Throughout the summer the mainstream press was full of hot air about a new ‘winter of discontent'. So editors, both tabloid and broadsheet, must have breathed a collective sigh of relief when postal workers walked out en masse in October. With further action threatened by public services workers in response to paltry pay offers and the possibility of large scale action in response to job cuts at the BBC, the media's nostalgic dreams of a rerun of 1979 seem to be finally coming true. But, as usual, reality is more complicated. Unlike much that appears in the media the current strikes are not a repeat, a rerun of past ‘glories'. Workers don't struggle in order to fulfil the media's desires.

Response to an international crisis...

The growing unrest in the public sector is just the most visible national expression of a more general feeling of anger felt internationally throughout the working class. While capitalism's crisis deepens with the shock waves of America's emerging recession reaching every corner of the world, attacks on working conditions continue to increase and the number of job losses in all sectors rises daily. Whether it's on the question of pensions, housing, healthcare, jobs or the environment capitalism can't provide a perspective for the future. It is a system that has reached a stage of decomposition from which it can never escape.

Nowhere is this chaos clearer today than in the housing market. A recent biannual report from the IMF stated that, "housing markets have boomed in a number of fast-growing countries, most notably Ireland, Spain and the UK, with rapid price rises and sharp increases in residential investment relative to GDP exceeding even those observed during the US housing boom" (The Guardian 18.10.7). Put simply a number of European countries risk a US-style collapse in house prices, where according to The Guardian (25.10.7) "sales of existing homes [have plunged] to their lowest rate since records began", as the ‘credit crunch' continues to reek havoc on the American economy.

Economists may argue that the European market is more robust because it hasn't "seen such a marked deterioration in lending standards as the US" (The Guardian 18.10.7) but in Britain at least, a record number of repossessions suggests otherwise. This perspective is reinforced by the IMF report, "the extent of house price over-valuation may be considerably larger in some national markets in Europe than in the US, and there would clearly be a sizeable impact on the housing markets in the event of a widespread credit crunch" (The Guardian 18.10.7). The Bank of England is certainly nervous. In its half-yearly Financial Stability Review it "admits it would need to learn its own lessons from the handling of the three-day crisis at Northern Rock - the first run on a big UK bank in almost 150 years" and is critical "of the way banks made risky loans and them passed them on to other institutions" (The Guardian 25.10.7). So perhaps sub prime loans are not just a US problem? Ten years after Black Monday no matter what the bourgeois press tells us economists are still no better at predicting the markets. Confidence is sliding; confusion reigns.

...an international class struggle...

In response to all of this chaos only the working class is able to provide a perspective. Over the last four years the working class has regained its combativeness, shrugging off the illusions that appeared in the aftermath of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989. The struggles in, for example, France and Austria around the question of pensions in 2003 marked a turning point in the class struggle. Workers have slowly, tentatively, been returning to struggle. The evidence for this can be seen internationally with strikes stretching from Bangladesh to Brazil, from baggage handlers in London to textile workers in Cairo. As we wrote in International Review 130, "not a month passes without struggles taking place somewhere in the world, giving expression to the essential characteristics of the workers' struggle internationally, and bearing with them the seeds of the future: workers' solidarity across the barriers of corporation, generation and nationality". The recent postal strike in Britain and the potential for further strikes in the public sector must be seen in this context, in the context of the international class struggle, not through the distorted vision of the bourgeois press.

One characteristic of recent struggles is the question of a perspective for the future and the postal strike was no different. The latest official strikes at the beginning of October saw up to 130,000 walk out against the Royal Mail's provocative ‘modernisation plans', in reality an attack on jobs, wages, conditions (particularly so called ‘Spanish practices') and pensions. As one postal worker said to The Guardian (12.10.7), "they [the management] want to turn the screw". The press portrayed the strike as a ‘classic' struggle between Royal Mail management and the leaders of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) reporting on traditional late night meetings at TUC headquarters. But as we explained in WR 308, the CWU were late to ‘take the battle' to the Royal Mail and their recent complete capitulation to all of the Royal Mail's proposals except on the question of pensions, which will be discussed separately, justifies postal workers' concerns that a rotten deal would be forced on them. By removing the pensions issue from the current ‘deal' with Royal Mail management the CWU has been able to get postal workers back to work, at least for the time being. Thus fulfilling their role as a cop in the workplace: workers' militancy has been dampened and the strike movement, albeit temporarily, has been defeated.

...and expressions of class solidarity

This is not to say that postal workers have begun to openly challenge the CWU or have lost their illusions in the unions. Throughout the strike the CWU managed to maintain control over the majority of postal workers, but some interesting developments did take place during the strike that echo recent struggles internationally and provide lessons for future struggles. Throughout the strike there were real expressions of class solidarity. Although only at a local level there was a tendency for unofficial walkouts and wildcat strikes that began in the summer and continues as we write this article. At the height of the strike "some 30 depots out of a total of more than 1,400 were affected by wildcat action in London and Liverpool" (The Guardian 12.10.7). These walkouts were often in response to suspensions of workers who refused to cross picket lines (which in Liverpool included Polish agency workers) and spread spontaneously throughout the country. Workers also expressed solidarity and discussed the progress of the strike online on the Royal Mail Chat forum. The internet has opened up a new arena for workers to discuss, one which has been exploited in a number of recent struggles but most notably during the fight in France against the CPE in 2005 where participants used blogs and online forums to exchange ideas and spread the struggle.

Solidarity is the key to any struggle and although this was a strong feature of the postal strike, particularly in the wildcats, workers weren't always able to extend solidarity between offices and depots. Direct links between different groups of workers weren't made because the struggle remained within the union prison. As we wrote in World Revolution 308, "postal workers can't win alone". Workers in all sectors are under attack: in the health service workers conditions are deteriorating; teachers have just rejected their latest pay offer; on the question of pensions "more than a quarter of Britain's largest companies want to offload their final salary retirement schemes to the new breed of pension buyout funds to escape the increasing costs and regulation of guaranteed pension plans" (The Guardian 19.10.7). Of course none of this is unique to Britain. While the postal workers were on strike, rail workers in France went on strike over the pension reform plans of Sarkozy's government, closing down the Paris transport system.

So, the real lesson of the postal strike is that in order to win, workers need to spread the struggle, both throughout their own sector and across union divisions to other sectors. Workers need to revive the mass meeting where workers from all sectors in struggle are welcome and encouraged to discuss the current situation. None of this is easy: many workers still see the unions as the only way to fight the bosses' attacks and the recent behaviour of the CWU won't change this overnight. These illusions are reinforced by the left who insist that rank and file initiatives can put enough pressure on the CWU leadership to turn it into a ‘fighting union'. But if workers can begin to extend solidarity across these barriers, and there is evidence that a minority of workers have begun to do this (see the article on Dispatch in WR 307), they will see the potential of their collective strength.

From out of the shadows

British anti-parliamentarian communist Guy Aldred wrote in 1916, "The Word [i.e. the struggle against capitalism] must be whispered in the shadows before it is proclaimed from the housetops". The postal strike was part of the ‘campaign of whispering' that is currently taking place internationally amongst the working class. Workers are stepping out of the shadows and beginning to rediscover their collective voice. It may be some time before they are shouting from the rooftops, but the struggles that happen today provide important lessons for the future. Capitalism has no perspective to offer and with the attacks on pensions workers are slowly beginning to realise this. William 1.11.7

‘Everything is going well - it's not serious'. ‘There's no need to be disturbed'. These are the lying and hypocritical speeches of the bourgeoisie. In the last months, when the new phase of the acceleration of the world economic crisis of capitalism broke out, the so-called ‘sub-prime crisis', the bourgeoisie wanted at all costs to reassure us with ideological mystifications. ‘The crisis won't last long'. Ben Bernanke, new US Federal Reserve Bank chairman, suggested that the crisis would be over by next March - a bit like the First World War being over by Christmas. And the bourgeoisie were even saying that the crisis was welcome and salutary, so as to correct certain excessive speculations and reign in some bad intentioned financial sharks. Only a few weeks later reality has swept away all the words of these kidders appointed by the bourgeoisie.

In fact we haven't had to wait long to see this crisis of credit and debt propagate throughout the whole economy. And it was also foreseeable that the American economy would very quickly go into recession. This is already a fact. In the US, the economy is losing 100,000 jobs per month. Bank workers are strongly hit and massive job cuts rain down daily. In Britain the banking sector is also hit with job losses, as is the Ministry of Defence and the public sector overall; in the ‘privatised' gas, water and electricity industries job cuts are a continual process. Thousands of relatively well-paid and full-time jobs are going every week in the manufacturing sector: Cadbury, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and B.P. to name a recent few. Even in Switzerland, the symbol of the comfortable life in a capitalist regime, job cuts are the order of the day. In the USA, in the construction industry alone, redundancies are already counted in tens of thousands. This sector is, without any doubt at the moment, the hardest hit by the crisis. The construction of buildings and new houses faced with a growing stock has just undergone a violent slowdown, whereas the sector was one of the major pillars of growth. The inhumanity and indifference of the bourgeoisie has no limits when it's a question of its interests and there are nearly 500,000 immigrant workers in this sector who have seen their jobs disappear. These workers, mostly of Mexican nationality, and the families that have joined them, have been taken to the border without any form of process. Many of those who have lost their homes and deposits are immigrant workers who have just settled and been conned into outrageous debt. These foul practices of the bourgeoisie show just what this class of exploiters is capable of when they have no need for workers. But the price the working class has to pay doesn't end there.

In capitalism, there are no guarantees for the working class

Who could have imagined a couple of months ago seeing queues of workers and savers in the streets in front of building societies, coming at dawn trying to rescue their life savings from catastrophe? This is what happened at Northern Rock, the third largest borrower on the housing market in Britain. Incapable of repaying its mountain of debt, this financial institution appealed to the Bank of England to rescue it from immediate bankruptcy. The latter straightaway provided ‘support' (over 20 billion pounds so far and continuing), guarantees and public assurances that all those with deposits would be fully reimbursed. In fact, all these capitalists care not one whit that after a life of work and saving, thousands of workers would find themselves without a penny from one day to the next. Their fear lies elsewhere. Northern Rock is the first major victim, after Countrywide in the US and several German banks, of this generalised crisis of credit and debt. What the bourgeoisie fear is the effect of contagion. All banks throughout the world have, more or less, been using deposits so as to gamble them shamelessly, taking still more risks in order to heap up their profits. Worse still, they have pushed more and more working class families with low incomes into taking on more debt or making more credit available. What would happen if everyone who had savings in building societies or banks wanted to withdraw their money? Despite the promises of the bourgeoisie they would not get their money back. It's for that reason that the queues formed in front of the doors of Northern Rock.

It is faced with the fear of the collapse of the whole banking system that the bourgeoisie has reacted. In Britain, in the image of the USA, household debt is more than 100% of Gross Domestic Product and is made up of more than 80% borrowed against rising house prices. In other words, all the accumulated labour in one year, without the workers consuming anything, would not be enough to pay off this debt! After the explosion of the speculative housing bubble in the United States last August, just starting to burst in other developed countries, it is now the turn of Britain to suffer the same fate.

In fact, moving away from its reassuring mantras, the Bank of England in its ‘Financial Stability Report', published on October 25 (The Times, the same day), recognises this fact. The Report warns on credit, the vulnerability of the British economy to further shocks and can, of course, offer no solutions. The Policy Exchange think-tank (linked to the mainstream Conservative element) in its report two days earlier is more forthright: Britain's growth and low inflation is "more mirage than miracle" it says. "We need to find more sustainable foundations for our future economic prosperity than house prices and debt". And it points out that the vast increase in personal debt is matched by the public sector with the national debt more than doubling since 1992.

Capitalism's flight into debt is accelerating

The principal banks in the world and notably the US Federal Reserve as well as the Central European Bank have, throughout August, September and into October, injected colossal sums in order to support their economies and prevent as much as possible a chain reaction of bankruptcies.

But all that isn't sufficient. During the last months stock markets are still volatile and US activity has clearly slowed down. The US central bank has lowered its credit charge to lend monies to other banks and institutions by half-a-percent. As if by magic (‘the alchemy of the printing press') it has just artificially created a colossal sum of new money that has come out of nowhere. In an immediate manner and in the very short term, this will certainly have an impact on the economy and further rate cuts are predicted for the end of October in the USA. But that will not prevent the crisis continuing and developing. Much more, this policy of a still deeper generalised indebtedness, which is at the base of the present acceleration of the crisis, can only prepare for still more violent and deeper catastrophes tomorrow.   Tino/B.

After nearly 3 months of dispute the worse fears of postal workers have been confirmed. The Communication Workers Union (CWU), through its executive, have recommended acceptance of a deal which is practically the same as the original offer made by Royal Mail. After 3 weeks of wrangling Billy Hayes and Dave Ward were desperately attempting to put together a package that they could sell to postal-workers. In a joint statement of Royal Mail/CWU to all CWU branches, Ward and Hayes had the gall to say: "Royal Mail and CWU recognise that the scale of the recent dispute has the potential to damage relationships between managers, reps and employees ... Everyone wants to put the dispute behind us and we are all committed to restoring good industrial and employee relations at all levels". The statement says that "The CWU will withdraw all current and proposed industrial action relating to the national dispute".

This is after Royal Mail had agreed that union reps were reinstated to their original status, maintaining that the CWU are able to control the strike.... "We must also recognise that the agreement gives the Union the opportunity to be at the centre of dealing with change at the national and local level".

Many postal-workers are now asking themselves why they struggled so hard for so many weeks, and lost so much pay (in the case of Liverpool and London the loss of 3 weeks pay through wildcat action) to be handed a deal which is hardly distinguishable from the original offer.

The CWU boasts that it has separated the questions of pensions from the national dispute, when quite obviously postal-workers see the defence of their pension rights as absolutely fundamental. The question of the pensions has been postponed until the Twelfth of Never.

"The Postal Executive has also agreed a joint statement on the Pension Consolidation. Pensions has been decoupled from the Pay and Modernisation Agreement and given that it's a group-wide issue, will now be subject to a separate national briefing and separate communications". Retiring at 60 means a massive loss of benefits and new entrants into the industry will not be eligible for this pension scheme. Essentially, this was the original Royal Mail position on the issue of pensions as now endorsed by the CWU.

The joint agreement is not a ‘sell-out' but the time-honoured manner in which unions play their role in disputes.

With the question of pay, the 6.9% (5.4% now and the rest at a later date) that the CWU has accepted is practically the same increase that was originally offered by Royal Mail. The sweetener being a lump sum of £175 with acceptance and the possibility of a further £400 some time in the future under Royal Mail's phoney ‘ColleagueShare' scheme. The £400 is contingent on ‘productivity' and ‘flexibility' completed in "phase 2 of the modernisation process". Acceptance of the pay deal means an acceptance of the modernisation process put forward by RM. ‘Flexibility' will change working practices in the industry and was the main concern of all postal-workers and the reason that they fought so hard during the strike. The CWU tried to circumvent this thorny issue by very devious means indeed. It placed the question of change and flexibility onto the local level, which meant by-passing the CWU executive and passing it on to local union reps and RM managers.

Such are the changes to present working practices that workers will be asked to work all sorts of different hours and with management having the ability to use posties at any time. Also group working will be introduced on the Dutch model which sets responsibility for dealing with large volumes of mail traffic on the shoulders of postal-workers.

Royal Mail would not be able to introduce such changes without the determination of the CWU to sell the deal to postal workers. It's yet more evdence that workers need to take struggles into their own hands.   Melmoth 3/11/7

In Oslo, on 12 October 2007, the Norwegian Nobel Committee decided to award the Noble Peace Prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore Jr.

The IPCC is the body set up between the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organisation to monitor and report on the science of global warming. Al Gore Jr. is the former US vice-president who failed narrowly to beat George W Bush in 2000, and is now a campaigner on climate change issues.

The Nobel Committee explained their decision to award the peace prize to environmentalists- "Extensive climate change may alter and threaten the living conditions of much of mankind. They may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth's resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world's most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states." (Nobel Peace Prize 2007-Press release)

By awarding half the prize to Al Gore, the committee reveal their real attitudes to the environment and to peace, no less than when Henry Kissinger, principal weaver of the carpet bombing of Cambodia and other atrocities, was given the same prize in 1973, prompting the musical satirist Tom Lehrer to say that "political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Prize."

As we wrote in no. 143 of our US paper, Internationalism: "Despite all the media glorification celebrating Gore as the pre-eminent champion of the environment, Gore, like the rest of the capitalist class, is an environmental hypocrite. In light of his acknowledgment that Kyoto was never meant to impact seriously on GHG emissions, Gore's denunciation of the Bush administration's attitude on Kyoto and global warming rings hollow. Furthermore, while Gore voiced support for Kyoto in 1997, the Clinton/Gore administration did nothing to push for ratification of the treaty. A bi-partisan ‘sense of the Senate resolution' opposing the treaty because it exempted China and India from emissions limits and ‘would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States', passed by 95-0. Clinton/Gore administration never submitted the treaty for ratification, and the U.S. has not abided by the guidelines. Thus, no matter how much Gore vilifies Bush for not embracing Kyoto and no matter how clumsy Bush is in how he talks about the environment, the rejection of Kyoto has been a consensus policy position of the American bourgeoisie that began on the Clinton/Gore watch. Bush's policy is a continuity of the position set by Clinton/Gore in 1997".

Al Gore defends US national interests because he is a bourgeois politician and does not wish to get rid of the main cause of the destruction of our world: capitalism and its relentless pursuit of profit. By the same token, the "violent conflicts and wars" referred to by the Nobel Committee are caused by the frenzied competition between capitalist nation states.

Wars and environmental destruction are a normal part of capitalism in its period of decomposition. Each section of the bourgeoisie is forced into conflict to maintain its position or face defeat. The spirit of global co-operation is impossible in such a system.

Only the efforts of the working class to destroy capitalism are worthy of such an award, but the turkeys in Oslo will never be voting for Christmas.   Ash 31/11/07

On the 17th October President Bush insisted that he "had told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make nuclear weapons". This could be dismissed as another example of Bush's exaggerated rhetoric, but underlying this statement is the real threat that the wounded bear that is US imperialism will strike out at imperialist rivals that are constantly baiting it.

World War III is not around the corner. The conditions do not exist for it: the world is not divided into military blocs, and the working class is not defeated and ready to march off to war for its ruling class. Nevertheless, the Bush regime is stepping up military and economic pressure on Iran with the declaration that the Revolutionary Guards are a terrorist organisation, the build up of US armed forces in the Gulf and the growing propaganda campaign aimed at preparing the population for the possibility US military action against Iran (in the name of stopping it gaining nuclear weapons) holding out the perspective of a qualitative worsening of military barbarism in the Middle East and internationally.

This threat of military action against Iran, while it is still up to its neck in the disaster of Iraq and with Afghanistan heading in the same direction, appears crazy, courting even greater disaster. Nevertheless, American imperialism is tightly bound by the insane logic of imperialism. As the world's only superpower it has to force every other imperialist power to accept its domination, whilst all its rivals are forced by the same insane reasoning not only to resist this domination but to do all they can to undermine US imperialism. It is this logic that has reduced Iraq to chaos, and which threatens to engulf the whole region (the cradle of human civilisation) into such terror.

Iran is seen as a pivotal country in the Middle East by US imperialism. The old warhorse of US imperialism Zbigniew Brzezinski defines pivotal countries as "Active geo-strategic players are the states that have the capacity and the national will to exercise power or influence beyond their borders in order to alter -to a degree that affects America's interests- the existing geopolitical state of affairs....Turkey, and Iran play the role of critically important pivots" (The Grand Chess Board, 1997). Iran sits astride the Middle East and Central Asia, and is thus important to the US's plans to dominate this region and Western Europe and Russia beyond. The US would also like to control its oil supplies.

This pivotal position cost the populations of Iran and Iraq over one million dead during the war in the 1980s when the US backed Iraq. The reason for this war was Iran's break with the US bloc, through the overthrow of the US backed Shah and the imposition of a theocracy. The sheer barbarity of this war: chemical weapons, the mass slaughter of wave upon wave of soldiers from both sides, including children, rocket attacks on cities, all of this done with the direct cooperation of the Western Bloc (the Iran/Contra scandal demonstrated that the US was arming both sides) in order to bring Iran to heel, demonstrated that something had changed in imperialist relations. Previously in the post WW2 period wars had been proxy ones between the two blocs. Iran was something new, an imperialist power that defended its own interests in open defiance of both East and West. It was a foretaste of the spirit of ‘every man for himself' that let rip after the collapse of the old bloc system.

In the first Gulf War the Iranian bourgeoisie had supported the US, as it attacked its old rival, but any ambitions it may have had to take advantage of the weakening Iraq were stopped when the US left Saddam in power. The disaster of the Second Gulf War for the US has allowed Iran to feed its imperialist appetite. The destruction of Saddam and the following chaos has allowed Iran to use its influence with the Shia bourgeoisie to full effect. The ‘government' of Iraq is dominated by Shia parties with links to Iran, but who also want to keep it at arms length, whilst in the South the Iran backed Shia militia have routed the British and gained control of the region. At the same time the Iranian bourgeoisie has made every effort to develop the means to produce nuclear weapons in order to better challenge its main imperialist rival in the region, Israel, and to give it a bargaining card with US imperialism in the same way as North Korea.

The Iranian bourgeoisie is also trying to take full advantage of the weakening of US imperialism and its major rivals' willingness to try and thwart its plans. Thus, its willingness to go along with diplomatic solution proposed by the EU above all Germany and Italy who have close ties with Tehran and thus can further their own imperialist ambitions.

Europe is not a homogenous whole. Each country has it own interests to defend. Thus French imperialism, that has historical ties with Lebanon and Syria, has taken a hard line. A line which also aims to worsen the situation of British imperialism which has suffered a mauling in the South of Iraq (see ‘No way out for British imperialism' WR 308) and through being too closely tied to the US in Iraq. It does not want to be pulled into another conflict, hence Brown's more subtle support for sanctions. Nevertheless, the SAS has been engaged with US and Austrian special forces in operations along the Iraq/Iranian boarder and within Iran (Sunday Times 22.10.07). This expresses the difficulty facing Britain, since it needs to take part in such operations in order to protect the beleaguered troops at Basra Airport, and not to appear to abandon the US, but at the same time such operations risk dragging it into military escalation beyond its control.

This explosive situation is made even more threatening by the increasing involvement of Russian imperialism. In October there was a summit of Caspian Sea countries: Iran, Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan in Tehran. The summit cemented a growing relationship between Russia and Iran: "Indeed, it is as much shared interests as common worries and concerns, eg, the US's unbounded interventionist policies, that have now brought Iran and Russia closer together and to the verge of a new strategic relationship. After all, both Iran and Russia are today objects of American coercion, their national security interests and objectives imperilled by the US's post-9/11 militarism" (Asia Times on-line, 18.10.07). It is reported that President Putin told Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that "An American attack on Iran will be viewed by Moscow as an attack on Russia" (Asia Times On-line 26.10.07), during an unprecedented meeting with the ‘supreme leader'.

Iranian imperialism is also making eyes at Chinese imperialism. It wants to join China and Russia in a ‘counter-weight to US hegemony', the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. China is more circumspect in its support for Iran than Russia, but does see its interests served by appearing to oppose the US's belligerent attitude to Iran.

To this mix has to be added growing destabilisation of the region marked by Turkey's threats against Northern Iraq, and Israeli imperialism's determination to show that its defeat in Lebanon last year was a one off. Israel has always said it will try to stop Iran developing nuclear weapons and in a situation where it appears to be weakened such an action appears all the more likely. At the same time Saudi Arabia cannot allow its regional position to be weakened by a resurgent Iran.

What the outcome of this boiling cauldron of tensions will be we cannot predict. What we can say though is that US imperialism is caught in a vicious vice: if it does not make a display of its military might its rivals will seek to take full advantage of its weakness, whilst if it does take military action against Iran it will push the whole region deeper into chaos. Whether or not the US decides to take military action this time, the working class and humanity will still be subjected to the chaos in Iraq, the whipping up of nationalist hysteria in Iran, the constant threat of military action by Turkey or Israel and all the misery that this will lead to.  Phil 2.11.07

Martial law has been declared in Pakistan, the culmination of all the conflicts that have been going on within the state since the summer. This appears to have been precipitated by the fears that the High Court might rule Musharraf ineligible for his re-election as president last month, and he has finally replaced the Chief Justice with one of his own men, something he tried and failed to do in August when he pulled back from declaring a state of emergency. This suspension of the Constitution contrasts with all the propaganda about moving towards democracy and civilian rule and will put Benazir Bhutto in a difficult situation as she flies back from Dubai. She originally returned from exile after swapping an amnesty for agreeing that her supporters would not block Musharraf's election. It will also put a spanner in the works for the US tactic of supporting a coalition of the ‘moderates', those likely to be most willing and able to support it against Al Qaida.

Among all the pious expressions of concern voiced by various bigwigs around the world, British Foreign secretary David Miliband said "We recognise the threat to peace and security faced by the country...". To understand what is going on in Pakistan today we don't so much need to look at how the President is looking after his personal self-interest, but why the ruling class as a whole cannot cohere and why a section of it put a military dictator in charge. To do so we need to see where Pakistan stands in the geo-strategic map of the world and the imperialist tensions that are pulling it apart. It has a large frontier with Afghanistan, as well as having Iran, China and India on its borders. It has over a million Afghan refugees. The six decade long fight with India over Kashmir is hardly Pakistan's only concern. Internal conflicts, such as the battle between the army and Islamists in the North West region, complete the picture of a country being torn apart by the pressures coming from within and without.

The effects of conflicts between the great powers

Back in the 1980s, when the major imperialist conflicts were between the USA and its allies and vassals on the one hand and the Russian imperialist bloc on the other, Pakistan was strategically important for western supplies to the Mujahadin, who were fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. Back then, these Islamists had not just God but also the CIA and American Stinger missiles on their side, and Russia was duly forced out. Pakistan also has its interests in Afghanistan, a useful hinterland for training and strategic depth in its confrontation with India in Kashmir.

More recently the USA launched its own invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, using the destruction of the World Trade Centre etc and the need for a ‘war on terror' as an excuse. Once again Pakistan's support was needed. America promised it would support those tribes hostile to the Northern Alliance, Pakistan's traditional enemy and a barrier to its influence in Afghanistan, but this promise was broken when the Northern Alliance gained influence in the post-Taliban settlement. In any case, Pakistan's assistance was obtained by other means of persuasion when the US threatened to bomb it into the stone age if it didn't give support. This threat has been more or less repeated by Barack Obama in the current presidential campaign, suggesting that the US could bomb Al Qaida strongholds in Pakistan without permission.

At the same time there were millions of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, adding to the instability of the country, and even though 2.3 million were repatriated in 2005, over a million remain.

Regional imperialist interests

Pakistan has its own imperialist interests, and to pursue them has made itself the greatest recipient of arms transfers in the third world in 2006, with India coming a close second. Its conflict with its larger Indian rival over Kashmir and their nuclear arms race led to the brink of war in 2002, with the weaker power stating it would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons against a superior enemy. The danger of war was averted with pressure from the US, which did not want this conflict getting in the way of its pursuit of its own military adventures, but none of the issues were resolved. The peace process Pakistan was forced into meant it could not take advantage of any of its gains on the ground. The conflict has been continued in a less newsworthy way with terrorist attacks in both countries, and in Kashmir itself Pakistan admitting to only ‘moral and diplomatic' support to Islamists, but in fact giving much more, and India repressing these fundamentalist ‘freedom fighters'. Both sides rely on virulent nationalism and neither shows any concern for their uncounted victims.

When the strategic situation is looked at more widely it is not to Pakistan's advantage. Forced at gunpoint to support the USA in its ‘war on terror' it can gain nothing from its loyalty to the USA. As China is following up its economic growth rates with growth in its imperialist appetites so it is coming into conflict with not only India but also America. Pakistan is faced with a convergence of interests between its traditional enemy, India, and its super-power boss of bosses. And to make a bad situation worse, Pakistan finds itself in the middle between its two much stronger ‘allies' and major trading partners, the USA and China, as they come into conflict.

The failure of the ‘war on terror'

The ‘war on terror' has not been a major success for the USA, faced as it is with a quagmire in Iraq and an intractable Afghanistan which limit its options in its desire to launch new military adventures. For Pakistan this is a further disaster. As the US shows its weakness, so Al Qaida supporters, many of them based in North West Pakistan, are more daring. Soldiers are kidnapped or killed with impunity. In the summer 200 were killed in 10 weeks and at the end of August 250 were kidnapped in South Waziristan without firing a shot, giving rise to speculation that the Army has been infiltrated. Neither the 90,000 troops deployed to the border nor the $10 billion US aid has brought the situation under control. A government peace deal with tribal leaders in Waziristan angered America, but broke down and fighting has increased since the storming of the Red Mosque. Musharraf cannot please anyone. Some senior officers blame him for being distracted by the political crisis.

In Pakistan the state is at war with itself. Opposition leaders were rounded up in September, former PM Nawaz Sharif was expelled as soon as he returned. Political rallies are the scene of terrorist murders. High Court judges protested against the administration after one of them was sacked, and then suspended a police chief after violence at a demonstration of protesting lawyers. These are the institutions at the heart of the state and their conflict reflects the way the country is being torn apart by the imperialist conflicts that go under the heading of the ‘war on terror'. And now this has culminated in the declaration of the state of emergency.

Whether elections are held in January or not, there will be no move to democracy and civilian government, Pakistan is struggling to avoid being torn apart. Even without being directly attacked it shows the chaos and misery that is being caused by imperialist conflicts today.   Alex 3/11/07

During October workers' struggles continued in Egypt. This year, according to one source, there have been 580 ‘industrial actions' in the nine months to the end of September. This compares to 222 strikes recorded in the whole of 2006. The strikes continue to be as inspiring as during last December's strike wave (see WR 302 [8] , 304 [9] , 308 [10] ). Workers in state-owned industries have found themselves coming up against the state as employer, but also against the state-run unions. In an article in Middle East Report Online Joel Beinin writes that "Opposition to the regime takes the form of opposition to the Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF), which, though nominally an umbrella group representing all of the country's organized workers, is in fact an arm of the state. The Mahalla workers renewed their call for impeaching the local union committee, which reports to the ETUF and has sided with the regime and company management throughout 2006 and 2007. Fourteen thousand Mahalla workers signed petitions in support of this demand in March. ETUF representatives were less than useless in the September strike. The head of the local factory committee resigned after he was beaten by workers and taken to the hospital. ETUF secretary-general Husayn Mugawir announced that he would not visit Mahalla until the crisis was resolved."

In opposition to this state of affairs Muhammad al-‘Attar, a strike leader who was imprisoned at one point, told the Daily News Egypt (27/9/7) "We want a change in the structure and hierarchy of the union system in this country.... The way unions in this country are organised is completely wrong, from top to bottom. It is organised to make it look like our representatives have been elected, when really they are appointed by the government."

Elsewhere around the world there are demands for, and the growth of ‘independent' unions. For example in South Africa the government is made up of the ANC, the South African Communist Party and the COSATU union federation. It should come as no surprise that there are more ‘militant' ‘independent' unions that are fiercely critical of COSATU and how its government role prevents it from acting properly on behalf of workers. In the US leftists want unions that don't support the Democratic Party.

In Palestine there are four different union federations, three controlled by Fatah and one by Hamas. Appointments to union positions are made on a political basis, and there is currently a campaign for unions that are independent of the political factions and the Palestine Authority.

In Venezuela, for 40 years before Hugo Chavez came to power in 1998, the trade union tops were explicitly part of the state. Trade unionists are currently arguing as to whether there's a need for trade union organisation that's independent of the Chavist apparatus.

In Iran, Vietnam, Cambodia, China and Algeria, and in many other countries where either unions are closely identified with the state or ‘alternative' unions are illegal, there are ‘independent' unions or at least campaigns for ‘real' unions that will represent workers' interests.

Illusions fomented by militant rhetoric

There are many political currents that are sympathetic to this demand for ‘independent' unions. In the leftist mainstream there is the Socialist Workers Party which sums up its basic position in saying "No matter how left wing union officials or union policies may be, the need regularly arises for independent rank and file organisation within and across the unions". But there are also many anarchist currents that are sympathetic to the idea of unions that have distanced themselves from the state.

The SWP says it doesn't matter how left wing official union policies are. This is true, but the SWP don't tell us the reason. The  official policies of a union don't matter because its function remains the same regardless of whether it proclaims its loyalty to the state or breathes the rhetoric of militancy or even revolution. Unions have become an integral part of capitalism. They try to control the working class, to sabotage its struggles, or divert it into dead-ends that don't challenge the capitalist state. Indeed, far from defending the interests of the working class, unions have become part of the capitalist state, or, in the most radical instances, an ‘alternative' adjunct to the state.

So, when the SWP sees the need for something ‘independent', that exists ‘within and across the unions', it only amounts to a plea for differently structured unions, not for a change in their function, which, as they almost admit, is not possible, no matter how left wing their policies are. The only difference in a union that has a more democratic constitution or a more ‘militant' or ‘independent' reputation is that workers will have more illusions in it.

In their struggles workers need to create their own fighting organisations that correspond to the need for the extension and unification of working class struggle. Just because there are unions that brandish oppositional rhetoric and insist on their autonomy doesn't change their basic function. And just because some unions are harassed and repressed by many regimes today doesn't make them friends of the working class. What were organisations of the working class in the 19th century, when it was possible to wrest reforms from a still-developing capitalism, have become organisations of the ruling class in the period of capitalist decay, when the overall trend is towards the deterioration of the conditions of work and life of the working class.

Going back to the article on Egypt, it describes the union as having "sided with the regime and company management throughout 2006 and 2007." It's as though there was something exceptional in this and that, as Muhammad al-‘Attar suggested, a change in structure and hierarchy could rectify the anomaly. In fact, far from being an anomaly, unions, in one way or another, now always end up on the opposite side to workers. Some unions are obviously state-run, but workers shouldn't be deceived into thinking that the ‘independent alternative' serves the bourgeoisie any the less.

Remember Solidarnosc

The most dramatic example of an independent (and large-scale) union is Solidarnosc which emerged in Poland in 1980-81. The working class in a massive wave of strikes created a number of organs as part of its struggle. Committees were set up that acted in accordance to the needs of the struggle, responsive to workers' demands, with recallable delegates and a drive to the extension of the struggle across the whole country. Workers were understandably suspicious of the blatantly state unions; indeed that was one element in the dynamic toward the self-organisation of their struggle. However, there were also widespread illusions in the possibility of ‘independent' unions that would function differently from the Stalinist unions they had become used to. The growth of Solidarnosc gradually meant the decline of the struggle, as Walesa and Co transformed it from a workers' mass strike into a movement for the reform of Polish capitalism. Solidarnosc had already effectively broken the struggle before the imposition of martial rule in December 1981. For Walesa to later become Polish president was entirely in keeping with his earlier role. Brazilian President Lula's career also started in militant trade unionism (see WR 28).

This is the fate of all ‘independent' unions. Because they are formed in the framework of capitalist social relations they act to perpetuate the exploitation of labour by capital, regardless of the intentions of those who create them. In contrast, strike committees, assemblies, councils, and other bodies that are thrown up by the working class during its struggle have the potential to defend workers' interests, not just the re-arrangement of exploitation. When you look at the workers' councils that were created in the revolutions in Russia in 1905 and 1917, you can see the creation of organs capable of destroying the capitalist state and laying the basis for a classless society based on relations of solidarity. No union can ever pose anything other than the restructuring of capitalism. Car 31/10/07

Japan is one of the most powerful economies in the world but for decades the Japanese working class has been the victim of an extremely harsh and brutal exploitation. In this totally dehumanised society, workers must compete to survive; they spend long days at the office or the factory and this means many can't go home every night and have to sleep in various overcrowded dormitories near to their workplaces. And yet, until not so long ago, Japanese workers could look forward to a future of stable and reasonably well-paid jobs.

However, there has been a deep economic depression for the last 10 years. The working class is under attack from worsening poverty and insecurity and the new entrants to the labour market, young people, are being hit the hardest. This sector of the population, branded ‘the precariat' from a fusion of the words ‘precarity' and ‘proletariat', is being asked to accept unbearable living conditions.

The ‘precariat' and worsening poverty for young workers

In Japan, as elsewhere, young people have to put up with temporary jobs that are insecure and badly paid. In the best case, if they hang on to their job for a full month, they can ‘expect' to receive the equivalent of £400. But they will be expected to work extremely hard with poor pay and with three people doing the work of ten. For this whole sector of workers, housing itself and feeding itself has become an increasingly impossible task.

Because of these conditions, the manga cafés (cafés open 24 hours a day where customers read magazines and surf the internet) have become a sort of surreal escape from tiredness and the cold. Young people unable to afford to eat or drink here gather in large numbers just to get some sleep: "One 20 year old boy was arrested in January 2007 for not having paid for his food in a manga café [...], where he had spent 3 days. All he had in his pocket was 15 yen (about 10 pence). He had been staying in this place to avoid the cold and had only eaten a single meal with chips during the three days. The employee of another manga café had told me of one occasion when a customer had stayed for a week and had only consumed drinks in that time." (Courrier International, 05/07/07.)

The most despicable thing of all is that the ruling class wants workers to feel it's all their own fault. The bourgeoisie accuses the unemployed and temporary workers of being ‘good for nothings' ‘exploiting the system'. Subjected to this nauseating propaganda that ‘every man is his own keeper', young people suffering the insecurity and the drudgery are weighed down by the feeling that their lives are going nowhere. The pressure they feel is so severe that there has been a big wave of suicides and self-harming. And suicide has become the main cause of death in Japan for young people between the ages of 20 and 39!

Working class youth is searching but still hasn't found a way to respond to these attacks

However, since 2002, Japanese youth is slowly gaining confidence and beginning to get angry. Expressions of rebellion against this society are more common. In 2006, an important protest for free accommodation took place. Slogans raised by the column of demonstrators read: "We are living in dilapidated buildings", "We are staying in rooms of 4.5 tatamis [around 7.4 sq m]", "We are unable to pay the rent!", "Free accommodation!"....

For them to see that their situation is not their own fault but is due to the deep crisis affecting society is a vital necessity and it's the start of the reflection underway in the ranks of working class youth: "It is clear that, if young people's lives today have reached a point where they feel desperate, it doesn't mean that they have personal psychological problems or problems of will-power, rather, it is due to the unhealthy desire of companies who want to continue benefiting from a ‘flexible' labour force, so they can stay competitive internationally". However, there is still some way to go before a real perspective of struggle is reached. This sector has to be able to see itself as a part of a much greater whole, namely the working class. This can only happen when the struggles are able to go beyond the stage of responding to attacks in an immediate and impotent manner. For the present, while these young people feel isolated and cut off from the rest of the working class, the bourgeoisie will be able to channel the anger of all the temporary or unemployed workers into dead-ends and into despair. It's no surprise that a song ringing out from the loud speakers at the demonstrations was the Sex Pistols' No Future.

Japanese youth are not an exceptional case. In Germany, the young people feel obliged to accept government jobs for one Euro per hour. In Australia, for example, "one quarter of Australians between 20 and 25 years of age are not in full-time in work or at college, 15% more than it was ten years ago and it doesn't get much better for 35 year olds." (La Tribune, 10/08/07). In France in 2006 the bourgeoisie attempted to impose a new type of employment contract making sackings with no compensation possible, through the notorious CPE (the ‘Contrat Première Embauche'; young people sarcastically called it the ‘Contrat Poubelle (rubbish, in English) Embauche' (see ‘Movement against CPE: a rich experience for future struggles [12]' ) But on this occasion, the working class youth knew how to mobilise en masse. The struggle was victorious and rousing; the bourgeoisie had to withdraw the attack. It is a clear demonstration that there is a real perspective for the new generations today in linking their struggles once again to the collective struggle of their class. 28/10/7

We recently held two conferences in two of the country’s universities, Santiago de los Caballeros (the second-largest city in the country) and Santo Domingo (the capital city), on the theme ‘Socialism and the Decadence of Capitalism’. These debates were made possible by the efforts of an internationalist discussion group. We are sincerely grateful for the work they performed. There was nothing academic about these meetings. Just as during a similar conference held in a Brazilian university [14] , participants expressed concerns about the future that capitalism offers, about the way to struggle for a new society that can overcome the contradictions of the present system, about the social forces capable of bringing about this change...

These debates represent a moment in the efforts being made by proletarian minorities to develop class consciousness. The international dimension of these efforts is indisputable. The publishing of a summary of these discussions has two objectives: to participate in the development of an international debate, and to help to move these discussions which have developed in one country towards the only potentially fruitful framework: the international and internationalist framework.

Following our presentation, many questions were asked, some of which evoked lively discussions. In the following summary we have organised the discussions thematically and in a question-and-answer format.

There were several revolutions in the 20th century. You condemn all of them nonetheless, except the Russian Revolution, which you qualify as a failure. You are unfair towards the efforts of peoples struggling for their liberation.

The issue is not denigrating the struggles of the oppressed and exploited classes, but understanding what revolution is truly on the agenda since the beginning of the 20th century. According to this point of view, a fundamental change occurred with the explosion of the First World War. That war, unprecedented until then in its barbarity, showed the world that capitalism had become a decadent social system that could offer nothing to humanity but war, famine, destruction and misery. It brought to a close the period of bourgeois revolutions - of popular democratic, reformist and national revolutions. Those movements became simple resurfacings of the facade of the state. Since that war, the only revolution capable of bringing progress to humanity is the proletarian revolution whose aim is to establish a communist world. The Russian Revolution in 1917 and the whole revolutionary wave that followed it expressed this new state of affairs. The first congress of the Communist International in March of 1919 thus affirmed: “A new epoch has been born. Ours is the epoch of the breakdown of capital, its internal disintegration, the epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat”.

Why do you insist on the dogma of a world revolution, and why do you reject gradual improvements thorough national revolutions?

The bourgeois revolutions had a national character and could survive for long periods of time within national borders. This is how the English Revolution triumphed in the 1640s and survived in a feudal world until the bourgeois revolutions of the late 18th century. The proletarian revolution will either be global or it won’t be. First of all because production today is global. But also because capitalism has created a global market, and the laws of this market, the problems engendered by capitalism, have a global character and can only be resolved through the unified struggle of the entire global proletariat.

What is your position on Trotsky and Trotskyism?

Trotsky was a life-long revolutionary militant. He played a very important role during the Russian Revolution of 1917. He also struggled against the degeneration of the Russian Revolution by defending internationalist positions. He was the principal animator of the Left Opposition, which led a heroic struggle against the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia and within the Communist parties of the world. However, Trotsky and the Left Opposition never understood the nature of the USSR, considering it to be a bureaucratically deformed workers’ state that nonetheless needed to be defended. The consequences of that error were tragic. After his cowardly murder by Stalin’s assassin Ramon Mercader, those who claimed to be his heirs called for participating in the Second World War and became a political current that always defends, ‘critically’ of course, and using a radical lingo, the same postulates as the Stalinists and social-democrats.

You are unfair towards Chavez, but worse still: you ignore the revolutionary process inspired by Chavez, that is developing all over Latin America and putting the region into a revolutionary fervour.

The Chavism/anti-Chavism choice is a trap, as was demonstrated recently by the student mobilisations in Venezuela that are trying to free themselves from this sterile and destructive polarisation between Chavism and the Opposition.

Chavez supports the strengthening of state intervention in the economy as well as the concentration of powers into the hands of a single person (the constitutional reform to permit his perpetual re-election). He launches ‘social’ programmes that may momentarily address the situation of some marginalised layers, but in reality reinforce the exploitation of workers and the impoverishment of the vast majority of the population. The function of such programmes is to make the population accept the most degrading poverty. We are talking about formulae that have been repeated throughout the 20th century, and have all been resounding failures. They didn’t change capitalism; they simply helped to maintain capitalism and to maintain the sufferings of the masses.

Chavez claims he’s “anti-imperialist” due to his vigorous opposition to the devil Bush. Chavez’s so-called anti-imperialism is nothing but a smoke-screen to cover his own imperialist designs. Workers and oppressed peoples cannot base their struggles on feelings of hatred or vengeance against an all-powerful empire like the United States, because these feelings are manipulated by the Latin American bourgeois fractions, be they government or opposition fractions, to make the people sacrifice for the interests of the rulers.

There is no national solution to the global crisis of capitalism. The solution can only be international and based on the international solidarity of the proletariat, through the development of its autonomous struggles.

Why do you only talk about workers and not about peasants and other layers?

Regardless of its numerical importance in each country, the working class is the only class whose interests are global. Its struggles as a class represent the interests and the future of all the exploited and oppressed. The working class tries to win over the peasants and the marginalised layers of the cities to its struggle. This doesn’t entail the formation of a front of social movements because the real interests, the authentic liberation of workers, peasants, and the marginalised people of the cities isn’t a sum of corporatist grievances, but the destruction of the yoke of wage slavery and the profit system.

Aren’t you falling into outmoded recipes? The working class no longer exists, and here in America, there are no factories left.

The working class has never been limited to industrial workers. What characterizes the working class is the social relation based on the exploitation of wage labour. The working class is not a sociological category. Industrial workers, farm workers, public employees, and ‘intellectual’ workers are part of the proletariat. We must not forget all the workers that have been thrown into unemployment or who are forced to survive by peddling on the streets.

Isn’t a change in mentality necessary if workers are to make the revolution?

Of course! The proletarian revolution isn’t simply the result of unavoidable objective factors; it bases itself on the conscious and collective action of the great masses of workers. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels say that the revolution is not only necessary for the destruction of the State that oppresses the majority, but also for that majority to emancipate itself from the ideological rags that stick to its body. The proletarian revolution prepares itself with a gigantic transformation in the mentality of the masses. It is the product of the independent effort of the masses through struggles and through passionate debates. ICC 31/10/07

As usual, the organisers of the Anarchist Book Fair in London denied us a stall on the grounds that we are ‘dogmatic, authoritarian Leninists'. But, as usual, we set up a stall outside, and had many friendly and fraternal discussions with comrades from various backgrounds. We also went to 3 meetings - one on the NHS, one (allegedly) on workers' councils, and the meeting reported below by one of our sympathisers. We think it raises some interesting questions about human origins and early human society that we hope to come back to at a later date.

This is a report of a meeting on "Were the first humans anarchist?" by the ‘Radical Anthropology Group' that aims "...to communicate findings from modern science and anthropology relevant to an anarchist audience and to convince people of the relevance and importance of anthropology to political activism. This is for political activists interested in what science can teach us about what it means to be human".

The presentation made by Chris Knight, an evolutionary anthropologist, started off underlining the importance of the appearance of Homo Sapiens that he characterised as the "first revolution that worked". He pointed out the egalitarian aspects of hunter-gatherer society and the development of gens-based organisation, as opposed to the nuclear family of today. He was dismissive of previous species of Homo, whose millions of years' existence he described as "Darwinian dog eat dog". The "missing pieces to the jigsaw of the revolution" he informed us, was menstruation and the moon. Women ovulate around the full moon or a 29 and a half -day cycle, and this coincides with the hunt, which takes place then because of the light of the moon. His basic thesis was feminist, in that "oppressed sex, sex strikes and women's secrets was the basis for the HS revolution". In a short while he had dismissed Sapiens' ancestors as "animals"; he also dismissed male Homo Sapiens, often falling into the most ignorant bourgeois descriptions of ‘cave-man'. He could prove beyond doubt the menstruation theory because of the use of red ochre on body decoration, a totally unscientific assertion. One of the lessons from this for revolution today would be not to take power, but to take back this time of plenty and fun for today and perhaps have street parties once a month.

I've no doubt that menstruation was an important element and that the moon played a significant role in hunter-gatherer society and, possibly, the former rituals involved the use of red ochre. But to elevate this assertion to an importance of a motor force of change was ridiculous and unscientific. I spoke to agree with the importance of primitive communism as a concept and the qualitative leap that Homo Sapiens represented, but denounced his ignorant dismissal of pre-Sapiens species as "animals". I also pointed out that his ‘irrefutable' proof of the use of red ochre by Sapiens predated this species by hundreds of thousands of years. It was used by Homo Heidelbergensis 300,000 years ago, by everyone's admission by Neanderthals, in France, Spain and Czechoslovakia, and even findings in the Olduvai beds of Africa date from one million years ago. My inference was that its use in hunter gatherer society was more to do with life and death (red ochre is probably the "red earth" in Genesis from which God created Adam). He insisted he was the one digging in Africa, and it was left to his colleague to point out to the meeting that the use of red ochre as body decoration predated Homo Sapiens by some time. I also raised the question of the change from hunter gathering to the Neolithic - a change from a relative paradise to hard work and struggle, and this question was taken up by several other interventions. I put the view that this change was more due to the development of tools, associated labour and consciousness, where what is described as "cave men" were building stone temples prior to the domestication of plants and animals. "Where were they building them" he mocked, "in caves?" Which of course they were - twenty thousand years earlier in southern France and northern Spain, before the complex stone structures around the Tigris and Euphrates some ten thousand years ago.

He hit the roof about tools and referred to a discussion with or within the SWP on this question that I have never heard of, but he was dismissive of tools as a factor in the development of man and described it as an "anti-woman" concept (and politically correct as these feminists usually are, he also found the generic term "man" offensive). He said that monkeys use tools. I pointed out that so did birds, but the evidence for fine tooling within the development of the hand and the undoubted effect on consciousness prior to Sapiens was substantial, while not denying the qualitative leap that Homo Sapiens represented. In this respect, Anton Pannekoek's description of the development of touch, fingers and thumb, the hand, tools and consciousness represented a major contribution to the marxist understanding of the development of humanity. In Anthropogenesis, Pannekoek writes wonderfully about how the first hominid creatures, Sapiens' ancestors, began making advances through the use of tools and how the brain developed consciousness through a "detour", an indirectness, i.e., not using something for immediate gratification, but putting it off for better effect or result. A sideways dip to appear in front as it were, which I think is a good description of one of the properties of sub-atomic particles, which again accords similarities with marxism, consciousness and the science of quantum mechanics. But our anarchist anthropologist said that tools in the hands of species of Homo would have been used as weapons. This statement represents the crassest, most ignorant thought of the bourgeoisie.

Determined to demonstrate his anti-scientific credentials further, he particularly singled out and lambasted baboons! This seemed to be from the point of view of an anti-female activity by male baboons. But marxism has always taken lessons from the animal kingdom and a recent 14-year study of the Moremi baboons of Botswana [16] by Cheney and Seyfarth of the University of Pennsylvania has demonstrated the bearing of the dynamics of baboon society and baboon thought processes on the nature and evolution of the human mind and human existence (New York Times, 28.10.7). As Darwin wrote in 1838: "He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke".

I further intervened to underline the role of women and the development of democracy in post hunter-gatherer society, a positive point for the working class in the marxist understanding of the necessity for world revolution today given the collapse of capitalism. But this sorry anarchist ‘analysis' by Radical Anthropology was more concerned about monthly street parties than the lessons of prehistory for the struggle of the working class or for the working class at all. Baboon 1.11.7

On 17 October, the Turkish parliament voted overwhelmingly in favour of the right of the Turkish army to pursue Kurdish guerrillas of the PKK back to their bases in northern Iraq. Four days later, 13 Turkish soldiers were killed in a PKK ambush, fanning the flames of a war campaign that had already begun. Nationalist demonstrations, some of them very large, have been organised all over Turkey, fully supported by the army, the police, the majority of political parties, the majority of the trade unions, the media, and the education system. Every citizen is urged to hang a Turkish flag from his window or to carry them to football matches. Shops and office buildings vie with each other to display the biggest flag.

For the Turkish ruling class, this is part of the ‘war against terrorism' which of course has a US designer label. But the American bourgeoisie, which certainly regards Turkey as a key ally in its military strategy for the Middle East, is not entirely happy about these developments. Shortly before the Turkish parliament's declaration, the Democratic majority in the US Congress raised the question of Turkey's great skeleton in the cupboard, the massacre of the Armenians in 1915. The Republicans, Bush at their head, warned against angering the Turks by describing this slaughter as a form of ‘genocide'. But following the Turkish parliament's vote on 17 October, Bush himself warned that an escalation of the Turkish presence in northern Iraq (since as Bush himself let slip, the Turkish army has quite a few troops there already) could undermine the fragile stability of the autonomous Kurdish region - Iraq's only ‘haven of peace' since the US invasion and the toppling of Saddam plunged the country into total disarray. The Turks accuse the ruling Kurdish parties of this region of aiding and abetting the PKK, and although the likes of Barzani and Talabani (Iraq's main Kurdish politicians) have urged the PKK to stop its attacks, the situation remains extremely tense. Barzani, for example, declared that, while not wanting to be part of any conflict, they (the government of Kurdish northern Iraq with its intact force of peshmerga fighters) would certainly defend themselves.

This simmering war on the Turkish/Iraqi border is yet another chapter in a horror story that now includes open war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Israel/Palestine and the threat of further conflicts spreading to Iran and Pakistan. Faced with this slide into barbarism and chaos, the comrades of the EKS (Internationalist Communist Left) in Turkey have responded by issuing the internationalist statement that we print below. They have been distributing it as a leaflet along with their recent bulletin ‘Night Notes', which also relates to the militant strike at Turkish Telecom and points towards such struggles as the only alternative to militarism and war.

The EKS comrades are intervening in an atmosphere of state-sponsored war hysteria, in a country where (as anyone who has read Orhan Pamuk's book Snow will know) political murder is a long-established tradition. They deserve the solidarity and support of revolutionaries all over the world. Amos, 31/10/07.

EKS leaflet

Once again, we've had the upsetting news of more workers' children being sacrificed for the brutal war in the South East. The bourgeoisie and their media started screaming for more blood and chaos as always. As a result, people are now looking for ‘terrorists' in the street. But why did this happen?

Because the bourgeois state is in a state of crisis which hasn't been so openly apparent for a long time. The economic reason at the bottom of this is the fact that the workers in Turkey have no more blood for the bourgeoisie to suck; and if that isn't enough, as in the Turkish Airlines yesterday and more strongly in the Türk Telekom and Novamed strikes today, they are beginning to resist. Increasing international debts, capital that is becoming more and more fictitious, growing fragility on the ‘money markets' - the consequences are all loaded onto workers' backs. The bourgeoisie is pumping in racism to continue this situation; thus Kurdish workers are exploited for a cheaper price and Turkish workers are left to rot miserably in the streets. The political consequence of this situation is the battle cries we always hear but which aren't a solution to anything. The ideological walls of the bourgeois state are cracking every day. The more the outrage workers live through is put into question, the more capital will push society into degeneration, decay and decomposition, and the more it loses the social validity which gave it its meaning in the first place. The response of the bourgeois politicians to the latest massacre is the following.

For the nationalist wing of the bourgeoisie, the issue is, as always, the ‘conspiracy' organised by the United States. According to them, if the Turkish Armed Forces invade Iraq, "terror will be eradicated". In reality, only three years have passed since the United States itself wanted working class boys from Turkey to go fight other workers in Iraq. However the Turkish bourgeoisie was unable to do this because of their inability to convince workers to go to war and because of their incapability and weakness. The truth is that the Turkish bourgeoisie has always aligned itself with the United States and the Turkish Armed Forces are standing ready to kill workers in Lebanon and Afghanistan if necessary. Thus, contrary to the lie the nationalist wing of the bourgeoisie is trying to make workers believe, there are no conflicting interests between them and American imperialism. Quite the contrary: there is a common interest and the Turkish Armed Forces are the armed executioners of this alliance. What's more, not only will any massacre to be done in Northern Iraq cause more soldiers to die and more ‘civilians' to be forced into concentration camps and massacred in battlefields, but also it will be countered with more bombs exploding in major cities.

The Islamic and liberal wing of the bourgeoisie is not supporting the war very reliably, which is how it normally is. Of course the fact that they have doubts about how the "operation" will take place is only an expression of them trying to get the permission they want from the United States. For this, they have no other choice but to wait ‘patiently' to have a compromise with Barzani and Talabani.

As for the left wing of the bourgeoisie, they aren't doing anything other than whining from their high rostrums. Of course they are not interested in the hunger, misery, poverty and death of workers. They are bending their rhetoric more and more in front of their masters to protect their position. In short, they once again prove the pointlessness of parliaments.

As a result, workers in Turkey too are being pulled into the dead-end cycle of more war, destruction, terror and chaos that is being inflicted on the Middle East by a bourgeoisie who neither cares about their lives nor their deaths. Because capitalism can only postpone the execution of its unsolvable crisis by dragging humanity into more destruction.

The response of the proletariat keeps lighting the way forward as we saw in the Telekom strike. A single strike which has been going on for only a few days was enough to make the bourgeoisie tremble. Only if workers enter into solidarity with their class to spread those struggles, and if workers say no to war internationally, can the capitalist massacre be stopped. The way to stop war and massacres is not to deepen and widen them, but to build class solidarity across borders, reaching every military battlefront. The enemy is not class brothers and sisters in other countries but the capitalists right here, sitting in their warm houses!

EKS, October 2007.