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

Imperialist war = barbarism

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

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

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

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

Deterioration of the biosphere

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

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

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

Hot air on global warming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ICC Public forums to launch the book

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

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

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

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

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

Blair and the ruling class

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

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

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

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

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

Blair and the working class

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

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

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

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

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

Towards socialism

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

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

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

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

The bloody failure of US policy in Iraq

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

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

The American bourgeoisie is forced to recognise its defeat in Iraq

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

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

What future for Iraq and the Middle East?

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

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

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

What is the bourgeoisie reallyoing about the ‘genocide’?

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

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

Media parades and macabre ballets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article, contributed by a close sympathiser of the ICC, is the second part in a series on the history of the workers’ movement in Britain. The first part ‘The struggle of the working class to organise itself [8] ’ appeared in WR 301.

Introduction

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

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

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

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

The working class builds a mass party

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

In 1838 the London Working Men’s Association [9], which was linked to Owenite [10] socialism and the movement for working class education [11], formed a committee with radical MPs which drafted the People’s Charter of democratic demands. Chartism was officially launched at a mass meeting in Birmingham and the movement rapidly gained support among the working class with 150 affiliated societies nationwide.

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

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

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

After the Chartist leaders were arrested the strike had to be called off, and when in June 1839 [12] the Charter was finally presented to parliament, the bourgeoisie refused to even look at it. This not surprisingly threw the movement into disarray, and many Chartists now advocated force as the only means of achieving their aims. There were violent clashes leading to further arrests, the most important of which was the Newport Rising in November 1839, which was to have been the signal for a national uprising but ended in a brief, violent, and bloody battle.

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

The working class launches mass strikes

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

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

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

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

Chartists, trade unionists and the general strike

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

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

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

Chartism and the 1848 revolutions

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

MH, April '07.

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

World Revolution, 5/5/07.

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

WORKERS!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WORKERS!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WORKERS!

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

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

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

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

WORKERS!

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

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

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

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

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

WORKERS OF THE WORLD!

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

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

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

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

On your feet for the revolutionary struggle in all countries!

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

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

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

Let us be worthy of our brothers who have fallen!

Long live the world communist revolution!

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

A discussion in March on ‘Defending the NHS [16] ’ on the libertarian internet discussion forum libcom.org posed some very important issues about how workers in the NHS can defend themselves, and how we as a class can struggle against hospital closures and cuts in services. All agreed that the NHS is an expression of state capitalism, no one held that it is a wonderful reform and the envy of the world as we used to hear in the 1970s and 1980s. This is a forum where we find people questioning what capitalism has to offer us, and of course, 40 years of cuts and shake-ups have inevitably removed a lot of illusions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In WR 302 we reported on the wave of strikes which swept numerous sectors in Egypt [18] at the beginning of the year: in cement and poultry plants, in mines, on the buses and on the railways, in the sanitation sector, and above all in the textile industry, workers have been out on a series of illegal strikes against rapidly declining real wages and cuts in benefits. The militant, spontaneous character of these struggles can be glimpsed in this description of how, in December last year, the struggle broke out at the big Mahalla al-Kubra’s Misr Spinning and Weaving complex north of Cairo, which was the epicentre of the movement. The extract is from ‘Egyptian textile workers confront the new economic order [19] ’ by Joel Beinin and Hossam el-Hamalawy, published in Middle East Report Online and libcom.org, and based on interviews with two workers at the plant, Muhammed ‘Attar and Sayyid Habib.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus, we stress that:

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

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

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

4. We have to create a wide front to settle our battle with the government unions. We have to overthrow those unions now, not tomorrow”. (Translation from the Arabawy website and first published in English on libcom.org [20] )

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

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

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

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

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

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