According to the media politics experts, Brown and Cameron both made very effective speeches at their party conferences. A more relaxed Brown talked about his family background and his parents' influence on his politics, his belief in "British values" and a "good society", "A Britain where we can do better than we are. Where we do feel and share the burdens of others. Where we do believe in something bigger than ourselves. Where we can be inspired by the driving power of social conscience. And where by working together we grow more prosperous and secure. This is the Britain I believe in. A Britain where by the strong helping the weak, our whole society becomes stronger and where by all contributing, each and every one of us is enriched".
Cameron, even more relaxed, strode about on the rostrum for 67 minutes referring only to four sheets of notes, extemporising on such key notions as: "REAL CHANGE", "STRONG COUNTRY", not the "OLD POLITICS" but "POLITICS YOU CAN BELIEVE IN", "A NEW WORLD OF FREEDOM". Together with the Shadow Chancellor's promise of tax cuts, this ‘virtuoso' speech seems to have dramatically cut the Tories' deficit in the opinion polls (which, incidentally, are also a product of the media).
At one point in his speech, Brown dismissed those who "see politics simply as spectacle", replying "I see politics as service because it is through service that you can make a difference and you can help people change their lives".
As a matter of fact, "politics" - the bourgeois politics of Brown and Cameron - is both. It is a spectacle designed to hide what interests the politicians really serve: not the "people", a meaningless abstraction in a world riven by class conflict, but the present social system, ruled by the vast impersonal power of capital, by production for profit. The increasingly indistinguishable platitudes of our political leaders are aimed at preventing those who benefit least from this system from questioning its foundations. And so we are offered the prospect of a "good society" and a "new world of freedom" which leaves the existing social order - a social order which is spreading crisis, war, hunger and poison across the entire planet - entirely unchanged.
In the wake of the conferences, speculation about a possible autumn election reached fever pitch in the newspapers and radio and TV broadcasts, until Gordon Brown ruled it out.
From the point of view of the majority who do not enjoy the privileges of the capitalist system, it makes no difference which colours the politicians paint themselves - New Labour pink, green/blue Tories - or which party sits on the government side of the House of Commons. Not only will their ideologies be the same, but, with small variations, so will their policies: all will require us to sacrifice our living and working conditions to the insatiable demands of the national economy. None of their policies will be remotely capable of sparing us from the impact of an economic crisis which is both global and historic in its scope. None of them, driven by the relentless drive to maintain profits in the face of this crisis, will be able to put the needs of the natural environment above the needs of ‘the economy'. And none of them, however much they talk about peace and international justice, will be able to stop British imperialism participating in the escalating military free-for-all which is turning more and more regions of the Earth into a madhouse.
Real change and the fight for a "good society" involve something much more difficult and profound than listening to the phrase-making of the political leaders and voting them in or out every few years. It involves a bitter class struggle at the roots of social life, in the workplace and the streets, a struggle which cannot be entrusted to political specialists but must be controlled by its protagonists through organisations they create in the struggle, like the soviets created by the Russian workers and soldiers in 1917. It involves dispatching, not patching up, a social order which is already in its death-throes, and the construction of a wholly new society, based on the common need in reality and not in hypocritical rhetoric. WR 6/10/7
This article is a shortened version of one that will appear in the next issue of the ICC's International Review, which will be published shortly.
The recent stock exchanges convulsions (see article on front page) pose the following question: whether the approaching open recession, which everyone agrees is likely, is part of the inevitable up and down pattern of the capitalist economy which is fundamentally sound, or whether it is a sign of a process of inner disintegration and breakdown, integral to capitalism, that will be punctuated by more and more violent convulsions.
To answer this question it is first necessary to deal with the idea that the development of speculation and the resulting credit crisis is in some way an aberration or a departure from the healthy functioning of the system, which could be corrected by state control or better regulation. In other words is the present crisis a result of financiers holding the economy hostage?
The development of the banking system, the stock market and other credit mechanisms have been integral to the development of capitalism since the 18th century. They have been necessary for the amassing and centralising of money capital in order to permit the levels of investment required for vast industrial expansion that was outside the scope of the richest individual capitalist. The idea of the industrial entrepreneur acquiring his capital by saving or by risking his own money is a pure fiction. The bourgeoisie requires access to the sort of sums of capital that have already been concentrated in the credit markets. In the stock markets the ruling class is not betting with their own individual fortunes but with monetised social wealth.
Credit, and lots of it, has thus played an important part in immensely accelerating the growth of the productive forces in comparison with previous epochs and in the constitution of the world market.
On the other hand given the inherent tendencies of capitalist production, credit has also been a tremendous accelerator of overproduction, of overvaluing the capacity of the market to absorb products and has thus been a catalyst of speculative bubbles with the consequent crises and drying up of credit. Side by side with facilitating these social catastrophes the stock markets and the banking system have encouraged all the individual vices of greed and duplicity that are typical of an exploiting class living off the labour of others; vices that we see flourishing today in insider trading, fictitious payments, outrageous ‘bonuses' that amount to huge fortunes, ‘golden parachutes', accountancy fraud, and plain theft.
The speculation, the risky loans, the swindles, the subsequent crashes and the disappearance of huge quantities of surplus value are therefore an intrinsic feature of the anarchy of capitalist production.
Speculation is, in the last analysis, a consequence, not the cause of capitalist crises. And if today it seems that speculative activity in the financial sector dominates the whole economy, it is because over the past 40 years capitalist overproduction has increasingly lapsed into a continuing crisis, where world markets are saturated with goods, investment in production is less profitable and money capital's inevitable recourse is to gamble in what has become a ‘casino economy'.
Therefore there is no possibility of a capitalism without its financial excesses, which are an intrinsic part of capitalism's tendency to produce as if the market had no limits.
The recent slump in the housing market in the US and in other countries is an illustration of the real relationship between overproduction and the credit squeeze.
The characteristics of the crisis in the housing market are reminiscent of descriptions of the capitalist crises that Karl Marx described in the Communist Manifesto in 1848:
"In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of over production. ...there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce".
So today we don't see homelessness as a result of a shortage of homes but paradoxically because there are too many of them; there is a veritable glut of empty houses. The construction industry has been working flat out over the past five years. But at the same time the purchasing power of American workers has fallen, as American capitalism attempts to increase its profitability. A gap opened up between the new homes being thrown onto the market and the ability to pay by those who needed them. Hence the risky - ie sub-prime - loans to seduce new buyers who could hardly afford them, and square the circle. Eventually the market crashed. Now, as more and more homeowners are evicted as a result of foreclosure on the crippling interest rates on these loans, the housing market will be further flooded - in the US some 3 million people are expected to lose their roofs as a result of defaulting on sub-prime mortgages. This human misery is anticipated in other countries where the housing bubble has either burst, or is about to. The surge in the construction industry and in mortgage lending over the past decade, then, far from reducing homelessness has put decent housing effectively out of reach for the mass of the population, or put homeowners in a precarious state[1].
Evidently what concerns the leaders of the capitalist system - its hedge-fund managers, its treasury ministers, its central bankers, etc - in the current crisis are not the human tragedies created by the sub-prime debacle, the dashed aspirations to a better life (except insofar as they might lead to questioning the insanity of this mode of production) but their inability as consumers to pay the inflated prices of houses and usurious rates of interest on the loans.
The sub-prime fiasco epitomises therefore the crisis of capitalism, its chronic tendency in the drive for profit to overproduce in relation to the solvent demand, its inability, despite the phenomenal material, technological and labour resources at its command to satisfy the most basic human needs[2].
However absurdly wasteful and anachronistic the capitalist system appears in the light of the recent crisis, the bourgeoisie still tries to reassure itself and the rest of the population that at least it won't be as bad as 1929.
The 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression continues to haunt the bourgeoisie, as the media coverage of the recent crisis testifies. Editorials, in-depth articles, historical analogies, have tried to convince us that the present financial crisis won't lead to the same catastrophe, that 1929 was a unique event that turned into a disaster by wrong decision making.
The bourgeoisie's ‘experts' foster the illusion that the present financial crisis is rather a repeat of the relatively limited - in time and place - financial crashes of the 19th century. In reality today's situation has more in common with 1929 than this earlier period of capitalism's ascendancy, sharing many of the common characteristics of the catastrophic financial and economic crises of the decadence of capitalism, of the period opened up by the First World War; of the inner disintegration of the capitalist mode of production, of a period of wars and revolutions.
The economic crises of capitalist ascendancy, and the speculative activity that often accompanied them and preceded them, were the heartbeats of a healthy system and gave way to new capitalist expansion throughout the world, through the construction of railways over entire continents, massive technological breakthroughs, the conquest of colonial markets, the conversion of artisans and peasants into armies of proletarian labour, etc.
The 1929 New York stock market crash, which announced the first major crisis of capitalism's decay, put all the speculative crises of the 19th century in the shade. During the ‘roaring twenties' the value of shares in the New York Stock Exchange, the biggest in the world, had increased five fold. World capitalism had failed to recover from the catastrophe of the First World War, and in the now richest capitalist country the bourgeoisie sought an outlet in stock market speculation.
But on Black Thursday 24 October 1929, a precipitous decline took place. Panic selling continued on Black Tuesday of the following week. And the stock market kept on crashing until 1932, by which time stocks had lost 89% of their peak value in 1929. They returned to levels not seen since the 19th century. The 1929 peak in share value was not reached again until 1954!
Meanwhile the US banking system which had lent money to buy the stocks itself collapsed. This catastrophe heralded the great depression of the thirties, the deepest crisis capitalism has ever experienced. American GDP was effectively halved. 13 million workers became unemployed with no relief to speak of. A third of the population sank into abject poverty. The effects were echoed around the world.
But there was no economic rebound as there had been after the crises of the 19th century. Production only began to resume when it had been harnessed to arms production in preparation for a new re-division of the world market in the imperialist bloodbath of World War II. In other words when the unemployed had been transformed into cannon fodder.
The thirties depression appeared to be the result of 1929, but in reality the Wall Street Crash only precipitated the crisis, a crisis of the chronic overproduction of capitalism in its decadent phase. Here lies the essential identity of the thirties with today's crisis, which began in the late 60s.
The bourgeoisie in the 1950s and 60s smugly claimed to have solved the problem of crises and consigned them to a historical curiosity through such palliatives as state intervention in the economy both at the national and international level, through deficit financing and progressive taxation. To its consternation the world wide crisis of overproduction reappeared in 1968.
Over the past 40 years this crisis has lurched from low point to another, from one open recession to one more damaging, from one false Eldorado to another. The form of the crisis since 1967 hasn't taken the abrupt nature as the crash of 1929. In 1929 the financial experts of the bourgeoisie took measures that only allowed the financial crisis to take its course. The measures were not errors but methods that had worked in previous crashes of the system, like in the panic of 1907, but weren't sufficient in the new period. The state initially refused to intervene. Interest rates were increased, the money supply was allowed to shrink, tightening the credit squeeze and further shattering confidence in the banking and credit system. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff bill imposed import barriers that accelerated the downturn in world trade and consequently worsened the depression.
In the last 40 years the bourgeoisie has understood the need to use state mechanisms to reduce interest rates and inject liquidity into the banking system in the face of financial crises. It has been able to phase in the crisis, but at the price of overloading the capitalist system with mountains of debt. A more gradual decline has been achieved than in the thirties, but nevertheless the palliatives are wearing out, and the financial system is increasingly fragile.
The phenomenal growth of debt in the world economy during the recent decade is exemplified in the extraordinary growth, within the credit markets of the now famous ‘hedge-funds'. The estimated assets of these funds have risen from $491bn in 2000 to $1,745bn in 2007[3]. Their complicated financial transactions, mostly secret and unregulated, use debt as a tradable security in the search for short term gain. The hedge-funds are judged to have spread bad debt throughout the financial system, accelerating and rapidly extending the present financial crisis.
The economic history of the last 40 years has been the history of the failure of one magical remedy after another. Keynesianism - deficit financing by the state to maintain full employment - evaporated in the galloping inflation of the 1970s and the recessions of 1975 and 1981. Reaganomics and Thatcherism - restoring profits by cutting the social wage, cutting taxes and allowing unprofitable industries to collapse with mass unemployment - expired in the stock market crash of 1987, the Savings and Loans scandal, and the recession of 1991. The Asian Dragons, saddled with huge debts, ran out of puff in 1997. The dot com revolution, the ‘new' economy, turned out to have no visible means of support, and the boom in its shares bust in 1999. The housing booms and credit card debt explosion of the past five years, and the use of the gigantic US foreign debt to provide demand for the world economy and the ‘miracle' expansion of the Chinese economy - this too has now been put in question.
We can't predict exactly how the world economy will continue to decline but increasing convulsions and even greater austerity is inevitable.
Karl Marx, in the third volume of Capital, argued that the credit system developed by capitalism revealed in embryo a new mode of production within the old. By enlarging and socialising wealth, taking it out of the hands of individual members of the bourgeoisie, capitalism had paved the way for a society where production could be centralised and controlled by the producers themselves and bourgeois ownership could be done away with as a historical anachronism:
"The credit system hence accelerates the material development of the productive forces and the creation of the world market which it is the historical task of the capitalist mode of production to bring to a certain level of development, as material foundations for the new form of production. At the same time, credit accelerates the violent outbreaks of this contradiction, crises, and with these the elements of dissolution of the old mode of production"[4].
For a century now conditions have been ripe for the abolition of capitalist exploitation. In the absence of a radical proletarian response, the contradictions of this moribund system, the economic crisis in particular, have only become more acute. While today credit continues to play a role in the evolution of these contradictions, it's not that of conquering the world market, since capitalism has long established its social relations throughout the planet. The massive indebtedness of all states has allowed the system to avoid brutal collapse despite the virtual impossibility of further expansion of the world market. But there is a price. After functioning for decades as a means of attenuating the conflict between the development of the productive forces and the obsolete social relations of capitalism, the headlong flight into debt is beginning to "accelerate the violent outbreaks of this contradiction" and to shake the social edifice as never before. Como
[1] Benjamin Bernanke, Chairman of the US Fed, referred to mortgage arrears as "delinquencies": in other words crimes or misdemeanours against Mammon. Accordingly the ‘criminals' have been punished... by still higher interest rates!
[2] We can't here go into the state of homelessness in the world as a whole. According to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, 1 billion people on the planet are considered to be without adequate housing, while 100 million have no home at all.
[4] Part 5, Chapter 27: ‘The Role of Credit in Capitalist Production'
The recent financial turmoil and the shocks to the British banking system, notably the run on the Northern Rock bank (described by Richard Lambert, the CBI chief, as "almost unimaginable" and akin to what one expects "in a banana republic"), underlines a far more profound problem for capitalism than defaulting mortgage payments in Florida. 1866 saw the last run on a British bank. As well as Northern Rock in August 2007, two other major lending institutions, Alliance & Leicester and Bradford & Bingley, almost went to the wall, which would have led to millions of savers losing billions of pounds at a stroke. Out of the top 13 UK lenders only two had their loans covered by deposits. These most austere, supposedly responsible institutions of capitalism have been gambling with their deposits and in some cases, gambling with deposits that didn't exist. This is all a well-established part of the world casino economy of credit, debt, bubbles, speculation and gambling that British Prime Minister Gordon ‘Prudence' Brown oversaw at the Treasury during his ten years there. The lack of solvent markets and outlets for goods produced means that capital chases any short-term profits, the riskier the better, even at the risk of its own destruction. Even today, after the Northern Rock events, British banks are pumping billions of pounds into as yet unvalued Chinese banks whose accountancy practices are suspect to say the least.
From elements of the bourgeoisie, words like "unimaginable", "extraordinary" and "unprecedented" were used to describe Chancellor Alistair Darling's bail-out of Northern Rock and the state's underwriting of the British banking system. Unprecedented indeed. Darling, blaming US sub-prime lending for the problems said:"Here in Britain, we meet these challenges against the background of a strong economy". But obviously not strong enough to prevent major financial institutions in the fourth largest economy in the world from staring bankruptcy in the face. The action of the Labour government as guarantor of the British banking system, belatedly following the European Central Bank and the US Federal Reserve in pumping billions into their economies, points to both the development of state capitalism and its growing weakness in patching up an economic system which is tending to move out of control.
But these "challenges", as Darling put it, are nothing less than the profound limitations of production for profit, and this is what is being expressed, and will be expressed, in the financial markets. British banks have been enthusiastic about ‘off-balance sheet' borrowing and are at the front of the queue in parcelling up and selling off their dodgy debts. Thus the European Securities Forum shows that by June this year, there were £350 billion worth of outstanding securitised loans backed by UK assets, compared to the equivalent £72 billion in Germany and £28 billion in France. Mortgage lending, all lending, has been manipulated by all states in order to keep their economies going from day to day. House prices have fallen in Spain as defaults have risen. Similar for Ireland and Germany and soon Canada and Australia will be affected. These are all some of the expressions of credit and debt crisis which lie at the heart of capitalism's historic crisis. Led by the US state, cheap and easy money, as well as growing state debt, has been the policy of the bourgeoisie since the end of the 1960s. Henry Paulson, US Treasury Secretary, said in September: "the whole world including the US... has benefited from credit availability" . But the effects of the dope of credit are wearing off, leaving the poison deep within the system. And what's been the answer of the bourgeoisie to the current crisis? Lower interest rates and the injection of masses of monies into the system in order to underwrite it. The very actions that caused the problems in the first place. Thus the ECB and the Fed acted by pumping billions into their economies, accepting even riskier securities for collateral and risking further destabilisation by lending over longer periods.
In the face of the near collapse of British banks, the British bourgeoisie were forced to follow suit. The contradiction for the economy of pouring more poison into an already poisoned body just for short-term respite is well summed up in the position of the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King. Abandoning the fiction of an ‘independent' Bank of England, the British state was forced to massively intervene in the crisis. After telling the Commons Treasury Committee in September (quite correctly) that "If risks continue to be underpriced (and one could add, underwritten) the next period of turmoil will be on an even bigger scale". King then went on to say, completely contradicting himself, that he was ready to take far stronger emergency action by cutting interest rates and flooding the financial markets with capital, ie, ‘underpricing' risk in the longer term. Such is the insoluble contradiction for capitalism: whatever state interventions are made in the short term to allay the effects of the crisis, the latter will only come back in force.
All this poses something of a quandary for leftists like the Socialist Workers Party. They are all for state intervention, the more the better. They support and advocate state control of the economy. They support the Labour Party and funding for this or that industry and public service. But writing in Socialist Worker, (28.9.7), the leftists are forced to disapprove of state intervention in the current crisis: "And the funny thing is that all the free-market ideologues - who believe the invisible hand of the free market should determine all things - fully expect that the central government can step in and make everything right... as if this were a centrally planned economy". The "funny thing is" that the British state, like all capitalist states, is a "centrally planned economy"; the very state capitalism that Socialist Worker advocates. What do they think has been going on throughout this current expression of the crisis - and before? The last recession of 2000 was brought to an end by the most active state intervention since World War II and an unprecedented increase in levels of debt, state budget deficits, the reordering of loans and interest rate manipulations in all the major capitals. This is not the "crisis of the dominant neo-liberal model" as Socialist Worker puts it, but the crisis of state capitalism, the very policy that it advocates. It is not only becoming increasingly difficult for state capitalism to buy its way out of trouble, but the very act of doing so, absolutely necessary for short term relief, makes the overall crisis much worse.
There is no ‘good'or ‘bad' capitalism, as Socialist Worker would have us believe; just state capitalism shared by governments of the left and the right the world over. Today this same state capitalism is in crisis and "the neo-liberal model" that Socialist Worker talks about is just one more fig leaf to cover up this reality. The rise in finance capital unable to find productive investment lies in the crisis of overproduction and the scarcity of fields for profitable accumulation. "Financial parasitism is a symptom of capitalism's difficulties, not a cause. The financial sphere is the crisis' showcase, for this is where stock market bubbles, currency collapses, and banking upheavals make their appearance. But these upheavals are the product of contradictions whose origins lie in the productive sphere" (International Review 115, 4th Quarter 2003, ‘The crisis reveals the historic bankruptcy of capitalist production relations [3] '). Baboon, 30.9.7
The working class in Britain is daily faced with its sons, daughters, sisters, brothers and friends in the armed forces being sucked ever deeper in to what appears to be a growing series of wars. The chaos in Iraq is rejoined by the revival of conflict and casualties in Afghanistan, although the full extent of the victims of war is deliberately hidden by the state, which does not report the number of injured. Troop numbers in Iraq are being reduced, but increasing in Afghanistan. The government and media say all the sacrifices are needed in order to bring about democracy and stability.
This spin is starting to wear thin, especially in relation to Iraq. Recent comments by the head of the armed forces about the nation not welcoming the returning troops, express the ruling class's growing concern that the population, and particularly the working class is becoming increasingly distrustful of it. The great lie about the ‘weapons of mass destruction' in Iraq and the appalling bloodshed since the invasion has profoundly undermined much of the support that the ruling class was initially able to rely on. In Afghanistan the invasion in 2001 used the 9/11 terrorist attacks as justification, but the worsening military situation is causing people to ask some very critical questions. We can add to this last year's promise by the former Defence Secretary, John Reid, when justifying the deployment of British troops in the notorious Helmand province, that they probably would not need to fire a shot!
This apparent incompetence on the part of the ruling class expresses the fundamental problem confronting British imperialism: "Since the collapse of the Eastern bloc the ICC has argued that British imperialism is caught in a contradiction it cannot resolve. In seeking to play an independent role and to continue to punch above its weight, it must play the US off against Europe, but more and more the reality has been that it is caught between these powers." (WR 302 "Resolution on the British Situation [4] "). This is graphically expressed by its present humiliation in Iraq and the looming prospect of being engulfed in another military adventure in Afghanistan.
British imperialism rode into Iraq as the US's lieutenant, desperately hoping it could increase its standing as an imperialist power. Far from increasing its imperialist stature it has been undermined. How to extricate itself from this disaster is vexing the bourgeoisie. The destructive potential of staying too close to the US in the way Tony Blair did is clear for all to see. It was hinted when Gordon Brown first became Prime Minister that a total withdrawal would exacerbate existing tensions with the US and look like a defeat to its rivals. The announcement of the withdrawal of 1000 troops from Basra by Christmas seems to be an attempt to reduce the British presence. British imperialism's rivals will still understand that it has been driven back to one heavily fortified base, but they cannot say it has been driven out. It also gives the impression that they have not totally abandoned the US.
The Iraqi disaster precedes a possible further lurch into chaos if the US is to attack Iran. British imperialism, as the occupier of southern Iraq had been given the role of stemming the influence of Iran in the region. Its very limited capacity to achieve this was exposed in the spring with Iran's capture of British sailors and the total inability of British imperialism to do anything about it. This places them in a very difficult situation. If the US attacks Iran, its allies in Iraq, above all in the South, will strike back at the US and its allies. The Basra outpost would be an obvious target. This is causing very real concern to the ruling class. It does not want to get sucked into another military adventure. To avoid this it has been working with other European states to try and undermine the US's efforts to give itself the opportunity to make another display of military might after the debacle of Iraq.
The British government may spin its retreat from Basra with talk of having created the necessary security conditions and stability etc, but reality is very different. In September last year the British launched Operation Sinbad aimed at driving the militias from the streets and enabling the local security forces to take over i.e., a British ‘surge'. However, the initial success of this operation was reversed this spring: "By March-April 2007, renewed political tensions once more threatened to destabilise the city, and relentless attacks against British forces in effect had driven them off the streets into increasingly secluded compounds. Basra's residents and militiamen view this not as an orderly withdrawal but rather as an ignominious defeat. Today, the city is controlled by the militias, seemingly more powerful and unconstrained than before "("Where is Iraq going? Lessons from Basra", June 2007, International Crisis Group) And on a wider level the same report makes the point that "What progress has occurred cannot conceal the most glaring failure of all: the inability to establish a legitimate and functioning provisional apparatus capable of redistributing resources, imposing respect for the rule of law and ensuring a peaceful transition at the local level". In August this humiliation worsened when they had to abandon the final stronghold in Basra city, Saddam's old palace (the most attacked complex in Iraq). This retreat was dressed up by Gordon Brown on a visit to the 5500 military personal beleaguered at Basra Airport "What we propose to do over these next few months is to move from a situation where we have a combat role to an overwatch role".
British imperialism's rivals and the British bourgeoisie are not fooled by this; they know this is the bitter price of getting too close to the US.
British imperialism's ability to impose its authority in Iraq has been weakened by the growing quagmire in Afghanistan. Initially, in 2001, it basked in the reflected glory of participation in the US invasion. At the time, the idea was spread that the Taliban was some rag tag bunch of fanatical peasants, hence Reid's ridiculous comment, in order to reassure the population. As we demonstrated last November this deployment was far from a walkover: "Today it is engaged in the most serious battles since the Korean War and has been unable to contain the situation in Helmand province, effectively being forced to surrender control of some parts. Its forces are over-stretched and taking casualties, leading to increasing disquiet in parts of the military." (WR302 "Resolution on the British Situation [4] " ). The Taliban is well armed, trained, with a level of organisation better than envisaged, and above all with the support of the Pakistani state. They have safe areas from which to carry out attacks and help from the Pakistani secret services and military. The Pakistani bourgeoisie are willing to give support to the Taliban because it has disputes with Afghan imperialism over its frontiers and Afghanistan claims over its Pushtan border areas. But even more importantly "Afghanistan is also a political football in the rivalry of Pakistan and India, both of which attempt to use it to undermine the other's regional interests" ("Countering Afghanistan's insurgency: no quick fixes". International Crisis Group Report, November 2006).
On a wider level the war in Helmand (and increasingly other provinces) is not only a local but an international affair. The aim of the US invasion was to impose its domination on the whole region. But the Taliban is not only openly supported by Pakistan but also by other powers who want to see the US tied down in another sticky situation
British imperialism cannot afford another defeat and has been increasing its deployment in Afghanistan (there are now 7700 troops there, double the number present during the invasion). The bourgeoisie is seriously worried about the situation. In July the Defence Select Committee issued a report on the situation in Afghanistan which, according to the BBC, delivers a "central message - things are going badly, alarmingly wrong in Afghanistan. With an accumulation of detail, the defence select committee paints a sorry picture - muddled strategy, shirking allies, a lack of helicopters and, stuck in the middle, the servicemen and women who have to make the whole thing work." A similar message was delivered by Lord Inge - former chief of the defence staff - during a House of Lords debate "The situation in Afghanistan is much worse than many people recognise,' Inge told peers. ‘We need to face up to that issue, the consequence of strategic failure in Afghanistan and what that would mean for Nato... We need to recognise that the situation - in my view, and I have recently been in Afghanistan - is much, much more serious than people want to recognise.' According to the Observer (15/7/7) he was speaking with the permission of the Defence Staff.
These warnings underline the depth of the problem facing the ruling class: they are having to devote increasing numbers of troops and resources in order to avoid defeat, in a situation of an expanding presence of the Taliban (and its backers) and the weakening of the puppet government in Kabul. This is going to accelerate the increasing numbers of dead and wound, not only amongst the Afghan population but also in the British armed forces: 35 dead this year, out of 55 killed in action since 2001.
The relentless war, destruction, death and injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan is generating a growing unease and discontent. The ruling class is aware of this. When the head of the armed forces complained about the lack of respect for returning troops and called for more public support, Major General Patrick Cordingley, who commanded the army during the 1991 Gulf War, responded by saying "The second Gulf War was a very different situation indeed - probably not just, perhaps not even legal and a 50-50 split in the country - not a popular war."
This situation is very difficult for the ruling class. All the lies and spin about Iraq and Afghanistan are wearing thin, and are breeding distrust in what the state says about war. This, combined with the growing toll of dead and injured, which mostly affects the working class can only stimulate a questioning within the class on war and the system that gives rise to it. At the same time increasing attacks on living and working conditions show the reality of what capitalism has to offer the working class.
What lies ahead is a worsening situation in Afghanistan, the continued collapse of Iraq and the threat of war on Iran. The barbarity of capitalism is increasingly exposed for the working class to see. Phil 6/10/7
130,000 postal workers throughout the country have struck against Royal Mail's devastating attacks on their pay and working conditions. At 12.00 on 4 October postal workers began two 48 hour strikes stretching over two weeks.
It's very clear to all postal workers that the attacks are very real and severe. Under the Royal Mail ‘Plan' management have put forward proposals for an increase in the pay offer of 6.7% over two years (in itself a pay cut with the rate of inflation running at 4%) but at a price! There can be no doubt that RM is attempting to push through their ‘modernisation plan' and this means thousands of redundancies in the industry, estimated at nearly 40,000. Right from the very beginning RM have taken an intransigent stance and not shifted from their initial proposals for ‘flexibility' (here read job-losses and part-time working). These are both the short and long term objectives of RM and, under the guidance of Leighton and Crozier, it has used the tactic of ‘executive action', that is imposing management's plans whether the workers like it or not. They used this tactic of ‘executive action' in last year's pay round, paying RM's initial offer into the posties' bank accounts. RM has employed the same tactic for new starting times and other proposals, such as a plan to change the pension scheme, which would close it to new entrants, and put back the retirement age to 65.
At the end of September after weeks and weeks of prevarication, the ‘talks' between Royal Mail management and the postal union the CWU broke down.
According to the CWU, the new round of strikes will take the battle to RM. Dave Wiltshire, Bristol CWU branch chairman, said in an interview with Socialist Worker: "Management like to portray themselves as tough guys - now they are going to find how tough we can be".
Another union rep - Bradford's Simon Midgley - was nearer the truth when in the same Socialist Worker article he pointed out that "there are some who became a bit cynical when the action was called off for negotiations - but with the right campaign they can be won over. We need some really good union propaganda that spells out the case."
It's true that there is a good deal of cynicism amongst postal workers regarding this struggle and the CWU's delaying tactics.
Throughout the national workforce there is widespread concern that a rotten deal would be forced on them. In particular, postal workers looking to their jobs and conditions are worried that the ‘22 conditions' of change to working practises put forward as part of the RM deal would be accepted whole or in part by the CWU. This unease was accentuated by a total lack of information on how the negotiations were developing.
During the initial round of strikes in the summer, and again in the current ones, the CWU has maintained overall control of the struggle despite the existence of this cynicism. Workers have not challenged the CWU's overall direction of the struggle at national level. However, during the summer, a different tendency appeared at local level, with a number of unofficial walk-outs and spontaneous expressions of class solidarity.
At the beginning of August thousands of Glasgow postal workers walked out after 13 drivers refused to cross the picket line of the official strike at Edinburgh airport. The 13 drivers were suspended, prompting the mass walkout at Glasgow. This movement quickly spread to Motherwell and then to the rest of Scotland. At this point the CWU attempted to end the action, a spokesman telling the Scottish Evening News: "There are hopes of a resolution to the row over the delivery drivers. We are holding out the olive branch. We want to get our members back to work".
This movement prompted by management's strong-arm tactics was to spread to the whole of the country. In Liverpool, three days later, attempts by management to drive in mail resulted in a wildcat which was supported by Polish agency workers. In Newcastle, Hartlepool, Chester, Bristol the same scenario was repeated with solidarity actions after management suspensions. Throughout this period postal workers expressed a very high level of militancy and solidarity with victimised comrades. This has been impressive but there still remains a strong localised aspect to these struggles. With the exception of Scotland (where very quickly area after area came out over the suspensions of the 13 Edinburgh airport drivers) there has been a strong tendency to keep the strikes to local offices and we haven't seen the development of the flying pickets to other areas.
At the beginning of August, faced with an intransigent Royal Mail and a series of militant wildcat strikes, the Communications Workers Union called upon the services of the TUC and ACAS to broker a series of negotiations. Subsequently, Assistant General Secretary Dave Ward announced that the strikes would be called off pending "meaningful negotiations" with RM, and both RM and the CWU jointly called for a "period of calm". Both parties gave a commitment to reach a deal by the 4th of September. That date passed with an apparent deadlock and the deadline was extended to Sunday 10th September. That deadline was also broken and then further extended to the end of September. This has meant that there have been three separate ‘deadlines'. The CWU explained away these talks under the guise of appearing ‘reasonable' and ‘willing to negotiate' as opposed to the intransigent stance taken by RM management.
It is very clear that these delaying tactics were implemented in order to take control of the wildcat strikes. Most certainly they had the desired effect of having weeks of ‘negotiations' to dampen down postal workers' militancy. All this was a real setback for the workers.
Despite all this, today on the picket lines postal workers are still expressing a strong resolve to fight RM's ‘Plan', which they understand very well is a massive attack on their pay and working conditions. But how to fight? This is the real question posed in all postal workers' discussions. Alongside the programme of rolling strikes, the CWU are proposing the tactic that postal workers ‘do the job properly'. In particular that posties stop using their cars for the delivery of mail and take authorised meal breaks. This will indeed lead to a jamming up of mail and massive backlogs in the system. But this tactic tends to reinforce the idea that postal workers can win this dispute mainly by keeping it going in their own sector until the management cave in. Experience shows that struggles that remain bottled up in one sector rarely force the bosses to back down, especially when they have the backing of the whole state machine, and when other capitalists are waiting in the wings to profit from RM's difficulties.
As we saw in the students' struggles against the CPE (legislation aimed at increasing casualisation) in France, or the recent textile workers' strikes in Egypt, what forces the ruling class to moderate its attacks is the threat of a massive movement spreading throughout the working class. Solidarity is a fundamental prerequisite. This was shown quite clearly in the series of wildcat strikes in the summer. Postal workers not only have to make direct links between different offices and depots but also to other sectors. As an example, Post Office Counters workers and ROMEC engineers in the same industry are facing the same attacks from the same employer. Yet there has been no attempt to link up the fight against RM. This is because the unions, with the CWU at the forefront, have religiously separated any joint action. And the issue is not just the post office, but the general attack on all workers, especially those in the public sector, who are facing a winter of deepening economic crisis, pay-cuts, redundancies and other attacks. Already a number of health workers, transport workers, education workers and others have shown their solidarity with the posties by joining their picket lines, but what is needed is a common struggle, not just ‘support' from other sectors. That automatically means organising across union divisions through mass meetings open to all workers in struggle. That may seem a big and dangerous step beyond leaving it all in the hands of the ‘professionals' of the trade union apparatus, but it's the only way the workers can really exert their huge potential strength. And any small initiatives in this direction - such as small groups of workers getting together to call for such methods of struggle (like the Dispatch publication mentioned in WR 307 [9] , an initiative of libcom.org) - are steps in the right direction. Melmoth 5.10.07
Last December there was a wave of strikes and other protests across Egypt (see WR 302 [11] , 304 [12]) which resulted in the government conceding annual bonuses equivalent to 45 days wages. However, this did not put a lid on workers' struggles, which have continued ever since. Toward the end of September 27,000 workers struck at Misr Helwan Spinning and Weaving Company's factory in Mahalla al-Kubra, with several thousand staging a six-day sit-in in a takeover of the textile factory. It's one of the biggest in Egypt, owned by the state and at the heart of last year's movement. Workers said that the government had gone back on its agreement, also demanding higher wages and the firing of top managers. Initial reports appear to indicate that all the workers' demands were met.
It seems that the government was concerned that the struggle would have the same impact as last year and spread to workers in other low-paid industries. Voice of America (27/9/7) reported that "The wildcat strikes have been far larger than any protest organized by the political opposition groups because the workers' movements have more grassroots support than any of Egypt's political parties or activist groups."
And although the police and army were mobilised it's not the same thing to confront thousands of workers as it is to deal with a modest demonstration by the political ‘opposition'.
The ruling class in Egypt is also concerned that workers have rejected the government-approved unions. When representatives from the ‘official' unions came to the factory workers chased them away and beat up the leader of the official Factory Union Committee. The strikes have been organised by workers independent of the state unions. The government has tried to combat this, for example, in April by closing the offices of a group that gave advice to workers and unofficial unions.
But the movement was not curtailed. Earlier this year there were strikes involving tens of thousands of workers at other textile factories, at two cement factories, and among poultry workers. Workers on the railway blocked the Alexandria-Cairo line and were supported in a go-slow by metro drivers in Cairo. There have been hundreds of smaller-scale actions by workers, including a sit-in by workers at a major post office in Cairo and strikes by rubbish collectors, bakers, Suez Canal employees, dockers, local council and hospital workers. According to one source there were about 220, mostly wildcat, strikes in Egypt in 2006. This year shows every sign of exceeding that figure.
The reason that workers are struggling is that, despite the supposed health of the Egyptian economy, workers have not felt any benefits. In particular, inflation is stated to be anything from 8 to 15 percent, but a government report issued during September said the cost of basic foodstuffs had risen 48 percent during the previous year. It is this, and consistently high levels of unemployment, that lie behind workers' struggles. And the ruling class knows it. At a recent conference in Cairo the Finance Minister admitted that it wasn't obvious how economic growth could benefit the poor, saying "It is a basic challenge that keeps me awake at night because I do not know how to handle it,"
And the development of an open class struggle is likely to cause even more sleepless nights to the ruling class. At the time of writing, the concessions made to the Mahalla workers, far from preventing the movement from spreading, have encouraged other workers to enter the struggle: at the Tanta Linseed and Oil factory, striking workers' demands were also quickly met and government officials were rushing to deal with another strike at Damietta Spinning and Weaving. And most importantly, the Egyptian working class is the biggest in the Middle East and its struggles have the potential to inspire workers throughout the region and the rest of the world.
Bangladesh is another country where the class struggle has been sustained during the last year. Back in January there was a whole series of general strikes and unrest. An interim government backed by the army was installed, headed by the former head of the central bank Fakhruddin Ahmed. It imposed a state of emergency, but has not succeeded in containing workers' struggles, despite frequently resorting to violence.
Back in May for example at FS Sweaters Ltd in Gazipur, just north of Dhaka, at least one person died and more than 80 were injured when police fired on garment workers. They were on an unofficial strike not only for a wage rise but also for the release of two of their comrades who had been imprisoned. It was after a demonstration when workers put up a barricade across the road that the police made their first baton-charge. Workers retaliated by throwing stones and then the police started throwing tear gas canisters and firing live bullets which hit a dozen people.
More recently, in mid September, during a strike involving factories throughout the Dhaka Export Processing Zone in Savar, there were running battles between police and workers with more than 100 people injured. Starting with several hundred workers from Featherlight Ltd (part of the Ready Made Garment sector - RMG) workers from many other factories joined them in a protest demonstration, which was then baton-charged by the police, leaving many workers injured. Workers responded by barricading the road, damaging a number of factories and vandalising a number of vehicles. After a long period of fighting with the police workers were finally dispersed by a large-scale tear gas attack by the police.
Attacking factories is common in Bangladesh. Last year for example rioting at RMG plants in and around Dhaka over an eight week period left 400 factories damaged. There's a lesson to be learnt in the approach of workers at Misr Spinning and Weaving in Mahalla al-Kubra. When they were accused of damaging property two Daily News Egypt journalists were taken inside the occupied factory to show that the machinery was all in working order. One worker was quoted as saying "We are not sabotaging this factory. We are guarding these machines. This is our factory. This is where we make our living. We understand that." The destruction of factories can't help the class struggle.
In mid September in the Khalishpur industrial belt, Khulna, south-west Bangladesh striking workers at Platinum Jubilee Jute Mills attacked union leaders. They accused them of conspiring and conniving with management against workers' demands. 5000 workers had been on strike for nearly a fortnight, and were increasingly unhappy with the behaviour of the unions. On the morning of 16 September union officials had to be protected from angry workers when they arrived at the factory gates. Workers went to the house of the general secretary of the mill's trade union and ransacked his house. Later they met the union president and beat him up.
Again, these expressions of rage are perfectly understandable and do express an incipient grasp of the anti-working class role played by the unions, but beating up one or two union officials won't solve the problem of how to cut through the obstacles posed by unions as institutions tied to the bourgeois state.
A week after these events there were further clashes between garment workers and police that brought 25,000 workers on to the streets of Dhaka in a militant demonstration that was held despite a government ban on protests and rallies. More factories were damaged, buses burnt and roads blocked. It should be added that, with the prospect of further struggles in this area, the RMG sector has a 90% female workforce, rather undermining the stereotype of the passive Asian woman.
The struggles are likely to continue, in the face of rising inflation, working conditions often enforced with violence, and long periods of unpaid wages. The Bangladeshi economy is affected by frequent cyclones and flooding which increase its instability. In this fragile economy the jute and garment sectors are not only the most important industries, they have also been the setting for the most widespread workers' militancy. Car 2/10/7
Workers have to face violence or the threat of it when they struggle, but they also have to deal with all the manoeuvres of the unions and their political allies.
In the US, at the end of September, there was a classic example of a union strike at General Motors, where workers, worried about job security and retirement benefits, found themselves in a two day strike which resulted in the union (the UAW) agreeing to a further decline in workers' living standards.
At the beginning the strike of 73,000 GM workers, which shut down all 82 GM facilities in the US and stopped supplies to plants in Canada and Mexico, was hailed as the first strike at GM since 1998, the first national strike in the auto sector in 3 years and the first nationwide strike at GM since 1970. It was said that GM had enough cars and trucks to withstand a short strike as, at the beginning of September, it had a 65-day supply. Yet despite the underlying militancy that the union was responding to, it felt confident enough to agree to a settlement with the company that was greeted with delight by the media, Wall Street and other car companies. The pressure is off GM to deal with retiree health care, which becomes the responsibility of the union, which in turn becomes a major investor with the funds it has been provided. There will also be a two-tier pay and benefit system where newly hired workers will get far less, maybe even half, the package for current workers.
The reason for the relief in the ruling class is the state of the US car industry. Detroit's Big Three (GM, Ford and Chrysler) lost a collective $15 billion last year, as they face more competition in the US market. They had 73 percent of the home market in 1996, down to 54 percent last year and now less than 50%. GM's market share has gone from 40% in the mid 1980s to under 24% today. Against this Japanese and European car makers based in the South are paying their workers less as their market share increases. 100,000 car workers jobs have gone in the last four years. It's a very real crisis in the car industry and the workers are having to pay for it.
The groups on the left wing of capitalism (Trotskyists, Stalinists etc) complain about the union bureaucracies, how they betray workers and ally themselves to a capitalist party, the Democrats. This is not headline news, as even a CBS report could spell out that the UAW had " agreed to massive buyout plans and changes to retiree health care to help the automakers." Denouncing ‘business unionism', where unions seem to go out of their way to help the capitalists, is the stock-in-trade of the left. The World Socialist Web Site denounces the UAW for "collaborating with GM on its restructuring plans that eliminated 34,000 UAW jobs." But, like all the left, it still holds to a union framework (just less bureaucratic), presents the 1930s as a golden age for unionism and wants the car industry taken into state ownership.
The same problems are posed to workers across the world. The crisis of the capitalist economy lies behind the attacks of the bourgeoisie. The capitalist state can't be used by workers, and, since unions have long ago become the main obstacle to the development of workers' struggles, workers clearly need means of struggle that serve the need for self-organisation and a growing solidarity in the ranks of the working class. Car 2/10/7
In this series we have examined the struggle of the working class in Britain to organise itself against capitalism during the period of capitalism's ascendance, looking in particular at the growth of the trade unions as defensive organisations against the attacks of capital.
As we said at the start in WR 301, these articles are aimed at answering the popular argument in the anarchist milieu that the trade unions have always been reactionary. An article reprinted from the now defunct but still influential British paper Wildcat, expressing exactly these views, has recently appeared in the online library of libcom.org [16] , so in this article we want to directly respond to this argument.
Wildcat's position is very simple: "the unions have sabotaged working class struggle since their inception."
Wildcat's version of history, which partly follows in the footsteps of John and Paula Zerzan, and Cajo Brendel, can easily be summed up. Back in the 18th century there were uncontrollable mobs, but in the early 19th century the working class movement reached a high point with the Luddites. From then on it was all downhill as the bourgeoisie ‘tamed' the workers' anger against capitalism by encouraging the creation of legalistic, pacifist trade unions and diverting workers' energies into parliamentary struggles for the vote.
The first problem with this argument is that it prompts the question: if the unions have always been reactionary why did workers ever create them in the first place? Why is it that, even today, while expressing their anger at the now reactionary unions' betrayals, and deep criticisms of this or that leader or union, workers still very often express the idea, especially in Britain, birthplace of trade unionism, that at some deep level the trade unions are still somehow ‘theirs', and therefore have to be defended?
The answer is: because the trade unions originally were theirs; they belonged to the workers, who built them to defend themselves against capital's attacks; fought for them; were persecuted, imprisoned and transported for the very act of belonging to them.
How did the working class in the 19th century not notice that the unions were, in fact, "sabotaging the working class struggle from their inception"? Although Wildcat doesn't say so, the logical conclusion from their argument is that the working class were somehow duped by the bourgeoisie into thinking that the unions were ‘their' organisations, when they were products of the bourgeoisie all along...
No, if the workers persisted in putting their energies into the building of trade unions, it was because this model of permanent mass organisation in the factories corresponded to their immediate and objective needs as a class, and they were prepared to invest all their energies in their defence against the bourgeoisie. And this is why, despite the betrayals of a union leadership which, yes, even in the mid-19th century, became deeply infected with opportunist and reformist ideas and practices (see WR 305), in this historical period the unions still expressed abundant proletarian life.
For Wildcat the highly disciplined organisation and violent actions of the Luddites are the real alternative to the reactionary trade unions, even arguing that "Some kind of Luddite-style community organisation would be appropriate for workers in small, scattered work-places today."
But we need to put the Luddites in their proper historical context. As we showed in WR 301, in the early 19th century Luddism expressed the resistance of the skilled hand-loom weavers to the relentless advance of large-scale capitalist industry. Machine-breaking was a symptom of the weakness of this struggle, not strength, while the Luddites' clandestine organisation was an attempt to overcome the scattered nature of production in this declining sector, especially in conditions of heightened repression during wartime.
In contrast, it was the factory workers, especially in the textile industry, who increasingly took the lead in the workers' movement in this period, and whose struggles demonstrated an open, massive character; also highly disciplined but with very little violence, as in the first great cotton spinners' strike of 1818. Wildcat ignore all this, clinging to the argument that the only reason Luddism did not continue was that state repression had the effect of "opening up a space for parliamentarism and trade unionism, which was powerful enough to prevent a serious resurgence of Luddism." This is simplistic. But even Wildcat, which thinks that the Luddites are still a model to copy today, has to admit that this could only be relevant for small, scattered communities, when the working class today is precisely characterised by its concentration in massive urban and industrial areas, where its struggles tend to take on an open, mass character.
The violent actions of the Luddites against the state and employers are one of the main reasons why Wildcat sees them as a model to be followed today. But Wildcat generally downplays the importance for the working class of organisation; it wasn't violence which explains the success of the workers in spreading their struggles across the country during the 1842 general strike, as Wildcat suggests, but their organisation in local strike committees, mass pickets and ‘committees of public safety', and their unification at the national level through conferences of trade delegates to direct the struggles and give them explicit political objectives to gain the demands of the Peoples' Charter.
Significantly in the 1842 general strike there is also no evidence that the workers themselves saw any opposition between their own struggles and trade unionism; on the contrary, the delegates to the national conferences were trade unionists, active locally in their union branches and agitating in them for Chartist demands. And it was precisely the spectre of an alliance between trade unionism and Chartism that so terrified the bourgeoisie - see WR 216 and 304.
Wildcat argues that as early as 1824 measures like the Combination Acts, which legalised some forms of organisation, merely enabled the recuperation of working class organisation by the middle class from the outside, citing as examples the use of the courts by early trade union leaderships.
For a start this rather neglects the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 which banned all forms of union organisation. Small unions had existed from before the Industrial Revolution, but the ruling class was concerned that a new more militant type of unionism was spreading to factories and mines in the Midlands and the North of England.
It also needs to be said that after the 1824 measures the bourgeoisie still found ways of attacking working class organisation, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, for example, were convicted of administering unlawful oaths.
But for Wildcat it wasn't just the trade unions that represented an attack on the working class at this time; the struggle for the vote in this period was also an expression of the invasion of bourgeois influence from the outside. So the Chartist movement, far from representing the first mass proletarian political party, was nothing but a "middle class movement dedicated to recuperating working class struggle. The intention of Chartism was always to divert working class anger into demands for an extension of the franchise."
As for the improvements in working and living standards won by the working class in his period, for example the restriction on child labour and working hours for women, these were nothing but "pre-emptive concessions to the working class designed to buy social peace in the long term."
So, to be clear, Wildcat's argument is that the whole struggle for reforms by the working class during the period of capitalism's progressive expansion was nothing but a bourgeois diversion from violent insurrection.
This radical-sounding argument is empty of historical method, and of any understanding of the conditions in which the working class was struggling. Given the condition of the great mass of the working class, it was still absolutely necessary to organise in order to struggle for improvements such as the limitation of the working day, as a precondition for the further development of the class struggle. Despite the growth of reformist illusions in the workers' movement, which the bourgeoisie of course did all it could to reinforce, the working class secured real economic and political benefits in this period, like extension of the franchise, legalisation of the unions and real wage rises at least for skilled workers. But even after the legal recognition of trade unions in the early 1870s, trade unionised workers were only a small minority of the class in Britain; vast sectors of the working class were still virtually unorganised, and only some parts of the class had the vote.
Wildcat dismisses the hard-fought gains made by the working class in this period, but more importantly dismisses the real struggle of the class to organise itself in a period when revolution was not yet on the historic agenda. Superficially Wildcat's arguments sound radical, and to those today who can see the very real reactionary nature of the trade unions everywhere it no doubt sounds very revolutionary to be told that in fact the trade unions have always acted in this way. But it hides not only a complete lack of historical method and understanding, but above all a disdain for the working class and its struggle against capitalism.
MH 1/10/07.
Discussion is the lifeblood of the workers' movement as it tries to clarify the questions thrown up by the class struggle and in the fight for communism. It obviously takes many forms. For example, we always encourage people to write to us, at as great a length as is necessary, if there are issues that really need to be spelt out and given proper consideration. Or, there's the example of our participation in online forums, where you might not be able to say everything, but you can certainly get over the basics of the approach of the communist left. But it's in the public meetings of the ICC that it's possible to ask questions, state your point of view and really debate questions facing the working class.
At the September public meeting in London we started with a short presentation on the current state of the class struggle. During the course of the meeting we covered a wide range of questions, but, in a sense, particularly in looking forward to post-revolutionary society, it was only possible to do so because a social force, the working class, exists that has the capacity to overthrow capitalism.
One participant, for example, found it difficult to imagine a society without money. Looked at just from the experience of atomised individuals in a society based on commodity production, it is indeed hard to imagine something so radically different. But as soon as you grasp the possibility of a society based on relations of solidarity, and the impact on millions of people who have organised themselves and gone through the whole revolutionary process that the overthrow of capitalism requires, with all the development this implies for class consciousness, you're talking about an enormous leap. This is not just idle speculation as we already have the experience of the Russian revolution to draw on for lessons that will help in future struggles.
For example, the question of planning in a future society has to be seen as the complete opposite of planning in Stalinist Russia. There the only planning that took place was at the level of the needs of the Russian state capital in the context of the anarchy of international capitalist competition. Planning in communism can only be for the satisfaction of the needs of humanity based on the coordination of all available resources, human and otherwise. It's like when marxists talk about the dictatorship of the proletariat. Normally, when talking about dictatorship it refers to some sort of harsh authoritarian regime, but for marxists it's to be understood that we mean the domination of a particular social class. So, at present, the capitalist class is the dominant class, the ruling class in every country in the world, that's the dictatorship of a small minority, the bourgeoisie over the vast majority of the rest of the population. The dictatorship of the proletariat is in the interests of the working class and all other non-exploiting strata, and against those who want to re-establish relations of exploitation and the dictatorship of capital.
Other questions discussed at the meeting included an assessment of the growing influence of marxism. We were modest in our claims about the recent experience of the ICC as one example of this, but could definitely see a quantitative development in correspondence, appearance of new groups, online hits and a qualitative change in the response to our intervention, with a greater openness to debate, even from those initially suspicious of anything labelled ‘marxist' or communist.
On the class struggle itself we looked at the weight of social decomposition and the obstacles facing workers' struggles. In the face of isolation and atomisation, how does the working class gain confidence and consciousness, what is the potential for the politicisation of the struggle? This is a very important question, as, for all we insist on the emerging struggle since 2003, we cannot deny the difficulties that face the working class. There is nothing inevitable about the class struggle and the road to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. Yes, the deepening economic crisis of capitalism is inevitable, but workers don't inevitably recognise the best way to defend their interests. One of the functions of revolutionary minorities is to try and show the long term goals of the movement and what potential the working class has.
Face to face political meetings have not been made redundant by the advent of the internet. They remain vital because they allow debate to develop and questions to be clarified in a much more direct manner than through written correspondence or online forums. That's why we can only encourage readers of our press and visitors to our website, all those who really want to develop a debate about communist politics, to overcome any hesitations and attend our meetings in greater numbers. WR 30/9/7
When the protests in Burma started in the middle of August the issue was price rises, specifically the end to fuel subsidies that caused a fivefold price rise that inevitably affects the cost of everything else. And this was still the concern when Buddhist monks first took to the streets in support. But this concern has been rapidly eclipsed by the talk of democracy in what had become largely a movement of the monks, and with it has gone any visible expression of the needs of the poverty-stricken population and the tiny working class of the country. Instead we have the high politics of international influence and imperialist interest.
These protests have been met by a wave of repression across the country. The initial fuel price protests led to at least 150 arrests. However, the monks' protests escalated for several weeks before the crackdown at the end of September. During this time there has been much media talk of peaceful protest, of monks as the conscience of the country, of the attempt to go and pray with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. The monks' banner "Love and kindness must win over all" was widely quoted. We were led to believe we were witnessing a ‘saffron revolution' after the style of the democracy movements in former Soviet Republics (although Burmese monks wear oxblood red, not saffron). We do not have reliable figures for the victims of the repression, since the official figures for both death and detention are totally unbelievable when you had well armed troops attacking unarmed protesters and thousands of monks, often bearing injuries, fleeing across the borders.
Burma's largest land border is with China, its most significant trading partner and supplier of General Than Shwe's military government with cut-price military hardware. China is rebuilding the old British road to India, bringing in 40,000 construction workers, and parts of Burma are completely dominated by their powerful neighbour, using Chinese currency and language, as though it were a province ruled from Beijing. Burma supplies China with listening posts and a naval base on the Indian Ocean, just where it needs it to respond to its Indian rival as well as any other ocean-going power. It is one of China's ‘string of pearls', the satellites key to its imperialist strategy. As well as owning Tibet, China has influence in Nepal, Burma, Cambodia and Laos with a view to extending towards Vietnam and Indonesia. Its ambitions lie to the west in Central Asia as well as south to the Indian Ocean. China's bellicosity towards Japan and Taiwan shows another dimension of this rising imperialist power. Nevertheless, Shwe has allowed the Russians to gain some influence, much to China's annoyance.
All China's neighbours are worried. Australia has expressed concern about China's expansion towards Indonesia, while India is also trying to get influence in Burma. Britain, the old colonial power, may not be able to send journalists in legally but still has substantial investments. And the USA is not far away from any hotspot and, like the others, keen to limit China's ambitions in the area.
The western powers base their hopes on Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy. She is the daughter of Aung Sang, the Prime Minister put in place under the British, and possibly murdered by them just before independence for being too friendly to the Japanese. In any case democracy is the imperialist battle-cry used by the USA and Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan to such destructive effect. Clearly China is not going to be allowed a free hand in Burma or anywhere else.
Our media have emphasised Chinese responsibility for the Burmese military junta, the repression meted out and the lack of development in the country. After all they and Russia have previously vetoed sanctions against Burma over the issue of human rights; while China and India have major trade and investment in the country that could be used to pressure the junta into more humane behaviour - as if those who run Abu Ghraib and camp X-ray were really worried about that! However, while China is the major power in Burma today, it did not invent the junta. Military rule has lasted over four decades, long before China gained such influence. It was back in 1990 that the junta refused to accept the result of the last elections and would not allow parliament to sit. The renewed interest in democracy in Burma relates to its greater strategic importance on the imperialist chess board today. But unlike the period before 1989 each area of conflict is attended not by two imperialist blocs, but by a whole dangerous and unstable cacophony of competing interests, as Burma is today.
The revolt by the poor over fuel prices took Britain, America and all the other western powers by surprise, but it has given them an opening to play the democratic card in order to assert their own imperialist interests and make things difficult for China and its ally, Shwe. But nationalism and democracy are simply the rallying cry for the bourgeois opposition and their imperialist backers. They offer no way out of the poverty suffered by the vast majority of the population, and no way out of the dangerous conflict between China and the various other imperialist powers in the region. Alex 6.10.07
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis
[2] https://www.mcclatchydc.com/
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/302/brit-sit-resn-02
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/britain
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-iraq
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/afghanistan
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/worldrevolution/200709/2209/dispatch-workers-groups-and-potential-wider-intervention-and-discussion
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/302/index
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/304/index
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/bangladesh
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/388/egypt
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[16] https://libcom.org/article/good-old-fashioned-trade-unionism-wildcat
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/19/union-question
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/public-meetings
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/burmamyanmar