‘funny money', and it applies in spades to the ‘richest' countries in the world today. These tendencies of credit and debt themselves could for a while alleviate the immediate problems of the restricted market but, used in the larger and larger doses they have been, they can only become poisonous. Capitalism is no longer a positive, expanding system which can continue to always put off its contradictions to a higher level. The capitalist economy cannot continue to ‘burn the candle at both ends'. Baboon, 26.8.7

[1] Undoubtedly there are high level bourgeois who are fully aware of the real depths of the crisis and others whose task it is to obscure this from the working class.

[2] Enron, one of the biggest corporations in the US and the world, collapsed well before the Twin Towers.

In the pages of World Revolution we frequently refer to the attacks of the ruling class, often giving figures for the latest redundancies or the impact of the budget and other government measures. However, the true situation of the working class can only really be seen by taking a broader and longer look. This article aims to contribute to this by using official figures and a number of reports by business and voluntary organisations to try to delineate what some aspects of life are like for the working class today. Such information certainly has its flaws but it has always been important for revolutionaries to do what they can to understand the real conditions of life for the working class.

Employment and unemployment

The headline figures proclaimed by the state are that the number in work is higher than ever, hitting 28.8 million in 2005, with rises in the overall employment rate for both men and women, and that unemployment remains low at 4.7% (Labour Market Review 2006, Office for National Statistics). However, when considered in more detail these figures show that there have been substantial changes in the pattern of employment in Britain over the last 30 years and that these have been at the expense of the working class. In 1978 manufacturing accounted for 28% of jobs; by 2005 this had more than halved to 12%. In contrast services grew from 61% to 82% of jobs over the same period (ibid). For many this has been a shift from well-paid, permanent, full-time jobs to part-time, temporary jobs paid near to the minimum wage.

The gender composition of the workforce has also changed significantly with the decline of the employment rate of males from over 90% in 1971 to under 80% in 2005 being matched by the rise in female employment from about 56% to 70%, leaving the total employment rate stable at around 75% (ibid). However significant this may be in social terms, in economic terms it has reduced the cost of labour to the employer since women's pay is still only 87% of men's on average. Women make up the greatest proportion of those who earn less than £6.50 an hour, with 30% of all female workers in this bracket (Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion 2006, Joseph Rowntree Foundation).

Over the last 35 years unemployment has climbed and fallen. At the start of 1971 the rate was 3.9%. It rose to 12.1% in the first half of 1984, fell back at the end of the decade only to rise still further by the early 1990s before falling to 4.7% in late 2005. The various tricks used to hide the real level of unemployment, notably by changing the way unemployment is counted, have been covered many times even in the mainstream media. In order to address this Labour began to use a second measure based on the Labour Force Survey alongside the discredited claimant count. The new measure is usually higher than the old.

Another way of looking at this issue is to use the overall rates of employment and economic inactivity.

The overall level of employment went up slightly during this period but has remained stable at around 75% for the last four or five years and is currently at a similar level to 1971. The overall economic inactivity rate has remained relatively stable at around 21-22% over the last few years but the composition has changed. In 1971 male inactivity was 4.9%. By 2005 it had increased to 16.6%. Female inactivity has gone from 40.6% in 1971 to 26.4% by 2005. The reasons for economic inactivity have also changed, with a decline in the number looking after the family from over 36% to 29.5%. In 2005, 26.8% or 2.1m were inactive due to long term sickness. Amongst males long term sickness was main reason, accounting for 38% in total but 60% of those aged 35-49 and 52% of those aged 50-64. The inactivity rate of young people has increased because more are remaining in education although there has also been a rise amongst 16-17 year olds not in education, 28.1% of whom were economically inactive in 2005.

For some time the government has been attempting to increase the numbers in work, in part by manipulating the tax and benefit system to create ‘incentives' for the economically inactive to become active. One particular target has been the disabled where there has been a range of initiatives to get them into work: between 1998 and 2005 the number of people with a long term disability who are economically inactive, fell by four percentage points to 45.5%

Employment as a whole is becoming less secure, with the idea of a job for life an increasingly distant memory. The official figure for measuring the number leaving jobs, euphemistically called the job ‘separation' rate, is calculated by taking all of those who have lost a job in the last three months and dividing that number by the number of those who said they were in employment for more than three months, plus those who had separated from a paid job. This produces a figure that seems unrelated to the total actually in work. Thus, in 2004/5 the rate moved between just over 4% to 2.5%. In 2005 there were 30.8m jobs (of which 26.7m were employees) and 4.564m ‘separations', which means that 14.8% of all those in work or 17% of employed workers were ‘separated' from their jobs. This is a fairly high turnover rate, even accepting that some of these are individual choices to change jobs rather than just being made redundant (Labour Market Review 2006, ONS).

This is supported by a recent study of private firms, which found that between 1997 and 2005 job creation averaged 15.2% while job destruction averaged14.5%. This equated to 53,000 jobs being created each week and 51,000 destroyed. In services the rates were 16.4% and 14.8% respectively and in manufacturing 11% and 13.5%. (‘Job creation, job destruction and the role of small firms: firm-level evidence for the UK', Hijzen, Upward and Wright, 2007, GEP Centre, University of Nottingham). As well as illustrating the shift in employment from manufacturing to service industries these figures also suggest that on average workers can expect to change jobs about every 6 or 7 years. Once out of work finding another job is not straightforward for many. In 1998-9 43.9% of those made redundant found work within three months; in 2005-6 this had increased slightly to 46.7%. This still implies that over 50% remain unemployed for more than 3 months (Labour Market Review 2006, ONS).

Working hours and pay

The official figures also show a continued decline in the average number of hours worked. More than half of the workforce now work between 31 and 45 hours a week. The number working over 45 hours a week has dropped from 25.7% in 1995 to 20.9% in 2005. However this is not the whole picture. Amongst the self-employed, 34% work over 45 hours a week. The number of self-employed has grown in recent years to form 13% of the workforce. Most of this increase is in small businesses of just one or two people, suggesting that a proportion at least have been compelled to turn to this in the absence of other employment. Secondly, the current official figures are silent about the amount of overtime worked. A report from the Department of Trade and Industry in 2003 showed that there had been a significant increase in the amount of unpaid overtime worked: between 1988 and 1998: from 25.2% to 40.6% of males working fulltime and from 27% to 57% of females working fulltime (Working long hours: A review of the evidence Vol.1, DTI November 2003). The number working part time has also increased over recent years from 21% in 1984 to 26% in 2004. 44% of women and 11% of men work part time (Labour Market Review 2006, ONS). This may partly explain the reduction in the average number of hours worked.

In 2005/6 the average, or mean income was £443. However, half of the population lives on £362 or less per week. This later figure is the known as the median income and is the point that separates the population into two equal groups - half earn less and half earn more. This is an important measure because it is less affected by the income growth of the rich. Thus, while mean income grew by 2.3% during Labour's first term in office, median income grew by 2.0% during the same period. Since then both measures have slowed to 1.3% and 1.0% respectively (Poverty and Inequality in the UK 2007, Institute for Fiscal Studies). The August inflation report from the Bank of England states that growth in real income (the rate of increase of income less rises in prices and taxes) "was weak in 2007 Q1, continuing the trend seen in recent quarters". The report does not give exact figures but the accompanying chart suggests this may have declined to around 0.5% a year or less over the last three years and that at some points in 2006 it dipped below zero.

Debt

Debt, and personal debt in particular, is the motor that keeps the economy going. Despite all of the concern expressed it is essential for British capitalism that the working class keeps spending. This is why ever more risky loans continue to be given. The consequences of this have already been seen in the US with the turmoil flowing from the crisis in the sub-prime loan market. In Britain loans have been given based on ever greater multiples of annual earnings, leading to increasing difficulties in repayments, despite the fact that interest rates are less than half what they were during the last such crisis in the mid 1990s.

Personal debt has grown dramatically in Britain over the last decade reaching £1,355bn at the end of July, a rise of over 10% in one year (these figures and those that follow, unless otherwise specified, are taken from Credit Action "Debt facts and figures", September 2007). Household debt now stands at 160% of annual household income (Bank of England). In 1997 it was 105%. According to Credit Action, the current figure is the highest ever recorded and the highest in the developed world. It is made up of lending on homes, so-called ‘secured' lending, and consumer credit lending. The first is £1,140bn, having increased by 11% in a year and the other £214bn, having increased by 5.3%. Excluding mortgages average household debt is £8,856; including mortgages it is £56,000.

The results of this are wide ranging. 26,956 people went bankrupt or made an Individual Voluntary Arrangement in England and Wales in the second quarter of 2007, an increase of 4.2% on a year ago. 14,000 properties were repossessed in the first half of 2007, 30% more than the year before. In the first quarter of the year there were 247,187 consumer debt related county court judgements, the highest since 1997. 8.2m adults are in serious debt and 2.1m are struggling with repayments. Millions more miss payments on bills, are in arrears or have permanent overdrafts.

At the same time credit continues to be given out hand over fist with banks and building societies loaning some £1bn a day. Savings have continued to drop with only 46% saving regularly. 27% have no savings; 25% have less than £3,000.

Poverty

According to the official figures poverty has declined throughout the years of Labour government, until last year when the number went up by between 400 and 600 thousand. The standard measure of poverty is 60% of median income, which, using the 2005-6 figures, amounts to £217 a week. In 1996-7 14 million people, 25.3% of the population lived in poverty; in 2005-6 this was 12.7 million or 21.6 % (Poverty and Inequality in the UK 2007, Institute for Fiscal Studies).

The reduction in child poverty has been one of the government's most publicised aims with some 700,000 claimed to have been lifted out of poverty since Labour came to power. However, as we argued in WR 305, "not only does this mean that some 2.4 million, or 19% of children still live in poverty; it also only takes the situation back to where it was in the mid 1980s, which itself was above the level seen in the 1960s and 70s".

The impact of government policies to reduce poverty have been more marked amongst pensioners than any other group, with the number living in poverty reducing from 29.1% of pensioners to 17% since 1996/7 (this is based on income after housing costs, if measured before housing costs the figures are 24.6% and 20.8%, respectively). This still leaves 1.8m pensioners living in poverty. A recent study argues that this decline is unlikely to continue over the next decade and could reverse (IFS, 2007 Pensioner poverty over the next decade: what role for tax and benefit reform?). Looking further ahead, the reduction in the quality of pensions suggests that this rate will rise again as final salary pensions disappear and the relative value of the state pension declines from 16% of average earnings in 2005 to 6% in 2050 (OECD United Kingdom Economic Survey, 2005). Many workers will struggle to make up this shortfall with 9 million already judged to be making inadequate provision (ibid). A recent report shows that 54% of the FTSE 100 companies have closed their defined benefits scheme (this is another term for final salary pensions) to new employees and overall 81% of organisations have closed their schemes to new employees, the majority switching to the less-generous defined contribution scheme. The future continues to look uncertain, despite the fact that pension funds overall returned to credit last year after many years of deficit (Lane, Clark and Peacock, Accounting for pensions 2007). The number of people in final salary pension schemes has declined by 500,000 since 2004 to 27.5m (Credit Action). The real situation faced by older workers is revealed in the fact that every winter tens of thousands more older people die than at other times of the year. Although the number has fallen from the 1950s the decline since the early 1970s has been much slower with fairly frequent increases to over 40,000.

Outside these groups things have been worse "Poverty rates increased dramatically during the 1980s, more slowly in the early 1990s and then stabilised or fell from the mid 1990s. But the latest year of data puts an end to the eight-year decline in relative poverty: between 2004-05 and 2005-06 relative poverty rose by 1.1 percentage points (AHC) and 0.6 percentage points (BHC. Both of these increases are statistically significant..." (IFS). The poorer you were the worse things seem to be since the number of those in severe poverty - defined as less than 40% of median income - has increased, albeit only slightly, during this period. For those on benefits the picture is worse again with the ‘Jobseekers' allowance dropping from 39% of median income in 1996-97 to 31% by 2005-6 (AHC) (ibid).

Insecurity and stress

The consequence of all of this is to create a world of uncertainty and fear, leading to physical and mental health problems. Many people worry constantly about money; it is the major cause of stress reported to the Samaritans. The Citizens Advice service has seen 15% more people with debt problems than a year ago, dealing with 1.4 million problems in the past year. 89% of those with debts report worrying about them ‘most' or ‘all' of the time and a majority said their health had been affected with three in five saying they had received treatment, medication or counselling as a result (Credit Action and A Helping Hand, Legal Services Research Centre, ND).

All of the factors that have created this situation continue to develop: exploitation in work, poverty outside, stress and fear for the future everywhere. This is the reality of life under capitalism today. This is the future for us all so long as capitalism continues. This is the material situation that can cause individuals to despair but provokes the working class to resist attacks on it through its collective struggle, not just in Britain but all round the world. It is also stirring workers, particularly the younger generation, to question what sort of future capitalism has in store for humanity. When these two aspects of the class struggle, against the attacks and against the ideological justification for capitalism, go hand in hand then the situation is truly pregnant with danger for the ruling class and hope for humanity.

North, 6/9/07

A toxic mode of production

In the west of Ukrainian close to the Polish border, in the region of Lviv, a train transporting 15 tanks of inflammable and very toxic yellow phosphorus was derailed on 16 July. The pressure valves were broken on the dilapidated tanks which should have been withdrawn from service five years ago. 6 tank-wagons full of phosphorus for the manufacture of fertiliser were smashed open releasing a toxic cloud that covered 86 square kilometres, in an area where over 11,000 people live. 16,000 people were medically examined and 184 of them hospitalised for phosphorus poisoning, some of them remaining for more than 3 weeks. In spite of the pollution of earth and air there was no evacuation organised and this was left to the initiative of the residents of the region: people were assured that the substance has dispersed without further damage to the atmosphere, and the emergency ministry spokesman on regional radio was eager to give assurances that the ‘situation is under control' and that there was no danger... These words were soon refuted by reality: phosphorus residues spontaneously burst into flames on contact with the air on 3 August, making the population run from the new risk to their respiratory tracts and life threatening lesions. We get an idea of the extent of the risk faced all the time from the fact that in the Ukraine alone about 50 million tons of merchandise are transported by rail every year, of which 70% consists of dangerous substances such as chlorine, nitrogen, ammonia and oil products. On the 3 August, in the same region of Lviv, a locomotive hit three tanker wagons full of petrol, causing a fire in the vicinity of a refinery and a paint factory. A week earlier, in the same station, another train was derailed and collided with unused wagons.

In Japan, on 16 July, in the Niigata region in the north west, there was an earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale. With 9 dead and a thousand injured, and more than 500 individual homes and 300 buildings destroyed, it was far from causing the same level of destruction as the Kobe quake on 17 January 1995 (6,400 dead, 40,000 injured, 200,000 homes destroyed), but it caused a fire in an electric transformer of the largest nuclear power plant in the world, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa. The operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) made no announcement for several hours after a leak of 1,200 litres of contaminated water, after having at first affirmed that the shock had not had any effect on the plant and after having denied any crack in the reactor. According to the Kyodo press agency, a hundred or so casks of contaminated waste were knocked over and their contents spilled. The Institute of Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety has recorded at least 67 anomalies in the functioning of the reactor. Tepco and a competitor have already admitted concealing several accidents some months ago. The Japanese government has however continued to assert that the leak has no consequences for the environment and some ‘scientific meetings' have been at pains to reassure us that there is no risk of human contamination.

"I believe that nuclear reactors can only work with the confidence of the population"' as the prime minister Shinzo Abe cynically declared to journalists. "Personally I think that a nuclear power station is the safest place in an earthquake" added an eminent professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and specialist in nuclear power[1].

Thirteen other nuclear facilities are under construction and the Japanese authorities have no intention of giving up an energy that supplies 30 to 40% of the country's electricity. However, the government has had to take the decision to close the power station for an unspecified time (at least a year) and the IAEA is inspecting it.

The risk is not limited to Japan, nor to seismic shocks. At the end of June there was a fire in a nuclear power plant in north Germany (at Krummel in Schleswig-Holstein, close to Hamburg), set off by a pump failure in the water surrounding the reactor, and a series of faults in the automatic fire extinguishers in the reactor. This launched a new round of polemics on the future of nuclear power. The spectre of a new Chernobyl is everywhere[2].

A recent World Bank study reported that there are 350-400,000 premature deaths in China due to air pollution (and 30,000 of them are children). Another 300,000 are dying due to the poor quality of ventilation in buildings, workshops and factories (without counting those due to working conditions or handling dangerous materials). In the countryside poor water quality is responsible for 60,000 deaths a year.

Capitalism is a catastrophe for humanity

On the 1 August a bridge over the Mississippi collapsed in Minneapolis, Minnesota. About 50 vehicles toppled into the river 20 metres below: 5 dead, 79 injured, a dozen missing. This 160 metre bridge of steel and concrete, with an eight lane road across it, constructed 40 years ago, had been inspected in 2005 and 2006 but no structural defect had been found. It was, however, classed as in need of repair since 2005[3]. Repairs on the metal framework were underway at the time of the event during the evening rush hour, without any decision to interrupt the flow of traffic. According to the local transport authority 200,000 vehicles cross this bridge every day and a school bus carrying about 60 children only just escaped the tragedy[4].

The country has 756 bridges with a similar steel structure, of which at least 27% are thought to be in an equally alarming state as the one that collapsed.

The law of profit, of immediate returns, the heightened competition between states, is a permanent threat both now and for the future of the world. Those who sing the praises of the progress of civilisation have become like the sorcerer's apprentice, the high priests in a dance of death, a ghastly black mass around the altar of decadent capitalism which, with total contempt for human life, delivers its wage slaves up to sacrificial rituals more absurd and barbaric than the cruellest societies in history.

The news has given us another example in a different domain. On 17 July in Brazil, a TAM airbus overshot the wet runway of Sao Paulo's Congonhas airport, in the heart of a residential area, sweeping across a very busy avenue before hitting a fuel station and cargo terminal belonging to TAM, causing a fire. At least 207 were killed, the biggest air catastrophe in Brazil's history[5].

Brazil's airport personnel have been protesting against the deterioration in their working conditions for several years: a quasi-absence of aeroplane checks due to financial economies, use of the cheapest fuel for refuelling, equipment not replaced, ever denser air traffic going along with a policy of reducing the number of mechanics and air traffic controllers to get the maximum profit.

The inquiry at Sao Paulo revealed a multitude of anomalies: the runway had been notoriously dangerous for some years, safety conditions were not fulfilled with a landing strip that was too short and traffic too dense.

It had been resurfaced the previous month but the work had not been finished, and the runway had been put back into service at the end of June without the drainage channels to remove rainwater being completed. Many had denounced the premature reopening for purely commercial reasons. Four similar accidents (uncontrolled skidding on the runway) had already occurred in recent months. At the time of the landing the sun was entirely blotted out by heavy rain. And the day before the accident the government had refused to close the runway as demanded by the air traffic controllers at the airport. Further, the TAM plane was missing one of its two pressure inverters, which allow the aircraft to slow down on landing. Globo TV even claimed that this equipment had been withdrawn after a fault the previous week and that the plane had difficulty braking on the same runway the day before the accident. A video showed that the plane had accelerated after touching down close to the marker for the limit of the runway for landing, which may mean that the pilot tried to take off again realising that he could not stop in time.

A representative of the airline gave assurances that the plane was airworthy even in the absence of two pressure inverters. However an identical breakdown killed 99 people at the same airport in 1996.

"The government is obviously trying to convince public opinion that the runway at Congonhas is not the cause. They want to do everything to blame the pilot", was the reaction of the president of the pilots' association.

Evidently. Less than 15 days after the catastrophe at Congonhas the official inquiry attempted to throw the blame for the accident onto the pilot[6].

Faced with such dangers and against such working conditions the Brazilian air traffic controllers of Curitiba, Manaos and Salvador went on strike, spontaneously, on 30 March last. They addressed a prophetic message to all workers in a Manifesto before paralysing the service, embarking on a hunger strike and occupation to put pressure on the authorities of the Aeronautic Command, the military organ responsible for air traffic control in Brazil: "We have reached the limits of human endurance, we are in no fit condition to maintain this service, which is of great importance to this country, given the way we are managed and treated. WE HAVE NO CONFIDENCE IN OUR EQUIPMENT, OR IN THOSE WHO MANAGE US! We are working with rifles pointed at us..." (WR 305). There had already been a collision between a Boeing and another plane at the end of September 2006 in Mato Grosso, which killed 154 passengers. The controllers had already carried out several stoppages to protest against the accusations of the government and military authorities that they were responsible. In their Manifesto the workers defended themselves against these slanders: "Six months after the collision there have been no positive signs about the difficulties faced by the air traffic controllers. On the contrary, they have got worse. As if these technical-work difficulties are not bad enough, we are also accused of being saboteurs, in order to try to cover up the faults in the management of the system..." The strike expressed the air traffic controllers' indignation at the government and military command's response, which included imprisoning some of the controllers. This Manifesto and the strike also denounced all the hypocrisy of the whole Brazilian bourgeoisie and its responsibility for the crisis of air transport, from the left which is in government today to the right. The bourgeoisie also tried to hide the role of the unfettered competition between airlines, the policy of reducing costs, the overselling of tickets, the crowding of airspace, the increase in the number of flights, compelling the air traffic controllers and aeroplane pilots to work in extreme conditions.

The conditions are even worse today. Six months after the accident at Congonhas Airport, a power cut and breakdown in the emergency generators paralysed the Amazon air traffic control centre again, leading to the cancellation of 10% of flights over Brazil and forcing the controllers to work in the most precarious conditions once again.

Only the working class, through its struggles, can expose and fight against the real culprit behind all these tragedies: the capitalist system. Wim 10.8.07

[1] It is however true that Japan is the state whose nuclear power stations are by far the best equipped to withstand earthquakes. In a country like France for example where some power stations are built near fault lines (Alsace, PACA...) without the least earthquake protection we can only imagine the horror that could be caused by an earth tremor...

[2] We have not forgotten that reactor number 4 in the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded on 26 April 1986. Radioactive material was deposited all around, causing thyroid cancer, particularly in large areas of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine. We were also asked to believe that the radioactive fallout stopped at the frontiers, under the protection of the anticyclone over the Azores; otherwise it would have swept across the whole of Europe from East to West. The official death toll from Chernobyl varies between 50,000 and 150,000, yet the former secretary general of the UN, Kofi Annan, admitted afterwards that at least 7 million people had been affected by this catastrophe.

About 50 operatives were given the job of collecting highly radioactive debris from the roof and immediate surroundings in the first days after the catastrophe. Each operative had only 90 seconds to carry out the task. In this time he was exposed to extremely high levels of radiation and received only scant protection from derisory safety equipment, principally designed to prevent the inhalation of radioactive dust. Many of these front line workers developed cancers and died in the following years.

It is estimated that 350,000 decontamination operatives or ‘liquidators', from the army, factory workers, local police and firemen, participated at the start of the work of confining and decontaminating the radioactive debris in the period 1986-7. Nearly 240,000 of these ‘liquidators', who took turns every 5 minutes, received the highest doses of radiation when they carried out the vital work of limiting the effects of radioactivity in a 30 kilometre zone around the explosion. Following this the number of liquidators listed topped 600,000. The concrete foundations under the heart of the reactor threatened to collapse. So tens of thousands of miners were brought from around Moscow and Donbass to tunnel under the reactor to dig out a cave. A cooling coil of helium was installed to cool the foundations. The miners worked in very difficult conditions due to the heat and the massive radiation. Their sacrifice was in vain, since the cooling circuit was never installed and was finally replaced by a concrete sarcophagus over the top. For several years cracks have appeared in the sarcophagus, but neither the Ukraine nor Russia nor any other authority wants to take responsibility for the new risks, nor above all for the enormous cost of the necessary work... We are told that this tragedy was an exception due to the backwardness of the eastern countries and their technology, to the lack of maintenance inherited from the Stalinist era, and that the nuclear reactors of more modern states do not run such a risk. The fissure in the Japanese reactor and before that the accident at Three Mile Island in the United States show the contrary. The same risk exists everywhere.

[3] A similar study found about 60 structures defective and at high risk in a country such as France.

[4] In the same period other ‘accidents' whose consequences would have been much more dramatic were only just prevented. On the 18 July an underground gas pipe exploded in New York in the heart of Manhattan, at Lexington and 41st Street, close to Grand Central Station, causing great panic (due to the force and violence of the explosion people feared a new terrorist attack reviving the nightmare of 11 September 2001). One person died of a heart attack and about 30 others were injured. The 60 cm diameter pipe, installed in 1924, exploded due to the heat. The mayor expressed the fear of a release of asbestos. New York is full of aging underground pipes and several dozen have exploded in the city over the last twenty years.

On 29 July there was a fire on a Parisian metro train on one of the busiest lines of the network. 150 passengers stuck underground were poisoned by the noxious fumes within one of the compartments. 35 were taken to hospital. A fire in a completely worn out brake-block on a carriage was the cause of the incident. The consequences could have been much worse if it had not taken place on a Sunday morning when it is least crowded.

This gives an indication of the dangers which the world's populations are constantly exposed to.

[5] This is not the first time that a plane has crashed in a city centre, into a building, a road or a residential area (without being able to point to a terrorist attack). The list is long: in Venezuela on 16 March 1969 a DC9 crashed into a shanty town with 163 dead and about a hundred injured. For Europe it is enough to remember two similar accidents: in October 1992 a Boeing 747 crashed into two buildings in the workers district of Amsterdam: 53 dead. The effect is similar to bombardment: buildings ripped apart, a sea of fire, flames 30 metres high transforming the victims into living torches or crushing them under tons of concrete and steel.

On 25th July 2000 a Concorde (celebrated as the most beautiful and technologically advanced aircraft) en route to New York crashed into a Gonesse hotel in the Oise Valley two minutes after taking off from Roissy Airport. The 109 passengers on board were killed as well as 4 hotel employees. The inquiry revealed that a wheel had been damaged during take-off by a metal strip that had fallen onto the runway from another plane. The debris from the tyre caused a rupture in a fuel tank where the fire started.

[6] The theory of ‘human error' itself in such a case is not at all surprising given the responsibility and the working conditions in which pilots are constrained to work, since they must carry out a long return journey on the same day or with a single hour for rest, the time taken for refuelling.

This year was the UK's wettest ever recorded summer. In June and July there were a number of exceptional floods throughout the country. In one day, on June 25, an entire month's rain fell on some parts of Britain. In Sheffield the drainage system was rapidly overwhelmed, causing flash flooding. The Ulley reservoir was full to almost breaking point. The authorities closed the M1 motorway near Sheffield, fearing that it would be washed away.

Another major cloudburst occurred on July 20. The rainfall led to flooding in the South Midlands. The rivers Severn and Thames burst their banks. Thousands of homes and businesses were flooded. Electricity sub stations and water treatment plants were overwhelmed. Many people in Gloucestershire were without water and electricity for several days. Emergency water supplies were delivered to the effected areas, but these quickly ran out and some were reported as vandalised.

The media looked back to the last great floods. In March 1947 Britain had been through an exceptionally cold winter with snowfall greater than anyone could remember. The great thaw began with an inch of rain in a few hours that could not be absorbed by the icy ground. The snow began to melt and continued over the next few weeks. Floods were widespread as the accumulation of ice and snow turned to water. The floods of 1947 affected more people over a larger area, but, unlike 1947, the 2007 floods were in the middle of summer and the flood water came almost solely from heavy rainfall.

Radio phone-ins had a full range of responses. Some wished to show their solidarity with the victims and called for the government to help them out financially. Others were less generous, suggesting uninsured householders only had themselves to blame. The uninsured were often characterised as being greedy individuals who were happy to spend money on luxuries like satellite television and four wheel drive cars, but lacked the prudence to insure their homes. This had echoes of the morality of the workhouse; the bourgeoisie dividing the victims in capitalist society between the ‘deserving' and ‘undeserving poor'.

The government's policy of promoting mass housebuilding while ignoring the dangers of building on flood plains was generally criticised. For example a tenant farmer in Staffordshire, whose livestock was drowned in the floods, complained that he will have to leave his land in a few years to make way for new houses. While acknowledging the problem, the government has said it has no intention of changing its plans.

The extreme weather in the UK is not an isolated event. In August the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) produced a press release on record extreme weather in 2007. It recorded that the Indian sub-continent had experienced double the monsoon depressions in June and July leading to major floods, displacing 10 million people and killing 500. The Arabian Sea experienced its first ever recorded cyclone in June. Germany had the wettest May recorded. Mozambique suffered severe flooding in February. The river Nile was flooded in Sudan in June. The Maldives were swamped by waves between 3 and 4.5 meters high in May. In May Uruguay had its worst flooding since 1959. In June, July and August south-eastern Europe experienced extreme heat waves; Bulgaria recorded a temperature record of 45° C. Russia recorded its highest temperature for May. Europe experienced its warmest ever April. The southern hemisphere had an exceptionally cold winter. In South America some regions experienced rare snow falls. In Argentina temperatures reached as low as -22°C. In June South Africa experienced its first significant snow since 1981. Many European countries recorded their warmest Januarys. The WMO were keen to make the links between the projections of more extreme weather and climate change and the events experienced this year.

Extreme weather has continued since. North Korea has called for international relief aid after 300,000 people were made homeless through flooding. 300 are dead or missing, 46,580 homes, 400 commercial plants and 20 mines were flooded. China has had extensive flooding, destroying large areas of land and homes. Deadly flooding is an annual problem for those living on reclaimed farmland on China's flood plains. On 18 August AFP reported that 172 miners were trapped underground by flooding. The director of the mine said they had a slim chance of survival. 14 miners were rescued from another mine the day before. 69 were rescued on 1 August. China has the most dangerous mines in the world with 4700 killed in 2006.

Scientists say that no one event can be linked to global warming. The science of global warming is about averages over long periods. It is easy to dismiss any event as being a ‘natural' occurrence, and nothing to do with human-induced climate change, if looked at in isolation. The evidence suggests otherwise and we are faced with a long term problem with global warming. The bourgeoisie are unable to make capitalism green. To maintain growth is a matter of life and death for the system, even when that system threatens to destroy humanity. Even the deaths and homelessness caused by the recent worldwide flooding will not change a thing. Capitalism's mastery of nature is like mastering a violin with a sledge hammer. Ash 7/9/7

Fires aren’t unusual in the summer months in Greece. But this year the area devastated was ten times the average affected over the last 50 years. More than 60 people died in the fires at the end of August that caught the media’s appetite for sensational images. There were the accounts of people trapped in mountain villages surrounded by fire, the tragedy of the 9 people who died when a car crashed into a fire engine causing a fatal blazing traffic jam, the pictures of burnt-out villages, and the bodies lying in fields, houses, cars and among smouldering trees.

This was the third serious outbreak of fires across Greece this summer. Many other countries in Europe also suffered during a heat wave that touched 40, 45 degrees at times. The focus of media coverage was on two things: how had the fires started and what was the Greek government doing about it?

In hot weather fires do start easily in the right conditions. Lightning, for example, is not uncommon in SE Europe, and the Greeks are among the heaviest smokers in the world. But the media blamed arsonists. The finger was pointed at people acting in the pay of property developers who stood to gain from the availability of newly deforested land. In addition to the profit motive, an FBI profiler cited revenge, excitement, vandalism, extremism, or cover for another crime as the main motives for arson. All this is possible, but it hardly explains the general conditions which might have made it possible for a few greedy firms or damaged individuals to cause so much devastation.

As for the Greek government, it deployed thousands of fire fighters, fire engines and soldiers. They appealed for fire fighters and planes from other countries. They did as much as any government, whether of the right or the left, was likely to. Inevitably there were criticisms of the government having done ‘too little, too late’. In the pages of Socialist Worker you could read how they thought “the government’s policies … contributed to the spread of the fire”. No doubt they did in some respects, but the same would be true of PASOK, the left alternative currently in opposition in Greece. Yet the left always says that there is no problem the capitalist state can’t solve.

The reality is quite different. Fundamentally, the fires in Greece started and spread as a result of two phenomena that capitalism cannot control. Firstly, the bourgeoisie has no control over the climate change that lies behind the increasing temperatures in the Mediterranean (and elsewhere) that turn forests into potential kindling. In the face of global warming there is a need for a global response. However, the capitalist class can’t act at an international level because it is divided into ruthlessly competing imperialist states.

Secondly, whether we’re looking at the psychology of those employed by property developers, or those who seek excitement through seeing massive destruction by fire, the ruling class has no answers for such alienated behaviour, as it has no means for nurturing basic human solidarity

At the level of the individual, capitalism won’t stop being a society that breeds greed, heartlessness, desperation and despair, any more than, at the level of the environment, it can reverse the process of ecological destruction. Car 6/9/7

The summer of 2007 has once again been marked by the worsening of military chaos and horror in many parts of the world. While the situation has momentarily eased in Lebanon (with the exception of the slaughter in the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp after a long stand-off between the army and Islamists), in Afghanistan there has been a sharp rise in the fighting and in terrorist attacks by the Taliban. The massacre in Iraq meanwhile has continued unabated. Dozens are killed every day, both in armed conflicts and suicide bombings, most of them aimed at a defenceless population. This insane violence has spread all over the country in an increasingly uncontrolled way. 500 people from the Yezidi community[1] were killed in four successive bomb outrages in August, while the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites have all been under attack. In July alone 1650 Iraqi civilians were killed and the figures for August will probably be worse.

Since 2003, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died as a direct result of the war and its aftermath. The population is hungry, deprived of medical care; electricity and even water are luxuries. Baghdad has been transformed into a collection of walled ghettoes, splitting families in half, and run by all kinds of contending gangs.

More than two million people have been displaced throughout the country in the attempt to flee the killing; the same number has left the country for the same reason.

As for the American army, officially there have been over 3000 deaths; some sources put it as high as 10,000, not counting the growing number of suicides (in 2006 it stood at 100) and there are rumours of revolt in the ranks.

This is the immediate heritage of the Bush administration's grand war against terrorism. According to recent polls, 58% of Americans now think the war was a mistake.

A new acceleration of global chaos

The USA's anti-terrorist crusade has been a total failure and has left Washington in a real impasse. The various options it can envisage today are all unfavourable. Bush has been unable to set up an Iraqi government that has a minimum of credibility and which does not function as the simple expression of dissensions between Shiites and Sunnis. The representatives of this government have diverted half the weapons granted to the Iraqi authorities by the Pentagon over the last three years into the arsenals of their respective cliques. Not to mention a police force that frequently provides suicide-bombers with access to the American military camps. So much for the reliability of the people the US has put in power in Iraq. Thus, if the US forces stay in Iraq, this will change nothing and will provoke more anti-war sentiment in the US. On the other hand, if they leave, pulling out 150,000 men over several months, it could be very costly to the US army in terms of loss of personnel, and could open the way to an even greater explosion of violence, with Iran waiting at the gates. This is unlikely to be offset by the 90 men which the UN is rushing to Iraq, in place of the 65 already there!

However, the perspective of a partial withdrawal at least has already been adopted by the Bush administration, despite its criticisms of the recent British pull-out from the centre of Basra. This is why, in order to counter the hegemonic ambitions of Tehran, the US is trying to build up an alliance of pro-American Arab states by offering to strengthen their military apparatus: 20 billion dollars spent on ultra-sophisticated weapons for Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates over the last ten years, and 13 billion for Egypt over the same period. And Israel has demanded its own compensation, because it hardly wants to see any reduction in its military superiority in the region. This has amounted to 30 billion dollars worth of arms - a 25% increase in US military supplies to the Israeli government.

We thus see the US piling up the arms stocks in a region which is already highly volatile. In the case of Saudi Arabia, it's supplying a country which has even been suspected of supporting Sunni terrorists in Iraq, including Al Qaida. In a world where ‘every man for himself' is already the rule, the response by the world's leading power can only be to aggravate the chaos even more.

The race for nuclear weapons

On a more general scale, since the end of 2006 we have seen a feverish growth in the arms race. And acquiring nuclear weapons has become top of the list for a number of states. This is hardly a surprise. The North Korean nuclear tests at the beginning of 2006, the repeated purchases of Russian nuclear technology and missiles by Iran over the last year or more, the ambitions of a country like Brazil to revive its nuclear programme, were all signs that a whole number of countries are no longer content to rely on some great power's ‘nuclear umbrella' but want to have the weapons themselves.

The US itself has played a big part in this race. Following the destruction in January 2007 of a US weather satellite by a Chinese missile - an event which highlighted the USA's potential weakness in directing aerial, naval and terrestrial warfare from a distance - the American response has been to reinforce its anti-missile shield at the very gates of Russia. The latter has responded with the vague threat of targeting European cities and the more concrete one of installing missiles in Kaliningrad on the Baltic, just between Poland and Lithuania, and very close to the American shield.

But the race for nuclear weaponry is not restricted to the major powers. In fact we are seeing a nuclearised belt stretching from the Middle East to the Far East, from Israel to North Korea via Pakistan, India and China, all of it topped off by Russia's arsenal. In short, an atomic powder-keg, located in regions which are already the theatre of all sorts of tensions and open conflicts. A sword of Damocles hangs over our heads and it will not be lifted by nuclear non-proliferation treaties which are not worth the paper they are written on. Only the massive development of workers' struggles and the overthrow of capitalism will bring an end to the threat of war and provide humanity with a future.

Mulan Based on an article in Revolution Internationale 382, September 2007.

[1] The Yezidis are a religious community seen as heretical by orthodox Sunni Islam. A lot of them are Kurds.

"It's an old story, we've all got stories like this, you want out but there are certain formalities, certain annihilations that need to be concluded, a white flag won't help. You can accept all the Soviet peace plans you'd like, it's too late, the spokesperson says, ‘Meaningless', ‘An outrage,' says the President, he promises more war ‘with undiminished intensity', leaving Kuwait is irrelevant, you are slaughtered on the highway home, where are your Scuds now? You are bumper to bumper and slaughtered with impunity, it's you versus the whole electromagnetic spectrum, and you are slaughtered until the slaughter stops" (J. Sacco, Diary of a Defeatist).

Nobody knows for sure how many were slaughtered on the road from Kuwait back into Iraq in one infamous instance of the Gulf War of 1991; tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe? A press-ganged conscript Iraqi army fleeing bumper to bumper with civilian men, women and children. Then the British and American jetfighters arrived, circled, and the slaughter began. Bombs, rockets, cannon, all the latest weaponry. Those that tried to leave the road were followed, targeted and carbonised - just like those who stayed on it. The bourgeoisie chortled about ‘the turkey shoot' and privately viewed the videos. "260,000 Iraqi troops are no longer a factor"; "The gates are closed and there is no way out of here"; "The only question is how high we're going to roll up the score" (US military briefings). The totally subservient media, who up until then had deliberately exaggerated Saddam Hussein's threat, talked about Iraqi ‘baby killers' and spread the lies about the ‘clean war', ‘surgical strikes' and ‘smart bombs', showed virtually no pictures of the massacre. A British army spokesman, asked about casualties from one reporter brave enough to ask a salient question, refused to answer on the grounds that he didn't want to get into "the pornography of war". Such was the reality of the USA's ‘new world order' of peace and prosperity announced only one year earlier.

It's quite usual today to hear politicians and even High Court judges(1) attempting to counter the excuses of suicide bombers and murderous jihadists who plead that ‘you (the West) started it', with the argument that that 9.11.2001 came before the Gulf War of 2003. The essence of their argument is therefore: ‘you (the jihadists) started it'. Without in any way taking up the anti-American cause of religious fundamentalism (as many leftists do) we can say that the Gulf War of 1991, while initially a victory for the USA's ‘new world order', was a significant moment in the downward spiral of militarism and decomposition that we find ourselves in today. While this is particularly the case in and around the Middle East it is also manifested in the suicide bombings and attacks that threaten every major town, city and resort and the civilians that live, work and holiday within them.

Saddam Hussein, described in the press in the run up to the war as ‘the new Hitler', had, up until 1990, been the USA's and Britain's policemen in the area (just like the ‘old' Hitler had been their policemen in central Europe some six decades before). It was particularly important for the western bloc to rely on him, while ignoring his ‘excesses', such as the gassing of the Kurds and his murderous oppression of the Shias, in the situation of the Cold War where Russian imperialism was trying to make inroads into the Middle East. Thus Saddam was armed and bankrolled by the British state as well as all the other major players of the western bloc. After the implosion of the Russian imperialist bloc in 1989, it was necessary for the US to make a terrible and impressive example of its determination to maintain its leadership over its erstwhile ‘allies' in order to keep them in line and prevent challenges arising from any imperialist rival, the most obvious candidate being Germany and a possible European-based bloc. Saddam's Iraqi regime was perfect; a brutal third-rate gangster, located in a vital geo-strategic area with, as the western press didn't stop reporting in its warlike, patriotic fervour, ‘the fourth largest army in the world'. To this end Saddam was suckered into his invasion of Kuwait on August 2 1990, not least through the complicity of the US administration by way of its ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspin(2).

All the necessary ‘dodgy dossiers' appeared in 1990, just as they did under Blair and Bush thirteen years later: ‘terrifying weapons capable of being delivered to the civilised world'; ‘chemical weapons' (yes, but supplied by Britain and Germany); ‘purchases of enriched uranium' (a fiction) a ‘super cannon' (again, the parts supplied by Britain), and so on, in order to justify the military build-up and the terrible response. From late 1990 to early 1991 the US put in the Gulf 6 aircraft carriers and 600,000 troops. More than 2000 daily sorties were flown over Kuwait and Iraq, dropping 7 tonne fuel air bombs, napalm, and cluster bombs; uranium tipped shells were fired by artillery. Cruise missiles and 1200kg shells were fired from warships and Stealth bombers dropped their deadly loads. More explosives were dropped on Kuwait and Iraq in one month than was dropped on Germany in the whole of World War II. And all the time the supine media talked about the clean, victimless war, reinforcing the already existing confusion and disorientation of the working class ‘at home' resulting from the collapse of the Russian bloc and the bourgeoisie's campaign about the end of communism and the victory of liberal capitalism.

The US and Britain contemptuously brushed the Russian ‘peace plan' aside in the run-up to the war and the US rallied a mostly unwilling coalition of some 30 countries. Britain, basing itself on its historical experience of global gangsterdom, was right behind the US. France, Italy, Spain, China and Saudi Arabia were more or less reluctantly drawn in and Germany and Japan were presented with the bill by the US administration. Any potential bloc rivalry to US imperialism was nipped in the bud, and the prospect of any sort of unified European bloc was shown to be a hollow sham.

So the crusade of America and Britain against the populations of the Middle East, and the subsequent development of this particular phase of imperialist terrorism and suicide bombings, didn't begin with the Gulf War of 2003 but with the Gulf War of 1991. And the development of the terror bombing of civilians didn't begin with Islamic fundamentalism. It was demonstrated with murderous force with the carpet bombing of Bagdad and the ‘Turkey Shoot' on the road out of Kuwait. This aerial slaughter of civilians was itself a development of imperialism in decadence, and well before the terror bombing of Germany during World War II, British ‘war hero', Sir Arthur ‘Bomber' Harris, had been involved in dropping chemical bombs from aeroplanes onto Kurdish civilians in order to defend the interests of British imperialism in Iraq. US General Curtis LeMay sums up the attitude of the bourgeoisie in a nutshell: "There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people. You are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn't bother me so much to be killing innocent bystanders"(3). These words and sentiments of LeMay are strikingly similar to those on the videotaped message that the suicide bomber Siddiq Khan made before he and his fellow murderers unleashed their bombs in London on 7/7/05. The slaughter of civilians is the rationality and practice of imperialism from its highest generals to its lowliest footsoldiers. The only difference being a matter of scale.

In a subsequent article we will look at how the American and British bourgeoisies left Saddam intact and then encouraged the Kurds and Shias to rise up against his regime at the end of the 1991, while they stood by and watched him slaughter them.

Baboon 7/9/7

Notes

(1) Mr. Justice Fulford at the trial of the 21.7.2006 would-be suicide bombers (The Times, 12.7.2007)

(2) Le Monde Diplomatique May 1991

(3) Michael Sherry The Rise of American Air Power Yale University Press, 1987.

In an article on its recent International Congress the ICC saluted the appearance of a newly emerging generation of revolutionaries (see WR 306). Whether being engaged in online discussions on various web forums, receiving correspondence from people who've never contacted us before, discussing with new groups, or meeting people at meetings and demonstrations who have never come across the communist left before, we are finding ourselves in contact with a growing number of people who have fundamental questions about the nature of capitalist society and want to discuss the way to establish an alternative. Since we published our book on communism (Not a nice idea but a material necessity), with the whole range of subjects dealt with in its pages, there has been discussion on many aspects of the areas it touches. To develop this discussion, and because of our generally positive view of the potential of the current period, we decided to hold an invitation-only meeting to discuss some of the questions raised in the book. While it took place on one of the few warm weekends this summer, that did not diminish the enthusiasm of the participants, who came from across the country, as well as from Spain, Switzerland and Turkey (represented by a comrade of the group Enternasyonalist Komünist Sol). Some of these comrades are very close to the ICC (including some ex-members), some well acquainted with the positions of the ICC, one was from the Midland Discussion Forum and others maybe not so close to the ICC but interested in our approach and wanting to discuss seriously.

Communism is not a utopia

Non-ICC members prepared the presentations to the two sessions of the meeting, and they both did an excellent job in getting over the basics of difficult subjects. We started with the question ‘Is communism a utopia?' We were prepared for a wide-ranging discussion on such a broad theme, but most of the contributions could be seen as answers to the question ‘How do we get communism?'

For example, what is the role of revolutionaries? Are they organisers of the working class? Do they teach the working class the nature of capitalism and how it can be overthrown? Are the Trotskyists right to say that the crisis of humanity is characterised by the crisis of the leadership of the proletariat? Or, as the ICC understands it, is the role of revolutionaries to participate in the struggles of the working class, in the development of its self-organisation, and in the discussions that are integral to the process of clarification within the class and in the development of class consciousness and solidarity?

Revolutionaries identify the nature of the historic period; they try to grasp the material situation in which the working class finds itself and in which its struggle must develop. But, although the activity of revolutionary minorities has an absolutely essential role to play, it cannot substitute for the conscious mass activity of the working class as a whole. In leftism we find a current that not only denies workers' self-activity and tries to enrol it behind the forces of the bourgeoisie (we referred to the example of Trotskyism's support for the Allies in World War II), but also poses as the saviour of the working class and its struggle.

On a related subject we discussed the problems facing the class today. For example, while we can talk about workers' capacity to become conscious of their situation and the perspective it opens up for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, at the moment we have to be clear in understanding that the consciousness within the working class of what's at stake is very much behind what the historic situation demands. Similarly, while revolutionaries should not be dismissive of what they have achieved, they must be well aware of what is demanded of them by the struggles and discussions within the working class.

Also, we have to be aware of the difficulties facing the working class in relating to other non-exploiting social strata. In western Europe, where there is such a preponderance of those who work for wages paid by bourgeois big and small, it could be easy to forget the situation that prevails in so much of the rest of the world. In most of the so-called underdeveloped countries, not only are there landless and landowning peasants, there are also millions in the most precarious of situations, living hand to mouth by whatever means they can find. And, in many of the big cities in these regions, there are many extremely deprived neighbourhoods where wage-labourers live side by side with those who could be described as being part of the ‘informal' economy, living through crime, begging, scams, barter or through any arrangement that might possibly seem to work. The working class, even when sharing the same living conditions as other strata, faces capital and its state in a different relationship, as a force that can overthrow capitalism. But for this very reason its struggles can also inspire others, by example and by the force of persuasive argument in discussion, of the communist perspective.

The state cannot bring about socialism

The second session of discussion was started off by a thorough presentation on the role of the state, how it can't usher in socialism, and why it has to be destroyed by the revolutionary struggle.

We very soon moved to looking at the nature of the illusions within the ranks of the working class. With the force of the campaign around Chavez as the bringer of socialism to Venezuela, it is not surprising if some workers have been taken in by the propaganda around the state capitalist measures introduced there. However, the view that many workers have of the state is as a provider of some sort of ‘protection' from the worst excesses of capitalism. This goes along with the idea that democracy can be made to work in the interests of the working class. In the discussion we looked at things like education and the NHS. The services provided by the NHS (paid for through a lifetime of National Insurance contributions) are part of the social wage that workers depend on in times of illness. The whole bureaucratic apparatus of the NHS is, like any other part of the capitalist state, part of the means used by the ruling class to maintain its position against the interests of the working class. Ultimately workers need the social wage, but not the state institution.

Later we discussed the role of revolutionaries in the face of war. This was not in relation to current conflicts, or the major wars of the twentieth century, but through looking at Marx and Engels and their response to the American Civil War of 1861-65 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. For the ICC, these conflicts took place in a period when it was not possible to denounce every act of the bourgeoisie as reactionary. For example, Marx, and the workers' movement of the time, supported the North against the slave owning states of the US South, even though it affected cotton supplies that were still essential for the mills in the north of England. Opposition to slavery went hand in hand with support for the forces of the North as this would mean the development of capitalist America.

With the Franco-Prussia War Marx insisted on the working class being always conscious of its own interests. The position of Marx and Engels was one of opposition to France when it went on the offensive against Germany. As soon as it was no longer a matter of defence against attack they changed their position, because the situation had changed.

In each example we can only understand the intervention of revolutionaries if we see the historical framework in which they were acting. To fail to do this would be like saying that the English Revolution of the 17th century or the French Revolution of the late 18th had no significance for the workers because they were conflicts between exploiting classes. Marxists were not unaware of the class nature of belligerents during the wars of the 19th century but they put these events in the context of a capitalist mode of production that was still developing across the face of the globe.

To the next meeting

Throughout this day of discussion there was a very good spirit. Although there were a number of differences these were approached in an open and comradely manner. All who were there shared a serious commitment to the process of clarification. We asked for the response of participants at the end of the meeting - these were all enthusiastic. Already, in informal discussions after the meeting, there were suggestions as to what future subjects could be discussed. It's too early to say at this stage, as we want to get some more feedback from the participants, although one definite possibility is the lessons of the Russian revolution and the revolutionary wave of 1917-23. Given the success of this day of discussion, we would like to repeat it and widen it in the future: comrades interested in participating in the next one should write to us. We will also be publishing the presentations and summaries of the discussion on our website in the near future.

ICC August 2007

What do the following have in common: a former Labour MP and local mayor; celebrity academic Germaine Greer, author of feminist classic The Female Eunuch; and the Ethiopian ambassador to London?

They were all speakers at a recent event to celebrate the life of Sylvia Pankhurst as a "crusader, artist and feminist"!

The Sylvia Pankhurst Festival held on 8 July included a series of talks and an exhibition in the Essex suburb of Woodford Green, where she lived for over 30 years. Members of Pankhurst's close family were also present, including her son, Doctor Richard Pankhurst, and the speakers included the local author of a recent biography (Shirley Harrison, Sylvia Pankhurst, a Maverick Life 1882-1960), and others with personal stories of her life.

Over the last 10 years or so there has been an effort by the left of the bourgeoisie to appropriate Pankhurst and gain official recognition for her, as a pioneer of the vote for women, an anti-fascist, anti-colonialist and indefatigable campaigner for world peace. There has even been a campaign, supported by Labour baronesses and former union bosses in the House of Lords, to erect a statue of her outside the Houses of Parliament (!). The holding of the Festival has to be seen in this context.

During her long political life, of course, Sylvia Pankhurst was all of these things (she died in 1960 in Ethiopia, and was given a full state funeral by her friend Emperor Haile Selassie), which is why the left can appropriate her in the first place. But they can only do this by suppressing or distorting her experience as a proletarian revolutionary, and in particular her defence of left-wing communist positions against parliamentarism and the Labour Party in the period from 1917 to 1924.

The Festival's speakers, while referring to her support for the Russian revolution, her visit to Moscow to attend the Third International and meet with Lenin, and her eventual expulsion from the British Communist Party, were coy about the positions she defended in this significant period of her life, preferring instead to praise her "contributions to human rights and campaigning for peace". Germaine Greer's presentation was at least more radical in language, pointing to the ‘limitations' of the women's movement and of the struggle for the vote, and arguing passionately that Pankhurst deserved to be more than a footnote to history. But Pankhurst the left-wing communist was still notable for her absence.

So not surprisingly, when it came to a debate on Pankhurst's legacy, the presence of the ICC at this event was very much as the ghost at the feast. A WR sympathiser intervened to affirm that Pankhurst was indeed not a footnote to history, as shown by the existence today of communist organisations like the ICC, and the modest contribution it has published on the history of the British Communist Left which contains some of her writings. To the re-emerging revolutionary minorities in the period after May '68, the re-discovery of the positions defended by the left-wing communists and of their criticisms of the Bolsheviks was crucial in re-forging the link with the past struggles of the working class. In Britain, for example, the revolutionary ex-shop stewards of the Workers' Voice group on Merseyside in the 1970s re-published many texts by Sylvia Pankhurst and the Workers' Dreadnought group, bringing them to the attention of a whole new generation of revolutionaries for the first time.

Finding herself unexpectedly in the face of living rather than dead revolutionaries, Greer swiftly backtracked, remarking that, yes well, of course back in the 1970s we all thought there was going to be a revolution, but capitalism won, didn't it? Thus she added to the bourgeoisie's lies about the ‘end of communism' (and in so doing consigned Pankhurst's own struggle for communism to the dustbin). Asked a question from the floor about whether there were any regimes today that Pankhurst would see as progressive, Greer warmly wished Sylvia was alive so that they could both go to ... Cuba! (If Sylvia came back as a left communist she would not be impressed with the state capitalist regime that is Fidel's island paradise). In response we pointed out that even in 1920 Pankhurst had been critical of the Bolshevik regime in Russia, and although we can never know what positions she would defend today, the real lasting value of Pankhurst's politics was her intransigent defence of the need for the working class to abolish the institutions of the capitalist state.

To the bourgeoisie, Sylvia Pankhurst is to be remembered as a feminist, a leftist or a liberal. To the proletariat, while not disguising the facts of her abandonment of revolutionary politics and subsequent betrayals, she is someone who, under the influence of the class struggle, broke with bourgeois politics and was won over to communism; greeting the Russian revolution as a practical hope for abolishing capitalism and creating a better world, she threw in her lot with the proletarian cause and for a period of her life gave to it all her energies and commitment - despite brutal treatment by the same democratic state that now tries to appropriate her to its own, alien cause. Thanks to the stubborn determination of Pankhurst and other, less well known working class militants (many of them women), the weak but authentic voice of left-wing communist opposition was heard in this country, leaving behind a body of writing that was to become a source of strength and learning for a new generation of revolutionaries fifty years later, of which the ICC remains an organisational expression today. This is the real legacy of Sylvia Pankhurst; this is the legacy communists defend today; and this is why we say to the left and liberal servants of the bourgeoisie: hands off Sylvia Pankhurst!

MH August 2007

We are publishing a leaflet by a close contact of the ICC about the student movement in Venezuela. It was produced by the comrade at the height of the movement and distributed at a student assembly held on the 22 June in one of the lecture halls of the Universidad Central de Venezuela.

We share the comrade's viewpoint, particularly the perspective posed by the movement: "It is towards the proletariat that the assembles organised by the young today throughout the country have to direct themselves, it is through discussion of the revolutionary potential of this class that the young will find the means to strengthen their movement, to orientate their struggle in the only direction that makes sense: that of the struggle of the working class against all the social inequalities of the capitalist system".

It is two months since the student movement began, and we can see that there has been a loss of impetus compared to the first few weeks. This has been brought about by the joint action of the forces of the bourgeoisie in power and in opposition, who have made it impossible to prevent the movement being identified as one more part of the opposition. In order to do this the student leaders linked with one or the other gang have been mobilised. The danger is that not only this student movement, but any social movement in Venezuela that tries to place itself outside of the strait-jacket of the political polarisation imposed by Chavistas and the opposition, will end up getting caught up in just such a trap.

Nevertheless, despite the actions of the opposition and the government, the student movement has not finished, but it is rather ‘in recess' during the holiday period. The conditions that gave birth to it, the growth in poverty, criminality, the high cost of living, etc, not only continue but are becoming increasingly unbearable.

We have also seen the slow beginnings of the mobilisation of the workers on their own class terrain: the oil workers (accused by the government of being oppositionists) have carried out several protests against the laying off of more than 1000 drilling workers and delays in the discussion of collective contracts; public sector employees have also being pushing for a discussion of the collective contracts, delayed for a year; transport workers have threatened a general strike due to the daily killings of drivers and assaults on passengers, etc...The workers' discontent is such that the official unions, for example the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores and the oil sector unions, have had to begin to ‘oppose' the government, as a way of channelling workers' discontent.

This corroborates what we said in our article that analysed the student movement [80] that it is an expression of the social discontent that exists in Venezuelan society. Thus it will not be necessary to have a ‘hot autumn' for the bourgeois hoax that is Chavismo's ‘Socialism for the 21st century' to start to be exposed. ICC, 20/8/07

Rebellion of the innocents or the implosion of ideology?

The youth protests that have flowered on the political and social scene of this country in the last few weeks, whose main protagonists have been university students (private and autonomous), as well as students of the education sector, have been an important political movement. Though burdened with certain demands (defence of the freedom of expression and protests against the closure of RCTV), this movement has opened the floodgates of an interesting scenario where, from now on, the working class can develop its struggle against the representatives of the capitalist system.

We will begin by making some things clear: we have to salute the spontaneity, the calmness and strength that this movement has shown since the beginning. This clearly place it outside of the influence of the antagonistic political factions that buttress Venezuelan capitalism and which have dominated the political scene over the last 8 years.

We need to look at the shape of these factions of capitalism. On one side is the faction that defends the liberal orientation of capitalism and which includes elements of the ‘critical left', remnants of Stalinism who used to flirt with Chavismo and who today are against it, as is the case with MAS, BR, Douglas Bravo, Pablo Medina, etc. Cohabiting with them we find recalcitrant factions of the right: the residue of COPEI, the Church, Primero Justicia, retired military men, along with the Centre Right with the Social Democrats around AD, Alianza Popular, Un Nuevo Tiempo etc, and a union fraction tinged by various orientations. All of these good gentlemen declare opposition to the regime controlled by Chavismo.

On the other side, we find the state capitalist model as the alternative to the crisis of capitalism. Those in this faction nestle under a posture of recalcitrant nationalism, tinged by an ideology based on Bolivarianism and militarism. It is important to highlight the theoretical framework that serves as the support of this movement. This is made up of the counter-revolutionary traditions of Stalinism, the guerrillas movement of the 60's, the experience of the ‘heroic Cuban revolution', which today is caricatured in the snobbery of Chávez's anti-imperialism. This rag bag of ideologies are the foul-smelling leftovers of Trotskyism, anarchism, Gramsci-ite pedagogy of the oppressed, mystifications about Afro roots and nativism, liberation theology and evangelism, Guevarism, Islamism etc. All this ideological vomit is the preamble to the piece of nonsense that is called ‘the socialism of the 21st century'.

These two capitalist factions have used different methods in order to try and capture the youth movement which today is shaking the homeland of the god Bolivar. The first, the petty-bourgeois and whining opposition, is trying to ride the crest of the wave, using the defence of freedom of expression and RCTV as its slogan, but the youth put a break on this by telling them that there was no room for them in this movement, and that this movement has nothing in common with their reaction or methods of struggle.

The second, at the beginning was panicked. Chávez in a livid and threatening speech on national TV told the parents of the children to reprimand and control them. As this drivel didn't work, they then resorted to summarily condemning them as the pawns of imperialism, as enemies of the motherland, as little bourgeois from the private universities who received counter-revolutionary instructions over the internet from the Empire. What bollocks! These obscenities are clearly not working; they are the product of a whole reactionary culture that is part of the theoretical repository of the ideologies of ‘Socialism for the 21st century.' Nor is the advice that Chávez desperately asked for at the enclave held in Cuba, called by the mummifed Fidel and the cocky Daniel Ortega. This wretched person was brought to Caracas by Chávez in order to besmirch the students who were looking for a political space within the class struggle.

The fear and cowardice of the regime was made clear in the pathetic attitude adopted by Madame Cilia Flores and Chávez himself when they furiously scolded the young who had left the environs of the National Assembly after fulfilling their mission of rejecting, through the right of reply, the shabby and slanderous accusations of the cretins of the Chavist parliament, thus again clearly demonstrating their independence. This was also demonstrated when they were ambushed in the concourse of the Parliament by Chávez and the ‘heroes' of the student section of Chavismo who tried to trap them. These actions show the wearing out of their accusation about the young being agents of imperialism and coup plotters.

We can see that the militant forces of reaction, Chavismo as much as the opposition, have not been able to shackle the movement of the young.

The prison in which the young have been confined is precisely the one that is dearest to them: the universities. The university, as a status institution, is the organism where all of the ideological justifications for the fundamental social and economic relations of capitalism are refined. The confrontation between the autonomous and private universities boils down to an antagonism about two visions, Chavismo's Gramscian vision of what education ought to be, particularly what must be imparted in the universities and, on the other side, the traditional conception. This is nothing more than a turf war between gangsters over how the universities will serve to impose their liberal or state capitalist conceptions. The demonstrations called by the rectors of the autonomous and private universities was a manoeuvre whose aim was, in the first place, to engrave in the minds of the young the bourgeois slogans of freedom of opinion and expression, and the defence of the instrument par excellence for capitalism's stupefying of society: television. Another aim was to tie them to the broken-down car of the defence of university autonomy. The universities have shown themselves to be the ideal instrument for drawing the young away from the direction that their movement instinctively takes towards the class struggles, towards contact with the only class that has a revolutionary historical perspective: the working class. It is towards the proletariat that the assembles organised by the young today throughout the country have to direct themselves, it is through discussion of the revolutionary potential of this class that the young will find the means to strengthen their movement, to orientate their struggle in the only direction that makes sense: that of the struggle of the working class against all the social inequalities of the capitalist system; the struggle for the destruction of the state at whose head we find either Chávez or the liberal bourgeoisie. In short, the direction towards real socialism, the classless, communist society.

We are En La Barricada

e-mail: [email protected] [81]

According to the media politics experts, Brown and Cameron both made very effective speeches at their party conferences. A more relaxed Brown talked about his family background and his parents' influence on his politics, his belief in "British values" and a "good society", "A Britain where we can do better than we are. Where we do feel and share the burdens of others. Where we do believe in something bigger than ourselves. Where we can be inspired by the driving power of social conscience. And where by working together we grow more prosperous and secure. This is the Britain I believe in. A Britain where by the strong helping the weak, our whole society becomes stronger and where by all contributing, each and every one of us is enriched".

Cameron, even more relaxed, strode about on the rostrum for 67 minutes referring only to four sheets of notes, extemporising on such key notions as: "REAL CHANGE", "STRONG COUNTRY", not the "OLD POLITICS" but "POLITICS YOU CAN BELIEVE IN", "A NEW WORLD OF FREEDOM". Together with the Shadow Chancellor's promise of tax cuts, this ‘virtuoso' speech seems to have dramatically cut the Tories' deficit in the opinion polls (which, incidentally, are also a product of the media).

At one point in his speech, Brown dismissed those who "see politics simply as spectacle", replying "I see politics as service because it is through service that you can make a difference and you can help people change their lives".

As a matter of fact, "politics" - the bourgeois politics of Brown and Cameron - is both. It is a spectacle designed to hide what interests the politicians really serve: not the "people", a meaningless abstraction in a world riven by class conflict, but the present social system, ruled by the vast impersonal power of capital, by production for profit. The increasingly indistinguishable platitudes of our political leaders are aimed at preventing those who benefit least from this system from questioning its foundations. And so we are offered the prospect of a "good society" and a "new world of freedom" which leaves the existing social order - a social order which is spreading crisis, war, hunger and poison across the entire planet - entirely unchanged.

In the wake of the conferences, speculation about a possible autumn election reached fever pitch in the newspapers and radio and TV broadcasts, until Gordon Brown ruled it out.

From the point of view of the majority who do not enjoy the privileges of the capitalist system, it makes no difference which colours the politicians paint themselves - New Labour pink, green/blue Tories - or which party sits on the government side of the House of Commons. Not only will their ideologies be the same, but, with small variations, so will their policies: all will require us to sacrifice our living and working conditions to the insatiable demands of the national economy. None of their policies will be remotely capable of sparing us from the impact of an economic crisis which is both global and historic in its scope. None of them, driven by the relentless drive to maintain profits in the face of this crisis, will be able to put the needs of the natural environment above the needs of ‘the economy'. And none of them, however much they talk about peace and international justice, will be able to stop British imperialism participating in the escalating military free-for-all which is turning more and more regions of the Earth into a madhouse.   

Real change and the fight for a "good society" involve something much more difficult and profound than listening to the phrase-making of the political leaders and voting them in or out every few years. It involves a bitter class struggle at the roots of social life, in the workplace and the streets, a struggle which cannot be entrusted to political specialists but must be controlled by its protagonists through organisations they create in the struggle, like the soviets created by the Russian workers and soldiers in 1917. It involves dispatching, not patching up, a social order which is already in its death-throes, and the construction of a wholly new society, based on the common need in reality and not in hypocritical rhetoric.   WR 6/10/7

This article is a shortened version of one that will appear in the next issue of the ICC's International Review, which will be published shortly.

The recent stock exchanges convulsions (see article on front page) pose the following question: whether the approaching open recession, which everyone agrees is likely, is part of the inevitable up and down pattern of the capitalist economy which is fundamentally sound, or whether it is a sign of a process of inner disintegration and breakdown, integral to capitalism, that will be punctuated by more and more violent convulsions.

To answer this question it is first necessary to deal with the idea that the development of speculation and the resulting credit crisis is in some way an aberration or a departure from the healthy functioning of the system, which could be corrected by state control or better regulation. In other words is the present crisis a result of financiers holding the economy hostage?

The role of credit in capitalism

The development of the banking system, the stock market and other credit mechanisms have been integral to the development of capitalism since the 18th century. They have been necessary for the amassing and centralising of money capital in order to permit the levels of investment required for vast industrial expansion that was outside the scope of the richest individual capitalist.  The idea of the industrial entrepreneur acquiring his capital by saving or by risking his own money is a pure fiction.  The bourgeoisie requires access to the sort of sums of capital that have already been concentrated in the credit markets. In the stock markets the ruling class is not betting with their own individual fortunes but with monetised social wealth.

Credit, and lots of it, has thus played an important part in immensely accelerating the growth of the productive forces in comparison with previous epochs and in the constitution of the world market.

On the other hand given the inherent tendencies of capitalist production, credit has also been a tremendous accelerator of overproduction, of overvaluing the capacity of the market to absorb products and has thus been a catalyst of speculative bubbles with the consequent crises and drying up of credit. Side by side with facilitating these social catastrophes the stock markets and the banking system have encouraged all the individual vices of greed and duplicity that are typical of an exploiting class living off the labour of others; vices that we see flourishing today in insider trading, fictitious payments, outrageous ‘bonuses' that amount to huge fortunes, ‘golden parachutes', accountancy fraud, and plain theft.

The speculation, the risky loans, the swindles, the subsequent crashes and the disappearance of huge quantities of surplus value are therefore an intrinsic feature of the anarchy of capitalist production.

Speculation is, in the last analysis, a consequence, not the cause of capitalist crises. And if today it seems that speculative activity in the financial sector dominates the whole economy, it is because over the past 40 years capitalist overproduction has increasingly lapsed into a continuing crisis, where world markets are saturated with goods, investment in production is less profitable and money capital's inevitable recourse is to gamble in what has become a ‘casino economy'.

Therefore there is no possibility of a capitalism without its financial excesses, which are an intrinsic part of capitalism's tendency to produce as if the market had no limits.

The recent slump in the housing market in the US and in other countries is an illustration of the real relationship between overproduction and the credit squeeze.

Housing industry illustrates the anachronism of capitalist production

The characteristics of the crisis in the housing market are reminiscent of descriptions of the capitalist crises that Karl Marx described in the Communist Manifesto in 1848:

"In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of over production. ...there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce".

So today we don't see homelessness as a result of a shortage of homes but paradoxically because there are too many of them; there is a veritable glut of empty houses. The construction industry has been working flat out over the past five years. But at the same time the purchasing power of American workers has fallen, as American capitalism attempts to increase its profitability. A gap opened up between the new homes being thrown onto the market and the ability to pay by those who needed them. Hence the risky - ie sub-prime - loans to seduce new buyers who could hardly afford them, and square the circle. Eventually the market crashed. Now, as more and more homeowners are evicted as a result of foreclosure on the crippling interest rates on these loans, the housing market will be further flooded - in the US some 3 million people are expected to lose their roofs as a result of defaulting on sub-prime mortgages. This human misery is anticipated in other countries where the housing bubble has either burst, or is about to. The surge in the construction industry and in mortgage lending over the past decade, then, far from reducing homelessness has put decent housing effectively out of reach for the mass of the population, or put homeowners in a precarious state[1].

Evidently what concerns the leaders of the capitalist system - its hedge-fund managers, its treasury ministers, its central bankers, etc - in the current crisis are not the human tragedies created by the sub-prime debacle, the dashed aspirations to a better life (except insofar as they might lead to questioning the insanity of this mode of production) but their inability as consumers to pay the inflated prices of houses and usurious rates of interest on the loans.

The sub-prime fiasco epitomises therefore the crisis of capitalism, its chronic tendency in the drive for profit to overproduce in relation to the solvent demand, its inability, despite the phenomenal material, technological and labour resources at its command to satisfy the most basic human needs[2].

However absurdly wasteful and anachronistic the capitalist system appears in the light of the recent crisis, the bourgeoisie still tries to reassure itself and the rest of the population that at least it won't be as bad as 1929.

The present situation: the same problems as 1929

The 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression continues to haunt the bourgeoisie, as the media coverage of the recent crisis testifies. Editorials, in-depth articles, historical analogies, have tried to convince us that the present financial crisis won't lead to the same catastrophe, that 1929 was a unique event that turned into a disaster by wrong decision making.

The bourgeoisie's ‘experts' foster the illusion that the present financial crisis is rather a repeat of the relatively limited - in time and place - financial crashes of the 19th century. In reality today's situation has more in common with 1929 than this earlier period of capitalism's ascendancy, sharing many of the common characteristics of the catastrophic financial and economic crises of the decadence of capitalism, of the period opened up by the First World War; of the inner disintegration of the capitalist mode of production, of a period of wars and revolutions.

The economic crises of capitalist ascendancy, and the speculative activity that often accompanied them and preceded them, were the heartbeats of a healthy system and gave way to new capitalist expansion throughout the world, through the construction of railways over entire continents, massive technological breakthroughs, the conquest of colonial markets, the conversion of artisans and peasants into armies of proletarian labour, etc.

The 1929 New York stock market crash, which announced the first major crisis of capitalism's decay, put all the speculative crises of the 19th century in the shade. During the ‘roaring twenties' the value of shares in the New York Stock Exchange, the biggest in the world, had increased five fold. World capitalism had failed to recover from the catastrophe of the First World War, and in the now richest capitalist country the bourgeoisie sought an outlet in stock market speculation.

But on Black Thursday 24 October 1929, a precipitous decline took place. Panic selling continued on Black Tuesday of the following week. And the stock market kept on crashing until 1932, by which time stocks had lost 89% of their peak value in 1929. They returned to levels not seen since the 19th century. The 1929 peak in share value was not reached again until 1954!

Meanwhile the US banking system which had lent money to buy the stocks itself collapsed. This catastrophe heralded the great depression of the thirties, the deepest crisis capitalism has ever experienced. American GDP was effectively halved. 13 million workers became unemployed with no relief to speak of. A third of the population sank into abject poverty. The effects were echoed around the world. 

But there was no economic rebound as there had been after the crises of the 19th century. Production only began to resume when it had been harnessed to arms production in preparation for a new re-division of the world market in the imperialist bloodbath of World War II. In other words when the unemployed had been transformed into cannon fodder.

The thirties depression appeared to be the result of 1929, but in reality the Wall Street Crash only precipitated the crisis, a crisis of the chronic overproduction of capitalism in its decadent phase. Here lies the essential identity of the thirties with today's crisis, which began in the late 60s.

The bourgeoisie in the 1950s and 60s smugly claimed to have solved the problem of crises and consigned them to a historical curiosity through such palliatives as state intervention in the economy both at the national and international level, through deficit financing and progressive taxation. To its consternation the world wide crisis of overproduction reappeared in 1968.

Over the past 40 years this crisis has lurched from low point to another, from one open recession to one more damaging, from one false Eldorado to another. The form of the crisis since 1967 hasn't taken the abrupt nature as the crash of 1929. In 1929 the financial experts of the bourgeoisie took measures that only allowed the financial crisis to take its course. The measures were not errors but methods that had worked in previous crashes of the system, like in the panic of 1907, but weren't sufficient in the new period. The state initially refused to intervene. Interest rates were increased, the money supply was allowed to shrink, tightening the credit squeeze and further shattering confidence in the banking and credit system. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff bill imposed import barriers that accelerated the downturn in world trade and consequently worsened the depression.

In the last 40 years the bourgeoisie has understood the need to use state mechanisms to reduce interest rates and inject liquidity into the banking system in the face of financial crises. It has been able to phase in the crisis, but at the price of overloading the capitalist system with mountains of debt. A more gradual decline has been achieved than in the thirties, but nevertheless the palliatives are wearing out, and the financial system is increasingly fragile.

The phenomenal growth of debt in the world economy during the recent decade is exemplified in the extraordinary growth, within the credit markets of the now famous ‘hedge-funds'. The estimated assets of these funds have risen from $491bn in 2000 to $1,745bn in 2007[3].  Their complicated financial transactions, mostly secret and unregulated, use debt as a tradable security in the search for short term gain. The hedge-funds are judged to have spread bad debt throughout the financial system, accelerating and rapidly extending the present financial crisis.

The economic history of the last 40 years has been the history of the failure of one magical remedy after another. Keynesianism - deficit financing by the state to maintain full employment - evaporated in the galloping inflation of the 1970s and the recessions of 1975 and 1981. Reaganomics and Thatcherism - restoring profits by cutting the social wage, cutting taxes and allowing unprofitable industries to collapse with mass unemployment - expired in the stock market crash of 1987, the Savings and Loans scandal, and the recession of 1991.  The Asian Dragons, saddled with huge debts, ran out of puff in 1997. The dot com revolution, the ‘new' economy, turned out to have no visible means of support, and the boom in its shares bust in 1999. The housing booms and credit card debt explosion of the past five years, and the use of the gigantic US foreign debt to provide demand for the world economy and the ‘miracle' expansion of the Chinese economy - this too has now been put in question.

We can't predict exactly how the world economy will continue to decline but increasing convulsions and even greater austerity is inevitable.

Capitalism has prepared the conditions for socialism

Karl Marx, in the third volume of Capital, argued that the credit system developed by capitalism revealed in embryo a new mode of production within the old. By enlarging and socialising wealth, taking it out of the hands of individual members of the bourgeoisie, capitalism had paved the way for a society where production could be centralised and controlled by the producers themselves and bourgeois ownership could be done away with as a historical anachronism:

"The credit system hence accelerates the material development of the productive forces and the creation of the world market which it is the historical task of the capitalist mode of production to bring to a certain level of development, as material foundations for the new form of production. At the same time, credit accelerates the violent outbreaks of this contradiction, crises, and with these the elements of dissolution of the old mode of production"[4].

For a century now conditions have been ripe for the abolition of capitalist exploitation. In the absence of a radical proletarian response, the contradictions of this moribund system, the economic crisis in particular, have only become more acute. While today credit continues to play a role in the evolution of these contradictions, it's not that of conquering the world market, since capitalism has long established its social relations throughout the planet. The massive indebtedness of all states has allowed the system to avoid brutal collapse despite the virtual impossibility of further expansion of the world market. But there is a price. After functioning for decades as a means of attenuating the conflict between the development of the productive forces and the obsolete social relations of capitalism, the headlong flight into debt is beginning to "accelerate the violent outbreaks of this contradiction" and to shake the social edifice as never before.  Como

[1] Benjamin Bernanke, Chairman of the US Fed, referred to mortgage arrears as "delinquencies": in other words crimes or misdemeanours against Mammon. Accordingly the ‘criminals' have been punished... by still higher interest rates!

[2] We can't here go into the state of homelessness in the world as a whole. According to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, 1 billion people on the planet are considered to be without adequate housing, while 100 million have no home at all.

[3] www.mcclatchydc.com [82]

[4] Part 5, Chapter 27: ‘The Role of Credit in Capitalist Production'

The recent financial turmoil and the shocks to the British banking system, notably the run on the Northern Rock bank (described by Richard Lambert, the CBI chief, as "almost unimaginable" and akin to what one expects "in a banana republic"), underlines a far more profound problem for capitalism than defaulting mortgage payments in Florida. 1866 saw the last run on a British bank. As well as Northern Rock in August 2007, two other major lending institutions, Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley, almost went to the wall, which would have led to millions of savers losing billions of pounds at a stroke. Out of the top 13 UK lenders only two had their loans covered by deposits. These most austere, supposedly responsible institutions of capitalism have been gambling with their deposits and in some cases, gambling with deposits that didn't exist. This is all a well-established part of the world casino economy of credit, debt, bubbles, speculation and gambling that British Prime Minister Gordon ‘Prudence' Brown oversaw at the Treasury during his ten years there. The lack of solvent markets and outlets for goods produced means that capital chases any short-term profits, the riskier the better, even at the risk of its own destruction. Even today, after the Northern Rock events, British banks are pumping billions of pounds into as yet unvalued Chinese banks whose accountancy practices are suspect to say the least.

From elements of the bourgeoisie, words like "unimaginable", "extraordinary" and "unprecedented" were used to describe Chancellor Alistair Darling's bail-out of Northern Rock and the state's underwriting of the British banking system. Unprecedented indeed. Darling, blaming US sub-prime lending for the problems said:"Here in Britain, we meet these challenges against the background of a strong economy". But obviously not strong enough to prevent major financial institutions in the fourth largest economy in the world from staring bankruptcy in the face. The action of the Labour government as guarantor of the British banking system, belatedly following the European Central Bank and the US Federal Reserve in pumping billions into their economies, points to both the development of state capitalism and its growing weakness in patching up an economic system which is tending to move out of control.

But these "challenges", as Darling put it, are nothing less than the profound limitations of production for profit, and this is what is being expressed, and will be expressed, in the financial markets. British banks have been enthusiastic about ‘off-balance sheet' borrowing and are at the front of the queue in parcelling up and selling off their dodgy debts. Thus the European Securities Forum shows that by June this year, there were £350 billion worth of outstanding securitised loans backed by UK assets, compared to the equivalent £72 billion in Germany and £28 billion in France. Mortgage lending, all lending, has been manipulated by all states in order to keep their economies going from day to day. House prices have fallen in Spain as defaults have risen. Similar for Ireland and Germany and soon Canada and Australia will be affected. These are all some of the expressions of credit and debt crisis which lie at the heart of capitalism's historic crisis. Led by the US state, cheap and easy money, as well as growing state debt, has been the policy of the bourgeoisie since the end of the 1960s. Henry Paulson, US Treasury Secretary, said in September: "the whole world including the US... has benefited from credit availability" . But the effects of the dope of credit are wearing off, leaving the poison deep within the system. And what's been the answer of the bourgeoisie to the current crisis? Lower interest rates and the injection of masses of monies into the system in order to underwrite it. The very actions that caused the problems in the first place. Thus the ECB and the Fed acted by pumping billions into their economies, accepting even riskier securities for collateral and risking further destabilisation by lending over longer periods.

In the face of the near collapse of British banks, the British bourgeoisie were forced to follow suit. The contradiction for the economy of pouring more poison into an already poisoned body just for short-term respite is well summed up in the position of the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King. Abandoning the fiction of an ‘independent' Bank of England, the British state was forced to massively intervene in the crisis. After telling the Commons Treasury Committee in September (quite correctly) that "If risks continue to be underpriced (and one could add, underwritten) the next period of turmoil will be on an even bigger scale". King then went on to say, completely contradicting himself, that he was ready to take far stronger emergency action by cutting interest rates and flooding the financial markets with capital, ie, ‘underpricing' risk in the longer term. Such is the insoluble contradiction for capitalism: whatever state interventions are made in the short term to allay the effects of the crisis, the latter will only come back in force.

Leftists back state capitalism

All this poses something of a quandary for leftists like the Socialist Workers Party. They are all for state intervention, the more the better. They support and advocate state control of the economy. They support the Labour Party and funding for this or that industry and public service. But writing in Socialist Worker, (28.9.7), the leftists are forced to disapprove of state intervention in the current crisis: "And the funny thing is that all the free-market ideologues - who believe the invisible hand of the free market should determine all things - fully expect that the central government can step in and make everything right... as if this were a centrally planned economy". The "funny thing is" that the British state, like all capitalist states, is a "centrally planned economy"; the very state capitalism that Socialist Worker advocates. What do they think has been going on throughout this current expression of the crisis - and before? The last recession of 2000 was brought to an end by the most active state intervention since World War II and an unprecedented increase in levels of debt, state budget deficits, the reordering of loans and interest rate manipulations in all the major capitals. This is not the "crisis of the dominant neo-liberal model" as Socialist Worker puts it, but the crisis of state capitalism, the very policy that it advocates. It is not only becoming increasingly difficult for state capitalism to buy its way out of trouble, but the very act of doing so, absolutely necessary for short term relief, makes the overall crisis much worse.

There is no ‘good'or ‘bad' capitalism, as Socialist Worker would have us believe; just state capitalism shared by governments of the left and the right the world over. Today this same state capitalism is in crisis and "the neo-liberal model" that Socialist Worker talks about is just one more fig leaf to cover up this reality. The rise in finance capital unable to find productive investment lies in the crisis of overproduction and the scarcity of fields for profitable accumulation. "Financial parasitism is a symptom of capitalism's difficulties, not a cause. The financial sphere is the crisis' showcase, for this is where stock market bubbles, currency collapses, and banking upheavals make their appearance. But these upheavals are the product of contradictions whose origins lie in the productive sphere" (International Review 115, 4th Quarter 2003, ‘The crisis reveals the historic bankruptcy of capitalist production relations [83] '). Baboon, 30.9.7

The working class in Britain is daily faced with its sons, daughters, sisters, brothers and friends in the armed forces being sucked ever deeper in to what appears to be a growing series of wars. The chaos in Iraq is rejoined by the revival of conflict and casualties in Afghanistan, although the full extent of the victims of war is deliberately hidden by the state, which does not report the number of injured. Troop numbers in Iraq are being reduced, but increasing in Afghanistan. The government and media say all the sacrifices are needed in order to bring about democracy and stability.

This spin is starting to wear thin, especially in relation to Iraq. Recent comments by the head of the armed forces about the nation not welcoming the returning troops, express the ruling class's growing concern that the population, and particularly the working class is becoming increasingly distrustful of it. The great lie about the ‘weapons of mass destruction' in Iraq and the appalling bloodshed since the invasion has profoundly undermined much of the support that the ruling class was initially able to rely on. In Afghanistan the invasion in 2001 used the 9/11 terrorist attacks as justification, but the worsening military situation is causing people to ask some very critical questions. We can add to this last year's promise by the former Defence Secretary, John Reid, when justifying the deployment of British troops in the notorious Helmand province, that they probably would not need to fire a shot!

This apparent incompetence on the part of the ruling class expresses the fundamental problem confronting British imperialism: "Since the collapse of the Eastern bloc the ICC has argued that British imperialism is caught in a contradiction it cannot resolve. In seeking to play an independent role and to continue to punch above its weight, it must play the US off against Europe, but more and more the reality has been that it is caught between these powers." (WR 302 "Resolution on the British Situation [62] "). This is graphically expressed by its present humiliation in Iraq and the looming prospect of being engulfed in another military adventure in Afghanistan.

Iraq: between a rock and a hard place

British imperialism rode into Iraq as the US's lieutenant, desperately hoping it could increase its standing as an imperialist power. Far from increasing its imperialist stature it has been undermined. How to extricate itself from this disaster is vexing the bourgeoisie. The destructive potential of staying too close to the US in the way Tony Blair did is clear for all to see. It was hinted when Gordon Brown first became Prime Minister that a total withdrawal would exacerbate existing tensions with the US and look like a defeat to its rivals. The announcement of the withdrawal of 1000 troops from Basra by Christmas seems to be an attempt to reduce the British presence. British imperialism's rivals will still understand that it has been driven back to one heavily fortified base, but they cannot say it has been driven out. It also gives the impression that they have not totally abandoned the US.

The Iraqi disaster precedes a possible further lurch into chaos if the US is to attack Iran. British imperialism, as the occupier of southern Iraq had been given the role of stemming the influence of Iran in the region. Its very limited capacity to achieve this was exposed in the spring with Iran's capture of British sailors and the total inability of British imperialism to do anything about it. This places them in a very difficult situation. If the US attacks Iran, its allies in Iraq, above all in the South, will strike back at the US and its allies. The Basra outpost would be an obvious target. This is causing very real concern to the ruling class. It does not want to get sucked into another military adventure. To avoid this it has been working with other European states to try and undermine the US's efforts to give itself the opportunity to make another display of military might after the debacle of Iraq.

The British government may spin its retreat from Basra with talk of having created the necessary security conditions and stability etc, but reality is very different. In September last year the British launched Operation Sinbad aimed at driving the militias from the streets and enabling the local security forces to take over i.e., a British ‘surge'. However, the initial success of this operation was reversed this spring: "By March-April 2007, renewed political tensions once more threatened to destabilise the city, and relentless attacks against British forces in effect had driven them off the streets into increasingly secluded compounds. Basra's residents and militiamen view this not as an orderly withdrawal but rather as an ignominious defeat. Today, the city is controlled by the militias, seemingly more powerful and unconstrained than before "("Where is Iraq going? Lessons from Basra", June 2007, International Crisis Group) And on a wider level the same report makes the point that "What progress has occurred cannot conceal the most glaring failure of all: the inability to establish a legitimate and functioning provisional apparatus capable of redistributing resources, imposing respect for the rule of law and ensuring a peaceful transition at the local level". In August this humiliation worsened when they had to abandon the final stronghold in Basra city, Saddam's old palace (the most attacked complex in Iraq). This retreat was dressed up by Gordon Brown on a visit to the 5500 military personal beleaguered at Basra Airport "What we propose to do over these next few months is to move from a situation where we have a combat role to an overwatch role".

British imperialism's rivals and the British bourgeoisie are not fooled by this; they know this is the bitter price of getting too close to the US.

Afghanistan: another quagmire

British imperialism's ability to impose its authority in Iraq has been weakened by the growing quagmire in Afghanistan. Initially, in 2001, it basked in the reflected glory of participation in the US invasion. At the time, the idea was spread that the Taliban was some rag tag bunch of fanatical peasants, hence Reid's ridiculous comment, in order to reassure the population. As we demonstrated last November this deployment was far from a walkover: "Today it is engaged in the most serious battles since the Korean War and has been unable to contain the situation in Helmand province, effectively being forced to surrender control of some parts. Its forces are over-stretched and taking casualties, leading to increasing disquiet in parts of the military." (WR302 "Resolution on the British Situation [62] " ). The Taliban is well armed, trained, with a level of organisation better than envisaged, and above all with the support of the Pakistani state. They have safe areas from which to carry out attacks and help from the Pakistani secret services and military. The Pakistani bourgeoisie are willing to give support to the Taliban because it has disputes with Afghan imperialism over its frontiers and Afghanistan claims over its Pushtan border areas. But even more importantly "Afghanistan is also a political football in the rivalry of Pakistan and India, both of which attempt to use it to undermine the other's regional interests" ("Countering Afghanistan's insurgency: no quick fixes". International Crisis Group Report, November 2006).

On a wider level the war in Helmand (and increasingly other provinces) is not only a local but an international affair. The aim of the US invasion was to impose its domination on the whole region. But the Taliban is not only openly supported by Pakistan but also by other powers who want to see the US tied down in another sticky situation

British imperialism cannot afford another defeat and has been increasing its deployment in Afghanistan (there are now 7700 troops there, double the number present during the invasion). The bourgeoisie is seriously worried about the situation. In July the Defence Select Committee issued a report on the situation in Afghanistan which, according to the BBC, delivers a "central message - things are going badly, alarmingly wrong in Afghanistan. With an accumulation of detail, the defence select committee paints a sorry picture - muddled strategy, shirking allies, a lack of helicopters and, stuck in the middle, the servicemen and women who have to make the whole thing work." A similar message was delivered by Lord Inge - former chief of the defence staff - during a House of Lords debate "The situation in Afghanistan is much worse than many people recognise,' Inge told peers. ‘We need to face up to that issue, the consequence of strategic failure in Afghanistan and what that would mean for Nato... We need to recognise that the situation - in my view, and I have recently been in Afghanistan - is much, much more serious than people want to recognise.' According to the Observer (15/7/7) he was speaking with the permission of the Defence Staff.

These warnings underline the depth of the problem facing the ruling class: they are having to devote increasing numbers of troops and resources in order to avoid defeat, in a situation of an expanding presence of the Taliban (and its backers) and the weakening of the puppet government in Kabul. This is going to accelerate the increasing numbers of dead and wound, not only amongst the Afghan population but also in the British armed forces: 35 dead this year, out of 55 killed in action since 2001.

Workers: growing unease

The relentless war, destruction, death and injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan is generating a growing unease and discontent. The ruling class is aware of this. When the head of the armed forces complained about the lack of respect for returning troops and called for more public support, Major General Patrick Cordingley, who commanded the army during the 1991 Gulf War, responded by saying "The second Gulf War was a very different situation indeed - probably not just, perhaps not even legal and a 50-50 split in the country - not a popular war."

This situation is very difficult for the ruling class. All the lies and spin about Iraq and Afghanistan are wearing thin, and are breeding distrust in what the state says about war. This, combined with the growing toll of dead and injured, which mostly affects the working class can only stimulate a questioning within the class on war and the system that gives rise to it. At the same time increasing attacks on living and working conditions show the reality of what capitalism has to offer the working class.

What lies ahead is a worsening situation in Afghanistan, the continued collapse of Iraq and the threat of war on Iran. The barbarity of capitalism is increasingly exposed for the working class to see. Phil 6/10/7

130,000 postal workers throughout the country have struck against Royal Mail's devastating attacks on their pay and working conditions. At 12.00 on 4 October postal workers began two 48 hour strikes stretching over two weeks.

It's very clear to all postal workers that the attacks are very real and severe. Under the Royal Mail ‘Plan' management have put forward proposals for an increase in the pay offer of 6.7% over two years (in itself a pay cut with the rate of inflation running at 4%) but at a price! There can be no doubt that RM is attempting to push through their ‘modernisation plan' and this means thousands of redundancies in the industry, estimated at nearly 40,000. Right from the very beginning RM have taken an intransigent stance and not shifted from their initial proposals for ‘flexibility' (here read job-losses and part-time working). These are both the short and long term objectives of RM and, under the guidance of Leighton and Crozier, it has used the tactic of ‘executive action', that is imposing management's plans whether the workers like it or not. They used this tactic of ‘executive action' in last year's pay round, paying RM's initial offer into the posties' bank accounts. RM has employed the same tactic for new starting times and other proposals, such as a plan to change the pension scheme, which would close it to new entrants, and put back the retirement age to 65.

At the end of September after weeks and weeks of prevarication, the ‘talks' between Royal Mail management and the postal union the CWU broke down.

According to the CWU, the new round of strikes will take the battle to RM. Dave Wiltshire, Bristol CWU branch chairman, said in an interview with Socialist Worker: "Management like to portray themselves as tough guys - now they are going to find how tough we can be".

Another union rep - Bradford's Simon Midgley - was nearer the truth when in the same Socialist Worker article he pointed out that "there are some who became a bit cynical when the action was called off for negotiations - but with the right campaign they can be won over. We need some really good union propaganda that spells out the case."

It's true that there is a good deal of cynicism amongst postal workers regarding this struggle and the CWU's delaying tactics.

Throughout the national workforce there is widespread concern that a rotten deal would be forced on them. In particular, postal workers looking to their jobs and conditions are worried that the ‘22 conditions' of change to working practises put forward as part of the RM deal would be accepted whole or in part by the CWU. This unease was accentuated by a total lack of information on how the negotiations were developing.

The unofficial strikes in the summer: expressions of real class solidarity

During the initial round of strikes in the summer, and again in the current ones, the CWU has maintained overall control of the struggle despite the existence of this cynicism. Workers have not challenged the CWU's overall direction of the struggle at national level. However, during the summer, a different tendency appeared at local level, with a number of unofficial walk-outs and spontaneous expressions of class solidarity.

At the beginning of August thousands of Glasgow postal workers walked out after 13 drivers refused to cross the picket line of the official strike at Edinburgh airport. The 13 drivers were suspended, prompting the mass walkout at Glasgow. This movement quickly spread to Motherwell and then to the rest of Scotland. At this point the CWU attempted to end the action, a spokesman telling the Scottish Evening News: "There are hopes of a resolution to the row over the delivery drivers. We are holding out the olive branch. We want to get our members back to work".

This movement prompted by management's strong-arm tactics was to spread to the whole of the country. In Liverpool, three days later, attempts by management to drive in mail resulted in a wildcat which was supported by Polish agency workers. In Newcastle, Hartlepool, Chester, Bristol the same scenario was repeated with solidarity actions after management suspensions. Throughout this period postal workers expressed a very high level of militancy and solidarity with victimised comrades. This has been impressive but there still remains a strong localised aspect to these struggles. With the exception of Scotland (where very quickly area after area came out over the suspensions of the 13 Edinburgh airport drivers) there has been a strong tendency to keep the strikes to local offices and we haven't seen the development of the flying pickets to other areas.

At the beginning of August, faced with an intransigent Royal Mail and a series of militant wildcat strikes, the Communications Workers Union called upon the services of the TUC and ACAS to broker a series of negotiations. Subsequently, Assistant General Secretary Dave Ward announced that the strikes would be called off pending "meaningful negotiations" with RM, and both RM and the CWU jointly called for a "period of calm". Both parties gave a commitment to reach a deal by the 4th of September. That date passed with an apparent deadlock and the deadline was extended to Sunday 10th September. That deadline was also broken and then further extended to the end of September. This has meant that there have been three separate ‘deadlines'. The CWU explained away these talks under the guise of appearing ‘reasonable' and ‘willing to negotiate' as opposed to the intransigent stance taken by RM management.

It is very clear that these delaying tactics were implemented in order to take control of the wildcat strikes. Most certainly they had the desired effect of having weeks of ‘negotiations' to dampen down postal workers' militancy. All this was a real setback for the workers.

The need for the struggle to spread

Despite all this, today on the picket lines postal workers are still expressing a strong resolve to fight RM's ‘Plan', which they understand very well is a massive attack on their pay and working conditions. But how to fight? This is the real question posed in all postal workers' discussions. Alongside the programme of rolling strikes, the CWU are proposing the tactic that postal workers ‘do the job properly'. In particular that posties stop using their cars for the delivery of mail and take authorised meal breaks. This will indeed lead to a jamming up of mail and massive backlogs in the system. But this tactic tends to reinforce the idea that postal workers can win this dispute mainly by keeping it going in their own sector until the management cave in. Experience shows that struggles that remain bottled up in one sector rarely force the bosses to back down, especially when they have the backing of the whole state machine, and when other capitalists are waiting in the wings to profit from RM's difficulties.

As we saw in the students' struggles against the CPE (legislation aimed at increasing casualisation) in France, or the recent textile workers' strikes in Egypt, what forces the ruling class to moderate its attacks is the threat of a massive movement spreading throughout the working class. Solidarity is a fundamental prerequisite. This was shown quite clearly in the series of wildcat strikes in the summer. Postal workers not only have to make direct links between different offices and depots but also to other sectors. As an example, Post Office Counters workers and ROMEC engineers in the same industry are facing the same attacks from the same employer. Yet there has been no attempt to link up the fight against RM. This is because the unions, with the CWU at the forefront, have religiously separated any joint action. And the issue is not just the post office, but the general attack on all workers, especially those in the public sector, who are facing a winter of deepening economic crisis, pay-cuts, redundancies and other attacks. Already a number of health workers, transport workers, education workers and others have shown their solidarity with the posties by joining their picket lines, but what is needed is a common struggle, not just ‘support' from other sectors. That automatically means organising across union divisions through mass meetings open to all workers in struggle. That may seem a big and dangerous step beyond leaving it all in the hands of the ‘professionals' of the trade union apparatus, but it's the only way the workers can really exert their huge potential strength. And any small initiatives in this direction - such as small groups of workers getting together to call for such methods of struggle (like the Dispatch publication mentioned in WR 307 [85] , an initiative of libcom.org) - are steps in the right direction. Melmoth 5.10.07

Last December there was a wave of strikes and other protests across Egypt (see WR 302 [86] , 304 [87]) which resulted in the government conceding annual bonuses equivalent to 45 days wages. However, this did not put a lid on workers' struggles, which have continued ever since. Toward the end of September 27,000 workers struck at Misr Helwan Spinning and Weaving Company's factory in Mahalla al-Kubra, with several thousand staging a six-day sit-in in a takeover of the textile factory. It's one of the biggest in Egypt, owned by the state and at the heart of last year's movement. Workers said that the government had gone back on its agreement, also demanding higher wages and the firing of top managers. Initial reports appear to indicate that all the workers' demands were met.

It seems that the government was concerned that the struggle would have the same impact as last year and spread to workers in other low-paid industries. Voice of America (27/9/7) reported that "The wildcat strikes have been far larger than any protest organized by the political opposition groups because the workers' movements have more grassroots support than any of Egypt's political parties or activist groups."

And although the police and army were mobilised it's not the same thing to confront thousands of workers as it is to deal with a modest demonstration by the political ‘opposition'.

The ruling class in Egypt is also concerned that workers have rejected the government-approved unions. When representatives from the ‘official' unions came to the factory workers chased them away and beat up the leader of the official Factory Union Committee. The strikes have been organised by workers independent of the state unions. The government has tried to combat this, for example, in April by closing the offices of a group that gave advice to workers and unofficial unions.

But the movement was not curtailed. Earlier this year there were strikes involving tens of thousands of workers at other textile factories, at two cement factories, and among poultry workers. Workers on the railway blocked the Alexandria-Cairo line and were supported in a go-slow by metro drivers in Cairo. There have been hundreds of smaller-scale actions by workers, including a sit-in by workers at a major post office in Cairo and strikes by rubbish collectors, bakers, Suez Canal employees, dockers, local council and hospital workers. According to one source there were about 220, mostly wildcat, strikes in Egypt in 2006. This year shows every sign of exceeding that figure.

The reason that workers are struggling is that, despite the supposed health of the Egyptian economy, workers have not felt any benefits. In particular, inflation is stated to be anything from 8 to 15 percent, but a government report issued during September said the cost of basic foodstuffs had risen 48 percent during the previous year. It is this, and consistently high levels of unemployment, that lie behind workers' struggles. And the ruling class knows it. At a recent conference in Cairo the Finance Minister admitted that it wasn't obvious how economic growth could benefit the poor, saying "It is a basic challenge that keeps me awake at night because I do not know how to handle it,"

And the development of an open class struggle is likely to cause even more sleepless nights to the ruling class. At the time of writing, the concessions made to the Mahalla workers, far from preventing the movement from spreading, have encouraged other workers to enter the struggle: at the Tanta Linseed and Oil factory, striking workers' demands were also quickly met and government officials were rushing to deal with another strike at Damietta Spinning and Weaving. And most importantly, the Egyptian working class is the biggest in the Middle East and its struggles have the potential to inspire workers throughout the region and the rest of the world.

Bangladesh: workers battle with police and troops

Bangladesh is another country where the class struggle has been sustained during the last year. Back in January there was a whole series of general strikes and unrest. An interim government backed by the army was installed, headed by the former head of the central bank Fakhruddin Ahmed. It imposed a state of emergency, but has not succeeded in containing workers' struggles, despite frequently resorting to violence.

Back in May for example at FS Sweaters Ltd in Gazipur, just north of Dhaka, at least one person died and more than 80 were injured when police fired on garment workers. They were on an unofficial strike not only for a wage rise but also for the release of two of their comrades who had been imprisoned. It was after a demonstration when workers put up a barricade across the road that the police made their first baton-charge. Workers retaliated by throwing stones and then the police started throwing tear gas canisters and firing live bullets which hit a dozen people.

More recently, in mid September, during a strike involving factories throughout the Dhaka Export Processing Zone in Savar, there were running battles between police and workers with more than 100 people injured. Starting with several hundred workers from Featherlight Ltd (part of the Ready Made Garment sector - RMG) workers from many other factories joined them in a protest demonstration, which was then baton-charged by the police, leaving many workers injured. Workers responded by barricading the road, damaging a number of factories and vandalising a number of vehicles. After a long period of fighting with the police workers were finally dispersed by a large-scale tear gas attack by the police.

Attacking factories is common in Bangladesh. Last year for example rioting at RMG plants in and around Dhaka over an eight week period left 400 factories damaged. There's a lesson to be learnt in the approach of workers at Misr Spinning and Weaving in Mahalla al-Kubra. When they were accused of damaging property two Daily News Egypt journalists were taken inside the occupied factory to show that the machinery was all in working order. One worker was quoted as saying "We are not sabotaging this factory. We are guarding these machines. This is our factory. This is where we make our living. We understand that." The destruction of factories can't help the class struggle.

In mid September in the Khalishpur industrial belt, Khulna, south-west Bangladesh striking workers at Platinum Jubilee Jute Mills attacked union leaders. They accused them of conspiring and conniving with management against workers' demands. 5000 workers had been on strike for nearly a fortnight, and were increasingly unhappy with the behaviour of the unions. On the morning of 16 September union officials had to be protected from angry workers when they arrived at the factory gates. Workers went to the house of the general secretary of the mill's trade union and ransacked his house. Later they met the union president and beat him up.

Again, these expressions of rage are perfectly understandable and do express an incipient grasp of the anti-working class role played by the unions, but beating up one or two union officials won't solve the problem of how to cut through the obstacles posed by unions as institutions tied to the bourgeois state.

A week after these events there were further clashes between garment workers and police that brought 25,000 workers on to the streets of Dhaka in a militant demonstration that was held despite a government ban on protests and rallies. More factories were damaged, buses burnt and roads blocked. It should be added that, with the prospect of further struggles in this area, the RMG sector has a 90% female workforce, rather undermining the stereotype of the passive Asian woman.

The struggles are likely to continue, in the face of rising inflation, working conditions often enforced with violence, and long periods of unpaid wages. The Bangladeshi economy is affected by frequent cyclones and flooding which increase its instability. In this fragile economy the jute and garment sectors are not only the most important industries, they have also been the setting for the most widespread workers' militancy. Car 2/10/7

Workers have to face violence or the threat of it when they struggle, but they also have to deal with all the manoeuvres of the unions and their political allies.

In the US, at the end of September, there was a classic example of a union strike at General Motors, where workers, worried about job security and retirement benefits, found themselves in a two day strike which resulted in the union (the UAW) agreeing to a further decline in workers' living standards.

At the beginning the strike of 73,000 GM workers, which shut down all 82 GM facilities in the US and stopped supplies to plants in Canada and Mexico, was hailed as the first strike at GM since 1998, the first national strike in the auto sector in 3 years and the first nationwide strike at GM since 1970. It was said that GM had enough cars and trucks to withstand a short strike as, at the beginning of September, it had a 65-day supply. Yet despite the underlying militancy that the union was responding to, it felt confident enough to agree to a settlement with the company that was greeted with delight by the media, Wall Street and other car companies. The pressure is off GM to deal with retiree health care, which becomes the responsibility of the union, which in turn becomes a major investor with the funds it has been provided. There will also be a two-tier pay and benefit system where newly hired workers will get far less, maybe even half, the package for current workers.

The reason for the relief in the ruling class is the state of the US car industry. Detroit's Big Three (GM, Ford and Chrysler) lost a collective $15 billion last year, as they face more competition in the US market. They had 73 percent of the home market in 1996, down to 54 percent last year and now less than 50%. GM's market share has gone from 40% in the mid 1980s to under 24% today. Against this Japanese and European car makers based in the South are paying their workers less as their market share increases. 100,000 car workers jobs have gone in the last four years. It's a very real crisis in the car industry and the workers are having to pay for it.

Leftists support unions

The groups on the left wing of capitalism (Trotskyists, Stalinists etc) complain about the union bureaucracies, how they betray workers and ally themselves to a capitalist party, the Democrats. This is not headline news, as even a CBS report could spell out that the UAW had " agreed to massive buyout plans and changes to retiree health care to help the automakers." Denouncing ‘business unionism', where unions seem to go out of their way to help the capitalists, is the stock-in-trade of the left. The World Socialist Web Site denounces the UAW for "collaborating with GM on its restructuring plans that eliminated 34,000 UAW jobs." But, like all the left, it still holds to a union framework (just less bureaucratic), presents the 1930s as a golden age for unionism and wants the car industry taken into state ownership.

The same problems are posed to workers across the world. The crisis of the capitalist economy lies behind the attacks of the bourgeoisie. The capitalist state can't be used by workers, and, since unions have long ago become the main obstacle to the development of workers' struggles, workers clearly need means of struggle that serve the need for self-organisation and a growing solidarity in the ranks of the working class. Car 2/10/7

In this series we have examined the struggle of the working class in Britain to organise itself against capitalism during the period of capitalism's ascendance, looking in particular at the growth of the trade unions as defensive organisations against the attacks of capital.

As we said at the start in WR 301, these articles are aimed at answering the popular argument in the anarchist milieu that the trade unions have always been reactionary. An article reprinted from the now defunct but still influential British paper Wildcat, expressing exactly these views, has recently appeared in the online library of libcom.org [89] , so in this article we want to directly respond to this argument.

Why did workers create unions in the 19th century?

Wildcat's position is very simple: "the unions have sabotaged working class struggle since their inception."

Wildcat's version of history, which partly follows in the footsteps of John and Paula Zerzan, and Cajo Brendel, can easily be summed up. Back in the 18th century there were uncontrollable mobs, but in the early 19th century the working class movement reached a high point with the Luddites. From then on it was all downhill as the bourgeoisie ‘tamed' the workers' anger against capitalism by encouraging the creation of legalistic, pacifist trade unions and diverting workers' energies into parliamentary struggles for the vote.

The first problem with this argument is that it prompts the question: if the unions have always been reactionary why did workers ever create them in the first place? Why is it that, even today, while expressing their anger at the now reactionary unions' betrayals, and deep criticisms of this or that leader or union, workers still very often express the idea, especially in Britain, birthplace of trade unionism, that at some deep level the trade unions are still somehow ‘theirs', and therefore have to be defended?

The answer is: because the trade unions originally were theirs; they belonged to the workers, who built them to defend themselves against capital's attacks; fought for them; were persecuted, imprisoned and transported for the very act of belonging to them.

How did the working class in the 19th century not notice that the unions were, in fact, "sabotaging the working class struggle from their inception"? Although Wildcat doesn't say so, the logical conclusion from their argument is that the working class were somehow duped by the bourgeoisie into thinking that the unions were ‘their' organisations, when they were products of the bourgeoisie all along...

No, if the workers persisted in putting their energies into the building of trade unions, it was because this model of permanent mass organisation in the factories corresponded to their immediate and objective needs as a class, and they were prepared to invest all their energies in their defence against the bourgeoisie. And this is why, despite the betrayals of a union leadership which, yes, even in the mid-19th century, became deeply infected with opportunist and reformist ideas and practices (see WR 305), in this historical period the unions still expressed abundant proletarian life.

Was there an alternative to the unions?

For Wildcat the highly disciplined organisation and violent actions of the Luddites are the real alternative to the reactionary trade unions, even arguing that "Some kind of Luddite-style community organisation would be appropriate for workers in small, scattered work-places today."

But we need to put the Luddites in their proper historical context. As we showed in WR 301, in the early 19th century Luddism expressed the resistance of the skilled hand-loom weavers to the relentless advance of large-scale capitalist industry. Machine-breaking was a symptom of the weakness of this struggle, not strength, while the Luddites' clandestine organisation was an attempt to overcome the scattered nature of production in this declining sector, especially in conditions of heightened repression during wartime.

In contrast, it was the factory workers, especially in the textile industry, who increasingly took the lead in the workers' movement in this period, and whose struggles demonstrated an open, massive character; also highly disciplined but with very little violence, as in the first great cotton spinners' strike of 1818. Wildcat ignore all this, clinging to the argument that the only reason Luddism did not continue was that state repression had the effect of "opening up a space for parliamentarism and trade unionism, which was powerful enough to prevent a serious resurgence of Luddism." This is simplistic. But even Wildcat, which thinks that the Luddites are still a model to copy today, has to admit that this could only be relevant for small, scattered communities, when the working class today is precisely characterised by its concentration in massive urban and industrial areas, where its struggles tend to take on an open, mass character.

The violent actions of the Luddites against the state and employers are one of the main reasons why Wildcat sees them as a model to be followed today. But Wildcat generally downplays the importance for the working class of organisation; it wasn't violence which explains the success of the workers in spreading their struggles across the country during the 1842 general strike, as Wildcat suggests, but their organisation in local strike committees, mass pickets and ‘committees of public safety', and their unification at the national level through conferences of trade delegates to direct the struggles and give them explicit political objectives to gain the demands of the Peoples' Charter.

Significantly in the 1842 general strike there is also no evidence that the workers themselves saw any opposition between their own struggles and trade unionism; on the contrary, the delegates to the national conferences were trade unionists, active locally in their union branches and agitating in them for Chartist demands. And it was precisely the spectre of an alliance between trade unionism and Chartism that so terrified the bourgeoisie - see WR 216 and 304.

Wildcat rejects the struggle for reforms

Wildcat argues that as early as 1824 measures like the Combination Acts, which legalised some forms of organisation, merely enabled the recuperation of working class organisation by the middle class from the outside, citing as examples the use of the courts by early trade union leaderships.

For a start this rather neglects the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 which banned all forms of union organisation. Small unions had existed from before the Industrial Revolution, but the ruling class was concerned that a new more militant type of unionism was spreading to factories and mines in the Midlands and the North of England.

It also needs to be said that after the 1824 measures the bourgeoisie still found ways of attacking working class organisation, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, for example, were convicted of administering unlawful oaths.

But for Wildcat it wasn't just the trade unions that represented an attack on the working class at this time; the struggle for the vote in this period was also an expression of the invasion of bourgeois influence from the outside. So the Chartist movement, far from representing the first mass proletarian political party, was nothing but a "middle class movement dedicated to recuperating working class struggle. The intention of Chartism was always to divert working class anger into demands for an extension of the franchise."

As for the improvements in working and living standards won by the working class in his period, for example the restriction on child labour and working hours for women, these were nothing but "pre-emptive concessions to the working class designed to buy social peace in the long term."

So, to be clear, Wildcat's argument is that the whole struggle for reforms by the working class during the period of capitalism's progressive expansion was nothing but a bourgeois diversion from violent insurrection.

This radical-sounding argument is empty of historical method, and of any understanding of the conditions in which the working class was struggling. Given the condition of the great mass of the working class, it was still absolutely necessary to organise in order to struggle for improvements such as the limitation of the working day, as a precondition for the further development of the class struggle. Despite the growth of reformist illusions in the workers' movement, which the bourgeoisie of course did all it could to reinforce, the working class secured real economic and political benefits in this period, like extension of the franchise, legalisation of the unions and real wage rises at least for skilled workers. But even after the legal recognition of trade unions in the early 1870s, trade unionised workers were only a small minority of the class in Britain; vast sectors of the working class were still virtually unorganised, and only some parts of the class had the vote.

Wildcat dismisses the hard-fought gains made by the working class in this period, but more importantly dismisses the real struggle of the class to organise itself in a period when revolution was not yet on the historic agenda. Superficially Wildcat's arguments sound radical, and to those today who can see the very real reactionary nature of the trade unions everywhere it no doubt sounds very revolutionary to be told that in fact the trade unions have always acted in this way. But it hides not only a complete lack of historical method and understanding, but above all a disdain for the working class and its struggle against capitalism.

MH 1/10/07.

Discussion is the lifeblood of the workers' movement as it tries to clarify the questions thrown up by the class struggle and in the fight for communism. It obviously takes many forms. For example, we always encourage people to write to us, at as great a length as is necessary, if there are issues that really need to be spelt out and given proper consideration. Or, there's the example of our participation in online forums, where you might not be able to say everything, but you can certainly get over the basics of the approach of the communist left. But it's in the public meetings of the ICC that it's possible to ask questions, state your point of view and really debate questions facing the working class.

At the September public meeting in London we started with a short presentation on the current state of the class struggle. During the course of the meeting we covered a wide range of questions, but, in a sense, particularly in looking forward to post-revolutionary society, it was only possible to do so because a social force, the working class, exists that has the capacity to overthrow capitalism.

One participant, for example, found it difficult to imagine a society without money. Looked at just from the experience of atomised individuals in a society based on commodity production, it is indeed hard to imagine something so radically different. But as soon as you grasp the possibility of a society based on relations of solidarity, and the impact on millions of people who have organised themselves and gone through the whole revolutionary process that the overthrow of capitalism requires, with all the development this implies for class consciousness, you're talking about an enormous leap. This is not just idle speculation as we already have the experience of the Russian revolution to draw on for lessons that will help in future struggles.

For example, the question of planning in a future society has to be seen as the complete opposite of planning in Stalinist Russia. There the only planning that took place was at the level of the needs of the Russian state capital in the context of the anarchy of international capitalist competition. Planning in communism can only be for the satisfaction of the needs of humanity based on the coordination of all available resources, human and otherwise. It's like when marxists talk about the dictatorship of the proletariat. Normally, when talking about dictatorship it refers to some sort of harsh authoritarian regime, but for marxists it's to be understood that we mean the domination of a particular social class. So, at present, the capitalist class is the dominant class, the ruling class in every country in the world, that's the dictatorship of a small minority, the bourgeoisie over the vast majority of the rest of the population. The dictatorship of the proletariat is in the interests of the working class and all other non-exploiting strata, and against those who want to re-establish relations of exploitation and the dictatorship of capital.

Other questions discussed at the meeting included an assessment of the growing influence of marxism. We were modest in our claims about the recent experience of the ICC as one example of this, but could definitely see a quantitative development in correspondence, appearance of new groups, online hits and a qualitative change in the response to our intervention, with a greater openness to debate, even from those initially suspicious of anything labelled ‘marxist' or communist.

On the class struggle itself we looked at the weight of social decomposition and the obstacles facing workers' struggles. In the face of isolation and atomisation, how does the working class gain confidence and consciousness, what is the potential for the politicisation of the struggle? This is a very important question, as, for all we insist on the emerging struggle since 2003, we cannot deny the difficulties that face the working class. There is nothing inevitable about the class struggle and the road to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. Yes, the deepening economic crisis of capitalism is inevitable, but workers don't inevitably recognise the best way to defend their interests. One of the functions of revolutionary minorities is to try and show the long term goals of the movement and what potential the working class has.

Face to face political meetings have not been made redundant by the advent of the internet. They remain vital because they allow debate to develop and questions to be clarified in a much more direct manner than through written correspondence or online forums. That's why we can only encourage readers of our press and visitors to our website, all those who really want to develop a debate about communist politics, to overcome any hesitations and attend our meetings in greater numbers. WR 30/9/7

When the protests in Burma started in the middle of August the issue was price rises, specifically the end to fuel subsidies that caused a fivefold price rise that inevitably affects the cost of everything else. And this was still the concern when Buddhist monks first took to the streets in support. But this concern has been rapidly eclipsed by the talk of democracy in what had become largely a movement of the monks, and with it has gone any visible expression of the needs of the poverty-stricken population and the tiny working class of the country. Instead we have the high politics of international influence and imperialist interest.

These protests have been met by a wave of repression across the country. The initial fuel price protests led to at least 150 arrests. However, the monks' protests escalated for several weeks before the crackdown at the end of September. During this time there has been much media talk of peaceful protest, of monks as the conscience of the country, of the attempt to go and pray with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. The monks' banner "Love and kindness must win over all" was widely quoted. We were led to believe we were witnessing a ‘saffron revolution' after the style of the democracy movements in former Soviet Republics (although Burmese monks wear oxblood red, not saffron). We do not have reliable figures for the victims of the repression, since the official figures for both death and detention are totally unbelievable when you had well armed troops attacking unarmed protesters and thousands of monks, often bearing injuries, fleeing across the borders.

Caught in the imperialist conflicts

Burma's largest land border is with China, its most significant trading partner and supplier of General Than Shwe's military government with cut-price military hardware. China is rebuilding the old British road to India, bringing in 40,000 construction workers, and parts of Burma are completely dominated by their powerful neighbour, using Chinese currency and language, as though it were a province ruled from Beijing. Burma supplies China with listening posts and a naval base on the Indian Ocean, just where it needs it to respond to its Indian rival as well as any other ocean-going power. It is one of China's ‘string of pearls', the satellites key to its imperialist strategy. As well as owning Tibet, China has influence in Nepal, Burma, Cambodia and Laos with a view to extending towards Vietnam and Indonesia. Its ambitions lie to the west in Central Asia as well as south to the Indian Ocean. China's bellicosity towards Japan and Taiwan shows another dimension of this rising imperialist power. Nevertheless, Shwe has allowed the Russians to gain some influence, much to China's annoyance.

All China's neighbours are worried. Australia has expressed concern about China's expansion towards Indonesia, while India is also trying to get influence in Burma. Britain, the old colonial power, may not be able to send journalists in legally but still has substantial investments. And the USA is not far away from any hotspot and, like the others, keen to limit China's ambitions in the area.

The western powers base their hopes on Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy. She is the daughter of Aung Sang, the Prime Minister put in place under the British, and possibly murdered by them just before independence for being too friendly to the Japanese. In any case democracy is the imperialist battle-cry used by the USA and Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan to such destructive effect. Clearly China is not going to be allowed a free hand in Burma or anywhere else.

Our media have emphasised Chinese responsibility for the Burmese military junta, the repression meted out and the lack of development in the country. After all they and Russia have previously vetoed sanctions against Burma over the issue of human rights; while China and India have major trade and investment in the country that could be used to pressure the junta into more humane behaviour - as if those who run Abu Ghraib and camp X-ray were really worried about that! However, while China is the major power in Burma today, it did not invent the junta. Military rule has lasted over four decades, long before China gained such influence. It was back in 1990 that the junta refused to accept the result of the last elections and would not allow parliament to sit. The renewed interest in democracy in Burma relates to its greater strategic importance on the imperialist chess board today. But unlike the period before 1989 each area of conflict is attended not by two imperialist blocs, but by a whole dangerous and unstable cacophony of competing interests, as Burma is today.

The revolt by the poor over fuel prices took Britain, America and all the other western powers by surprise, but it has given them an opening to play the democratic card in order to assert their own imperialist interests and make things difficult for China and its ally, Shwe. But nationalism and democracy are simply the rallying cry for the bourgeois opposition and their imperialist backers. They offer no way out of the poverty suffered by the vast majority of the population, and no way out of the dangerous conflict between China and the various other imperialist powers in the region. Alex 6.10.07

Throughout the summer the mainstream press was full of hot air about a new ‘winter of discontent'. So editors, both tabloid and broadsheet, must have breathed a collective sigh of relief when postal workers walked out en masse in October. With further action threatened by public services workers in response to paltry pay offers and the possibility of large scale action in response to job cuts at the BBC, the media's nostalgic dreams of a rerun of 1979 seem to be finally coming true. But, as usual, reality is more complicated. Unlike much that appears in the media the current strikes are not a repeat, a rerun of past ‘glories'. Workers don't struggle in order to fulfil the media's desires.

Response to an international crisis...

The growing unrest in the public sector is just the most visible national expression of a more general feeling of anger felt internationally throughout the working class. While capitalism's crisis deepens with the shock waves of America's emerging recession reaching every corner of the world, attacks on working conditions continue to increase and the number of job losses in all sectors rises daily. Whether it's on the question of pensions, housing, healthcare, jobs or the environment capitalism can't provide a perspective for the future. It is a system that has reached a stage of decomposition from which it can never escape.

Nowhere is this chaos clearer today than in the housing market. A recent biannual report from the IMF stated that, "housing markets have boomed in a number of fast-growing countries, most notably Ireland, Spain and the UK, with rapid price rises and sharp increases in residential investment relative to GDP exceeding even those observed during the US housing boom" (The Guardian 18.10.7). Put simply a number of European countries risk a US-style collapse in house prices, where according to The Guardian (25.10.7) "sales of existing homes [have plunged] to their lowest rate since records began", as the ‘credit crunch' continues to reek havoc on the American economy.

Economists may argue that the European market is more robust because it hasn't "seen such a marked deterioration in lending standards as the US" (The Guardian 18.10.7) but in Britain at least, a record number of repossessions suggests otherwise. This perspective is reinforced by the IMF report, "the extent of house price over-valuation may be considerably larger in some national markets in Europe than in the US, and there would clearly be a sizeable impact on the housing markets in the event of a widespread credit crunch" (The Guardian 18.10.7). The Bank of England is certainly nervous. In its half-yearly Financial Stability Review it "admits it would need to learn its own lessons from the handling of the three-day crisis at Northern Rock - the first run on a big UK bank in almost 150 years" and is critical "of the way banks made risky loans and them passed them on to other institutions" (The Guardian 25.10.7). So perhaps sub prime loans are not just a US problem? Ten years after Black Monday no matter what the bourgeois press tells us economists are still no better at predicting the markets. Confidence is sliding; confusion reigns.

...an international class struggle...

In response to all of this chaos only the working class is able to provide a perspective. Over the last four years the working class has regained its combativeness, shrugging off the illusions that appeared in the aftermath of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989. The struggles in, for example, France and Austria around the question of pensions in 2003 marked a turning point in the class struggle. Workers have slowly, tentatively, been returning to struggle. The evidence for this can be seen internationally with strikes stretching from Bangladesh to Brazil, from baggage handlers in London to textile workers in Cairo. As we wrote in International Review 130, "not a month passes without struggles taking place somewhere in the world, giving expression to the essential characteristics of the workers' struggle internationally, and bearing with them the seeds of the future: workers' solidarity across the barriers of corporation, generation and nationality". The recent postal strike in Britain and the potential for further strikes in the public sector must be seen in this context, in the context of the international class struggle, not through the distorted vision of the bourgeois press.

One characteristic of recent struggles is the question of a perspective for the future and the postal strike was no different. The latest official strikes at the beginning of October saw up to 130,000 walk out against the Royal Mail's provocative ‘modernisation plans', in reality an attack on jobs, wages, conditions (particularly so called ‘Spanish practices') and pensions. As one postal worker said to The Guardian (12.10.7), "they [the management] want to turn the screw". The press portrayed the strike as a ‘classic' struggle between Royal Mail management and the leaders of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) reporting on traditional late night meetings at TUC headquarters. But as we explained in WR 308, the CWU were late to ‘take the battle' to the Royal Mail and their recent complete capitulation to all of the Royal Mail's proposals except on the question of pensions, which will be discussed separately, justifies postal workers' concerns that a rotten deal would be forced on them. By removing the pensions issue from the current ‘deal' with Royal Mail management the CWU has been able to get postal workers back to work, at least for the time being. Thus fulfilling their role as a cop in the workplace: workers' militancy has been dampened and the strike movement, albeit temporarily, has been defeated.

...and expressions of class solidarity

This is not to say that postal workers have begun to openly challenge the CWU or have lost their illusions in the unions. Throughout the strike the CWU managed to maintain control over the majority of postal workers, but some interesting developments did take place during the strike that echo recent struggles internationally and provide lessons for future struggles. Throughout the strike there were real expressions of class solidarity. Although only at a local level there was a tendency for unofficial walkouts and wildcat strikes that began in the summer and continues as we write this article. At the height of the strike "some 30 depots out of a total of more than 1,400 were affected by wildcat action in London and Liverpool" (The Guardian 12.10.7). These walkouts were often in response to suspensions of workers who refused to cross picket lines (which in Liverpool included Polish agency workers) and spread spontaneously throughout the country. Workers also expressed solidarity and discussed the progress of the strike online on the Royal Mail Chat forum. The internet has opened up a new arena for workers to discuss, one which has been exploited in a number of recent struggles but most notably during the fight in France against the CPE in 2005 where participants used blogs and online forums to exchange ideas and spread the struggle.

Solidarity is the key to any struggle and although this was a strong feature of the postal strike, particularly in the wildcats, workers weren't always able to extend solidarity between offices and depots. Direct links between different groups of workers weren't made because the struggle remained within the union prison. As we wrote in World Revolution 308, "postal workers can't win alone". Workers in all sectors are under attack: in the health service workers conditions are deteriorating; teachers have just rejected their latest pay offer; on the question of pensions "more than a quarter of Britain's largest companies want to offload their final salary retirement schemes to the new breed of pension buyout funds to escape the increasing costs and regulation of guaranteed pension plans" (The Guardian 19.10.7). Of course none of this is unique to Britain. While the postal workers were on strike, rail workers in France went on strike over the pension reform plans of Sarkozy's government, closing down the Paris transport system.

So, the real lesson of the postal strike is that in order to win, workers need to spread the struggle, both throughout their own sector and across union divisions to other sectors. Workers need to revive the mass meeting where workers from all sectors in struggle are welcome and encouraged to discuss the current situation. None of this is easy: many workers still see the unions as the only way to fight the bosses' attacks and the recent behaviour of the CWU won't change this overnight. These illusions are reinforced by the left who insist that rank and file initiatives can put enough pressure on the CWU leadership to turn it into a ‘fighting union'. But if workers can begin to extend solidarity across these barriers, and there is evidence that a minority of workers have begun to do this (see the article on Dispatch in WR 307), they will see the potential of their collective strength.

From out of the shadows

British anti-parliamentarian communist Guy Aldred wrote in 1916, "The Word [i.e. the struggle against capitalism] must be whispered in the shadows before it is proclaimed from the housetops". The postal strike was part of the ‘campaign of whispering' that is currently taking place internationally amongst the working class. Workers are stepping out of the shadows and beginning to rediscover their collective voice. It may be some time before they are shouting from the rooftops, but the struggles that happen today provide important lessons for the future. Capitalism has no perspective to offer and with the attacks on pensions workers are slowly beginning to realise this. William 1.11.7

‘Everything is going well - it's not serious'. ‘There's no need to be disturbed'. These are the lying and hypocritical speeches of the bourgeoisie. In the last months, when the new phase of the acceleration of the world economic crisis of capitalism broke out, the so-called ‘sub-prime crisis', the bourgeoisie wanted at all costs to reassure us with ideological mystifications. ‘The crisis won't last long'. Ben Bernanke, new US Federal Reserve Bank chairman, suggested that the crisis would be over by next March - a bit like the First World War being over by Christmas. And the bourgeoisie were even saying that the crisis was welcome and salutary, so as to correct certain excessive speculations and reign in some bad intentioned financial sharks. Only a few weeks later reality has swept away all the words of these kidders appointed by the bourgeoisie.

In fact we haven't had to wait long to see this crisis of credit and debt propagate throughout the whole economy. And it was also foreseeable that the American economy would very quickly go into recession. This is already a fact. In the US, the economy is losing 100,000 jobs per month. Bank workers are strongly hit and massive job cuts rain down daily. In Britain the banking sector is also hit with job losses, as is the Ministry of Defence and the public sector overall; in the ‘privatised' gas, water and electricity industries job cuts are a continual process. Thousands of relatively well-paid and full-time jobs are going every week in the manufacturing sector: Cadbury, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and B.P. to name a recent few. Even in Switzerland, the symbol of the comfortable life in a capitalist regime, job cuts are the order of the day. In the USA, in the construction industry alone, redundancies are already counted in tens of thousands. This sector is, without any doubt at the moment, the hardest hit by the crisis. The construction of buildings and new houses faced with a growing stock has just undergone a violent slowdown, whereas the sector was one of the major pillars of growth. The inhumanity and indifference of the bourgeoisie has no limits when it's a question of its interests and there are nearly 500,000 immigrant workers in this sector who have seen their jobs disappear. These workers, mostly of Mexican nationality, and the families that have joined them, have been taken to the border without any form of process. Many of those who have lost their homes and deposits are immigrant workers who have just settled and been conned into outrageous debt. These foul practices of the bourgeoisie show just what this class of exploiters is capable of when they have no need for workers. But the price the working class has to pay doesn't end there.

In capitalism, there are no guarantees for the working class

Who could have imagined a couple of months ago seeing queues of workers and savers in the streets in front of building societies, coming at dawn trying to rescue their life savings from catastrophe? This is what happened at Northern Rock, the third largest borrower on the housing market in Britain. Incapable of repaying its mountain of debt, this financial institution appealed to the Bank of England to rescue it from immediate bankruptcy. The latter straightaway provided ‘support' (over 20 billion pounds so far and continuing), guarantees and public assurances that all those with deposits would be fully reimbursed. In fact, all these capitalists care not one whit that after a life of work and saving, thousands of workers would find themselves without a penny from one day to the next. Their fear lies elsewhere. Northern Rock is the first major victim, after Countrywide in the US and several German banks, of this generalised crisis of credit and debt. What the bourgeoisie fear is the effect of contagion. All banks throughout the world have, more or less, been using deposits so as to gamble them shamelessly, taking still more risks in order to heap up their profits. Worse still, they have pushed more and more working class families with low incomes into taking on more debt or making more credit available. What would happen if everyone who had savings in building societies or banks wanted to withdraw their money? Despite the promises of the bourgeoisie they would not get their money back. It's for that reason that the queues formed in front of the doors of Northern Rock.

It is faced with the fear of the collapse of the whole banking system that the bourgeoisie has reacted. In Britain, in the image of the USA, household debt is more than 100% of Gross Domestic Product and is made up of more than 80% borrowed against rising house prices. In other words, all the accumulated labour in one year, without the workers consuming anything, would not be enough to pay off this debt! After the explosion of the speculative housing bubble in the United States last August, just starting to burst in other developed countries, it is now the turn of Britain to suffer the same fate.

In fact, moving away from its reassuring mantras, the Bank of England in its ‘Financial Stability Report', published on October 25 (The Times, the same day), recognises this fact. The Report warns on credit, the vulnerability of the British economy to further shocks and can, of course, offer no solutions. The Policy Exchange think-tank (linked to the mainstream Conservative element) in its report two days earlier is more forthright: Britain's growth and low inflation is "more mirage than miracle" it says. "We need to find more sustainable foundations for our future economic prosperity than house prices and debt". And it points out that the vast increase in personal debt is matched by the public sector with the national debt more than doubling since 1992.

Capitalism's flight into debt is accelerating

The principal banks in the world and notably the US Federal Reserve as well as the Central European Bank have, throughout August, September and into October, injected colossal sums in order to support their economies and prevent as much as possible a chain reaction of bankruptcies.

But all that isn't sufficient. During the last months stock markets are still volatile and US activity has clearly slowed down. The US central bank has lowered its credit charge to lend monies to other banks and institutions by half-a-percent. As if by magic (‘the alchemy of the printing press') it has just artificially created a colossal sum of new money that has come out of nowhere. In an immediate manner and in the very short term, this will certainly have an impact on the economy and further rate cuts are predicted for the end of October in the USA. But that will not prevent the crisis continuing and developing. Much more, this policy of a still deeper generalised indebtedness, which is at the base of the present acceleration of the crisis, can only prepare for still more violent and deeper catastrophes tomorrow.   Tino/B.

After nearly 3 months of dispute the worse fears of postal workers have been confirmed. The Communication Workers Union (CWU), through its executive, have recommended acceptance of a deal which is practically the same as the original offer made by Royal Mail. After 3 weeks of wrangling Billy Hayes and Dave Ward were desperately attempting to put together a package that they could sell to postal-workers. In a joint statement of Royal Mail/CWU to all CWU branches, Ward and Hayes had the gall to say: "Royal Mail and CWU recognise that the scale of the recent dispute has the potential to damage relationships between managers, reps and employees ... Everyone wants to put the dispute behind us and we are all committed to restoring good industrial and employee relations at all levels". The statement says that "The CWU will withdraw all current and proposed industrial action relating to the national dispute".

This is after Royal Mail had agreed that union reps were reinstated to their original status, maintaining that the CWU are able to control the strike.... "We must also recognise that the agreement gives the Union the opportunity to be at the centre of dealing with change at the national and local level".

Many postal-workers are now asking themselves why they struggled so hard for so many weeks, and lost so much pay (in the case of Liverpool and London the loss of 3 weeks pay through wildcat action) to be handed a deal which is hardly distinguishable from the original offer.

The CWU boasts that it has separated the questions of pensions from the national dispute, when quite obviously postal-workers see the defence of their pension rights as absolutely fundamental. The question of the pensions has been postponed until the Twelfth of Never.

"The Postal Executive has also agreed a joint statement on the Pension Consolidation. Pensions has been decoupled from the Pay and Modernisation Agreement and given that it's a group-wide issue, will now be subject to a separate national briefing and separate communications". Retiring at 60 means a massive loss of benefits and new entrants into the industry will not be eligible for this pension scheme. Essentially, this was the original Royal Mail position on the issue of pensions as now endorsed by the CWU.

The joint agreement is not a ‘sell-out' but the time-honoured manner in which unions play their role in disputes.

With the question of pay, the 6.9% (5.4% now and the rest at a later date) that the CWU has accepted is practically the same increase that was originally offered by Royal Mail. The sweetener being a lump sum of £175 with acceptance and the possibility of a further £400 some time in the future under Royal Mail's phoney ‘ColleagueShare' scheme. The £400 is contingent on ‘productivity' and ‘flexibility' completed in "phase 2 of the modernisation process". Acceptance of the pay deal means an acceptance of the modernisation process put forward by RM. ‘Flexibility' will change working practices in the industry and was the main concern of all postal-workers and the reason that they fought so hard during the strike. The CWU tried to circumvent this thorny issue by very devious means indeed. It placed the question of change and flexibility onto the local level, which meant by-passing the CWU executive and passing it on to local union reps and RM managers.

Such are the changes to present working practices that workers will be asked to work all sorts of different hours and with management having the ability to use posties at any time. Also group working will be introduced on the Dutch model which sets responsibility for dealing with large volumes of mail traffic on the shoulders of postal-workers.

Royal Mail would not be able to introduce such changes without the determination of the CWU to sell the deal to postal workers. It's yet more evdence that workers need to take struggles into their own hands.   Melmoth 3/11/7

In Oslo, on 12 October 2007, the Norwegian Nobel Committee decided to award the Noble Peace Prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore Jr.

The IPCC is the body set up between the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organisation to monitor and report on the science of global warming. Al Gore Jr. is the former US vice-president who failed narrowly to beat George W Bush in 2000, and is now a campaigner on climate change issues.

The Nobel Committee explained their decision to award the peace prize to environmentalists- "Extensive climate change may alter and threaten the living conditions of much of mankind. They may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth's resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world's most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states." (Nobel Peace Prize 2007-Press release)

By awarding half the prize to Al Gore, the committee reveal their real attitudes to the environment and to peace, no less than when Henry Kissinger, principal weaver of the carpet bombing of Cambodia and other atrocities, was given the same prize in 1973, prompting the musical satirist Tom Lehrer to say that "political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Prize."

As we wrote in no. 143 of our US paper, Internationalism: "Despite all the media glorification celebrating Gore as the pre-eminent champion of the environment, Gore, like the rest of the capitalist class, is an environmental hypocrite. In light of his acknowledgment that Kyoto was never meant to impact seriously on GHG emissions, Gore's denunciation of the Bush administration's attitude on Kyoto and global warming rings hollow. Furthermore, while Gore voiced support for Kyoto in 1997, the Clinton/Gore administration did nothing to push for ratification of the treaty. A bi-partisan ‘sense of the Senate resolution' opposing the treaty because it exempted China and India from emissions limits and ‘would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States', passed by 95-0. Clinton/Gore administration never submitted the treaty for ratification, and the U.S. has not abided by the guidelines. Thus, no matter how much Gore vilifies Bush for not embracing Kyoto and no matter how clumsy Bush is in how he talks about the environment, the rejection of Kyoto has been a consensus policy position of the American bourgeoisie that began on the Clinton/Gore watch. Bush's policy is a continuity of the position set by Clinton/Gore in 1997".

Al Gore defends US national interests because he is a bourgeois politician and does not wish to get rid of the main cause of the destruction of our world: capitalism and its relentless pursuit of profit. By the same token, the "violent conflicts and wars" referred to by the Nobel Committee are caused by the frenzied competition between capitalist nation states.

Wars and environmental destruction are a normal part of capitalism in its period of decomposition. Each section of the bourgeoisie is forced into conflict to maintain its position or face defeat. The spirit of global co-operation is impossible in such a system.

Only the efforts of the working class to destroy capitalism are worthy of such an award, but the turkeys in Oslo will never be voting for Christmas.   Ash 31/11/07

On the 17th October President Bush insisted that he "had told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make nuclear weapons". This could be dismissed as another example of Bush's exaggerated rhetoric, but underlying this statement is the real threat that the wounded bear that is US imperialism will strike out at imperialist rivals that are constantly baiting it.

World War III is not around the corner. The conditions do not exist for it: the world is not divided into military blocs, and the working class is not defeated and ready to march off to war for its ruling class. Nevertheless, the Bush regime is stepping up military and economic pressure on Iran with the declaration that the Revolutionary Guards are a terrorist organisation, the build up of US armed forces in the Gulf and the growing propaganda campaign aimed at preparing the population for the possibility US military action against Iran (in the name of stopping it gaining nuclear weapons) holding out the perspective of a qualitative worsening of military barbarism in the Middle East and internationally.

This threat of military action against Iran, while it is still up to its neck in the disaster of Iraq and with Afghanistan heading in the same direction, appears crazy, courting even greater disaster. Nevertheless, American imperialism is tightly bound by the insane logic of imperialism. As the world's only superpower it has to force every other imperialist power to accept its domination, whilst all its rivals are forced by the same insane reasoning not only to resist this domination but to do all they can to undermine US imperialism. It is this logic that has reduced Iraq to chaos, and which threatens to engulf the whole region (the cradle of human civilisation) into such terror.

Iran is seen as a pivotal country in the Middle East by US imperialism. The old warhorse of US imperialism Zbigniew Brzezinski defines pivotal countries as "Active geo-strategic players are the states that have the capacity and the national will to exercise power or influence beyond their borders in order to alter -to a degree that affects America's interests- the existing geopolitical state of affairs....Turkey, and Iran play the role of critically important pivots" (The Grand Chess Board, 1997). Iran sits astride the Middle East and Central Asia, and is thus important to the US's plans to dominate this region and Western Europe and Russia beyond. The US would also like to control its oil supplies.

This pivotal position cost the populations of Iran and Iraq over one million dead during the war in the 1980s when the US backed Iraq. The reason for this war was Iran's break with the US bloc, through the overthrow of the US backed Shah and the imposition of a theocracy. The sheer barbarity of this war: chemical weapons, the mass slaughter of wave upon wave of soldiers from both sides, including children, rocket attacks on cities, all of this done with the direct cooperation of the Western Bloc (the Iran/Contra scandal demonstrated that the US was arming both sides) in order to bring Iran to heel, demonstrated that something had changed in imperialist relations. Previously in the post WW2 period wars had been proxy ones between the two blocs. Iran was something new, an imperialist power that defended its own interests in open defiance of both East and West. It was a foretaste of the spirit of ‘every man for himself' that let rip after the collapse of the old bloc system.

In the first Gulf War the Iranian bourgeoisie had supported the US, as it attacked its old rival, but any ambitions it may have had to take advantage of the weakening Iraq were stopped when the US left Saddam in power. The disaster of the Second Gulf War for the US has allowed Iran to feed its imperialist appetite. The destruction of Saddam and the following chaos has allowed Iran to use its influence with the Shia bourgeoisie to full effect. The ‘government' of Iraq is dominated by Shia parties with links to Iran, but who also want to keep it at arms length, whilst in the South the Iran backed Shia militia have routed the British and gained control of the region. At the same time the Iranian bourgeoisie has made every effort to develop the means to produce nuclear weapons in order to better challenge its main imperialist rival in the region, Israel, and to give it a bargaining card with US imperialism in the same way as North Korea.

The Iranian bourgeoisie is also trying to take full advantage of the weakening of US imperialism and its major rivals' willingness to try and thwart its plans. Thus, its willingness to go along with diplomatic solution proposed by the EU above all Germany and Italy who have close ties with Tehran and thus can further their own imperialist ambitions.

Europe is not a homogenous whole. Each country has it own interests to defend. Thus French imperialism, that has historical ties with Lebanon and Syria, has taken a hard line. A line which also aims to worsen the situation of British imperialism which has suffered a mauling in the South of Iraq (see ‘No way out for British imperialism' WR 308) and through being too closely tied to the US in Iraq. It does not want to be pulled into another conflict, hence Brown's more subtle support for sanctions. Nevertheless, the SAS has been engaged with US and Austrian special forces in operations along the Iraq/Iranian boarder and within Iran (Sunday Times 22.10.07). This expresses the difficulty facing Britain, since it needs to take part in such operations in order to protect the beleaguered troops at Basra Airport, and not to appear to abandon the US, but at the same time such operations risk dragging it into military escalation beyond its control.

This explosive situation is made even more threatening by the increasing involvement of Russian imperialism. In October there was a summit of Caspian Sea countries: Iran, Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan in Tehran. The summit cemented a growing relationship between Russia and Iran: "Indeed, it is as much shared interests as common worries and concerns, eg, the US's unbounded interventionist policies, that have now brought Iran and Russia closer together and to the verge of a new strategic relationship. After all, both Iran and Russia are today objects of American coercion, their national security interests and objectives imperilled by the US's post-9/11 militarism" (Asia Times on-line, 18.10.07). It is reported that President Putin told Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that "An American attack on Iran will be viewed by Moscow as an attack on Russia" (Asia Times On-line 26.10.07), during an unprecedented meeting with the ‘supreme leader'.

Iranian imperialism is also making eyes at Chinese imperialism. It wants to join China and Russia in a ‘counter-weight to US hegemony', the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. China is more circumspect in its support for Iran than Russia, but does see its interests served by appearing to oppose the US's belligerent attitude to Iran.

To this mix has to be added growing destabilisation of the region marked by Turkey's threats against Northern Iraq, and Israeli imperialism's determination to show that its defeat in Lebanon last year was a one off. Israel has always said it will try to stop Iran developing nuclear weapons and in a situation where it appears to be weakened such an action appears all the more likely. At the same time Saudi Arabia cannot allow its regional position to be weakened by a resurgent Iran.

What the outcome of this boiling cauldron of tensions will be we cannot predict. What we can say though is that US imperialism is caught in a vicious vice: if it does not make a display of its military might its rivals will seek to take full advantage of its weakness, whilst if it does take military action against Iran it will push the whole region deeper into chaos. Whether or not the US decides to take military action this time, the working class and humanity will still be subjected to the chaos in Iraq, the whipping up of nationalist hysteria in Iran, the constant threat of military action by Turkey or Israel and all the misery that this will lead to.  Phil 2.11.07

Martial law has been declared in Pakistan, the culmination of all the conflicts that have been going on within the state since the summer. This appears to have been precipitated by the fears that the High Court might rule Musharraf ineligible for his re-election as president last month, and he has finally replaced the Chief Justice with one of his own men, something he tried and failed to do in August when he pulled back from declaring a state of emergency. This suspension of the Constitution contrasts with all the propaganda about moving towards democracy and civilian rule and will put Benazir Bhutto in a difficult situation as she flies back from Dubai. She originally returned from exile after swapping an amnesty for agreeing that her supporters would not block Musharraf's election. It will also put a spanner in the works for the US tactic of supporting a coalition of the ‘moderates', those likely to be most willing and able to support it against Al Qaida.

Among all the pious expressions of concern voiced by various bigwigs around the world, British Foreign secretary David Miliband said "We recognise the threat to peace and security faced by the country...". To understand what is going on in Pakistan today we don't so much need to look at how the President is looking after his personal self-interest, but why the ruling class as a whole cannot cohere and why a section of it put a military dictator in charge. To do so we need to see where Pakistan stands in the geo-strategic map of the world and the imperialist tensions that are pulling it apart. It has a large frontier with Afghanistan, as well as having Iran, China and India on its borders. It has over a million Afghan refugees. The six decade long fight with India over Kashmir is hardly Pakistan's only concern. Internal conflicts, such as the battle between the army and Islamists in the North West region, complete the picture of a country being torn apart by the pressures coming from within and without.

The effects of conflicts between the great powers

Back in the 1980s, when the major imperialist conflicts were between the USA and its allies and vassals on the one hand and the Russian imperialist bloc on the other, Pakistan was strategically important for western supplies to the Mujahadin, who were fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. Back then, these Islamists had not just God but also the CIA and American Stinger missiles on their side, and Russia was duly forced out. Pakistan also has its interests in Afghanistan, a useful hinterland for training and strategic depth in its confrontation with India in Kashmir.

More recently the USA launched its own invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, using the destruction of the World Trade Centre etc and the need for a ‘war on terror' as an excuse. Once again Pakistan's support was needed. America promised it would support those tribes hostile to the Northern Alliance, Pakistan's traditional enemy and a barrier to its influence in Afghanistan, but this promise was broken when the Northern Alliance gained influence in the post-Taliban settlement. In any case, Pakistan's assistance was obtained by other means of persuasion when the US threatened to bomb it into the stone age if it didn't give support. This threat has been more or less repeated by Barack Obama in the current presidential campaign, suggesting that the US could bomb Al Qaida strongholds in Pakistan without permission.

At the same time there were millions of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, adding to the instability of the country, and even though 2.3 million were repatriated in 2005, over a million remain.

Regional imperialist interests

Pakistan has its own imperialist interests, and to pursue them has made itself the greatest recipient of arms transfers in the third world in 2006, with India coming a close second. Its conflict with its larger Indian rival over Kashmir and their nuclear arms race led to the brink of war in 2002, with the weaker power stating it would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons against a superior enemy. The danger of war was averted with pressure from the US, which did not want this conflict getting in the way of its pursuit of its own military adventures, but none of the issues were resolved. The peace process Pakistan was forced into meant it could not take advantage of any of its gains on the ground. The conflict has been continued in a less newsworthy way with terrorist attacks in both countries, and in Kashmir itself Pakistan admitting to only ‘moral and diplomatic' support to Islamists, but in fact giving much more, and India repressing these fundamentalist ‘freedom fighters'. Both sides rely on virulent nationalism and neither shows any concern for their uncounted victims.

When the strategic situation is looked at more widely it is not to Pakistan's advantage. Forced at gunpoint to support the USA in its ‘war on terror' it can gain nothing from its loyalty to the USA. As China is following up its economic growth rates with growth in its imperialist appetites so it is coming into conflict with not only India but also America. Pakistan is faced with a convergence of interests between its traditional enemy, India, and its super-power boss of bosses. And to make a bad situation worse, Pakistan finds itself in the middle between its two much stronger ‘allies' and major trading partners, the USA and China, as they come into conflict.

The failure of the ‘war on terror'

The ‘war on terror' has not been a major success for the USA, faced as it is with a quagmire in Iraq and an intractable Afghanistan which limit its options in its desire to launch new military adventures. For Pakistan this is a further disaster. As the US shows its weakness, so Al Qaida supporters, many of them based in North West Pakistan, are more daring. Soldiers are kidnapped or killed with impunity. In the summer 200 were killed in 10 weeks and at the end of August 250 were kidnapped in South Waziristan without firing a shot, giving rise to speculation that the Army has been infiltrated. Neither the 90,000 troops deployed to the border nor the $10 billion US aid has brought the situation under control. A government peace deal with tribal leaders in Waziristan angered America, but broke down and fighting has increased since the storming of the Red Mosque. Musharraf cannot please anyone. Some senior officers blame him for being distracted by the political crisis.

In Pakistan the state is at war with itself. Opposition leaders were rounded up in September, former PM Nawaz Sharif was expelled as soon as he returned. Political rallies are the scene of terrorist murders. High Court judges protested against the administration after one of them was sacked, and then suspended a police chief after violence at a demonstration of protesting lawyers. These are the institutions at the heart of the state and their conflict reflects the way the country is being torn apart by the imperialist conflicts that go under the heading of the ‘war on terror'. And now this has culminated in the declaration of the state of emergency.

Whether elections are held in January or not, there will be no move to democracy and civilian government, Pakistan is struggling to avoid being torn apart. Even without being directly attacked it shows the chaos and misery that is being caused by imperialist conflicts today.   Alex 3/11/07

During October workers' struggles continued in Egypt. This year, according to one source, there have been 580 ‘industrial actions' in the nine months to the end of September. This compares to 222 strikes recorded in the whole of 2006. The strikes continue to be as inspiring as during last December's strike wave (see WR 302 [44] , 304 [65] , 308 [92] ). Workers in state-owned industries have found themselves coming up against the state as employer, but also against the state-run unions. In an article in Middle East Report Online Joel Beinin writes that "Opposition to the regime takes the form of opposition to the Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF), which, though nominally an umbrella group representing all of the country's organized workers, is in fact an arm of the state. The Mahalla workers renewed their call for impeaching the local union committee, which reports to the ETUF and has sided with the regime and company management throughout 2006 and 2007. Fourteen thousand Mahalla workers signed petitions in support of this demand in March. ETUF representatives were less than useless in the September strike. The head of the local factory committee resigned after he was beaten by workers and taken to the hospital. ETUF secretary-general Husayn Mugawir announced that he would not visit Mahalla until the crisis was resolved."

In opposition to this state of affairs Muhammad al-‘Attar, a strike leader who was imprisoned at one point, told the Daily News Egypt (27/9/7) "We want a change in the structure and hierarchy of the union system in this country.... The way unions in this country are organised is completely wrong, from top to bottom. It is organised to make it look like our representatives have been elected, when really they are appointed by the government."

Elsewhere around the world there are demands for, and the growth of ‘independent' unions. For example in South Africa the government is made up of the ANC, the South African Communist Party and the COSATU union federation. It should come as no surprise that there are more ‘militant' ‘independent' unions that are fiercely critical of COSATU and how its government role prevents it from acting properly on behalf of workers. In the US leftists want unions that don't support the Democratic Party.

In Palestine there are four different union federations, three controlled by Fatah and one by Hamas. Appointments to union positions are made on a political basis, and there is currently a campaign for unions that are independent of the political factions and the Palestine Authority.

In Venezuela, for 40 years before Hugo Chavez came to power in 1998, the trade union tops were explicitly part of the state. Trade unionists are currently arguing as to whether there's a need for trade union organisation that's independent of the Chavist apparatus.

In Iran, Vietnam, Cambodia, China and Algeria, and in many other countries where either unions are closely identified with the state or ‘alternative' unions are illegal, there are ‘independent' unions or at least campaigns for ‘real' unions that will represent workers' interests.

Illusions fomented by militant rhetoric

There are many political currents that are sympathetic to this demand for ‘independent' unions. In the leftist mainstream there is the Socialist Workers Party which sums up its basic position in saying "No matter how left wing union officials or union policies may be, the need regularly arises for independent rank and file organisation within and across the unions". But there are also many anarchist currents that are sympathetic to the idea of unions that have distanced themselves from the state.

The SWP says it doesn't matter how left wing official union policies are. This is true, but the SWP don't tell us the reason. The  official policies of a union don't matter because its function remains the same regardless of whether it proclaims its loyalty to the state or breathes the rhetoric of militancy or even revolution. Unions have become an integral part of capitalism. They try to control the working class, to sabotage its struggles, or divert it into dead-ends that don't challenge the capitalist state. Indeed, far from defending the interests of the working class, unions have become part of the capitalist state, or, in the most radical instances, an ‘alternative' adjunct to the state.

So, when the SWP sees the need for something ‘independent', that exists ‘within and across the unions', it only amounts to a plea for differently structured unions, not for a change in their function, which, as they almost admit, is not possible, no matter how left wing their policies are. The only difference in a union that has a more democratic constitution or a more ‘militant' or ‘independent' reputation is that workers will have more illusions in it.

In their struggles workers need to create their own fighting organisations that correspond to the need for the extension and unification of working class struggle. Just because there are unions that brandish oppositional rhetoric and insist on their autonomy doesn't change their basic function. And just because some unions are harassed and repressed by many regimes today doesn't make them friends of the working class. What were organisations of the working class in the 19th century, when it was possible to wrest reforms from a still-developing capitalism, have become organisations of the ruling class in the period of capitalist decay, when the overall trend is towards the deterioration of the conditions of work and life of the working class.

Going back to the article on Egypt, it describes the union as having "sided with the regime and company management throughout 2006 and 2007." It's as though there was something exceptional in this and that, as Muhammad al-‘Attar suggested, a change in structure and hierarchy could rectify the anomaly. In fact, far from being an anomaly, unions, in one way or another, now always end up on the opposite side to workers. Some unions are obviously state-run, but workers shouldn't be deceived into thinking that the ‘independent alternative' serves the bourgeoisie any the less.

Remember Solidarnosc

The most dramatic example of an independent (and large-scale) union is Solidarnosc which emerged in Poland in 1980-81. The working class in a massive wave of strikes created a number of organs as part of its struggle. Committees were set up that acted in accordance to the needs of the struggle, responsive to workers' demands, with recallable delegates and a drive to the extension of the struggle across the whole country. Workers were understandably suspicious of the blatantly state unions; indeed that was one element in the dynamic toward the self-organisation of their struggle. However, there were also widespread illusions in the possibility of ‘independent' unions that would function differently from the Stalinist unions they had become used to. The growth of Solidarnosc gradually meant the decline of the struggle, as Walesa and Co transformed it from a workers' mass strike into a movement for the reform of Polish capitalism. Solidarnosc had already effectively broken the struggle before the imposition of martial rule in December 1981. For Walesa to later become Polish president was entirely in keeping with his earlier role. Brazilian President Lula's career also started in militant trade unionism (see WR 28).

This is the fate of all ‘independent' unions. Because they are formed in the framework of capitalist social relations they act to perpetuate the exploitation of labour by capital, regardless of the intentions of those who create them. In contrast, strike committees, assemblies, councils, and other bodies that are thrown up by the working class during its struggle have the potential to defend workers' interests, not just the re-arrangement of exploitation. When you look at the workers' councils that were created in the revolutions in Russia in 1905 and 1917, you can see the creation of organs capable of destroying the capitalist state and laying the basis for a classless society based on relations of solidarity. No union can ever pose anything other than the restructuring of capitalism. Car 31/10/07

Japan is one of the most powerful economies in the world but for decades the Japanese working class has been the victim of an extremely harsh and brutal exploitation. In this totally dehumanised society, workers must compete to survive; they spend long days at the office or the factory and this means many can't go home every night and have to sleep in various overcrowded dormitories near to their workplaces. And yet, until not so long ago, Japanese workers could look forward to a future of stable and reasonably well-paid jobs.

However, there has been a deep economic depression for the last 10 years. The working class is under attack from worsening poverty and insecurity and the new entrants to the labour market, young people, are being hit the hardest. This sector of the population, branded ‘the precariat' from a fusion of the words ‘precarity' and ‘proletariat', is being asked to accept unbearable living conditions.

The ‘precariat' and worsening poverty for young workers

In Japan, as elsewhere, young people have to put up with temporary jobs that are insecure and badly paid. In the best case, if they hang on to their job for a full month, they can ‘expect' to receive the equivalent of £400. But they will be expected to work extremely hard with poor pay and with three people doing the work of ten. For this whole sector of workers, housing itself and feeding itself has become an increasingly impossible task.

Because of these conditions, the manga cafés (cafés open 24 hours a day where customers read magazines and surf the internet) have become a sort of surreal escape from tiredness and the cold. Young people unable to afford to eat or drink here gather in large numbers just to get some sleep: "One 20 year old boy was arrested in January 2007 for not having paid for his food in a manga café [...], where he had spent 3 days. All he had in his pocket was 15 yen (about 10 pence). He had been staying in this place to avoid the cold and had only eaten a single meal with chips during the three days. The employee of another manga café had told me of one occasion when a customer had stayed for a week and had only consumed drinks in that time." (Courrier International, 05/07/07.)

The most despicable thing of all is that the ruling class wants workers to feel it's all their own fault. The bourgeoisie accuses the unemployed and temporary workers of being ‘good for nothings' ‘exploiting the system'. Subjected to this nauseating propaganda that ‘every man is his own keeper', young people suffering the insecurity and the drudgery are weighed down by the feeling that their lives are going nowhere. The pressure they feel is so severe that there has been a big wave of suicides and self-harming. And suicide has become the main cause of death in Japan for young people between the ages of 20 and 39!

Working class youth is searching but still hasn't found a way to respond to these attacks

However, since 2002, Japanese youth is slowly gaining confidence and beginning to get angry. Expressions of rebellion against this society are more common. In 2006, an important protest for free accommodation took place. Slogans raised by the column of demonstrators read: "We are living in dilapidated buildings", "We are staying in rooms of 4.5 tatamis [around 7.4 sq m]", "We are unable to pay the rent!", "Free accommodation!"....

For them to see that their situation is not their own fault but is due to the deep crisis affecting society is a vital necessity and it's the start of the reflection underway in the ranks of working class youth: "It is clear that, if young people's lives today have reached a point where they feel desperate, it doesn't mean that they have personal psychological problems or problems of will-power, rather, it is due to the unhealthy desire of companies who want to continue benefiting from a ‘flexible' labour force, so they can stay competitive internationally". However, there is still some way to go before a real perspective of struggle is reached. This sector has to be able to see itself as a part of a much greater whole, namely the working class. This can only happen when the struggles are able to go beyond the stage of responding to attacks in an immediate and impotent manner. For the present, while these young people feel isolated and cut off from the rest of the working class, the bourgeoisie will be able to channel the anger of all the temporary or unemployed workers into dead-ends and into despair. It's no surprise that a song ringing out from the loud speakers at the demonstrations was the Sex Pistols' No Future.

Japanese youth are not an exceptional case. In Germany, the young people feel obliged to accept government jobs for one Euro per hour. In Australia, for example, "one quarter of Australians between 20 and 25 years of age are not in full-time in work or at college, 15% more than it was ten years ago and it doesn't get much better for 35 year olds." (La Tribune, 10/08/07). In France in 2006 the bourgeoisie attempted to impose a new type of employment contract making sackings with no compensation possible, through the notorious CPE (the ‘Contrat Première Embauche'; young people sarcastically called it the ‘Contrat Poubelle (rubbish, in English) Embauche' (see ‘Movement against CPE: a rich experience for future struggles [93]' ) But on this occasion, the working class youth knew how to mobilise en masse. The struggle was victorious and rousing; the bourgeoisie had to withdraw the attack. It is a clear demonstration that there is a real perspective for the new generations today in linking their struggles once again to the collective struggle of their class. 28/10/7

We recently held two conferences in two of the country’s universities, Santiago de los Caballeros (the second-largest city in the country) and Santo Domingo (the capital city), on the theme ‘Socialism and the Decadence of Capitalism’. These debates were made possible by the efforts of an internationalist discussion group. We are sincerely grateful for the work they performed. There was nothing academic about these meetings. Just as during a similar conference held in a Brazilian university [95] , participants expressed concerns about the future that capitalism offers, about the way to struggle for a new society that can overcome the contradictions of the present system, about the social forces capable of bringing about this change...

These debates represent a moment in the efforts being made by proletarian minorities to develop class consciousness. The international dimension of these efforts is indisputable. The publishing of a summary of these discussions has two objectives: to participate in the development of an international debate, and to help to move these discussions which have developed in one country towards the only potentially fruitful framework: the international and internationalist framework.

Following our presentation, many questions were asked, some of which evoked lively discussions. In the following summary we have organised the discussions thematically and in a question-and-answer format.

There were several revolutions in the 20th century. You condemn all of them nonetheless, except the Russian Revolution, which you qualify as a failure. You are unfair towards the efforts of peoples struggling for their liberation.

The issue is not denigrating the struggles of the oppressed and exploited classes, but understanding what revolution is truly on the agenda since the beginning of the 20th century. According to this point of view, a fundamental change occurred with the explosion of the First World War. That war, unprecedented until then in its barbarity, showed the world that capitalism had become a decadent social system that could offer nothing to humanity but war, famine, destruction and misery. It brought to a close the period of bourgeois revolutions - of popular democratic, reformist and national revolutions. Those movements became simple resurfacings of the facade of the state. Since that war, the only revolution capable of bringing progress to humanity is the proletarian revolution whose aim is to establish a communist world. The Russian Revolution in 1917 and the whole revolutionary wave that followed it expressed this new state of affairs. The first congress of the Communist International in March of 1919 thus affirmed: “A new epoch has been born. Ours is the epoch of the breakdown of capital, its internal disintegration, the epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat”.

Why do you insist on the dogma of a world revolution, and why do you reject gradual improvements thorough national revolutions?

The bourgeois revolutions had a national character and could survive for long periods of time within national borders. This is how the English Revolution triumphed in the 1640s and survived in a feudal world until the bourgeois revolutions of the late 18th century. The proletarian revolution will either be global or it won’t be. First of all because production today is global. But also because capitalism has created a global market, and the laws of this market, the problems engendered by capitalism, have a global character and can only be resolved through the unified struggle of the entire global proletariat.

What is your position on Trotsky and Trotskyism?

Trotsky was a life-long revolutionary militant. He played a very important role during the Russian Revolution of 1917. He also struggled against the degeneration of the Russian Revolution by defending internationalist positions. He was the principal animator of the Left Opposition, which led a heroic struggle against the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia and within the Communist parties of the world. However, Trotsky and the Left Opposition never understood the nature of the USSR, considering it to be a bureaucratically deformed workers’ state that nonetheless needed to be defended. The consequences of that error were tragic. After his cowardly murder by Stalin’s assassin Ramon Mercader, those who claimed to be his heirs called for participating in the Second World War and became a political current that always defends, ‘critically’ of course, and using a radical lingo, the same postulates as the Stalinists and social-democrats.

You are unfair towards Chavez, but worse still: you ignore the revolutionary process inspired by Chavez, that is developing all over Latin America and putting the region into a revolutionary fervour.

The Chavism/anti-Chavism choice is a trap, as was demonstrated recently by the student mobilisations in Venezuela that are trying to free themselves from this sterile and destructive polarisation between Chavism and the Opposition.

Chavez supports the strengthening of state intervention in the economy as well as the concentration of powers into the hands of a single person (the constitutional reform to permit his perpetual re-election). He launches ‘social’ programmes that may momentarily address the situation of some marginalised layers, but in reality reinforce the exploitation of workers and the impoverishment of the vast majority of the population. The function of such programmes is to make the population accept the most degrading poverty. We are talking about formulae that have been repeated throughout the 20th century, and have all been resounding failures. They didn’t change capitalism; they simply helped to maintain capitalism and to maintain the sufferings of the masses.

Chavez claims he’s “anti-imperialist” due to his vigorous opposition to the devil Bush. Chavez’s so-called anti-imperialism is nothing but a smoke-screen to cover his own imperialist designs. Workers and oppressed peoples cannot base their struggles on feelings of hatred or vengeance against an all-powerful empire like the United States, because these feelings are manipulated by the Latin American bourgeois fractions, be they government or opposition fractions, to make the people sacrifice for the interests of the rulers.

There is no national solution to the global crisis of capitalism. The solution can only be international and based on the international solidarity of the proletariat, through the development of its autonomous struggles.

Why do you only talk about workers and not about peasants and other layers?

Regardless of its numerical importance in each country, the working class is the only class whose interests are global. Its struggles as a class represent the interests and the future of all the exploited and oppressed. The working class tries to win over the peasants and the marginalised layers of the cities to its struggle. This doesn’t entail the formation of a front of social movements because the real interests, the authentic liberation of workers, peasants, and the marginalised people of the cities isn’t a sum of corporatist grievances, but the destruction of the yoke of wage slavery and the profit system.

Aren’t you falling into outmoded recipes? The working class no longer exists, and here in America, there are no factories left.

The working class has never been limited to industrial workers. What characterizes the working class is the social relation based on the exploitation of wage labour. The working class is not a sociological category. Industrial workers, farm workers, public employees, and ‘intellectual’ workers are part of the proletariat. We must not forget all the workers that have been thrown into unemployment or who are forced to survive by peddling on the streets.

Isn’t a change in mentality necessary if workers are to make the revolution?

Of course! The proletarian revolution isn’t simply the result of unavoidable objective factors; it bases itself on the conscious and collective action of the great masses of workers. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels say that the revolution is not only necessary for the destruction of the State that oppresses the majority, but also for that majority to emancipate itself from the ideological rags that stick to its body. The proletarian revolution prepares itself with a gigantic transformation in the mentality of the masses. It is the product of the independent effort of the masses through struggles and through passionate debates. ICC 31/10/07

As usual, the organisers of the Anarchist Book Fair in London denied us a stall on the grounds that we are ‘dogmatic, authoritarian Leninists'. But, as usual, we set up a stall outside, and had many friendly and fraternal discussions with comrades from various backgrounds. We also went to 3 meetings - one on the NHS, one (allegedly) on workers' councils, and the meeting reported below by one of our sympathisers. We think it raises some interesting questions about human origins and early human society that we hope to come back to at a later date.

This is a report of a meeting on "Were the first humans anarchist?" by the ‘Radical Anthropology Group' that aims "...to communicate findings from modern science and anthropology relevant to an anarchist audience and to convince people of the relevance and importance of anthropology to political activism. This is for political activists interested in what science can teach us about what it means to be human".

The presentation made by Chris Knight, an evolutionary anthropologist, started off underlining the importance of the appearance of Homo Sapiens that he characterised as the "first revolution that worked". He pointed out the egalitarian aspects of hunter-gatherer society and the development of gens-based organisation, as opposed to the nuclear family of today. He was dismissive of previous species of Homo, whose millions of years' existence he described as "Darwinian dog eat dog". The "missing pieces to the jigsaw of the revolution" he informed us, was menstruation and the moon. Women ovulate around the full moon or a 29 and a half -day cycle, and this coincides with the hunt, which takes place then because of the light of the moon. His basic thesis was feminist, in that "oppressed sex, sex strikes and women's secrets was the basis for the HS revolution". In a short while he had dismissed Sapiens' ancestors as "animals"; he also dismissed male Homo Sapiens, often falling into the most ignorant bourgeois descriptions of ‘cave-man'. He could prove beyond doubt the menstruation theory because of the use of red ochre on body decoration, a totally unscientific assertion. One of the lessons from this for revolution today would be not to take power, but to take back this time of plenty and fun for today and perhaps have street parties once a month.

I've no doubt that menstruation was an important element and that the moon played a significant role in hunter-gatherer society and, possibly, the former rituals involved the use of red ochre. But to elevate this assertion to an importance of a motor force of change was ridiculous and unscientific. I spoke to agree with the importance of primitive communism as a concept and the qualitative leap that Homo Sapiens represented, but denounced his ignorant dismissal of pre-Sapiens species as "animals". I also pointed out that his ‘irrefutable' proof of the use of red ochre by Sapiens predated this species by hundreds of thousands of years. It was used by Homo Heidelbergensis 300,000 years ago, by everyone's admission by Neanderthals, in France, Spain and Czechoslovakia, and even findings in the Olduvai beds of Africa date from one million years ago. My inference was that its use in hunter gatherer society was more to do with life and death (red ochre is probably the "red earth" in Genesis from which God created Adam). He insisted he was the one digging in Africa, and it was left to his colleague to point out to the meeting that the use of red ochre as body decoration predated Homo Sapiens by some time. I also raised the question of the change from hunter gathering to the Neolithic - a change from a relative paradise to hard work and struggle, and this question was taken up by several other interventions. I put the view that this change was more due to the development of tools, associated labour and consciousness, where what is described as "cave men" were building stone temples prior to the domestication of plants and animals. "Where were they building them" he mocked, "in caves?" Which of course they were - twenty thousand years earlier in southern France and northern Spain, before the complex stone structures around the Tigris and Euphrates some ten thousand years ago.

He hit the roof about tools and referred to a discussion with or within the SWP on this question that I have never heard of, but he was dismissive of tools as a factor in the development of man and described it as an "anti-woman" concept (and politically correct as these feminists usually are, he also found the generic term "man" offensive). He said that monkeys use tools. I pointed out that so did birds, but the evidence for fine tooling within the development of the hand and the undoubted effect on consciousness prior to Sapiens was substantial, while not denying the qualitative leap that Homo Sapiens represented. In this respect, Anton Pannekoek's description of the development of touch, fingers and thumb, the hand, tools and consciousness represented a major contribution to the marxist understanding of the development of humanity. In Anthropogenesis, Pannekoek writes wonderfully about how the first hominid creatures, Sapiens' ancestors, began making advances through the use of tools and how the brain developed consciousness through a "detour", an indirectness, i.e., not using something for immediate gratification, but putting it off for better effect or result. A sideways dip to appear in front as it were, which I think is a good description of one of the properties of sub-atomic particles, which again accords similarities with marxism, consciousness and the science of quantum mechanics. But our anarchist anthropologist said that tools in the hands of species of Homo would have been used as weapons. This statement represents the crassest, most ignorant thought of the bourgeoisie.

Determined to demonstrate his anti-scientific credentials further, he particularly singled out and lambasted baboons! This seemed to be from the point of view of an anti-female activity by male baboons. But marxism has always taken lessons from the animal kingdom and a recent 14-year study of the Moremi baboons of Botswana [97] by Cheney and Seyfarth of the University of Pennsylvania has demonstrated the bearing of the dynamics of baboon society and baboon thought processes on the nature and evolution of the human mind and human existence (New York Times, 28.10.7). As Darwin wrote in 1838: "He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke".

I further intervened to underline the role of women and the development of democracy in post hunter-gatherer society, a positive point for the working class in the marxist understanding of the necessity for world revolution today given the collapse of capitalism. But this sorry anarchist ‘analysis' by Radical Anthropology was more concerned about monthly street parties than the lessons of prehistory for the struggle of the working class or for the working class at all. Baboon 1.11.7

On 17 October, the Turkish parliament voted overwhelmingly in favour of the right of the Turkish army to pursue Kurdish guerrillas of the PKK back to their bases in northern Iraq. Four days later, 13 Turkish soldiers were killed in a PKK ambush, fanning the flames of a war campaign that had already begun. Nationalist demonstrations, some of them very large, have been organised all over Turkey, fully supported by the army, the police, the majority of political parties, the majority of the trade unions, the media, and the education system. Every citizen is urged to hang a Turkish flag from his window or to carry them to football matches. Shops and office buildings vie with each other to display the biggest flag.

For the Turkish ruling class, this is part of the ‘war against terrorism' which of course has a US designer label. But the American bourgeoisie, which certainly regards Turkey as a key ally in its military strategy for the Middle East, is not entirely happy about these developments. Shortly before the Turkish parliament's declaration, the Democratic majority in the US Congress raised the question of Turkey's great skeleton in the cupboard, the massacre of the Armenians in 1915. The Republicans, Bush at their head, warned against angering the Turks by describing this slaughter as a form of ‘genocide'. But following the Turkish parliament's vote on 17 October, Bush himself warned that an escalation of the Turkish presence in northern Iraq (since as Bush himself let slip, the Turkish army has quite a few troops there already) could undermine the fragile stability of the autonomous Kurdish region - Iraq's only ‘haven of peace' since the US invasion and the toppling of Saddam plunged the country into total disarray. The Turks accuse the ruling Kurdish parties of this region of aiding and abetting the PKK, and although the likes of Barzani and Talabani (Iraq's main Kurdish politicians) have urged the PKK to stop its attacks, the situation remains extremely tense. Barzani, for example, declared that, while not wanting to be part of any conflict, they (the government of Kurdish northern Iraq with its intact force of peshmerga fighters) would certainly defend themselves.

This simmering war on the Turkish/Iraqi border is yet another chapter in a horror story that now includes open war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Israel/Palestine and the threat of further conflicts spreading to Iran and Pakistan. Faced with this slide into barbarism and chaos, the comrades of the EKS (Internationalist Communist Left) in Turkey have responded by issuing the internationalist statement that we print below. They have been distributing it as a leaflet along with their recent bulletin ‘Night Notes', which also relates to the militant strike at Turkish Telecom and points towards such struggles as the only alternative to militarism and war.

The EKS comrades are intervening in an atmosphere of state-sponsored war hysteria, in a country where (as anyone who has read Orhan Pamuk's book Snow will know) political murder is a long-established tradition. They deserve the solidarity and support of revolutionaries all over the world. Amos, 31/10/07.

EKS leaflet

Once again, we've had the upsetting news of more workers' children being sacrificed for the brutal war in the South East. The bourgeoisie and their media started screaming for more blood and chaos as always. As a result, people are now looking for ‘terrorists' in the street. But why did this happen?

Because the bourgeois state is in a state of crisis which hasn't been so openly apparent for a long time. The economic reason at the bottom of this is the fact that the workers in Turkey have no more blood for the bourgeoisie to suck; and if that isn't enough, as in the Turkish Airlines yesterday and more strongly in the Türk Telekom and Novamed strikes today, they are beginning to resist. Increasing international debts, capital that is becoming more and more fictitious, growing fragility on the ‘money markets' - the consequences are all loaded onto workers' backs. The bourgeoisie is pumping in racism to continue this situation; thus Kurdish workers are exploited for a cheaper price and Turkish workers are left to rot miserably in the streets. The political consequence of this situation is the battle cries we always hear but which aren't a solution to anything. The ideological walls of the bourgeois state are cracking every day. The more the outrage workers live through is put into question, the more capital will push society into degeneration, decay and decomposition, and the more it loses the social validity which gave it its meaning in the first place. The response of the bourgeois politicians to the latest massacre is the following.

For the nationalist wing of the bourgeoisie, the issue is, as always, the ‘conspiracy' organised by the United States. According to them, if the Turkish Armed Forces invade Iraq, "terror will be eradicated". In reality, only three years have passed since the United States itself wanted working class boys from Turkey to go fight other workers in Iraq. However the Turkish bourgeoisie was unable to do this because of their inability to convince workers to go to war and because of their incapability and weakness. The truth is that the Turkish bourgeoisie has always aligned itself with the United States and the Turkish Armed Forces are standing ready to kill workers in Lebanon and Afghanistan if necessary. Thus, contrary to the lie the nationalist wing of the bourgeoisie is trying to make workers believe, there are no conflicting interests between them and American imperialism. Quite the contrary: there is a common interest and the Turkish Armed Forces are the armed executioners of this alliance. What's more, not only will any massacre to be done in Northern Iraq cause more soldiers to die and more ‘civilians' to be forced into concentration camps and massacred in battlefields, but also it will be countered with more bombs exploding in major cities.

The Islamic and liberal wing of the bourgeoisie is not supporting the war very reliably, which is how it normally is. Of course the fact that they have doubts about how the "operation" will take place is only an expression of them trying to get the permission they want from the United States. For this, they have no other choice but to wait ‘patiently' to have a compromise with Barzani and Talabani.

As for the left wing of the bourgeoisie, they aren't doing anything other than whining from their high rostrums. Of course they are not interested in the hunger, misery, poverty and death of workers. They are bending their rhetoric more and more in front of their masters to protect their position. In short, they once again prove the pointlessness of parliaments.

As a result, workers in Turkey too are being pulled into the dead-end cycle of more war, destruction, terror and chaos that is being inflicted on the Middle East by a bourgeoisie who neither cares about their lives nor their deaths. Because capitalism can only postpone the execution of its unsolvable crisis by dragging humanity into more destruction.

The response of the proletariat keeps lighting the way forward as we saw in the Telekom strike. A single strike which has been going on for only a few days was enough to make the bourgeoisie tremble. Only if workers enter into solidarity with their class to spread those struggles, and if workers say no to war internationally, can the capitalist massacre be stopped. The way to stop war and massacres is not to deepen and widen them, but to build class solidarity across borders, reaching every military battlefront. The enemy is not class brothers and sisters in other countries but the capitalists right here, sitting in their warm houses!

EKS, October 2007.

The chief economist of the International Monetary Fund has warned of a "perfect storm" looming in the world economy. "The combination of the credit crunch and high oil prices could bring a big reduction in international trade from which no one would be immune". He also thought that projections for the prospects of the American and European economies were "too optimistic" and would have to be re-assessed downwards.

Among other forecasters Goldman Sachs have warned that the knock-on effects from the credit crunch crisis could plunge the US into recession. Others have suggested that the US is already in recession or at best facing a period of stagnation.

Following the outbreak of the credit crisis, the Federal Reserve saw little evidence of possible improvement, saying that "mortgage delinquencies are up significantly in many areas" and "home building is not expected to recover until next year".

Meanwhile the OECD has warned that stock markets around the world are set for a sharp decline. It thinks that the recent turmoil in share prices was just the "precursor of a more protracted downturn." This should come as no surprise because this year there have already been a series of mini-crashes on stock markets around the world, partly provoked by the weakness of the American economy.

In turn the weakness of the dollar has undermined the attempts of European businesses to export to the US. China is one country that relies enormously on the US market - its biggest export outlet - but the US economy is founded on debt, and therefore the Chinese economy is also effectively based on debt.

Despite all the propaganda, current growth in China and India is no more going to come to the rescue of the US and the rest of the world economy than did the Asian tigers or the dotcom bubble before that.

Ultimately the capitalists are relying on debt to a staggering extent. The movement of capital that results from this flight to debt is some twenty times more than the value of transactions in goods and profits. In the 19th century debt could be used to accelerate productive investments, for example in new markets, but in the epoch of glutted markets debt offers no solutions, only a postponement of the crises that are to come.

The current state of the economy is worse than the lurch of the crisis in 1987, 1995, 1997-8 and 2001. Ultimately it is worse than the situation in 1929. The bourgeoisie are aware of the way things are going. As Bill Gross, chief investment officer of Pimco, the world's largest bond fund, said: "The U.S. hasn't faced a downturn like this since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The slump in the housing market and increases in household debt will have negative effects on consumption and future lending attitudes, which could bring us close to the zero line in terms of economic growth". Former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers drew out further implications "When the sub-prime mortgage crisis hit the U.S. in September, 2007, the fallout was limited to the U.S. However, now it is likely to spread to other countries around the world, depressing the world economy as well as American economy."

The ruling class can resort to a number of state capitalist measures, and also try to deflect the effects of the crisis on to weaker economies, but it can't keep a lid on the pressure building up in the system for ever.

Capital tries to make workers pay

Among the measures undertaken by the bourgeoisie, many focus not so much on improvements in productivity but on cutting its costs. This can take many forms. For example, keeping increases in workers' wages beneath the rate of inflation benefits the capitalists, as does laying off staff so that fewer workers are doing the same work. Moving jobs to regions or countries where wages are lower, or moving workers who will accept lower wages to areas where wages are normally higher, or keeping workers on short-term contracts to avoid annual wage increases, all these measures also cut down on capitalists' outgoings.

With the role of the state being so fundamental to the management of modern capitalism, state expenditure is also a prime target for cuts in expenditure. Partly this is the same as elsewhere, making workers redundant and keeping tight control over workers' wages. But some of the services provided by the state are part of the social wage, that is, they're an essential part of the working class's attempt to survive, and cuts in the social wage, therefore, amount to attacks on working class living standards.

This is the reality of capitalism's economic crisis. Capital tries to increase workers' productivity, cuts wages, cuts jobs, and cuts services. These attacks can't be concealed forever with lies about the health of the economy. The ‘perfect storm' in the world economy has its impact on a working class that is not passively accepting everything that's being thrown at it. Since 2003 we have been witnessing increasing evidence of the return of the working class to struggle. The growing force of capitalism's economic crisis will add further fuel to these sparks of a massive working class response to a system in profound disarray. Car 30/11/07

At the time of writing, the huckster Richard Branson has made some sort of a bid for the bankrupt Northern Rock bank and despite the massive state intervention (estimated by some to eventually total some forty billion pounds) by the Bank of England, it is still not out of the woods. In fact if, as expected, house prices fall further, Northern Rock could be facing even bigger crises. At the same time, it's been officially confirmed that both Alliance and Leicester and Bradford and Bingley have suffered major losses over dodgy lending. Other effects of the so-called "sub-prime" crisis, all of them bad, are radiating out internationally: credit crunch, bankruptcies, unemployment, inflation and the real threat of a major recession.

In order to momentarily stem this crisis, the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and, latterly, the Bank of England, have spent hundreds of billions on the market! These colossal sums injected by the various central banks alone bear witness to the breadth of the crisis and the real fears of the bourgeoisie

Today the ‘experts' and other hacks try once again to fill us with illusions that these convulsions are only a passing phase or a ‘salutary correction of excessive speculation'. Thus the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, in his latest quarterly report (November 07), while laying bare the depth of the crisis, talks of a swift recovery. King suggests that there's no great underlying problem and that growth will ‘bounce back' to a much healthier level of 3% in two years time. The White House talks about "the good fundamentals of the economy". The bourgeoisie are both kidding themselves and kidding us. In reality these shocks are the sign of new phase of the acceleration of the crisis, the most serious and deepest since the end of the 60s. And once again the working class will suffer terrible consequences.

The monster of debt reveals the historic weakness of capitalism

In the media during the summer, when billions of dollars were going up in smoke, the bourgeois economists were saying it was "unprecedented". The crisis had apparently appeared out of the clear blue sky without warning. Lies! Stock market gains, rocketing house prices, and even growth, all that was built on sand and everyone knew it. Our organisation already affirmed last spring that the so-called good health of the economy resting only debt, was preparing for a bleak future: "In reality, it is a question of a real headlong rush, (into debt) which far from permitting a definitive solution to the contradictions of capitalism can only prepare for painful tomorrows and notably brutal slowdowns in its growth".[1] It's not a question of a premonition but of an analysis based on the history of capitalism. The present financial crisis is a major crisis of credit and debt. But this monstrous debt doesn't fall from the sky. It is the product of 40 years of the slow development of the world crisis.

In fact, since the 60s, capitalism itself has survived through the always growing recourse to debt. In 1967, the world economy began to slow down and since, decade after decade, growth is less and less. The only response of the bourgeoisie has been to maintain its system under perfusion, by injecting into it crazy sums of money in the form of credit and debt. The economic history of the last forty years forms a sort of infernal cycle: crisis... debt... more crisis... more debt... After the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 there was the open recession of 1991-1993, the Asian crisis of 1997-98 and the explosion of the Internet bubble of 2000-2002[2]. Each time these convulsions are more violent and the consequences more dramatic.

Today, the crisis is breaking out anew while debt reaches unimaginable levels. The total debt of the United States, the first world economic and military power, has gone from $630 billion in 1970 to $36,850 billion in 2003. And since then, the machine has got totally out of control. This debt is growing at a rate of $1.64 billion a day! These breathtaking figures show in a striking manner the fact that the present financial crisis is much more profound than those that preceded it.

The housing crisis unleashes a major financial crisis

For a decade this speculative madness has invaded all sectors of activity. As never before the overwhelming majority of capital cannot find sufficient outlets in the real economy (firms that produce products and goods). Quite naturally then, capital is thus oriented towards speculation pure and simple. Banks, building societies, more or less specialised societies of speculation in the placing of risks (the famous hedge funds) all take part in the gold rush to a supposed new El Dorado. Money and credit are thus rushed forth and the bourgeoisie seems to have only one obsession: debt and still more debt.

It's in this totally mad context that householders in the USA, but also in Britain, Spain and other countries, have been strongly encouraged to buy houses and flats without really having the means to do so. Financial houses are ready to lend money to workers' families on extremely low incomes with the sole guarantee of their home. The basic principles of these hypothecated loans is the following: when Mr. X wants to buy a house for $100,000, a lender, a bank for example, lends him the funds without reserve and without guarantee other than the security of the house. If Mr. X is in too much debt and can't repay his borrowing, the lender will take back the house, re-sell and recuperate its funds of $100,000. That's the sole guarantee of the bank. That's why it is mainly the hedge funds (specialists in the placing of risks) that have participated in these sub-primes. Workers can borrow more easily, thus more and more want to buy a house. Consequently house prices have risen (10% a year on average). These extremely low-paid workers have only debt as purchasing power; so they continue to get into more debt by hypothecating the rising value of their house. For example, Mr. X, seeing the value of his house rise to $120,000 can credit his purchases by hypothecating up to $20,000. Then the value goes up to $130,000! And he does it again... But it's not an endless process. On the one hand the working class becomes poorer (job cuts, wage freezes...). On the other, borrowing takes place at growing variable rates and month after month payments become higher and more difficult to make. The result is inexorable. When too many workers can't make their astronomical payments, the banks increase their requisitions of hypothecated homes, the crisis breaks out and the bubble bursts as is happening now. In fact there are too many houses for sale, prices are falling (they could fall 30% or more). It's perverse; the buying power of millions of families rests on the price of their house and thus on their capacity to get into debt and, for them, the house price falls mean bankruptcy. Thus as the value of Mr. X's house falls (to $110,000 say) the banks cannot recuperate their total lending of $150,000. Not only does Mr. X no longer have a home but also he must pay back the difference of $40,000, plus interest of course! The result in the US has been rapid[3]: more than 3 million households are out on the street this autumn.

At the same time, the hedge funds, lending under the sub-prime form, have themselves not hesitated to indebt themselves to banks and other credit organisations in order to speculate on real estate. The principle, quite simple, is to buy property and re-sell it some time later on a rising housing market. Thus the collapse of the housing bubble also means the bankruptcy of all these funds. In fact, even in recuperating the hypothecated houses and throwing millions onto the street, these organisations inherit houses that are worth hardly as much. By way of the domino effect, banks and other credit organisations are also hit. Imagine it! These institutions borrow the one from the other to the point of no longer knowing who owes what monies to whom! Each passing day we are told that this or that bank or credit organisation is on the edge of bankruptcy. Such is the case for the USA, Britain, Germany and certainly more to follow. It is now the whole credit and speculative sector that is in crisis and it's the working class who will pay the cost.

Behind the financial crisis, the crisis of the real economy

"A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there - it soon adds up to real money". So said one US senator, confirming that a financial crisis always becomes a crisis of the real economy. Even before the financial crisis of the summer, the economic specialists had slyly begun to revise economic forecasts for world growth downwards. In January 2007, the United Nations announced that it would fall back to 3.2% this year (after showing 3.8% in 2006 and 4.5% in 2005). But with the latest developments of the crisis, all these figures will be further revised downwards.

In fact, the profound crisis of credit inexorably means a brutal fall in activity for all businesses. Nobody can, or wants to lend money to business to invest. But the record gains that the latter sometimes show are in reality based in great part on massive indebtedness. The tap of credit shut, these businesses, for the most part, will be in a very bad position. The most striking example is the building sector. The housing bubble being based exclusively on risky lending means the number of constructions will fall in all the major countries. And the repercussions will go way beyond that: "in the United States, as borrowing against housing finances at least 80% of consumption, it's the whole of household demand that will be affected. American consumption will thus be cut by a point, a point-and-a-half; instead of growth of 3.5% next year, it may not pass 2%" (Patrick Artuis, La Tribune de l'Economie, 27.08.07). And here we are talking about the most optimistic scenario. Some economists are saying that US growth could come in at less than 1% and, evidently, this has a global importance. Europe's economy is profoundly linked to it. Further, the awaited slowdown of these two economies will have important repercussions on China and the whole of Asia. Europe and the USA represent 40% of Chinese exports! It is the whole of world growth that will slow down dramatically.

But there's another aggravating factor in the pipeline: the return of inflation. China's inflation rate has reached 6% and continues to grow month after month. This represents a tendency that will develop internationally, particularly in the sectors of raw materials and food. The latter is rising around 10% and the snowball effect means that it will affect the consumption of the working class and the great majority of the population and that again will rebound on businesses.

Since the 1960s, market falls and recessions have followed one another. Each time they become more brutal and profound. This latest episode will not break the rule as it represents a qualitative step, an unprecedented aggravation of the historic crisis of capitalism. It's the first time that all the economic indicators go into the red simultaneously: crisis of credit and consumption, colossal debt, recession and inflation! We are facing the worst recession for more than 40 years and major blows will fall on the working class. Only a united and solid struggle can face up to them. Tino/B November 2007

[1] Resolution on the international situation adopted by our last Congress and published in International Review no. 130 [101] .

[2] A new internet bubble is being inflated, again based mostly on fresh air. Google is now worth more than IBM, a company with eight times the revenue. Betters, speculators and Hedge Funds are getting involved on a bigger scale. All the problems of the 2000 .com bubble are being revisited at a higher level.

[3] See the November issue of Internationalism for more on the particulars of the US economy.

After less than 6 months the Brown government is on the rack. Its leader's reputation for competence and efficiency has plummeted, its ministers have been caught up in a series of cock-ups, and the Labour Party is under fire for sleaze and corruption. Obviously, you'd expect the opposition to take every advantage of each slip made by the government, but what's the truth about the problems facing Brown and Co?

The fuss over Labour fundraising and the various ways that donors found to get money into the party coffers is pretty modest in comparison to the record of John Major's Tory government. It also implies that dodgy financial dealing is somehow out of the ordinary for bourgeois political parties. Corruption is not exceptional but the rule. Lloyd George sold peerages, Tories under Major took cash for questions, Tony Blair's Labour took money for honours, and clearly every donor expects to get something for their investment. Why would Brown's regime be any different?

Discs containing 25 million personal records go missing and there are complaints about inefficiency. No one seems to care about the permanent inefficiency that's faced by workers when they're being dealt with by Job Centres, other government departments and local councils. As for confidential information getting into ‘the wrong hands', the hypocritical Labour government has broken all records for surveillance and intelligence-gathering. But evidently the state needs such material for its own purposes, not for the benefit of the population.

The British government does indeed have very real problems. These are not questions of efficiency or corruption, but stem from the international economic crisis, the position in which British imperialism finds itself and the threat of workers' struggles developing.

Economic outlook "uncomfortable"

The run on Northern Rock was just one sign of the fragility of the economy, at a national and international level. According to the latest quarterly economic forecast from the British Chambers of Commerce the global credit crisis and the threats facing the international banking system mean that prospects for the British economy have to be significantly downgraded. A leading economist at Deutsche Bank is anticipating British growth rates to be at a rate lower than any since 1992.

The Bank of England's chief economist has warned of further problems for banks and other finance bodies in the aftermath of the credit crunch. He thought that the report of recent losses by banks could be just the tip of the iceberg and that financial markets will continue to be volatile for some time.

When the governor of the Bank of England spoke to the Treasury Select Committee he said that the economic outlook was "uncomfortable" and that the economic environment is "less benign". After he had given evidence that "The most likely outcome is for output growth to slow and inflation to rise" a BBC business editor said of his report that it was "enough to make grown men weep".

Problems for British imperialism

Despite the British bourgeoisie being the most skilful and intelligent in the world it has found itself dragged into the dead-end adventure of Iraq. A reduction in troops or a complete disengagement is only going to be seen as a humiliating retreat for British imperialism. Not only is it bogged down in Iraq, it is facing increasing difficulties in Afghanistan.

Gordon Brown is shifting from the blatantly pro-US policy of his predecessor (which was Blair's downfall) to a more independent position between Europe and the US. This doesn't mean an improvement in the position of British imperialism, as it only emphasises the fundamental contradictions of its position. In reality it can't operate independently; that's an opportunity only open to the American superpower. So the main prospect for the British bourgeoisie at the imperialist level is a loss of credibility and a worsening of the situation.

The threat of class struggle

As far as the struggle of the working class goes, the economic situation in which workers find themselves is the basis for future struggles. Recently we've seen the defeat of the postal workers by the combined forces of the CWU and Royal Mail. But further back we've seen struggles in other sectors that show the working class's capacity to mount a united struggle and demonstrate the solidarity that is central to the development of workers' struggles. The threat of the working class is not immediate, but the British bourgeoisie's preparations at the ideological level and in building its apparatus of repression show that it is not blind to the potential of its class enemy.

The ruling class in Britain does face serious problems. However, the Labour government is broadly following the policies required by British capitalism, and the Tories are not offering anything markedly different. At present Cameron and his party are not being groomed for government, although it's only through an attention to the unfolding of the situation that it will be possible to identify when this changes.

The working class in Britain also faces serious problems - that of living in decaying capitalism and having to resist the attacks on its living and working standards. The more effectively it struggles, the bigger the real problems facing the British bourgeoisie.

Car 30/11/07

According to Lord West, Britain is already a world leader in anti-terrorism measures, "ahead of all countries in the world on the protection front". New measures proposed by the Labour government consolidate this position.

Security is to be stepped up at railway stations, ports and airports, with new security barriers, vehicle exclusion zones and blast resistant buildings. The security services, which had 2000 staff in 2001, will increase to more than 4000. There will be new police and deportation powers. A new UK border force with powers of arrest and detention will have 25,000 staff. Another 2000 will work in regional counter-terrorism units. 90 pieces of information will have to be provided to the security services for everyone flying to or from Britain. There will be propaganda against "extremist influences".

When Labour came to power you could only be detained for 4 days without charge, since then it has gone up to 28 days, the longest period of time in Europe, with the possibility that this will be doubled to eight weeks or more (Turkey, conducting a war against the Kurds in its South East, only allows seven and a half days).

In its existing ‘security' infrastructure Britain has more then 4 million CCTVs, the highest number per head anywhere in the world. A DNA database that will have 4.25 million people on it by the end of 2008 is the largest in the world. Official requests (from nearly 800 eligible bodies) for phone taps and email monitoring currently run at nearly 30,000 per month. Labour introduced control orders in 2005 that are used to put people under house arrest when there is not enough evidence to charge them.

The state puts forward a simple case for the strengthening of its apparatus of repression. The Director-General of the MI5 says that in this country there are 30 active groups and 200 other groups making 2000 people actually or potentially involved in terrorism. Lord West says that it will take 30 years to finally crush terrorism.

Yes, terrorism is a real concern for the ruling class, whether it's by disaffected individuals or by groups operating on behalf of hostile imperialisms. At that level anti-terrorism measures are just another part of an imperialist state's military provisions.

However, if you look through the range of measures introduced by governments over the years they are not just directed at its imperialist enemies (that lie behind ‘a tiny minority of violent extremists') but also at its class enemy: the working class and in particular its revolutionary militants.

The sheer volume of phone and email taps (some 400,000 in a recent 15-month period) is not just directed at MI5's 2000 ‘most wanted' but clearly a very wide range of people that the state feels the need to spy on. Or, to take the stop and search powers available under anti-terrorist legislation, only 1 out of every 400 searches results in an arrest (and an even smaller proportion lead to either a prosecution or conviction). The powers exist partly to gather information and partly to intimidate. Indeed, intimidation of individuals, social control, the monitoring of groups deemed a threat, are the focus of the state's security activity.

In the arguments between supporters of the government and civil liberties activists there has been a concentration on the extension of the period of detention without charge. In many ways this is academic as the government already has even more extensive powers if it chooses to declare a state of emergency. The state is effectively saying that it will have the powers normally used in wartime etc, without formally declaring hostilities. But also it doesn't actually need to cover everything it does with legislation. After all, the shoot-to-kill policy operated in Northern Ireland and at Stockwell tube station didn't require any legal sanction.

But why is Britain so far ahead in its preparation for repression? Is it because Labour has an ‘authoritarian reflex'? Or is there something particularly threatening in the current British situation?

No. That the British bourgeoisie is so advanced in its technological, legislative and ideological preparation shows the insight of this particular ruling class. While the struggle of the working class is in the final analysis a threat at an international level, each capitalist state has to prepare its own weapons at a national level. In Britain the state wants to undermine the possibility of future class confrontations, but also be prepared for the possibility of that sabotage failing. Other countries will follow Britain's example. Car 24/11/07

The revival of workers' struggles in 2003 has continued in many countries throughout 2007, and Britain has been no exception. The recent struggle of workers at Royal Mail showed both workers' militancy as well as the ability of the Communication Workers Union to sabotage the strike. When the union sold the pay deal they rather neglected to point out that it was effectively a pay cut. However, the unofficial strikes in Liverpool and South London showed that not all workers submitted to union diktats. And although workers did not entirely see what role the union had been playing, it was commonplace to view the final deal as at least a sell-out.

The CWU separated the question of pensions from the rest of the deal in order to sell it to postal workers. There was also a widespread idea, spread by union officials in the north, that it was only because of workers in the south that the deal got through, which both hid their responsibility for pushing the deal through and attempted to sow divisions among the posties.

In reality the new flexibility is one further step toward 76,000 lay-offs and local agreements that will push productivity and Royal Mail's agenda against the interests of workers.

But although it is impossible to see the deal as anything other than a defeat for postal workers, it is absolutely necessary to salute the solidarity action and moves towards the extension of the strike by the postal workers in the early stages of the struggle. And, at the end of the strike the wildcats in South London and Liverpool showed continuing combativity as workers clearly wanted to fight on.

The CWU countered workers' militancy by stopping picket lines and imposing a localism that kept each picket line separate and unconnected from each other.

One important feature of the strike lies in the parts of the movement that were unofficial, that is to say outside the control of the union. The perspective of such wildcat strikes is a positive sign for the future. Also the suspicion of the unions is slowly developing. At first workers thought the union was selling out. Then we saw workers say they were cancelling their union subs. Bit by bit workers are being compelled to understand that their struggles can only succeed if they're run by workers themselves and not by the unions. Car 2/12/07

According to our rulers, the struggle between the working class and the bourgeoisie is an outmoded idea. So when workers, fed up with the continuing attack on their living standards, engage in strikes or demonstrations to defend themselves, they are invariably portrayed as narrow-minded, backward looking, and above all selfish interest groups who just don't understand the need for ‘reforms' such as extending everyone's working life by 3 or 5 years, asking us to pay for medical costs on top of deductions from our wages that were already in place, or making way for new technology or the closure of entire industries in the name of making business leaner and meaner.

The recent series of struggles by workers and students in France have been presented in exactly this way, not only in France, but internationally. The new President Sarkozy, we are told, has decided to ‘take on the unions' in order to push through long-needed ‘reforms' of the French economy that will bring it in line with other western countries, which have already advanced further on the road towards a more modern, business-oriented, ‘neo-liberal' economic model. In particular, Sarkozy has targeted the ‘privileged' pension rights of certain key sectors like transport, gas and electricity workers, with the aim of pushing through a more equitable and affordable retirement system that will apply to everyone. The unions have responded in their usual conservative way by calling out the troops in defence of their entrenched privileges; and in the case of the strikes on public transport, the media have been able to pour out a veritable flood of abuse, accusing them of holding millions of transport users to ransom and thus further playing up divisions between different parts of the working population. On the international arena, this version of the recent movements in France has been given an added twist of spice by the idea that the addiction of certain elements of French society to strikes and street protests is proof of an equally conservative nostalgia for the barricades and France's tattered tradition of revolution.

On the other hand, the reality of what has been happening in France is offered by the selection of articles from our French-language press and website that we have translated here. The first is a general statement on the situation produced for a supplement that was distributed at the demonstrations and assemblies held by various sectors of the working class. It rejects the line that workers fighting attacks on pension schemes are ‘privileged': on the contrary, their fight is of concern to all workers, because the attack on ‘special' pension systems is merely the first prong of an even wider attack on all pensions and all workers' living and working conditions; indeed this offensive has been deliberately devised as a way of sowing divisions between the allegedly ‘privileged' sectors and the rest of the working class. The title of the article - ‘Against the government attacks, we all have to fight together!' - clearly puts forward what the proletarian response to these sordid manoeuvres has to be.

All three articles also make it clear that the real conflict going on in France is not between the Sarkozy government and the unions, but between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; and that the unions, far from defending the needs of the latter, are in fact part of the bourgeoisie's strategy for controlling and dividing it. Playing on divisions between different union federations, keeping different sectors of workers separate ‘at the base', undermining the capacity of workers to discuss and take decisions through their own general assemblies, the articles provide some very concrete examples of the way that the trade unions line up against the workers in struggle.

At the same time, the articles show that, despite all the stratagems of the government and the unions, the seeds of class unity are gradually fermenting, putting forth small but significant shoots: the appearance of small groups of workers and students challenging the authority of the unions and leftists, the opening of general assemblies to workers from different sectors, a growing receptivity to the ideas of revolutionaries...

At the time of writing the dynamic of the class movement in France seems to be on the wane. Focus has temporarily shifted to the outburst of fury and violence in the Parisian ‘banlieux' following the killing of two immigrant teenagers in a collision with speeding cops, who are said to have run off and left the two boys to die. As in the country-wide explosion of 2005, these rebellions express the deep anger and frustration of a particularly oppressed sector of the proletariat, but the forms and methods they use - random violence directed not only against obvious symbols of state repression like police stations but also buses, schools, and other public buildings - do not offer a perspective for the building of class unity through self-organisation in the assemblies, discussion between different groups of workers, the raising of common demands, all the elements which we were beginning to see in the recent strike movement. The problem facing the working class is how to channel the rage in the ‘banlieux' towards this effort to build a new class unity in the face of capital and its state.

Amos 1.12.07

In the name of ‘a fairer society' Sarkozy and his billionaire buddies have the nerve to ask us to accept the suppression or alteration of ‘special pension regimes' and to make everyone work 40 years for their pension.

What the railway workers, the RATP employees, the gas and electrical workers are demanding was expressed clearly in their general assemblies: they don't want ‘privileges', they want 37 and half years for everyone!

If this attack on the ‘special pension regime' is allowed to go through, the workers know very well that tomorrow the state will ask us to pay 41 then 42 years of contributions in order to get a full pension - maybe even more, as in Italy (which will soon go over to a regime of retirement at 65) and even 67 as it is already in Germany or Denmark.

In the universities, this government has during the summer quietly adopted (with the complicity of the UNEF (French Student Union) and the Socialist Party) a law which will open the door to a two-speed university system: on the one hand a few ‘centres of excellence' reserved for the best-off students, and on the other hand a mass of sink universities which will prepare most of the young, those who come from poorer backgrounds, for their future role as unemployed or precarious workers.

In the public sector, the government is preparing to suppress 300,000 jobs between now and 2012, at a time when right now teachers are faced with overcrowded classrooms and increasing numbers of state employees are being forced to do more and more tasks and work longer and longer hours.

In the private sector, the job-cuts and lay-offs are falling like rain at a time when the Sarkozy government is concocting a reform of the Labour Code where the key-word is ‘flexi-security', which will make it even easier for the employers to throw us out onto the street.

On January 1 2008, we will have to pay new medical contributions which will be accompanied by increased prescription charges, raised hospital charges (brought in by the former minister Ralite, a member of the French Communist Party), a 90 euro charge on medical operations, etc.

Sarkozy asks us to ‘work more to earn more'. In fact what we're being asked is to work more and earn less. The dizzying fall in spending power is now being accompanied by an exorbitant increase in all basic foodstuffs: dairy, bread, potatoes, fruit and vegetables, fish, meat...

At the same time, rents are soaring: more and more proletarians today live in insecure or unhealthy housing conditions.

More and more proletarians, even those with a job, are sinking into poverty, are unable to afford decent food, housing and medical care. And they tell us: ‘it's not over'. The future they have in store for us, the attacks they are promising us are even worse. And this is because the French bourgeoisie is now trying to catch up with its rivals in other countries. With the aggravation of the crisis of capitalism, with the exacerbation of competition on the world market, you have to ‘be competitive'. That means stepping up the attack on the living and working conditions of the working class.

The only way to oppose all these attacks is to develop the struggle

The anger and discontent that is being expressed today in the streets and in the workplaces can only spread because everywhere workers are faced with the need to respond to the same attacks.

Since 2003 the working class (which, according to the bourgeoisie, is an ‘outdated idea') has been displaying its will to resist, against the attacks on pensions in 2003 in France and Austria, against the reform of the health system, against lay-offs in the shipyards in Galicia Spain in 2006 or in the automobile sector in Andalusia last spring. Today their class brothers on the German railways are fighting for wage rises. In all these struggles, from Chile to Peru, from the textile workers of Egypt to the construction workers of Dubai, we are seeing the emergence of a deep feeling of class solidarity, which is pushing towards the extension of the struggle against a common exploitation. This same class solidarity raised its head in the students' movement against the CPE in the spring of 2006 and it is at the heart of the movement today. This is what the bourgeoisie fears more than anything else.

The trade unions divide and sabotage the workers' response

Going first of all for the special pension regimes in particular sectors like public transport (SNCF, RATP) and energy (EDF, GDF) can only bring derisory savings for the state. This is a purely strategic choice by the French bourgeoisie, aimed at dividing the working class.

The left and the unions are at root entirely in agreement with the government. They have always put forward the need for ‘reforms', in particular in the area of pensions. What's more it was the former Socialist Prime Minister Ricard who, at the beginning of the 1980s, produced the ‘White Paper' on pensions, which served as a canvas for all the attacks carried out by succeeding governments, left and right. The criticisms being made today by the left and the unions are only aimed at the form: they were not decided ‘democratically', there has not been enough ‘consultation'. What with the left being temporarily out of the game, the essential role of controlling the working class has fallen to the unions. The latter have divided up the work with the government, and among themselves, at all levels, with the aim of dividing and sabotaging the workers' response. The bourgeoisie must above all isolate the workers from the public transport sector, cut them off from the working class as a whole.

With this in mind, the ruling class has mobilised the whole of the media in order to discredit the strike and push the idea that other workers are being held hostage by an egotistical minority of privileged workers, making maximum use of the fact that the main sector concerned by the ‘special pension regimes' is public transport. It is counting on the unpopularity of a long transport strike, especially on the SNCF (traditionally the most combative sector in the strikes of winter 1986/7 and 1995) in order to set the ‘passengers' against the strikers.

Each union has played its role in the division and isolation of the struggles:

• The FGAAC (the small train drivers union which only represents 3% of SNCF workers but 30% of train drivers), after calling for a ‘renewable strike' on 18 October alongside the SUD and FO unions, on the very evening of the demonstration called for negotiation with the government in order to work out a ‘compromise' and a particular status for the drivers, and called for a return to work in the morning, thus taking on the role of the out-and-out ‘traitor';
• The CFDT (union linked to the Socialist Party) only called on the railway workers to strike and demonstrate that day, in order "not to mix up all the problems and all the demands" to quote its general secretary Chereque; afterwards, this federation, consistent with the same tactic, rushed to call for the suspension of the strike at the SNCF and the return to work in other sectors as soon as the government announced its intention to open up negotiations enterprise by enterprise;
• The CGT, the majority union (linked to the Communist Party) played a decisive role in the manoeuvre to stab the workers in the back. It limited itself to a 24 hour strike on 18 October (while letting the regional unions take ‘initiatives' to prolong the strike). Then, it took the initiative of launching a new call for a railway strike, this time a renewable one from 13 November, rallying other sectors and unions behind this proposal. On 10 November, the general secretary of the CGT, Thibault, asked the government to open a three-part (government, management and unions) negotiation on the special regimes (which was just a bluff because it is the government which directly dictates its policies to the directors of public enterprises); and two days later, on the 12th, the very eve of the strike, it called for a new initiative: proposing tripartite negotiations again, but this time enterprise by enterprise. This was taking the workers for idiots because it was precisely in this framework that the government originally intended to push forward its reforms, slicing up negotiations enterprise by enterprise, case by case. This volte face provoked angry reactions in the general assemblies, obliging the union ‘base' to advocate the continuation of the strike movement;
• FO and SUD (a union piloted by the Trotskyist Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire led by Olivier Besancourt), which had tried to keep the strike going on a minority basis for several days after 18 October, continued to outbid each other in trying to be the most radical, pushing the workers to keep going in a renewable strike up until the inter-union strike in the public sector on 20 November, while at the same time calling for workers to carry out commando actions like blocking the tracks instead of seeking to extend the struggle to other sectors;
• A leader of the UNSA, also a partisan of the renewable strike, declared that the demonstrations ought to be distinct and that the railway workers should not march with the civil servants because "they don't all have the same demands".

During this period, all the unions managed to get a quiet return to work at the EDF and GDF. On Wednesday 21st, soon after the demonstration, the six union federations negotiated the railway workers' future with a platform of specific demands.

To struggle effectively, we can only count on ourselves!

Despite the government's desire to crush the workers' resistance, despite the numerous legal injunctions aimed at forcing a return to work, despite the complicity of the unions and their work of sabotage, not only has the workers' anger and militancy remained but there is also an emerging recognition of the need to unite the different struggles. For example in Rouen in 17 November, students at the faculty of Mont-Saint-Aignan went to find striking railway workers, shared a meal with them and took part in their general assembly as well as in a ‘free passage' operation on the motorway. Little by little we are seeing the germs of the idea of the need for a massive and united struggle of the whole working class against the inevitable increase in government attacks. For this to become a reality, workers must draw the lesson of union sabotage. In order to fight effectively, to extend the struggle, they can only count on their own forces. They have no choice but to take charge of their own struggles and unmask all the traps and divisive manoeuvres of the unions.

More than ever, the future lies with the development of the class struggle. Wm 18.11.07

As we have already shown in our press, the attacks being imposed on the transport, electricity and other workers around the ‘special pension regimes' are just the first stage of an assault on the conditions of the working class as a whole. Tomorrow, the pensions of all workers will be put into question. At the same time, the new medical charges are part of a wider attack on social benefits.

The students in struggle have shown that they understand this when they widened their demands, not only for the withdrawal of the law for the ‘reform' of the universities but also for the defence of the existing pension and medical agreements.

The spectre of the struggle against the CPE is reappearing and the unions, both ‘worker' and ‘student', are doing all they can to prevent a similar dynamic from developing, from opening a perspective for the struggle of the whole working class, not just in France but internationally.

We have already published on our website a number of examples of union sabotage during these struggles. Wherever our forces have allowed us to intervene, in the workers' assemblies and the universities, we have received a lot of sympathy and support from workers and students. Thus, in the south of the country, a group of young students[1] came to discuss with our comrades and gave us their own experience of the union sabotage of the struggle.

What the comrades experienced is very revealing about the contempt these so-called ‘workers' organisations' have for the movement. The only thing that counts for them is that it doesn't escape their control and become a really autonomous force which would allow the workers and students to build real solidarity and draw confidence from a common struggle.

1. How the leftist and union organisations fight each other for control of the movement behind the backs of the general assemblies

We will cite the comrades who wrote to us: "Around 10 November, there were some major thefts at Mirail. Immediately, the administration threatened the AGET-FSE[2] that it would proceed to an administrative closure of the main buildings were not evacuated. We know that the term ‘administrative closure' is a euphemism for ‘sending in the CRS'.

Why did the administration threaten the union at this point? Because it knew that there was a conflict between the occupiers of one building ((l'Arche) and those of the main building. In one building there was the AGET-FSE and the JCR[3], and in the other the anarchists.

The AGET-FSE and the JCR organised an ‘extraordinary commission' to debate the question, in the absence of the anarchists. It was decided to liberate the building whose evacuation had been demanded by the administration, the one occupied by the anarchists!

But this ‘military' operation didn't go as planned. The AGET-FSE abandoned the JCR in the middle of the ‘strong-arm' operation. The anarchists resisted and the ‘putsch', as the anarchists described it, was a failure.

This attempted putsch did a lot of harm to the movement. The majority of he anarchists boycotted the struggle committee dominated by the AGET-FSE and the JCR. What's more, this coup was hidden from the general assembly".

And the comrades concluded: "if such manoeuvres are possible, it's because the commission are presented as something quite impersonal at the general assembly. The movement has a leadership and a well-organised one: it's the unions like the AGET-FSE, student SUD, political organisations like the JCR. There are numerous independents and anarchists. But this leadership is hidden from the general assembly through the hypocritical anonymity of the commissions, which are supposed to carry out the decisions taken by the assemblies!"

2. Not respecting the decisions of the general assemblies

At the assembly we supported the proposal of these comrades to send the largest possible student delegation to the general assemblies of the rail workers. This proposal was voted for by the assembly. But the self-proclaimed presidium declared that it was not possible to go en masse to the railway workers GA on the pretext that there were many actions to be carried out simultaneously. In the end only three students got a mandate from the GA for this delegation: a militant of the AGET-FSE, a militant of the JCR and an ‘independent', as the comrades put it. They themselves offered to be in the delegation, but not being as well-known as the union figures, they had no chance of being mandated.

"All the same we went to the railway workers GA, on the one hand because we had been invited by comrades from the station, and on the other hand because we wanted to listen to the interventions of our delegates.

We were not able to hear them. We went to four of the general assemblies and we never saw them. We asked the comrades of the Sud Rail and others if they had seen them in other general assemblies. They hadn't. In other words, the student delegates, elected by the general assemblies, had not respected their mandate.

In the evening we went to the struggle committee to ask why our delegates hadn't been to the rail workers' assemblies. A member of the AGET-FSE answered that the delegates hadn't known where or when the assemblies were being held...

There was a precedent. On 18 October, I was sent as a student delegate to the rail workers' assemblies. There had been 5 other delegates. At the beginning of the assembly I was the only one there. Only two others arrived when the assembly was over.

At the second assembly, I was once again the only delegate present. No other delegate had respected his mandate. And at that time also they said it was because they didn't have the information!

Railway workers have been holding assemblies for over 8 days. We can't believe that organisations like AGET-FSE and the JCR are incapable of opening their address books and finding the telephone number of a trade union. We who are hardly organised managed to do it".

Caught red-handed in its intrigues, the AGET-FSE found nothing better to do than reproach the comrades for having acted on their own initiative and accusing them of falsely acting in the name of the student assemblies. But in fact the comrades went to the rail workers' assemblies in their own name. They were well received and were able to speak, proposing that the rail workers' should come to the student assemblies (which was done) and a joint leaflet should be distributed at the metro.

As the comrades said, "Whereas these actions were a success, concretising the rapprochement between rail workers and students, they reproached us for taking initiatives, for having gone over the head of the general assembly! By going to the general assembly we were just applying the decision voted some time before by the student assemblies: go to the workers. As communists, it is our duty to work with all our strength for the practical unity of the struggle!

Everything we did was done in full view and knowledge of the assembly. We hid nothing from it. Those who wanted to take part in our action did so, those who didn't want to didn't. We imposed nothing on the assembly. The only thing is that we were independent of the organisations which currently lead the movement".

The ‘worker' and ‘student' unions hand in hand against the growing solidarity between workers and students

The growing solidarity between workers and students, the fact that retired comrades who are not rail workers were able to speak at the rail workers assemblies, all this showed real advances in the struggle: the struggle of the rail workers is not just for themselves, it's part of a struggle of the whole working class, whether working, studying or retired. The unions can't accept this and do all they can to prevent such expressions of solidarity from spreading.

On 22 November, the comrades participated in the student demonstration, in the streets of Toulouse. Again, let them speak:

"At our general assembly, the students were called to participate at the general assembly at the Mediatheque, at 15.30, the place the rail workers, electricity workers and gas workers were assembling. Unfortunately the CGT thought it would be a good idea to change the time of the gathering and sabotage any attempt to hold a general assembly. Had it really been organised, and who by?

The CGT had not expected the students to arrive but they quickly barred the way. When university and high school students arrived we called on them to join the workers, but the official union stewards blocked us. On the other side, the CGT decided to move off, all the more because the workers were making friendly gestures to the students and asking them to join them. The student demonstration was kept 50 yards away from the workers' demonstration".

The strength of the struggle is the struggle itself. These few elements reported here shows how the movement begins to pose in practice the necessity for solidarity in the struggle between workers, students, pensioners... In continuity with struggles like the CPE in France, only the widest possible unity can enable us to constitute a balance of forces that can push back the bourgeoisie's austerity plans.

The bourgeoisie has the unions and the leftists there to prevent this from happening. It is an important victory for the working class when it recognises its real enemies, and there were small signs of this happening in this struggle. 30.11.07

[1] A member of this group calls himself a Trotskyist although not part of any organisation and they sign their writings: ‘some communists of the Marx, Lenin, Trotsky branch'.

[2] Student Union: Association Generale des Etudiants de Toulouse-Federation Syndicale Etudiante.

[3] Jeunesse Communiste Revolutionnaire, youth wing of the Trotskyist Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire.

On Monday 19 November, in a large provincial town, a small group of students who had been to our last public meeting took a delegation of older politicised workers, members of the ICC, to two railway workers' general assemblies. Since the unions had taken care to divide up the assemblies into different sectors, our comrades split up to speak at the two assemblies: one of the station staff and one of the drivers.

In both assemblies, there was a very warm reception from the railway workers. In the station staff meeting, our comrade introduced himself by saying that he was not a rail worker, that he was a retired worker but that he had come to express his solidarity, adding that, if possible, he would like to speak in order to put forward his ideas about what solidarity means. The response of the railway workers who had welcomed him was to thank him for coming and to say "certainly you can speak".

The assembly began around 11.30 and finished around 12.30. In charge of the assembly was a whole raft of union representatives: FO, CFDT, CFTC, CGT, SUD... Each one made a speech reminding us of the demands of the movement, saying that it was necessary to establish a balance of forces "at a high level", presenting the negotiations that had recently been announced as a perspective for the struggle, insisting that the assemblies must decide - but all of this in a very sectional wrapping. Not only was this an assembly for a one sector, but also any concern about the situation of the students and the public employees was totally absent from their interventions. A union delegate even insisted that the perspective was to struggle "to win reforms" and not to fight all together, because the orientation of the unions was not to "revolutionise" everything. The CFDT representative said that the regional federation was not in agreement with the national leadership which had called for an end to the strike.

Following these speeches, a young railway worker went up to our comrade and said "you can speak if you want". The union speakers, understanding what was going on, said that it was necessary to wait a bit before allowing him to speak because first they had to move on to the vote to the renewal of the strike and then listen to proposals for action, which showed that, on the eve of the demonstration of 20 November, the union representatives were being forced to ‘jump on the bandwagon', whereas in the public sector workplaces they had made no call for a struggle in solidarity with the rail workers[1].

It was evident that the unions had no desire for this ‘minority' of students to make trouble by bringing their ‘box of ideas' (on the model of the movement against the CPE in spring 2006) to the rail workers' assembly, which they see as their private property. This kind of assembly, organised, run and sabotaged by the unions did not envisage and did not allow a real debate, a real exchange of ideas. And yet there was a real discontent and militancy. Of the 117 voting, 108 rail workers voted for renewing the strike

It was only after the vote that our retired comrade was able to come to the microphone. For the unions, proposals made by ‘external elements' are not there to be discussed by rail workers. Here is the content of his intervention:

"I am not a rail worker. I am retired. But I have come to express my solidarity with your struggle. Seen from the ‘outside', today, there are several struggles against the attacks hitting the workers' living and working conditions. You who are struggling for your pensions, the students, who are future workers, and who are struggling against a reform which will turn certain universities into ‘sink' universities, the public sector workers (such as those from National Education) are going to demonstrate tomorrow because their working conditions are becoming unbearable and a lot of jobs are going to be chopped. All these struggles are the same struggle for the defence of our living conditions. Just now I hear that we had to impose a balance of forces ‘at a high level'. I agree. But how do we do that? I think that we all have to fight together. It's because there was a lot of solidarity from the wage earners towards the students that, faced with massive demonstrations against the CPE, the government had to back down in the end. Tomorrow, we have to go in large numbers to the demonstration; but I also think that it would be good if there was one banner with something like ‘rail workers, students, public employees: all united in the struggle'. And then, at the end of the demo, instead of just going home or to the café, the rail workers need to discuss with the students, with the public employees, the public employees need to discuss with the students and the rail workers. We have to discuss among ourselves because that is the how we can start to build the unity we need. The only way to defend ourselves from the attacks is to build this unity". The intervention was warmly applauded.

Before the assembly had started, our comrade had discussed a little with the rail workers about the lies of the media. These lies are obvious to everyone, except the blind and the deaf (and the Liberte Cherie counter-demonstrators). At the end of the assembly, he was able to discuss again with a small group of young rail workers. He asked them "what do you think about having a common banner?" The response of one of them had been "at the base, most would be for it, but it's the federations who are against it".

You could hardly be clearer about the divisive role of the unions. Nevertheless, despite being opposed by the unions, the idea of unity and solidarity among all workers is gradually maturing.

In the other general assembly, the drivers' one, the welcome given to our comrades who accompanied the students was also very warm. They were able to intervene to defend the same orientation as our other comrade. The students were enthusiastic about the idea of a common banner. The interventions of the students and of our comrades were well received despite the fact that the train drivers still had the illusion that they could defend themselves effectively because they can block the traffic. However, it's the unity of the workers and not just ‘blocking' which constitutes the strength of the working class. This fetish for ‘blocking' is today the new ace in the pack of the unions aimed at preventing any real extension and unification of the struggles.

Since 18 October, the task of building class unity has come up against the divisive work of the unions. But, as this small group of students said in a discussion we had with them after the assembly: "The bourgeoisie's attacks on all sectors of the working class are so widespread that this can only facilitate the tendency towards the unity of the struggles".

This small group of students has understood very well that, as a student from the University of Censier in Paris said in 2006, "if we all fight alone, they will eat us all for breakfast". And it is because they didn't want their rail worker comrades to remain isolated and end up being beaten up by the militias of capital that they went looking for the solidarity of genuine communists (some of whom had been physically attacked by CGT union goons in the 70s and 80s). But it's true that since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the CGT and the so-called Communist Party have become a lot more ‘democratic'. The students who had been able to unlock the door to the rail workers' assemblies (held in the prison of the union local) said to our comrades of the older generation: "it's great to have ‘parents' like you". This is at the very opposite pole to the ‘contesting' students of the late 60s who were so marked by the ‘generation gap' and who, in rebelling against their parents who had seen the terror of Nazism and Stalinism, came up with slogans like "put the older generation into concentration camps"[2].

The intervention of our comrades wasn't aimed at selling party cards and recruiting at any price, because the ICC, unlike the Trotskyists and other organisations of the ‘left', is not an organisation which takes part in the bourgeois electoral circus. Neither is its aim to ‘recuperate the movement', as some ‘anti-party' ideologues think.

As for those who continue to cry wolf and warn against Bolsheviks with knives between their teeth, we can only advise then to learn some real history and not just repeat the lies of bourgeois propaganda. The new generations of the working class, whether they are rail workers, or still students, are discovering the truth about real ‘democracy' and real solidarity, even if they still have illusions and can't by-pass the school of experience. The courage they are showing in beginning to challenge the directive of the union chiefs and bring alive the real culture of the working class shows that the future of humanity is still in their hands. GM, November 2007

[1] It's worth pointing out that, in many public sector workplaces (hospitals, ASSEDIC, etc) the union leaflets (especially by the CGT) calling for the strike and demonstration of 20 November arrived the day after the demo. In certain places, all leaflets on the present situation were removed from union notice boards. .

[2] Forty years later, it's not surprising that certain young people who have not aged well and have become zealous servants of the bourgeoisie now want to liquidate the ghosts of May 68 by gassing the students who want to dream a little, or locking then up in the jails of capital. But it is true that the edu-castrators who want to clean the windows of the universities while licking the boots of Monsieur Le Pen are a bit short on ideas.

In the last two issues of WR, we have been marking the 90th anniversary of the October revolution in Russia by recalling the massive scale and importance of the Russian revolution - the first time in history that the working class had taken political power on the level of an entire country, and the opening salvo in an international explosion of workers' uprisings that shook world capitalism to the core. In these articles we showed the huge leap in working class self-activity and consciousness in the months preceding the actual seizure of power. Today the October insurrection is almost uniformly dismissed by bourgeois historians (and, in their shadow, the ideologists of anarchism) as a mere coup d'etat or putsch carried out by the Bolshevik party for their own nefarious purposes. The article that follows (extracted from a longer article that first appeared in International Review 72 and available in full online here [102] ) reaffirms the real character of October. In continuity with the maturation of the class movement in the period that began in February 1917, the insurrection was anything but a putsch, and to this day remains the highest point that working class self-organisation has ever attained.

The working class moves towards the insurrection

The situation of dual power which dominated the whole period from February to October was an unstable and dangerous time. Its excessive prolongation, due to neither class being able to impose itself, was above all damaging for the proletariat: if the impotence and chaos that marked this period accentuated the unpopularity of the ruling class, it at the same time exhausted and disorientated the working masses. They were getting drained in sterile struggles and all this began to alienate the sympathies of the intermediate classes towards the proletariat. This, therefore, demanded the taking of power through the insurrection to decant and decide the situation: "either the revolution must advance at a rapid, stormy and resolute tempo, breaking all barriers with an iron hand and place its goals ever farther ahead, or it will quite soon be thrown backwards behind its feeble point of departure and suppressed by the counter-revolution" (Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution).

Insurrection is an art. It has to be carried out at a precise moment in the evolution of the revolutionary situation, neither too soon, which would cause it to fail, nor too late, which would mean an opportunity being missed, leaving the revolutionary movement to become a disintegrating victim of the counter­revolution.

At the beginning of September the bourgeoisie, through Kornilov, tried to carry out a coup - the signal for the bourgeoi­sie's final offensive to overthrow the Soviets and to fully restore its power.

The proletariat, with the massive cooperation of the soldiers, thwarted the bourgeoisie's plan and at the same time accelerated the decomposition of the army: soldiers in numerous regiments pronounced themselves in favour of the expulsion of officers and of the organisation of soldiers' councils - in short, they came out on the side of the revolution.

As we have previously seen, the renewal of the Soviets from the middle of August was clearly changing the balance of forces in favour of the proletariat. The defeat of the Kornilov coup accelerated this process.

From the middle of September a tide of resolutions calling for the taking of power flooded in from the local and regional Soviets (Kronstadt, Ekaterinoslav etc). The Congress of Soviets of the Northern Region held on the 11-13th of October openly called for the insurrection. In Minsk the Regional Congress of Soviets decided to support the insurrection and to send troops of soldiers loyal to the revolution. On the 12th "Workers of one of the most revolutionary factories of the capital (the old Parviainen) made the following answer to the attacks of the bourgeoisie: ‘We declare that we will go into the street when we deem it advisable. We are not afraid of the approaching struggle, and we confi­dently believe that we will come off victorious'" (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol 3, ‘The Military Revolutionary Committee', page 91). On the 17th October the Petrograd Soldiers' Soviet decided that "The Petrograd garrison no longer recognises the Provisional Government. Our government is the Petrograd Soviet. We will only carry out the orders of the Petrograd Soviet issued through its Military Revolutionary Committee" (J Reed, Ten Days That Shook The World). The Vyborg district Soviet called a demonstration in support of this resolution, which sailors joined. A Moscow Liberal paper - quoted by Trotsky - described the atmosphere in the city thus: "In the districts, in the factories of Petrograd, Novsld, Obujov and Putilov, Bolshevik agitation for the insurrec­tion has reached its highest level. The animated state of the workers is such that they are disposed to carry out demonstrations at any time".

The increase of peasants' revolts in September constituted another element in the maturation of the necessary conditions for the insurrection: "It would be sheer treachery to the peasants to allow the peasant revolts to be suppressed when we control the Soviets of both capitals. It would be to lose, and justly lose every ounce of the peasants' confidence. In the eyes of the peasants we would be putting ourselves on a level with the Lieberdans and other scoundrels" (Lenin, ‘The Crisis Has Matured', Selected Works, Vol. 2, page 348).

Importance of the international situation

However, the international situation was the key factor for the revolution. Lenin made this clear in his letter to the Bolshevik comrades attending the Congress of Soviets of the Northern Region (8-10-17): "Our revolution is passing through a highly critical period. This crisis coincides with the great crisis - the growth of the world socialist revolution and the struggle waged against it by world imperialism. A gigantic task is being presented to the responsible leaders of our party, and failure to perform it will involve the danger of a complete collapse of the internation­alist proletarian movement. The situation is such that, in truth, delay would be fatal" (Lenin, SW, vol. 2, page 395). In another letter (1.10.17) Lenin made it clear that "The Bolsheviks have no right to wait for the Congress of Soviets, they must take power at once. By so doing they will save the world revolution (for otherwise there is danger of a deal between the imperialists of all countries, who, after the shootings in Germany, will be more accommodating to each other and will unite against us), the Russian revolution (otherwise a wave of real anarchy may become stronger than we are) and the lives of hundreds of thousands of people at the front" (Lenin, SW, vol. 2, page 391).

This understanding of the international responsibility of the Russian proletariat was not confined to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. On the contrary, many sectors of workers recognised it:

- on the 1st of May 1917, "throughout Russia, side by side with soldiers, prisoners of war were taking part in the processions under the same banners, sometimes singing the same song in different voices ... The Kadet minister Shingarev, during one of the Conferences with the trench delegates, defended the order of Guchkov against ‘unnecessary indulgence' towards prisoners of war... this remark did not meet with the slightest sympathy. The Conference decisively expressed itself in favour of relieving the conditions of the prisoners of war" (Trotsky, op cit, Vol. 2, pages 313, 269);

- "A soldier from the Romanian front, thin, tragical, and fierce cried: ‘Comrades! we are starving at the front, we are stiff from cold. We are dying for no reason. I ask the American comrades to carry word to America that the Russians will never give up their revolution until they die. We will hold the front with all our strength until the peoples of the world rise up and help us! Tell the American workers to rise and fight for the social revolution'" (J Reed, op cit, page 52).

The Kerensky government intended to disperse the most revolutionary regiments of Petrograd, Moscow, Vladimir, Reval etc. to the front or to remote regions in order to behead the struggle. At the same time, the Liberal and Menshevik press launched a campaign of calumnies against the soldiers, accusing them of "smugness" of "not giving their lives for the Motherland" etc. The workers of the capital responded immediately: numerous factory assemblies supported the soldiers, called for "all power to the Soviets" and passed resolutions calling for the arming of the workers.

Formation of the Military Revolutionary Committee

In this atmosphere, the meeting of the Petrograd Soviet on the 9th of October decided to create a Military Revolutionary Committee with the initial aim of controlling the government. However, it was soon transformed into the centre for the organisation of the insurrection. It regrouped representatives of the Petrograd Soviet, the Sailors' Soviet, the Finlandia region Soviet, the railway union, the congress of factory councils and the Red Guard.

The latter was a workers' body that was "formed for the first time during the 1905 revolution and was reborn during the March days of 1917, when there was a necessity for a force to maintain order in the city. In this period the Red Guard were armed and the Provisional Governments efforts to disarm them came to nothing. In each crisis that arose during the course of the revolution, detachments of the Red Guards appeared in the streets. They had no military training or organisation, but were overflowing with revolutionary enthusiasm" (J Reed, op cit).

On the foundations of this regroupment of class forces, the Military Revolutionary Committee (from now on referred to as the MRC) convoked a conference of regimental committees which on the 18th of October openly discussed the question of the insurrection. The majority of the committees, apart from 2 which were against and 2 that declared themselves neutral (there were another 5 regiments which did not agree with the Conference), pronounced in favour of the insurrection. Similarly the Confer­ence passed a resolution in favour of the arming of the workers. This resolution was already being put into practice: en masse the workers went to the state arsenals and demand all the arms. When the government prohibited the handing over of arms, the workers and employees of the Peter and Paul Fortress (a reactionary bastion) decided to place themselves at the disposal of the MRC, and along with other arsenals organised the distribution of arms to the workers.

On the 21st of October the Conference of regimental commit­tees adopted the following Resolution: "1) The garrison of Petrograd and its environs promises the RMC its full support in all its actions. 2) The garrison appeals to the Cossacks: we invite you to our meeting to-morrow. You are welcome, brother Cossacks! 3) The All-Russian Congress of Soviets must take power. The garrison promises to put all its forces at the disposal of the Congress. Rely upon us, authorised representatives of the power of the soldiers, workers and peasants, you can count on us. We are all at our posts to conquer or die" (Trotsky, op cit, vol. 3, page 108-109).

Here we have the characteristic features of a workers' insurrec­tion: the creative initiative of the masses, straight forward and showing admirable organisation; discussions and debates which give rise to resolutions that synthesise the level of consciousness that the masses have reached; reliance on persuasion and convic­tion, as in the call to the Cossacks to abandon the government gang, or the passionate and dramatic meeting of the soldiers of the Peter and Paul Fortress which took place on the 23rd of October, where it was decided to obey no one but the MRC. These characteristic features are, above all, expressions of a movement for the emancipation of humanity, of the direct, passionate, creative initiative and leadership of the exploited masses.

The "Soviet day" on the 22nd of October, which was called by the Petrograd Soviet, definitively sealed the insurrection: in all the districts and factories meetings and assemblies took place all day, which overwhelmingly agreed on the slogans "down with Kerensky" and "all power to the Soviets". This was a gigantic act where workers, employees, soldiers, many Cossacks, women, and children openly united in their commitment to the insurrec­tion.

It is not possible within the outline of this article to recount all of the details (we recommend reading Trotsky's and Reed's books, which we have mentioned). What we want to make clear is the massive, open and collective nature of the insurrection "The insurrection was thus set for a fixed date, the 25th of October. And this was not agreed on in some secret session, but openly and publicly, and the revolution was victoriously carried out on the 25th of October precisely (6th of November), as had been established beforehand. World history has known a great many revolts and revolutions, but could one find another insurrection by the oppressed class that had been openly and publicly set for a precise date and which had been triumphantly carried out on the day nominated beforehand. For this reason and various others, the November Revolution is unique and without comparison" (Trotsky, The November Revolution, 1919).

The Bolsheviks had clearly posed the question of the insurrec­tion in the workers' and soldiers' assemblies from September; they occupied the most combative and decisive positions in the MRC and the Red Guard; it was they who swung the barracks where there were doubts or which were for the Provisional Government. This was done through convincing the soldiers: Trotsky's speech was crucial in bringing over the soldiers of the Peter and Paul Fortress. They also untiringly denounced the manoeuvres, accusations and traps of the Mensheviks, and struggled for the calling of the 2nd Congress of Soviets against the sabotage of the social traitors.

An insurrection by the working class, not the party alone

Nevertheless, it was not the Bolsheviks, but the whole prole­tariat of Petrograd who decided on and carried out the insurrec­tion. The Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries had repeatedly tried to delay the holding of the 2nd Congress of Soviets. It was through the pressure of the masses, the insistence of the Bolshe­viks, the sending of thousands of telegrams from the local Soviets demanding its convocation, that finally obliged the CEC - the lair of the social traitors - to call it for the 25th.

"After the revolution of the 25th of October, the Mensheviks, and above all Martov, talked a lot about the seizure of power behind the Soviets' and workers' backs. It is hard to imagine a more shameless deformation of the facts. When the Soviets - in session - decided by a majority to call the 2nd Congress on the 25th of October, the Mensheviks said ‘you have decided the Revolution'; when in the Petrograd Soviet, by an overwhelming majority, we decided to refuse to allow the dispersal of the regiments away from the capital, the Mensheviks said: ‘This is the beginning of the revolution', when in the Petrograd Soviet we created the MRC the Mensheviks made it clear that ‘this is the organism of the armed insurrection'. But when the insurrection, which had been planned, created and ‘discovered' beforehand by this organ, exploded on the decisive day, the same Mensheviks cried: ‘a plot by conspirators has provoked a revolution behind the workers' backs!'" (Trotsky, ibid).

The proletariat provided itself with the means of force - the general arming of the workers, the formation of the MRC, the insurrection - in order that the Congress of Soviets could effectively take power. If the Congress of Soviets had decided "to take power" without first carrying out these measures such a decision would have been an empty gesture easily ripped apart by the revolution's enemies. It is not possible to see the insurrection as an isolated formal act: it has to be seen within the overall dynamic of the class and, concretely, within a process on the international level where the conditions for the revolution were developing, and within Russia where innumerable local Soviets were calling for the effective taking of power: the Petrograd, Moscow, Tula, the Urals, Siberia, Jukov Soviets simultaneously carried out the triumphant insurrection.

The Congress of Soviets took the definitive decision, com­pletely confirming the validity of the initiative of the proletariat in Petrograd: "Based upon the will of the great majority of workers, soldiers, and peasants, based upon the triumphant uprising of the Petrograd working men and soldiers, the congress as­sumes power ... The congress resolves: that all local power shall be transferred to the Soviets of workers', soldiers' and peasants' Deputies, which must enforce revolutionary order". (J Reed, op cit) Adalen 5/10/92.

Since we wrote about Pakistan in the last edition of WR, Pervez Musharraf has ceremoniously handed over command of the Pakistani military to his protégé General Ashfaq Kayani (thereby meeting one of the key demands of the USA) and also allowed former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to re-enter the country (after throwing him out at his last attempted return in September). It seems as though the good general has decided to play along and enter himself as a civilian candidate for the elections he has announced for January. Not a bit of it. Martial law has not been lifted. There are continual arrests, detentions and beatings of opposition supporters. There is still a heavy clampdown on all media outlets critical of the government. And the Pakistani Supreme Court has just been replaced with more favourable judges, after the last lot, and in particular the Chief Justice, began to be critical of the government. In short, not much has changed. The main reason for allowing Sharif back into the country - which was not specifically a US demand - seems to be that it is guaranteed that he will take votes away from Musharraf's main challenger, the other former Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto.

Musharraf will have undoubtedly noticed a less unambiguous support from the US sugar daddy. In a speech following his recent visit John Negroponte (US State department ‘trouble shooter') stated that he had confidence in the army and the institutions of Pakistan, that the US wanted a ‘relationship with the people'. He specifically no longer referred to Musharraf as the ‘indispensable ally' in the war on terror. All in all the US probably has come to the realisation that, with all the main factions of the bourgeoisie apart from the ‘extreme' Islamists being basically pro-American, they can hedge their bets for the forthcoming elections. The reality is that while the US can say they have confidence in the state and its institutions, it doesn't mean all that much.

The army, despite being the only force capable of holding the state together, doesn't even have control of the entire country: Pro-Taliban militants "...control substantial areas along the Afghan border. More worryingly, for the government, they have, in recent months, extended their control east and north. They have carried out deadly attacks in the capital, Islamabad, and the main garrison town, Rawalpindi. They have inflicted humiliating defeats on the army, capturing hundreds of soldiers this year" (BBC news). There is also the issue that, although Islamist militants are unlikely to militarily take over the country, there is a strong tendency (e.g. Algeria, Indonesia) for Islamist parties to do well electorally out of the corruption of the official ‘westernised' fractions. The nightmare scenario, one the USA would not allow, would be an Islamic state armed and primed with nuclear weapons.

And there are already massive pressures on Pakistan on the regional imperialist front, with China and India as neighbours on one side (with the unresolved issue of Kashmir waiting to burst forth bloodily) and no end in sight to the now nearly 5 years old war in Afghanistan, on the other. In short, whichever faction comes to power, there is an irresistible tendency towards the break-up of the state, towards increased violence and gangsterism. This is, in miniature, what is going on throughout the region generally: the daily barbarism in Iraq, the push by the Iranian bourgeoisie to develop their own nuclear arsenal, the fracturing of Lebanon, the squeezing of life out of the Palestinian people... Capitalism can ultimately offer no hope for ‘peace' between warring nations or a way out of the desperate poverty that the vast majority in this region endure. It is only in the struggles of the workers throughout the Middle East - in Israel, in Egypt, in Iran amongst others - a struggle whose basis is a solidarity between workers irrespective of religion, nationality or ethnicity, that the seeds of a challenge to this living nightmare can emerge. Graham 28/11/07

Two weeks since Cyclone Sidr hit Bangladesh the death toll has been estimated as at least 3,500, but the Bangladeshi Red Cross estimates that it could climb to 10,000. In any case the ruling class don't yet know. This is a disaster on an almost unimaginable scale: more than 2 million people displaced and without shelter, untold numbers left without food or water for days, among 5 million affected in all; people left to drag the corpses of their loved ones from the flood water; 600,000 tons of rice destroyed in the paddy fields and other agricultural and fishing production destroyed carrying the risk of increased malnutrition; the risk of water-borne diseases.

Yet it could have been so much worse. In 1991 a similar cyclone killed around 140,000, in 1970 a cyclone killed between 300,000 and half a million when it hit the city of Chittagong. This time the death toll has been reduced by the fact that Cyclone Sidr hit the South West, where there is more protection from mangrove swamp, and at low tide, so the 5 metre tidal wave was less than it would have been at high tide. Also the Cyclone Preparedness Programme warnings and shelters saved thousands of lives. But we shall not be joining those who praised the preparations. It's true that warnings were broadcast in the media and from the loudspeakers of mosques 3 days in advance, but this system does not rely not on the resources of the government-backed Bangladeshi Red Crescent, which has only 159 employees for the CPP, but on the 42,000 volunteers who carry out the warnings. Similarly, the 550 cyclone shelters are totally inadequate for the population at risk - for instance, FT.com reported that one village in Bagarat has shelters for 3,000 but a population of 27,000.

Bangladesh has always been subject to annual flooding and periodic cyclones, as a result of its geographical position as a low lying country of the Ganges Delta on the Gulf of Bengal. Yet capitalism bears the main responsibility for the death toll and misery resulting from this natural disaster. It is not just a question of the paltry resources put into the warning system compared to the need and to the vast resources put into weapons, but the very economic conditions that force millions to try and scratch a living in such dangerous conditions. Deforestation, soil erosion and poverty force the poor and landless peasants to live on and cultivate the most dangerous flood prone areas, putting millions in harm's way.

The cyclone has come at a very bad time for the economy with inflation at a 10 year high, 10% in July, and reduced demand for textiles which make up about 3 quarters of the country's exports. All this is set against a background of political instability, violence and corruption, with emergency law and a caretaker government taking over in January.

Seeing that the poorest in Bangladesh have no possibility to escape from the most dangerous low lying areas, the insufficiency of the cyclone shelters, the inadequacy of the immediate relief after the cyclone, there is little perspective for the victims to get the food, water and shelter they need nor for the longer term rehabilitation to help rebuild livelihoods destroyed by the floods. Global warming creates the perspective of more frequent and more powerful cyclones hitting the region.

There is no hope of relief for the poorest peasantry forced to farm such dangerous areas within capitalism. But we are also seeing developments in the struggle of the working class, for instance in Bangladesh we have recently seen very militant struggles by garment workers throughout the Dhaka Export Processing Zone, expressing solidarity, defending themselves against the police and the unions (see WR 308). This is fully part of the international development of working class struggles that is only at its beginning today. The hope for an end to capitalism, and all the misery it carries in its wake, lies in the existence and struggles of the working class, whose task is to dig the grave of capitalism. Alex 1.12.07