The article below was sent to us recently by a comrade in Japan: it describes the emergence and decline of the squatters' and day-workers' movements which have marked the life of several Japanese cities - more particularly Osaka in this case - since the collapse of the Japanese economic "bubble" at the beginning of the 1990s, to the present day.

Our regular readers may be surprised by the somewhat "literary" style that the comrade adopts. This does not in our view detract from the significance of the events that he describes, and indeed it rather enhances some interesting reflections on the way in which the capitalist productive process organises geography and time.

Historically, there has always been a deep divide between the workers' movement in the industrialised West and the East - in Japan and China in particular. This was largely inevitable given the late arrival of the Japanese and Chinese working class on the historical stage (see our articles in the International Review [1]) and the barriers of language.

The bourgeois media in the West have always worked to emphasise this divide (though usually with more subtlety than Edith Cresson (French Prime Minister 1991-92) who described the Japanese as "yellow ants"!). Japanese workers have been shown as going on "strike" by putting "unhappy flags" on their machines while continuing to work. There was even a short-lived vogue amongst management theorists for Japanese-style "quality committees" where the workers themselves could suggest improvements in the production process. The Japanese workers were presented to their class comrades in the West as hardworking and patriotic contributors to the Japanese "economic miracle", from which it has usually been implied that they profit at Western workers' expense.

Not only that: the workers in Japan supposedly enjoyed the supreme happiness of being guaranteed "jobs for life" thanks to the paternalistic attention of the Japanese mega-companies - something which supposedly set them completely apart from workers in the West.

The article below has the merit of blowing a hole in this completely fraudulent picture of Japan. Here we see the masses of impoverished day workers in struggle against the barbaric exploitation inflicted on them by the almost indistinguishable forces of the state, the bosses, and the mafia (yakuza). But we also - and the author is absolutely right to point this out - see that this is not limited to the most downtrodden sectors of the working class: the whole Japanese "economic miracle" has been founded on the increasingly ferocious exploitation of the entire workforce: factory workers and office workers, but also technicians and scientists as skilled jobs are proletarianised.

In our view, the events described in this article are more than just riots. They are clearly a workers' struggle, fought on the terrain of the working class: initially sparked off by an expression of solidarity with a victim of police aggression, drawing in workers and their families from the entire Kamagasaki area, and directed not only against the police but against employers trying to swindle workers out of their wages.

Western readers may recognise some similarity between the events described below, and the situation in certain European countries during the 1970s. The internal immigration towards cities less touched by the crisis, leading to a housing shortage, property speculation, rack-renting, and the squatting of empty property, was a large-scale phenomenon in London and some Dutch cities during the 1970s for example, although not on the same explicitly working class basis: the social composition of the squatters' movements in Britain and Holland was much more mixed.

Western readers will also recognise the manner in which the Japanese state has dealt with the movement in Kamagasaki: "NGOs replaced the direct discipline of police batons as their mediating roles were appreciated by the city in halting unrest (...) newly radicalized unions, who quickly transformed into facilitators of ritual action: such as protest marches completely surrounded by police". This is precisely the role that has been played historically by the trades unions, ever since they betrayed the working class by giving their support to the imperialist slaughter in 1914. Especially under bourgeois democracy, where they benefit from the appearance of separation from the state, the unions are able to achieve results that the police cannot, by sabotaging the struggle and preventing its self-organisation and extension rather than by open repression. A classic example is the role played by the newly formed Solidarnosc union in sabotaging the workers' struggles in Poland in December 1980, delivering the proletariat, bound hand and foot, to the state repression that followed a year later. In Osaka, once the NGOs and the unions have done their work, the squatters' tents which had once symbolised workers' resistance have become nothing but an empty shell, easily emptied by the police.

The value of this article lies - amongst other things - in its clear demonstration that the workers in Japan face the same problems, and the same enemies, as workers in other parts of the world: one more demonstration that the class struggle is international, that the working class is a world class.

All this being said, the article also contains a certain number of ambiguities, or perhaps we should say internal contradictions, which in our view detract from the force of the argument. There are three which seem to us particularly important.

1 - The first, is the role of the unions and of the left generally. While the article in effect denounces the union sabotage of the struggle (see the quote above), elsewhere it seems to suggest that there is a fundamental opposition between the unions, the left, and the "neo-liberal project", and that the collapse of the former in Japan made possible the success of the latter.

But the attacks on the working class from the late 1970s onwards were by no means a Japanese, they were a global phenomenon. The onset of the first post-war crisis in the late 1960s led to an enormous world wide wave of workers' struggles - of which May '68 in France was only the most impressive moment. The end of this wave of struggle was inevitably followed by a capitalist counter-attack, whose aim was to make the workers pay the price of the crisis that had opened up from the late 1960s onwards. The role played by "the left" in the resulting defensive struggles of the working class - when left governments were not directly imposing austerity themselves, as the "Socialist" and "Communist" government did under Mitterrand in France - was to sabotage the workers' efforts to react by making sure they never escaped the narrow boundaries of corporatism and nationalism (the "coal not dole" slogan and the campaigns against imports of Polish coal during the British miners' strike in 1985 are a clear example). The idea that the workers' struggle "re-composes" into unions and that the result, "far from being exterior to the ‘being' of the class which must affirm itself against them, [is] nothing but this being in movement", obscures the profound opposition between the permanent union structure and the needs of the working class in struggle: this is easily verified in practice by anybody who has tried to oppose workers' initiative to the union line during a mass meeting. More profoundly, this opposition arises from the impossibility today (contrary to the period prior to 1914) of the working class creating permanent mass organisations.

2 - The article's second ambiguity lies in the suggestion that it might be possible to create an "autonomous" space outside the institutionalisation imposed by the capitalist state (notably in its "welfare" version). This, it seems to us, contradicts the article's otherwise striking descriptions of capitalism's totalitarian domination of social life, from housing, to transport, to work, and right down to the helping hand and the friendly smile transformed into waged activity. It is this second emphasis in the article which seems to us correct: the idea that it is possible to create "islands of communism" or even "islands of autonomy" within capitalism, is simply an illusion. The experiment was tried repeatedly at the very beginning of the workers' movement, in the days of the Utopian socialists Fourrier, Cabet, and Owen: it was tried, and failed - 200 years on, the illusion belongs firmly in the past, not in the present. This is true even for more limited experiments: as Marx pointed out, in any society the dominant ideology is the ideology of the ruling class, and it is impossible to achieve "autonomy" from this. It will take whole generations after the revolution for humanity to "rebuild" itself, to rid itself of all the ideological muck accumulated in millennia of class society.

We can be inspired and touched by the spontaneous humanity of the homeless in Tennoji Park (see note 8 of the article), but this does not provide an organisational lesson for the struggle of the proletariat as a whole.

3 - The contradiction we have just described is at its most ambiguous in the final paragraph, where on the one hand the author advocates a struggle with "no commitments, no demands as such, no gathering points and thus no encirclement", yet at the same time posing the question of "how an autonomous space can develop against the crushing weight of capitalism". But what is a "social space" with "no gathering points"? What could it be? Surely nothing other than a contradiction in terms.

In Russia in 1917, the Russian workers did not confront the Cossacks (the riot police of their day) on their own terms, they dissolved the Cossacks' power. They were able to do this because the proletariat represented a massive and organised force able to take decisions as a class and to present a vision of the future that stood firmly and radically against the barbarity of capitalism. The road to revolution leads not through riots born of and ending in despair, but through massive, open, conscious struggle, able to assert its own perspective against capitalism's "no future", to the point where even the riot police begin to doubt themselves.

International Communist Current

You must help yourself: neo-liberal geographies and worker insurgency in Osaka

"I realize as the train pulls in that the station is on fire. The platform is aflame and below the streets are empty with people running past occasionally. Something is happening. I pick up some rocks and start throwing them at a police line."

-anonymous rioter at Kamagasaki

"You must help yourself."

-Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS

Confronting the riot police

October 2nd, 1990. The day started as any other does in Osaka's Nishi-Nari ward, men lined up around the yoseba employment center, in the thousands, waiting for work. If it came, they would load into the cars of construction contractors in groups, with parachute pants and wrapped heads. For eight hours they might wave light wands ‘guiding pedestrians', dig concrete roads, re-pave highways or variously break their backs in the sun. This proletarian fate was ceded by the city's bourgeoisie over a period of thirty years of continuous unemployed unrest; all the union officials touted it as labor ‘won' from an inhuman system. After all, without work, one does not eat, and once conditions have worsened to the point that this phrase becomes dictatorial, one works in a fervor; for work leads to ‘independence'. Work might one day lead out of the slum.

If work didn't come, the men wait out lunch and line up for the daily workfare handout, set aside for ‘unsuccessful job-seekers'. This yoseba is in Kamagasaki, a neighborhood of poverty and celebration, a breathing lung, where the yakuza patrol day-workers with icy looks and stashed weapons; at occupied ‘triangle' park, men, dogs and blue canvas spill out into the street sides. Udon and soba are served at improvised stool stands roofed with canvas. Women and men prepare boxed lunches, noodles and Okinawan fare at shops lining the crowded avenues. Just to the east the brothel neighborhood of Tobita sits in expectant dormancy, for the night will soon fall. The slum is quiet.

For the city hall and the construction capitalists, it was just another Tuesday.

There were multiple flashpoints, like any riot, origins that became history for the individuals and groups that experienced them. For most, the riots began with friends running past, heaving paving stones at the police. But most will point to an account of an old homeless man in the Namba theater district, north of Kamagasaki. Police on patrol had stopped at his improvised blue canvas house, berating him to leave the sidewalk. The man (known by most as 'a bit bizarre') unleashed his dog, which quickly sunk its teeth into a senior patrolman. After a struggle, he was surrounded by police and beaten as a crowd gathered, consisting of other homeless people and some day-workers. Hauled away and arrested, the angry crowd followed the car to the Nishinari police station.[1]

News spread on sprinting legs to the enormous yoseba hiring hall in the south, circulating among groups of day laborers. Without any particular confrontation, a few ‘troublesome' workers were pulled aside by the yoseba police patrol and in front of thousands, beaten. The neighborhood exploded. Yoseba day-workers, witnesses in their thousands, took their comrades back and drove the police from the hiring hall, swarming outward like blood through Kamagasaki's lungs. Crowds formed here and there, with a general movement towards the police station, from which the police re-emerged. A rain of stones fell. After the volleys reached a temporary abatement, barricades were quickly erected, bicycles ignited with cheap lighter fluid, stacked and burned, dumpsters dragged into the street. Capital's tendency to crisis, the proletarian form, was erupting.

Workers in the streets

The police retreated in order to barricade the neighborhoods, to shut off the arteries that connect Kamagasaki to the north, south, east and west. A classic siege strategy was put into action punctuated by sudden, violent streams of steel-shield armed police into the neighborhoods. Mobile riot squads surrounded the area with armored buses and paddy wagons, and soon lined the boulevards in columns with five foot steel shields. All the forces of government and private capital arrived to contain thousands of revolting workers and rapidly arriving allies, to circumscribe a space that was impassable for the surging rage of the rioters.[2] Media vans pulled up and were stoned if they attempted to penetrate the riot line and ‘get the real story'. In several cases cameras were sought after and smashed.[3] All footage of the events comes from behind police lines. Advances by the cops were met with volleys of objects flung from the parapets of apartment buildings by the unemployed, workers and housewives. At times, the riot constituted itself as a castle pocked with archers. When the first barricaded day slipped into night, the cars of the construction barons were smashed and degraded. Parks that had been evicted of squatters had their locks broken and were re-taken.

The insurrection faced its own limit, against the borders of space drawn by the state and its own projectuality. Discussions arose everywhere on where to go next. Many feared that the riotous action would blacklist the neighborhood from construction contracts, that the yoseba would close like the one in Tokyo had just a year earlier, that poverty would worsen. Most gazed over the surrounding steel buses of the riot police and saw the impossibility of expansion, of the riot spreading to other sectors. NGO workers and city hall mediators arrived urging people to ‘calm down', that police violence could be ‘addressed'. But these particular beatings were only moments on a continuum of violent surveillance and control. There was no doubt that the situation was in fact rapidly worsening as police ran wild in the streets, smashing skulls and faces with steel pipes and shields. The Kamagasaki population was at open revolt with the organs of repression, most saw no way back to ‘normality'. Buses and sound-cars of the unions and organizations of the unemployed mobilized from their garages and circled the neighborhood, providing a temporary barrier; they eventually moving through police lines, broadcasting messages to a wider portion of the city. Night fell again.

"I edged back to the crowd. From behind me, someone yelled ‘Aim for the lights!'. Stones were thrown aiming towards the lights of TV cameras stationed behind the riot squad.

I entered the crowd. No one took any notice of the camera that I held in my hand. After a while, a man spoke to me. ‘Are you from the news papers?' When I answered no, he said, ‘If you are, you are going to get killed.'" (-anonymous observer at Kamagasaki )

As the riot entered into its third, fourth day the city's strategy was in continual escalation. The rioting, unarmed workers were meat for the mobile riot squads. Largely defensive formations changed into charges, five-foot steel shields were leveled against the flesh of the disgusted. Barricades collapsed or were extinguished, and the police made real progress into the neighborhoods. If the streets could be cleared, then the tear-gas buses and paddy wagons could move in. Hundreds of the most militant were chased south into a union building where the insurrection made its last, unarmed stand. Concurrently and further south, partly in inspiration from the Kamagasaki rebellion, a youth revolt had exploded, spearheaded by ‘speed tribe' gangs on motorcycles who fought the police in skirmishes. This rebellion was contained even quicker, and most of the young rioters found themselves chased into the same building with the older workers.[4] There would be no cavalry for Kamagasaki.

The building was taken with tremendous violence. The 22nd riot in the neighborhood's 30 year history had ended.

Despite the arrest and imprisonment of many, over the next four years there would be more small riots, sporadically, where the police or contractors were targeted. When unrest broke out, other workers would come running; construction contractors dodging back-wages found themselves at the mercy of mobs. People took inspiration from the riots that raged through the neighborhoods throughout the 1960s, contestation, above all was the agenda!

The strategy against the riot by the city and the bourgeoisie was drawn from every lesson learned in the past forty years of class struggle in post-fordist Japan. Initial direct force, followed by the deployment of mediators, the deployment of advanced technological means of repression, filtering of news about the riots, news blackouts, concluding in total geographical isolation of the proletarian ferment. Riots can not be permitted to spread to other sectors, and therefore Japanese capital's only strategy against the eruption of its own contradictions is containment.

MUZZLED CONTRADICTIONS, STRANGLED PROLETARIANS

Tent city in Osaka

The riots of the 1990s took place amid the massive restructuring of the 1980s and the economic crisis of 1989 as the investment ‘bubble' burst and the promise of a Japanese 'prosperity' proved hollow. Already migrant workers from Okinawa and Tokyo had taken up park occupations all over Osaka, not to mention Nishi-nari ward and the Kamagasaki neighborhood. Improvised huts, roofed with blue tarp, decorated with paint, junk, sometimes city free jazz schedules and at the very least posters of famous female crooners holding beer mugs, sprung up all over the city. The huts were statements of autonomy, arising from the immediate inability of newly-arrived workers to afford housing; as a strategy the ‘tent villages' blanketed the city, in order to stake out an existence independent of the welfare state's institutionalization. Out of the riots, the workers' movement in Kamagasaki re-composed into union coalitions. NGOs replaced the direct discipline of police batons as their mediating roles were appreciated by the city in halting unrest.[5] 16 surveillance cameras at major intersections and shopping streets were installed in Kamagasaki alone. Over 1990-1995, the men at city hall dumped all the previous strategies, and Kamagasaki moved from a zone of discipline to one of control, from containment of outburst to total regulation; the unemployed were channeled, mediated and surveilled like never before; what could once communicate itself as a struggle of autonomy against the control apparatus was now more and more forced to speak the language of social peace. Park occupations were slowly apologized for as a response to the poverty of the city's institutional shelters as well as the lack of viable jobs, instead of their obvious essence, areas autonomous from capitalist time, characterized by relaxation, karaoke songs and games like go and shogi. The occupations were attempts to attain a moderately bourgeois standard of living, actualizing in motion, against an ocean of industrial poverty.[6] Continual violence and harassment by yakuza and police managed to dull the direct-action strategy of spiteful day-workers as well as the heaviest strategies by newly radicalized unions, who quickly transformed into facilitators of ritual action: such as protest marches completely surrounded by police, food handouts and supplication to city officials at any level of struggle.

"As real subsumption advanced it appeared that the mediations of the existence of the class in the capitalist mode of production, far from being exterior to the ‘being' of the class which must affirm itself against them, were nothing but this being in movement, in its necessary implication with the other pole of society, capital." (Theorie Communiste)

NEO-LIBERALISM: TRANSFORMED EXPLOITATION, TRANSFORMED GEOGRAPHIES

Outside of Kamagasaki and Osaka, across the social terrain of Japan, the neo-liberal project had been advancing at least since the collapse of the new left in the late 1970s. A near collapse of the social safety net ensued: previous welfare guarantees were transformed increasingly into workfare, an entire landlord class was born atop workfare-registered workers struggling to pay ‘discounted' rents on yoseba wages. The retirement age was officially moved from 60 to 65 for most businesses in 2005, completing an already unofficial shift planned long-term by the LDP; a whole generation of parents suddenly found themselves working longer and harder and by desperation turning their children's' schools into factories for the production of workers who could support them post-retirement, as pension guarantees seemed bound for an irreversible crisis. Elderly workers who laid-off in the crisis often found themselves on the street with no employment prospects. Among the bourgeoisie, support for privatization and the gradual wearing away of the ‘welfare state' gained steam.

Nothing characterized the period more than speed-up. With the unification in the late 60s of train lines around the country under the JR Company and the rapid acceleration of bullet train technology, capital smoothed space towards a white plane, one with no resistance to the circulation of raw materials, labor power and surplus value. Highways brought the same changes, and inside the workplace a collapse of the labor movement ensured human beings snared in 60-70 hour weeks became the norm for full-time employees.[7] The individual experience of labor became more and more an endless conveyor belt between home, transit and the workplace. A metropolitan factory modeled on assembly lines, bound by its very constitution, to disaster.

ENCLOSURE, SPEED, DISASTER

As an island chain along major fault lines, Japanese civilization is fraught with constant disaster. The 1995 earthquake in Kobe was only the most recent massive demonstration of the power of continental plates (5,273 people were killed, most crushed to death in the collapse of their houses or consumed by the fires that followed the earthquake, 96.3 billion dollars of damage were assessed). Earthquakes are phantoms, haunting all considerations of the future. Last December, a scandal broke in the news media; Hidetsugu Aneha, a 48 year old architect working at a construction firm called Hyuza in Tokyo had, under pressure from his superiors to cut costs on the buildings he was designing, reduced steel reinforcements in building skeletons and falsified data to cover his tracks. As his actions were uncovered and an investigation was launched by the city, it came out that the building for which design statistics had been falsified was not a lone example; the number quickly mushroomed, resulted in the implication of 78 hotels and buildings as being at 30-80% of minimal earthquake preparedness, meaning likely collapse during a strong earthquake. In his defense Aneha protested that when he raised these issues to his superiors they told him the firm would simply lose the contract to other firms if proper costs were covered, and so he must cut expenses any way he could; Aneha's comments therefore implicate not only himself and his corporation, but the construction industry as a whole. These vast, condensed metropolises of the Japanese islands contain millions of bodies on foundations increasingly precarious, and despite the spectacular efforts by city governments at reform and revision, thousands will not survive the next earthquake (as many were killed in recent Niigata prefecture earthquakes). Capitalism has developed all formalized dwellings, all massive dormitories of the exploited that stretch from the city to suburbia, into potential coffins.

In ironic contrast stand the humble hut-dwelling day-workers of Osaka whose low-impact ‘outside dwellings' are in no danger of killing them during a disaster.

In 1987, Japan's nationalized train lines were divided into west and east and privatized. Adding a profit motive to trains, already circulating on the rhythm of breakneck post-Fordist Japanese capitalism, guaranteed the narrowing of bottom lines and an amplified pursuit of speed between stations. In 2005, a rush-hour train derailed between Amagasaki station and Takaradsuka station north of Osaka. The young train driver had been berated repeatedly by supervisors and his supervising senior driver to cut seven minutes off of the recommended transit time for the 25 km between these two stations. The train derailed, traveling at a tremendous speed and collided with a large apartment building, destroying part of its foundation and causing the building to collapse on top of the train car. 105 people died either instantly or before rescue workers could reach them. Unfortunately for the bureaucrats and company officials rolled out to the scene to beg apology (and for all who ride these trains) no uptake of individual responsibility for this massacre can erase the obvious but unspeakable culpability of the economy, cloud of massified instrumental necessity, which by shearing away life-time from the individual worker according to its internal pressure, must constantly flirt with cheap materials and disastrous speed. The reaction of the individual: ‘Where is my train? My son is waiting.' gives form to this pressure. Universal demand for the reduction of transit time, born out of the stubborn intransigence of work time, pushes the trains faster and faster. The social pressure of work time against life time produces derailments, just as the concrete capitalist organization of geography ensures this acceleratory dynamic across space. Crisis is therefore implicit in the accumulated forms of capitalist working class subsumption. To which again, capital can only respond with containment.

"When the ship goes down, so too do the first class passengers... The ruling class, for its part incapable of struggling against the devil of business activity, superproduction and superconstruction for its own skin, thus demonstrates the end of its control over society, and it is foolish to expect that, in the name of a progress with its trail indicated by bloodstains, it can produce safer (trains) than those of the past..." (Amadeo Bordiga, Murdering the Dead)

DISINTEGRATING WORKPLACES; ANTAGONISTIC SPACES

During the neo-liberal wave, an expansion of ‘irregular employment' brought about the birth of a precarious class of workers that would precede Europe's ‘precariat' in conditions if not consciousness. It would also create new forms of social labor that were 'out', roving the cities.

Inside workplaces, an increasing concentration of fixed capital within factories accompanied by off-shoring meant that Japanese government had a mostly idle labor force, steadily being undermined in its real conditions of subsistence by welfare reform, one that could be put to work in entirely new ‘service' industries. Jobs were invented. Escalator girls, elevator girls, kyaku-hiki (customer pullers), street megaphones, flyering, etc. new ‘services' that were above all ‘out and about', social forms that seized forms of inter-human sociality, the tap on the shoulder, the kind holding of the elevator door, the smile, amplifying them, valorizing what had been mostly unwaged action. Population shifts led to the unavoidable importation of foreign labor, causing a gradual cosmopolitanization that has thrown the idea of a ‘Japanese' identity into crisis, while also strengthening reactionary ideologies that take strength from it. The growth of an English education industry brought thousands of temporary workers to Japan, and with them, historical methods of class struggle that clashed strongly with Japanese welfare state compromises of the 70s and 80s. As capitalists continually sought to preclude the ability of foreign labor to organize itself, the workplace form quickly dissolved from private schools to dispatch offices, private lessons in libraries, citizen halls, cafes everywhere. In a unique way, this foreign labor also became ‘out', dislocated, social.

To contain these new socialities arising across old geographies, the police and city planners are continuously at work. In late 2003, the already barricaded and privatized Tennoji Park in Osaka was invaded by 300 riot police who had come to evict what was known as the ‘karaoke village', a large area of the park taken over by karaoke carts, venders and crooners, gathering point for hundreds of day-workers daily who belted out song classics after work. For forty years the plaza was a hot-spot, even tourist attraction known as the ‘soul of Osaka', a musical space occupied by the downtrodden, who sunk into song and drink, dulling the pain, remembering more riotous times. In December 2003 the riot police moved in and barricaded the park for ‘construction purposes'. Vendors and crooners showed up in hundreds to watch the demolition and vent their rage. Barricades were thrown at the police, but the disobedients were quickly arrested. There would be no repeat of October 1990. All that is left of the karaoke village now is a steel fence, wrapping a completely empty lot. The park is silent.

Osaka city now plans a wave of evictions of squatters from parks all over its map. The first of the year is already underway in mid-city, and the park's residents are crouched down, preparing to resist the riot squads. The proletarians of Osaka's wards must learn the lessons of the past: against the brutal technological barricades of the riot police, surveillance and containment, they must adapt an improvised, mobile capability. The riots around Clichy-sous-bois provide a possible source of inspiration, totally mobile, skirmish-based attack, no commitments, no demands as such. No gathering points and thus no encirclement, no containment. Also in question is how social space can be re-worked and decelerated, how an autonomous space can develop against the crushing weight of capitalism, while simultaneously understanding its own limitations, how we might ‘help ourselves' to a future that doubtlessly awaits us if we seek it.[8] The strange new crisis-ridden social geographies of post-fordist capitalism offer gates for the fleeing proletariat, which now finds itself everywhere. 

[1] It was revealed earlier that week that the police chief in Nishinari had been taking bribes from Yakuza gangs for a variety of ‘favors'.

[2] Except for the Yakuza gangs who had all run away from the scene.

[3] The information sharing grid between media, yakuza and government is well known in most parts of the islands.

[4] Some of these older workers had cut their teeth on the anti-Yakuza struggles of the 1980s in Tokyo's Sanya district, some who were ex-members of militant groups like the red army, some who had served prison time for throwing bombs at police in the 60s. Incidentally, the Kamagasaki revolt was a big inspiration for Otomo Katsuhiro's Akira.

[5] NGO workers can now be seen every day on the winding employment lines, monitoring workers with friendly armbands that say ‘safety patrol'!

[6] Some hut plots in the autonomous parks have gorgeous gardens growing in them, in one case an occupant had improvised a permaculture system, with over-arching grape vines shading greens below and tomatoes flanking.

[7] Many factory jobs were also shipped to East Asia at this time.

[8] One phenomenon that may offer inspiration on this point: in Tennoji park, the same park that has been fenced and barricaded, robbed of most autonomy, two homeless men living in the lower part of the park have set out before their home five comfortable leather chairs, apparently open to anyone to sit in, chat or play go.  The path on which these men live and on which their chairs are situated is a vital walking path for commuters, who everyday gaze curiously or longingly at these lounging non-workers, these jesters of the free community.

A real outpouring of hatred, of rioting, arson and pillage, has taken place in Kondopoga, a small industrial town close to the Russian-Finnish border. The target of these attacks was the Caucasian and Chechen minority. These events have had quite an impact at the national level, in Russia, and even internationally.

The events in Kondopoga are not at all an isolated case, above all since the war in Chechnya which began in 1994. But in recent months, pogroms have broken out in several regions of Russia. In May 2006, in Novossibirsk, 20 native Russians burned a dozen homes belonging to Tsigans on the pretext of fighting the drug trade; in the town of Kharagun in the Tchita region, there were confrontations between Russians and Azerbaijanis, in which one person died; in the Astrakhan region, following the murder of a young Kalmuk in a fight with Chechnyans, 300 Kalmuks attacked Chechens and burned their houses. A month after, in the village of Targuis in the Irkutsk region, an anti-Chinese pogrom resulted in 75 Chinese having to leave. A few days later, the inhabitants of Salsk in the Rostov region took action against Daghestanis, leaving another person dead. On 21 August, a bomb exploded in the Cherkizovo market in Moscow, where the majority of traders come from central Asia or the Far East. Result: 12 dead and 40 injured. The Chechens, seeking refuge from the war, have been the main target of hostility, as well as the Tsigans.

In Kondopoga, the anti-Caucasian pogrom was without precedent in its intensity. For five days, from 30 August to 5 September 2006, a crowd of several hundred people, the majority of them young men between 15 and 20, ran amok. The first target was the town market where, like in many Russian cities, the Chechens run fruit and vegetable stalls. The stalls were smashed up, pillaged and burned. Then there were several nights of rioting with garages and vehicles belonging to Chechens being attacked with stones, bottles and Molotov cocktails. There was also an attempt to burn the school where a number of central Asian families had taken refuge! Several nationalist movements were involved and were publicly calling for the immediate deportation of the Caucasians. The troubles ended up with the massive departure of the immigrant population who were now in a state of panic. 200 Caucasians and dozens of Chechens had to flee for their lives to a another town 50 kilometres away.

The complicity between the neo-Nazis and the state

A lot of people have pointed to the ultranationalists of the Movement against Illegal Immigration (DPNI). Coming from Moscow and St Petersburg, the militants of this xenophobic, pro-Slav group, backed by neo-Nazis, played a key role in whipping up the young people and organising the pogrom in Kondopoga. However, if they were able to act like this it was because they were not acting alone. Their role was only made possible through the support of the local bourgeoisie. The leader of the DNPI, Belov, even came to the town at the invitation of the local deputy of the populist party, the LDPR, Nikolai Kourianovitch, who called for the formation of a militia of former Russian combatants from the Chechen war to re-establish order!

The public authorities treat the Caucasians as scapegoats responsible for all the ills affecting the population. They talk about their “ostentatious wealth” and their “open-topped Mercedes”, not to mention their “mafia connections” or the bribes given to the police to turn a blind eye to their activities. The governor of the region, Katanandov, a member of Putin’s Russia United party, displaying the racism that is natural to his class, stoked the fires of this irrational pogromism: “The main reason for the troubles is the fact that the representatives of another people have behaved in a n impertinent and provocative manner, showing ignorance towards the mentality of our people”. Chechens have the habit of “not queuing up for technical control” when there is a traffic accident, which shows that “everything is allowed as far as they are concerned” (Liberation, 8.9.06). He further justified the pogrom by denouncing “these young men who have come from Caucasia and other regions” and who behave “like occupiers”, he insists that they should “keep a low profile or go away”(Le Monde, 21.9.06)

The collusion between the official authorities and the neo-Nazi groups isn’t simply a habit of the lower echelons of the state machine. The Russian state as a whole has good reasons for treating Caucasians as scapegoats. The pogrom atmosphere suits the Russian state’s interests very well. It is directly encouraged by the big bourgeoisie and the state as one of the most repulsive means of defending its imperialist interests. The neo-Nazi groups, if they are not directly emanations of the regime, are widely manipulated by the Kremlin. It uses them as a sort of unofficial, parallel police force in the dirty work of repression against any kind of opposition. At the same time they are valuable auxiliaries for propagating all sorts of nationalist hatred within the population, which serves as a perfect cover for the barbarous actions of Russian imperialism in Chechnya.

In the imperialist contest between Georgia and Russia, the Russian state has stepped up the pogrom atmosphere against Georgians living in Russia, especially after the arrest on 27 September of four Russian officers whom the Georgians have accused of espionage. At the beginning of October Putin himself came out against “criminal ethnic groups” who had taken control of trade, making it necessary to “restore order” in the markets, which he called the “most ethnically polluted in the country”, with the aim of defending the “interests of Russian producers and of the native population”(lefigaro.fr.17.11.06) by expelling from Russian territory several thousand “criminalised” Georgians.

Pogroms are also useful to the bourgeoisie in another important way: they serve to create divisions in the ranks of its mortal enemy, the proletariat, to prevent the oppressed classes from recognising their real enemies. These endless campaigns against the immigrants who “steal jobs from Russians” (a credo both of the state and of the ultranationalist groups) provide the background to the numerous physical attacks on immigrants. Blaming the immigrants for the general decline in the living standards of the working class is consciously deigned to undermine the class solidarity and identity of the proletariat.

The instigation of pogroms by the state has a long tradition in Russia, notably in the form of the crimes of Czarism towards the Jews. The Russian state, which has made xenophobia its official ideology, is simply reviving the sinister tradition of instituting measures aimed at “defending Christians from Jewish exploitation” as Czar Alexander III (1882) once put it. Envisaging that “a third of Jews will emigrate, a third will convert, a third will perish”, Alexander ‘s measures were specifically designed to whip up anti-Semitic pogroms as a means of paralysing any struggle against the monarchy. This is why the workers’ movement denounced the role of the state in these pogroms, exposing “the all-Russian autocracy which acted as the protector of this whole clique of brigands and butchers, supported by the official bureaucracy and directed from the top by a cabal of courtisans” (Trotsky, 1905). The crowned heads had no more decorum than today’s capitalist state, which is carrying on the same barbaric tradition.

Pogroms have nothing to do with the struggle of the proletariat.

In a statement published on the internet (Libcom, 24/9/06 [4]) - we don’t know whether it is the individual initiative of its author (M. Magid) or whether it reflects the official position of the organisation he belongs to (the Russian section of the anarcho-syndicalist IWA), we can find some dangerous confusions about the class nature of this movement and the perspectives it contained. The author even defines this movement as something, if not from the working class itself, then at least as useful to its struggle: “Everywhere, or almost everywhere in Russian province destruction is widespread, due to bandits of all nationalities, who are controlling local markets, companies and banks…In Kondopoga we saw an attempt of people to set up an organ of self-governance, a regular meeting of people who would make resolutions, which according to opinion of the people authorities should fulfil. But riots became nationalist ones...Is this movement ordered or initiated by fascists or local traders? No, that claim is a lie by mainstream media. It was a popular riot, of working people, which developed to a nationalistic direction, safe for authorities - partly due to events themselves, partly due to initiative of local traders”.

In the final analysis, the author institutes the means used, riots and pogroms, as valid weapons that the proletariat can use. The only regret he expresses is that it should not have simply targeted what he calls Caucasian bandits but should have widened to target Russian bandits. The most striking thing is that he takes at face value the nationalist campaigns of the Russian state which portray all Caucasians as mafiosi. At no point does it occur to him that this could be a false idea. This is clearly making concessions to the repulsive lies of the state, giving credence to the racist scapegoating of the Caucasians.

This attitude is in complete contradiction with the one that revolutionaries should have, in continuity with the traditions of the workers’ movement. Faced with the anti-Semitic pogrom in Kishinev in 1903, the founding Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party called on its militants to “use all means at their disposal to fight against such movements and to explain to the proletariat the reactionary and class-based nature of all anti-Semitic and national-chauvinist agitation”. The attitude of the working class and of revolutionaries has always been to show solidarity with the victims of pogroms and to offer them its protection. This was one of the roles of the soviets in 1905and 1917: “the soviet organised the working class, directed strikes and demonstrations, armed the workers, protected the population against pogroms” (Trotsky, 1905). Under the direction of the councils, in a large number of towns, the workers organised armed militia to repress actions by pogromist thugs. The Bolsheviks themselves were strongly and constantly involved in the formation of armed revolutionary groups to oppose the pogromists. Here is an example of Bolshevik activity in the city of Odessa: “Here I was a witness to the following scene: a group of young men, aged around 20-25, among whom were police agents in civilian clothes and members of the Okhrana, frisked anyone who looked like a Jew – men, women and children – stole their clothes and beat them without mercy….we immediately organised a group of revolutionaries armed with revolvers…we ran towards them and fired on them. They cleared off. But between the pogromists and us there suddenly appeared a solid wall of soldiers, armed to the teeth and facing in our direction. We had to fight while retreating. The soldiers went and the pogromists reappeared. This happened several times. It was clear to us that the pogromists were acting in concert with the army” (O Piatnitsky, Zapiski Bol’shevika, Memoirs of a Bolshevik, Moscow 1956) Today the proletariat does not have the strength to adopt such measures, but if it is to rediscover this strength, it will have to adopt the attitude of the Bolsheviks, and not the one proposed by Magid. If the workers allow themselves to be divided and led into pogroms, they will lose everything. For the working class this is a question of life or death.

The vision developed by Magid, which lends authority to the designation of scapegoats to bear responsibility for the unbearable situation created by the capitalist economic crisis, is completely alien to the proletariat. This ambiguity on the nature of pogroms condemns those who accept it to playing the political game of the state. What lies behind these errors is the absence of class criteria for analysing the reality of capitalist society and the struggles which take place within it, dissolving the proletariat into the undifferentiated whole of the ‘people’, as well as the Bakuninst cult of violence with its idea that unleashing the destructive passions is the lifeblood of the revolution. This is all typical of anarchism. The dangerous confusions which lead to apologising for pogromism lie in its very roots.

The proletariat can only attain its revolutionary future by developing its class solidarity and rejecting all the divisions imposed by capitalism. All forms of nationalism and racism serve only to weaken its struggle for emancipation. The revolution is not and cannot be an act of revenge against a part of the population that gets the blame for its situation. The proletarian class struggle is aimed at the destruction of capitalism as a system, based on the exploitation of wage labour in the framework of capitalist relations of production. Its final goal is the transformation of the present order of things, with the aim of “creating conditions of life for all human beings such that they can develop their human nature with their neighbours in human conditions, and no longer have to go through violent crises turning their lives upside down” (Engels ‘Two Speeches at Eberfeld’).

Down with all pogroms!

Down with the capitalist system which generates pogroms and uses them for its self-preservation!

Long live the international solidarity of all workers!

ICC, 22/2/07.

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his death, the year 2006 witnessed the celebration of Heinrich Heine as the great poet of German romanticism. Heine: wasn’t that the author of the Lorelei song, which sounds so popularly romantic that even the Nazis could not do without it? Romanticism: was that not a flight from reality into the past, into religion and the world of legends and myths? And this being the case, why should a contemporary marxist paper deal with Heine today?

Yes, Heine did write the Lorelei song. The Nazis sang it. They signed it “author unknown”.

Yes, Heine was the great poet of German romanticism. Yes, the mood of this period was reactionary, turned towards the past. It idolised the Middle Ages, the aristocracy and the Catholic Church. On the shores of the Rhine and elsewhere, ruined castles were restored. Derelict gothic cathedrals such as in Cologne were brought to completion. Old myths and popular fairy tales were rediscovered. But Heine was a revolutionary, in politics partly, in his art completely. To such an extent, that the revolutionary proletariat owes him much, and can still learn from him today. How does all of this fit together?

Heine and the French Revolution

It is not a mistake to consider romanticism, at least in Germany, as a feudal reaction to the great bourgeois revolution in France, and to the industrial revolution which began in England. Romanticism flourished in particular after the revolutionary armies of Napoleon had been defeated by a European aristocratic coalition funded with English money. But it wasn’t just the feudal world that was shaken by the invasion of capitalist modernisation. Many of the most upright and compassionate human beings and most profound thinkers of the epoch felt concerned and indignant – not because of economic progress, but in the face of the brutalisation of society which accompanied it. They were not opposed to the French Revolution, but disappointed by its results. This is why many of the artists of the time, although influenced by the dominant mood of the day, began to develop a revolutionary side to the romantic reaction to capitalism. More than any other poet of his day, Heine embodied this revolutionary side of romanticism.

Born in Düsseldorf, he was a typical representative of the Rhineland of his time. This was the part of Germany where serfdom and all the rubbish of the Middle Ages had most drastically been eradicated by the French Revolution. This to such an extent that the German aristocracy did not dare to restore it even when, in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat, the Rhineland became part of Prussia. As a result, Heine remained throughout his life a bitter opponent of feudalism and an ardent admirer of Napoleon. For this reason, he was mercilessly persecuted in Germany and driven into exile. The reaction not only outlawed all his existing writings, but also all those he might write in the future! On account of his Jewish origins, Heine was particularly open towards the consequences of the French Revolution in the Rhineland. It was the Revolution which established Jewish equality, whereas the feudal reaction did everything in its power, after the defeat of Napoleon, to revoke these reforms or make them socially ineffective.

The experience of witnessing the introduction of social progress from abroad made of Heine an internationalist. He is said to have been the first to have used the formulation “world revolution”. Like other great minds in Germany before him, he learnt from the French Revolution and from the study of foreign history that social progress transgresses frontiers. He thus took up the struggle against the “shabby, plump, unwashed opposition against an approach which is the most marvellous and holy thing which Germany has brought forth, in other words against the generalised fraternisation of humanity, against that cosmopolitanism which has always been defended by our greatest spirits, by Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Jean Paul.”[1]

Heine had understood that the progress of humanity depends to an important extent on the capacity to make a higher synthesis of the best acquisitions of the cultures of all peoples. He himself – as a political refugee in Paris – considered it to be one of the most important tasks of his life to contribute to such a synthesis of the thought and creativity of Germany and France. This achievement of Heine made of him a target of hatred – and not only during his own lifetime - in a twofold manner. For one thing, because France was to remain, for another whole century, the arch-enemy of the German bourgeoisie (today of course it is easier to “honour” Heine, since the German bourgeoisie seeks an alliance with France). For another thing, since here Heine spins a thread which was to lead to marxism. As for instance Lenin was later to point out in an article written on the eve of World War I, the most important “pre-proletarian” sources of marxism were already international. “The history of philosophy and the history of social science show clearly that Marxism contains nothing which has the least resemblance to ‘sectarianism’ in the sense of any kind of closed up, fossilised doctrine arising on the sidelines of the main road of the development of world civilisation. On the contrary: The whole genius of Marx consists in his giving answers to questions which the progressive thinking of humanity had already posed. His teaching arose as the direct and immediate continuation of the teaching of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and of socialism.” [2]

Heine, popular art and contemporary discordance

Heine’s interest in popular tales and legends was far from being the result of any wish to hold up history or make it roll back. Instead, he took inspiration from these sources, in order to develop a new, unprecedented lyrical rhythm and a new language. Heine, as a great poet, was extremely sensitive towards the spiritual currents which were not only of his own day. As an artist with a philosophical education, who had trained himself with Hegelian dialectics, he was very much aware of the nature of the historical period he was living in. He thus recognised how the bourgeois epoch isolates the artist from society, so that art becomes increasingly incomprehensible to the people. The result of this development is, on the one hand, the appearance of capitalist mass culture as the expression of barbarism, which renders the working class ignorant. On the other hand art and culture are almost naturally considered to be the product of specialists, to which the working population make no contribution.

It would be wrong to consider the engagement with popular art in the period of romanticism to have been exclusively the expression of a reactionary nostalgia. As later on Tolstoy or the English marxist William Morris were to be, Heine was convinced that the creative heritage of humanity consists not only of the works of great architects, painters or writers, but also of popular songs, legends and sagas, or for instance the half-timbered houses or the wood carvings of the artisans of the Middle Ages. The period of romanticism was one of the last ones in which the most significant artists could still be inspired by the living art of the working population. The Grimm brothers wrote down the popular fairy tales of Germany for humanity; Beethoven, Dvorak and Liszt took up and further developed the melodies, dances and rhythms of popular music.

Indeed the whole of Heine’s work is inspired by this tradition. Not only his poems and stories, but even his philosophical, historical writings, or his reflections on the history of art, have something elementary, surprising and even fairytale-like about them. We have already seen how the “traditional” bourgeoisie, even when, all of a sudden, it pretends to honour Heine, has insurmountable problems with Heine’s works already because of his internationalism. But this is no less the case for the Stalinist bourgeoisie, even though these alleged marxists – knowing full well that Marx loved Heine and his poetry – always officially “celebrated” him. But Heine never fitted into the official canon of Stalinism, according to which only “realistic” art can be “progressive”. The “materialism” of the Stalinists is not unlike that of the bourgeois materialism of England after Bacon, about which Marx and Engels in The Holy Family wrote: “sensuality loses its blossoms” and “materialism becomes hostile to humanity”. [3]

Since the essence of Stalinism consists in the lie of presenting national, state totalitarian capitalism as socialism, it is impossible for it to understand the fantastic but truthful realism of Heine. This realism delves deeper than bourgeois vulgar materialism has ever dared to go. Heine was one of the first to bring the psychological truths of the unconscious to the surface. In doing so, he based himself on the wisdom of old tales. He thus opened up a path in the exploration of the human psyche, one which was to be taken up and further developed by the great realistic novelists like George Eliot in England, Dostoyevski and Tolstoy in Russia, but also by the “decadent” Kafka. And Freud recognised in Heine one of those who prepared the way for psychoanalysis. In this sense Heine was not only the poet of romanticism; he at the same time overcame it, through ironising the romantic pose.

But Heine employed romantic lyrics and acid humour above all as weapons in order to disarm us, so that he can take us by surprise with his truths. Heine was one of those spirits, rare enough in history to date, who wanted as much as possible to live without illusions. Already before Marx, Heine had the courage to face historical truth. One example of this is the way he presented the tragic fate of Münzer, who during the Reformation demanded earthly human happiness at a time when this was not yet feasible. “Such a proposition was admittedly untimely, and Master Himmling, who chopped off your head, poor Thomas Münzer, he was in a certain sense entitled to such a procedure. Then he had the sword in his hands, and his arms were strong.”[4]

Heine not only felt in himself the growing inner cleavage and the suffering of the artist in bourgeois society – he also analysed it. “Oh! Dear reader, when you feel like deploring this sense of being torn, you should instead deplore the fact that the world itself has been torn asunder at its heart. Since the heart of the poet is the central point of the world, in present times it must necessarily be woefully torn. Those who are able to boast that their hearts have remained whole are only admitting that they have a prosaic, narrow heart.”[5]

This discord makes the artist unpredictable and often difficult to understand. Whereas the young marxist movement had its difficulties with Heine – Wilhelm Liebknecht and even the young Engels at first had problems with Heine, until Marx was able to convince them to the contrary – Marx understood this problem very well. Later on, Eleanor, one of the daughters of Marx, was to recall in the Neue Zeit. “Marx was a great admirer of Heine. He loved him just as much as he loved his works, and was as indulgent as can be towards his political weaknesses. Poets, he declared, are peculiar people. You have to let them go their way. You cannot measure them with the usual scale for normal people.”

Heine and the society of the future

One of the most significant achievements of Heine was his contribution to the clarification of the nature of a future socialist society. Not that Heine had been a marxist! He belonged more to the generation before Marx, which, disappointed by the results and the terror of the bourgeois French Revolution, turned away from the class struggle. He was a glowing supporter of the utopian socialism of Saint-Simon. He hoped for the overcoming of class society through an enlightened philanthropist, a kind king or one of the Rothschilds, not through a mass insurrection. In the last years of his life, largely cut off from the world, suffering the tortures of a terrible illness amidst his “burial mattresses”, he no longer succeeded, despite his deep friendship with Marx, in understanding the modern workers’ movement and scientific socialism. He feared the intervention of the masses in history – which he himself had experienced more in the form of the anti-Semitic mob - more than he longed for it. Nevertheless he responded to the real movement of the proletariat when it appeared, for instance the insurrection of the weavers in Silesia in 1844.

From darkened eyes no tears are falling:

With gritted teeth we sit here calling:

“Germany, listen, ere we disperse,

We weave your shroud with a triple curse-

We weave! We are weaving!

“A curse to the false god that we prayed to,

And worshipped in spite of all, and obeyed, too.

We waited, and we hoped and suffered in vain;

He laughed at us, sneering, for all of our pain-

We weave! We are Weaving!

“A curse to the king, and a curse to his coffin,

The rich man's king whom our plight could not soften;

Who took our last penny in taxes and cheats'

And let us be shot like dogs in the streets-

We weave! We are Weaving!

“A curse to the Fatherland, whose face is

Covered with lies and foul disgraces;

Where the bud is crushed before it can seed'

And the worm grows fat on corruption and greed-

We weave! We are Weaving!

“The shuttle flies in the creaking loom;

And night and day we weave our doom.

Old Germany, ere we disperse,

We weave your shroud with a triple curse.

We weave! We are Weaving![6]

As far as the goal of a classless society is concerned, socialism before Marx was essentially utopian socialism. As such, Christianity was an important source of pre-marxist socialism. This socialism had not yet understood that only capitalism, through the enormous development of the productive forces, could create the preconditions for a classless society. The pre-marxist socialism of a Babeuf or Weitling was thus essentially hardly less hostile towards the body than the Christian sects of the time. They could only imagine a classless society in the form of a monastic sharing of poverty, in which there would hardly be any room for art and beauty, play and happiness, love and pleasure, seen as “bourgeois luxuries”. In other words, they would be societies in which proletarianisation and the lot of the proletariat would be idealised rather than overcome.

One might assume that the debates of the time about this question are at best of historical interest to us today. But we should not forget that today, once again, this idea about socialism has again become predominant – but no longer as an ideal, but as something to put us off! But with the difference that today this bourgeois monastery, or rather barracks, socialism, is no longer, as in those days, the expression of the immaturity of the movement, but the result of the Stalinist counter-revolution. As a result, the contribution of Heine to this question seems to us to be more relevant than ever!

Heine pleaded for a world in which humanity and nature, science and art, the spiritual and the sensual, would live in harmony, where the relations of the individuals to their own internal world and to the world outside would come together to form a real unity. In his poem “Germany: A Winter Tale” he wrote:

“A new song, and a better song,

Oh friends, I'll sing for you.

Here on earth we mean to make

Our Paradise come true.

We mean to be happy here on earth-

Our days of want are done.

No more shall the lazy belly waste

What toiling hands have won.

Wheat enough for all mankind

Is planted here below;

Roses and myrtle, beauty and joy,

And green peas, row upon row.

Yes, green peas enough for every man,

As soon as they break their pods.

We gladly leave to the angels and birds

The dainties of the Gods.

And, after our death, if wings should sprout

We'll visit you up there,

And eat the holiest tarts and cakes

That angel-cooks prepare.[7]

Using a developed sensitivity and an historical method learnt from Hegel, which prepared the way for marxism, Heine recognised that one of the sources of the attractiveness of religion lay in the imaginary promise of a kind of socialism, and that not least for this reason it had become a fetter on historical progress.

“The spiritualistic religion was until now helpful and necessary, as long as the greater part of humanity lived in misery and had to comfort itself with heavenly religion. But ever since the progress of industry and the economy have made it possible for people to overcome their material misery and be happy on earth, ever since – you understand what I mean. And the people will understand us, when we say to them, that from now on they will eat beef every day instead of potatoes, and will work less and dance more.”

For Heine, the critique of monastic socialism made a deeper critique of Christianity necessary.

“Our descendants will shiver when they will read about our ghostly existence, how within us the human being was split down the middle and only one half was actually alive. Our times – and they began on the cross of Christ – will be looked on as one of the great periods of the illness of humanity.”[8]

Heine identified the hatred of the body of Christianity as the source of this cleavage. “Whereas the Jews only treated the body with disdain, the Christians went much further down this path, considering it to be something to be rejected, as something evil, as evil itself.” [9]

In a very similar manner, Marx and Engels pointed out in their book, The Holy Family, how the punishment of blindness once became the epitome of Christianity, the “separation of human beings from the sensual world outside.”

Marxism, which was able to identify other, deeper lying causes of this cleavage, such as the contradiction between head and hand work, nevertheless confirmed its accentuated character within Christianity. “By taking up this widespread feeling that human beings were themselves responsible for their generalised ruin, expressing this in a sense of the guiltiness of each individual, it was able to preserve its capacity to become a world religion.” [10]

Heine also identified the link between the development of the contradiction between mind and body and the growing alienation of man from nature.

“Even the nightingale was slandered, and one made a sign of the cross when it sang. A true Christian walked around with fearfully closed up senses, like an abstract ghost, in the midst of blossoming nature.”

In this way the outlines of the future revolution became clearer. He demanded: “The well being of material existence, the material happiness of the peoples, not because we look down on the spirit as the materialists do, but because we know that the divinity of man also expresses itself in its bodily appearance.”[11]

He thus also called for a radical transformation of the relation of man to nature.

“In present day Germany conditions have changed, and the party of the flowers and the nightingales is closely connected with the revolution.” (ibid).

Or as Friedrich Engels put it:

“Thus at every step we are reminded that we can in no way rule over nature the way a conqueror rules a foreign people, like somebody standing outside nature – but rather we belong to it with our flesh and blood and stand in its very midst, and that our whole rule over it consists in our advantage over all other beings of being able to learn her laws and how to properly apply them (…) But the more this is done, the more will humanity not only feel itself once again at one with nature, but also know this, and all the more impossible will be that nonsensical and unnatural idea of a contradiction between spirit and material, humanity and nature, soul and body, such as it developed since the decline of classical antiquity in Europe, achieving its highest expression in Christianity.” [12]

Heine and communism

The poet Heine feared communism as a mass movement, because he could not imagine it to be in any way different from the risings of the marauding peasants and artisans of the times of the Reformation, who destroyed works of art. This is why, in an article in Der Spiegel he was quoted by the former GDR dissident Wolf Biermann as a witness against communism. In this connection it is worthwhile consulting the introduction to the French edition of his “Lutetia”, which Heine wrote shortly before his death in 1856, where he refers to the “two principles” which in his eyes justify the victory of communism. The first of these principles is that all human beings have the right of nourishment. “Let it be destroyed, this old world, where innocence died, where greediness flourished, where human beings were starved by other human beings? Let them be destroyed from top to bottom, these limned tombstones, where lies and injustice were at home.”

The second principle is internationalism. “Out of hatred against the partisans of nationalism, I could almost love the communists. At least they are no hypocrites with religion and Christianity on their lips. Although the communists have no religion (nobody is perfect), the communists themselves being atheists (which is certainly a great sin), but as their main dogma they recognise an absolute cosmopolitanism, the general love of all peoples, the fraternal community of goods between all mankind as the free citizens of this planet.”

October 2006, Elemer.

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

https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/airbus-leaflet.pdf [7]

After several weeks of contortions by the management of Airbus and a meeting between Merkel and Chirac, the axe has fallen: 10,000 redundancies in Europe, the closure and sale of several factories.

The management, hand on heart, tell us “there will be no compulsory redundancies”, “everything will be settled by early retirement and voluntary departures”.

No compulsory redundancies at Airbus, but that only concerns half of the workers affected: 5000 temporary or subcontract workers will be asked to go elsewhere. As for the workers at Airbus, we know what “voluntary redundancy” means: harassment by lower management to force workers out. In all, there will be still more unemployment, above all among the young who are looking for a job. And for those that remain at Airbus: speed-ups and an increase in hours worked for the same wages, or less.

How do the bourgeoisie and the unions explain the crisis at Airbus?

In order to explain the crisis at Airbus that lies behind such measures, everyone has their own song. For Gallois, the boss of Airbus, it’s principally because of the strong euro; the planes are too dear in relation to those produced by Boeing. For the unions, it’s because of bad management or the greed of shareholders. For the bosses, it’s because the state has interfered with their industrial policy, which is not its business: private investors should sort it out themselves. For the parties of the left, it’s because the state has not played its role of shareholder. For the French press, it’s because of the German state taking the lion’s share. For the German press, and the bourgeoisie behind it, it’s difficult to throw this argument back in their faces because, without the French being involved, 6,100 jobs have gone at the chemical giant Bayer, at the same time as the management of Deutsch Telekom decided to transfer 50,000 wages earners to sub-contracting, which is a way to set them up for redundancy once they have been dispersed around multiple small enterprises. And for good measure, those that remain work an extra 5 hours a week without any wage increase. Through its media, the German bourgeoisie tries to console the workers at Airbus by saying that it could be worse for them: the French workers have been hit harder. It’s the same in the Spanish press: it’s not too bad, but that’s because we are more competitive. And to add in the nationalist refrain, the French and Germans are accused of doing their own deals without consulting the Spanish.

As for the British press, discretion is the order of the day: after all, at the same moment there are hundreds of thousands of workers in health being attacked over wages that are already low.

What do those who reject the decisions of the Airbus management propose to us?

For the German unions, the difficulties at Airbus are one example among others of bad management by the bosses, which is equally responsible for the difficulties of Deutsch Telekom and Bayer. They want to be closer to the management of the firms, when they already represent practically 50% of the administration and are already involved in decisions concerning Airbus or other sectors. In this framework, they propose that measures taken “to preserve the future of Airbus” are discussed locally, factory by factory, between unions and bosses.

The French unions, for their part, also denounce the bad “governance” of the present management and propose that the state is more implicated in the management of Airbus, a perspective which is equally supported by the Prime Minister and the candidates of the right and the centre in the next presidential elections, Sarkozy and Bayrou. As for the socialist candidate, Segolene Royal, she makes the further proposal that regional authorities should be involved in managing the capital of the aircraft industry. That’s to say, what already exists in Germany, where the Lander is fully part of the capital of Airbus, with the great success that we now seeing!

Faced with capitalist competition, refuse to let them divide us!

There are partial truths in some of these declarations. It is true that the strong euro is an obstacle to the sale of the aeroplanes produced in Europe faced with competition from Boeing. It is true that there are problems in the management of Airbus. In particular, it is true that competition between the German and French states has not helped things. Everyone can state a small part of the truth, but all share the same lie: that the workers who today are paying for the difficulties at Airbus have the same interests as the bosses. In sum, they should adopt the aim put forward by all the speeches: that Airbus should be more profitable than Boeing. That is also exactly what the American bosses say to American workers and it is for that same reason that the latter have been subjected to tens of thousands of redundancies in the course of the last few years. In the final count, in all the speeches that we hear from the “responsible” people, whether government, bosses or unions, the American workers are supposed to be the enemies of European workers in the same way that French, German, British and Spanish workers are supposed to be all enemies of each other. In today’s economic war, all the bourgeois forces want to set workers of different countries against each other as they do in military wars.

That states are in competition with each other is perfectly true. But the wars of the 20th century show that it is the workers who have most to lose in these rivalries between capitalist nations and who have no interest in submitting to the orders and interests of their national bourgeoisies. In the logic of capitalism, it is necessary for American workers as well as European workers to make still more sacrifices. If Airbus became profitable faced with Boeing, American workers will submit to new attacks (moreover, today 7,000 job cuts have been announced) and after that European workers will again pay the cost. Each retreat by workers faced with capitalist demands can only prepare for new attacks more violent than the previous ones. There’s no other option possible for capitalism in crisis, and the only response it knows is always more job cuts and even more ferocious exploitation of the workers who have the “luck” to keep their job… for the moment.

A single solution: unity and solidarity of the whole working class!

For the workers today hit by the measures of the Airbus management, there is no alternative but to struggle. In several Airbus factories they understood it immediately: from the announcement of the management’s plans, 1000 workers at the Laupheim, in the south of Germany went on spontaneous strike, at the same time as those of Meaulte, in Picardy, stopped work; they only went back when the union told them that the factory wouldn’t be sold, which was a lie.

But the workers of Airbus are not alone in this struggle. All the exploited must feel solidarity faced with attacks that today rain down on aeronautical workers and that tomorrow will hit those in the motor industry, health, telecom, chemicals and all the other sectors.

It is necessary for workers everywhere to unite in sovereign general assemblies where they can discuss and decide the objectives and means of struggle. This struggle is the concern of the workers themselves. It is not the business of politicians whose promises are quickly forgotten. Neither is it the business of their “representatives”, the unions. The latter spend their time cultivating divisions between the workers, whether within the same firm or unit of production (as we see today at Toulouse where the speeches of the main union, Force Ouvriere, are aimed at setting “blue collar” workers against “white collar” office workers). Or they oppose workers from one country against workers from another, since the unions are first to wave the nationalist rags. For the French unions at Airbus, with the same Force Ouvriere at their head, the workers should fight to obtain a “fairer sharing out of the sacrifices”; in other words, French workers should try to ensure that the German workers are hit still harder. And even when a union like IG Metall proposes a day of action by Airbus workers in different countries, to be held in mid-March, it is nothing but a manoeuvre to get ahead of any development of the consciousness that workers’ interests are not those of the national capital. In almost the same breath IG Metall issued a statement condemning strikes in the name of “responsibility”. Such a Europe-wide action is also a means of cultivating a “solidarity” between European Airbus workers that sets them against American Boeing workers who, in Autumn 2005, went on massive strikes against the bosses’ attacks.

The need for solidarity between all workers has already begun to be expressed, since there have been spontaneous walk-outs not only in the Airbus plants most directly hit but also by workers in the factories in Hamburg and Bremen which have been more or less spared so far. A little while ago, workers at Airbus in southern Spain, today under attack, gave their support to demonstrations of families of workers in the motor firm of Delphi, thrown out of work by the closure of the Puerto Real.

Faced with the appeals of the bosses to accept job cuts, lower wages and deteriorating conditions at work, one response: reject sacrifices which prepare the ground for even more brutal attacks! Only struggle pays!

Faced with attempts to divide workers by firm or by country, solidarity of all the working class!

Against isolation, which always means defeat, spread the struggles! Worker’s assemblies must send massive delegations to other firms so that all workers are part of the movement.

Faced with a tottering world capitalist system that will bring even more brutal attacks against all workers, in all sectors, in all countries, there is no other alternative for the working class than to fight back and to develop class solidarity. This is the only way to stand up against the aggravation of exploitation, against more and more inhuman conditions of life and work; it is also the only way to prepare for the overthrow of this system, which offers us nothing but poverty, war and barbarism.

International Communist Current (5 March 2007).

Bush’s rejection of the Iraq study group’s recommendations has to be seen within the framework of the impasse of US imperialism. Since the collapse of the old blocs the, so-called, “new world order” is really disorder and chaos. The US has launched an offensive to protect its dominant position. It is becoming more and more isolated and has become bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire. The US has to pull itself out and reassert itself. We are faced with the future prospect of a confrontation between Iran and the USA.

The only way the working class can confront war is through the class struggle. The level of the class struggle is low, but we are seeing signs of a re-emergence through a new generation. We can see the students’ movements in France as an important example of this.

The discussion that followed was very good.

On the war a sympathizer said that workers are more cynical about the war. The ideological cover for imperialism, “the war on terror”, is seen more and more for what it is. The meeting discussed the ways that the bourgeoisie manipulates it’s so called opposition. In the UK there is a leftist anti-war movement, but in France the opposition is focused on anti-globalisation (i.e. anti-Americanism).

One thread in the discussion was the role of the revolutionary organization and the development of the class. A sympathizer asked the question “How does the class raise its consciousness to a revolutionary level and how does the revolutionary organization contribute to this?”

Another sympathizer answered that the working class learns from its struggles internationally. It needs to go beyond the distortions of the bourgeoisie. By reporting on struggles like those in Bangladesh and Egypt the ICC is contributing, in a small way, to the classes understanding of what is really going on. A comrade of the ICC pointed to the struggles in France. It was only when the ICC intervened in the assemblies that we were able to see the real dynamic that was hidden behind the media focus on the violence.

A comrade pointed out that George Galloway was due to speak in Birmingham. The meeting discussed the arguments put forward by the leftists. The support they give to national liberationism and anti-fascism. In the face of a low level of struggles what do revolutionaries do if they don’t join up with these leftist campaigns. The current favorites are Chavism & anti-Americanism. Like the communists during WW1 & the left communists during WW2 the ICC supports internationalism. This is a fundamental class line anything else is a betrayal of the working class.

A comrade asked the ICC how it defines class struggle. There must be other gauges than days on strike. A comrade of the ICC pointed to Marx’s definition of class struggle. Along with strikes there is political and theoretical struggle. When looking at the present situation it is not just about strike days, because they are at a low level compared to the past, but we are seeing a greater qualitative content. For example the large strikes in Vigo where workers held mass assemblies in the town center. They joined together even though the worked in different factories.

Though the class is at an early stage of development in it’s re-emergence, this meeting was a small example of the qualitative gains the class is making.

Ash, 4/03/07.