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.
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.
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 [2] ) 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.
“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).
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
[1] When Russian tanks were sent in against the Polish working class after the mass strike of 1980 had begun to weaken. See https://en.internationalism.org/ir/103_poland80.htm [6] for an analysis of the events.
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 [8] ’.
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.
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 [9] , 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.
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.
[1] Among these great play is made by the councilists on the theory of ‘consciousness brought from outside’ developed in ‘What is to be done?’. Well, afterwards, Lenin recognised this error and amply proved in practice that he had acquired a correct vision of the process of the development of consciousness in the working class.
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.
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.
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.
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
[1] Through these so-called missions, the state ‘takes charge’ of the distribution of food, health, education, subsidies to unemployed mothers and temporary employees, etc. Since 2003, several missions have been set up. Many of them are not permanent and only play out a façade of concern for the poor. They get their names from the heroes of the independence struggle against Spanish domination or from the sectors they deal with: Barrio Adentro (health); Mercal (food distribution); Madres del Barrio (aid to unemployed mothers); Ribas (education) etc.
[2] Chavez in particular is the son of primary school teachers, even though he is an army officer. It’s not the first time that someone from poor origins has assumed responsibility for the state: this was the case with Lech Walesa in Poland in the 80s and with Lula in Brazil, both of them workers. The fact that a person from poor or proletarian origins assumes high office in the state bureaucracy places him or her without any question in the camp of the bourgeoisie, since the state is the organ of bourgeois class domination.
[3] One of these works was the new bridge over the river Oronoco: Lula was present at the inauguration because the bridge was built with Brazilian capital. On this occasion, Lula gave his public support to Chavez - a support which shows the economic interests of Brazilian capital but above all its geopolitical interests, since Brazil is putting itself forward as a country that can control the influence of the ‘enfant terrible’ Chavez. It was no accident that Bush paid a visit to Lula during his special trip to Latin America in March.
[4] The NGOs have problems in putting forward reliable figures. The government, through the control of the institutions, especially the National Institute of Statistics (INE), manipulates the figures in a very crude way in order to adjust them to the official discourse. Following the requests that Chavez made to the INE, the latter succeeded in lowering the index of poverty from 55.1% at the end of 2003 to 37.9% at the end of 2005. Last year, there was a sharp polemic between the FAO and the government, when this organisation revealed that between 2001 and 2003 4.5 million people in Venezuela suffered from malnutrition: representatives of the government said that this organ “was not qualified to measure the revolutionary process”. The manipulation of statistics, which the majority of governments do in one way or another, shows the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie which tries to hide what can’t be hidden.
[5] The official minimum wage is equivalent to $232: it’s the second highest in the region, calculated at the rate of exchange controlled by the government, which stands at 2150 bolivars to the dollar. But according to the non-official rate, it should be reduced by a half. The vast majority of regular workers don’t receive this minimum wage and this is all the more true for the unregistered workers who represent nearly half the workforce of 12 million people.
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.
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 [13]). 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 [14]').
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
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/economic-crisis
[2] https://libcom.org/forums/organise/defending-nhs
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/260/iran
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/northern-ireland
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/103_poland80.htm
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/britain
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/199704/2088/april-theses-1917-signpost-proletarian-revolution
[9] https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ch15.htm
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1917-russian-revolution
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/venezuela
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[13] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6441529.stm
[14] https://libcom.org/article/wildcat-strikes-hit-zimbabwe
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/zimbabwe