The strike of transport workers (SNCF and RATP) which ended November 22 (and which unfolded simultaneously with the struggle of students against the law of "autonomy of the universities" aiming to accentuate the inequalities between working class students and those from the bourgeoisie) constituted the first significant response of the working class in France against the attacks of the government of Sarkozy/Fillon/Pecresse and associates. The dismantling of the special pension schemes was only a beginning since the government clearly announced that the perspective was to lengthen the period of contributions for all workers. In this sense, and the press was quite clear about it, it was of prime importance that the bourgeoisie succeeded in getting this first attack through under pain of compromising the success of those to follow. It's for that reason that transport workers rejected this "reform" by demanding not only the maintenance of their own pension arrangements but also the abolition of this "privilege" which only puts workers into competition with each other. The slogan of the rail workers and the workers of the RATP (suburban networks) was thus: "37.5 years of instalments FOR ALL!"

The preparation of the bourgeoisie

The attack against the special pension schemes was based on a consensus of all the forces of capital. The PS (Socialist Party) didn't hide away from it; it clearly affirmed that it favoured the reform. The sole "divergence" with the government related to the form (how to get it through) and not the basics. In order to implement this attack and prepare the terrain for those to come, the bourgeoisie had to mount a gigantic manoeuvre to break the back of the working class and make it understand that "struggle doesn't pay". To get this message across, the dominant class also gave itself the objective of wiping from the consciousness of the proletariat the lessons of the struggles of the younger generation against the CPE (laws to make it easier to sack young workers) in spring, 2006.

The bourgeoisie knew that forcing this measure through would come up against the resistance of the working class. That was confirmed with the day of action of October 18 (used by the government and the unions in order to "take the temperature") in which a very strong combativity was manifested: record participation in the transport strikes and despite that, an important participation of workers from all sectors in the demonstrations. They came on foot, bikes and car sharing, showing their rejection of the government's measures.

In order to break this combativity the bourgeoisie took two steps:

Faced with the will of the workers to continue the strike after October 18, the CGT union stopped the strike in its tracks saying: "One day and no more", and programmed a second day of action for November 13. The object of October 18, as well as gauging temperature was to "let off steam", in order to avoid an explosion of the pressure building up. From this, the strike of November 13, despite strong participation, had less following than October 18.

To break the workers' back and prevent future struggles, the bourgeoisie used a classic strategy, whose efficacy had been proved in the 1980s and 90s: it targeted a sector to develop its manoeuvre, that of transport and notably the SNCF. A numerically small sector and whose strike could only be an annoyance for other workers (the "customers"). The objective was to make the strike unpopular so as to put the "customers" against the strikers, divide the working class and break the solidarity inside it, preventing all attempts to enlarge the struggle and make the strikers feel guilty. The second reason that the bourgeoisie decided to specifically attack the sectors with a "special pension arrangement" is that, in the latter, the unions (and notably the CGT) are particularly strong, thus allowing a guarantee of a greater control of combativity and avoiding any "overflowing". Finally, a third reason justifying the choice of these "targeted" sectors resides in the fact that a strong corporatist traditionally marks them (notably through the SNCF) which has been nourished by the unions.

The sharing out of tasks between government and unions

The bourgeoisie had to be very cautious about carrying out its attacks simultaneously against all sectors of the working class (increasing medical costs, the Hortefeux law, the law on "university autonomy", special retirement schemes, price increases, job losses in the public sector and notably in education, etc.). The dominant class was thus prepared to face up to the danger of a simultaneity of struggles in several sectors. In particular, students were already mobilised when transport workers started their struggle.

The manoeuvre of dividing and slicing up the struggles had thus to unfold under a very precise timescale:

- The public sector workers' day of action of November 20 not only had the objective of acting as a "safety valve" faced with the growing discontent among their ranks, but was also to serve as a day for burying the strike of the train workers and of the RATP; a "national funeral" of some sort.

- It was necessary for each union to play its own role in this concert. In the first place, up to the 18th of October, it was necessary to give a feeling of "strength" to the rail workers by playing the card of unity of all the unions. After this date, the unions began to play their cards of division. The FGAAC (a minority, strictly corporatist driver's union) took the first step: it signed a separate agreement with the bosses for its drivers and called for a return to work. The aim was to sow confusion among the rail workers. In some depots, other drivers were angry about this, crying, "the others have betrayed us". This first blow was evidently well relayed through the media.

- The second blow was struck on the eve of the strike that started on November 13. Whereas the rail workers and those of RATP began to understand the manoeuvre of division (and demanded "37.5 years' contributions FOR ALL!), Bernard Thibault, Secretary General of the CGT, announced that he was giving up on general negotiations for all the sectors concerned with special schemes and proposed to negotiate enterprise by enterprise. This blow could only weaken the response of the rail workers.

- The third act could then unfold: the union front began to unravel, particularly with the call for the return to work launched by the CFDT, but also with the cleavage between the CGT, which accepted (without shouting about it) the principle of moving towards 40 years of pension contributions, and the "radical", Sud and FO, who continued to demand the withdrawal of this measure. At the same time, Prime Minister Fillon affirmed that it was out of the question to retreat on the question of 40 years contributions, posing it as a precondition for the opening of negotiations for a return to work. This policy of a master blackmailer isn't new: strikers are first of all called to lay down their arms (and accept the law of "the strongest") before "negotiating" some crumbs. It was unacceptable for workers in struggle but that would have allowed the unions to present "the opening of negotiations" as a first victory. Here is the "great classic" of the sharing out of tasks between bosses and unions. In reality, it's a trick: unions and bosses do not wait for official "negotiations" because they permanently discuss behind the backs of the workers. Mainly, it's a question of the unions giving the bosses an account of the "temperature" so as to define in what sense it's necessary to manoeuvre. At the time of this latest struggle, these manoeuvres became as plain as the nose on your face, to the point where they were related in detail by certain newspapers of the bourgeoisie! (1).

That's why the opening of "negotiations" reported on November 21, after the day of the strike by public sector workers, was totally empty. If the CGT and the government had put off the beginning of official discussions, it was not only that this day of action could serve to bury the strike of rail workers and Parisian tram drivers, but also to drag out the movement so as to "addle" it by mounting the workers one against the others, and all this on top of a media campaign of criminalisation of the strikers so as to make the strike unpopular.

From this table of "negotiations", the CGT came out and announced "important advances" with a timetable of negotiations put into place up to... December 20, which would prolong the dispute for a month. The rail workers were evidently not disposed to continue their movement for 4 extra weeks. The CGT, the majority union among the rail workers, announced that it was "letting" the assemblies "decide for themselves" It didn't officially call for a return to work but it might as well have done (2).

On their side, Sud and FO called for a continuation of the strike on the basis of the main claim of 37.5 years contributions.

But the return to work was proceeding depot by depot at the SNCF and line by line at the RATP.

This opposition between "moderate" and "radical" unions wasn't improvised and is nothing new. It's an old tactic that has shown itself to be effective in all workers' struggles since the end of the 1960s. A tactic that was already used in 1968 (and of which the "old sage" Chirac, as well as the ex-Maoist Kouchner, remembered perfectly well). Thus at the end of the movement of the working class of 1968, the majority union, the CGT, was already playing the role of "moderate" in calling for a return to work. And it's the minority union, the CFDT, who took on the role of the "radical" by opposing a return to work. The experience of the workers of the older generation shows that because a union is more "radical", it doesn't mean that it's not involved in manoeuvres of division and sabotage. It doesn't mean that those that want "to fight to the end" defend the interests of the working class. Because the strength of the working class is not in prolonged minority movements in which energy and wages are uselessly expended, while strengthening divisions (between those who work and those who don't) and provoking the feeling that the others have "betrayed" the struggle. The strength of the working class is first of all and before everything its unity. It's in the size and extension of the movement and not in the "fight to the end" approach of a minority (which can lead some workers into acts of despair, such as sabotage of the tools of production, opening the door to the criminalisation of the strikers). In every sector, public as well as private (same for the students) proletarians will be necessarily led to understand that the "radicalism" of minority unions who advocate isolated actions has no more substance than the "real defenders of the working class", the major unions that call for a return to work.

November 20, burial day

This massive manoeuvre aimed at breaking the back of the working class was to be crowned by the plan of the demonstration-funeral of November 20, which brought together 750,000 workers. The strategy of the union leaders consisted of calling the workers of the public sector to come onto the streets (notably to protest against the loss of jobs and price increases) while sabotaging their demonstration. Thus, the unions launched appeals to participate in this manifestation in leaflets that arrived in places of work after... November 20! In the majority of hospitals, they didn't even take the trouble to give the time or venue of the rendezvous. In order to find out if the demonstration was going to take place as indicated, workers had to find out themselves (on the internet, in the newspapers or by word of mouth) Why such a sabotage? Because the thermometer indicated that the temperature in the public sector was rising. The strike of the rail workers and RATP, far from being unpopular (despite all the campaigns relayed by TV) on the contrary gained more and more sympathy from numerous "customers". The media and the government (with its "strong arm" declarations), as well as the university presidents, who accused the striking students of being "Khmer Rouges", were going over the top. The more the government brandished the stick against the strikers, the more the strike aroused sympathy (and even the feeling of "solidarity", of not letting it "get carved up by the media in the pay of Sarkozy"). On the other hand, the contortions of Thibault were so evident that he appeared everywhere a "collaborator", a "traitor" (3). If the unions had to sabotage the mobilisation of public workers, it was to avoid them finding themselves side by side united on the streets. On the other hand, all the unions of the national police had mobilised their troops (4) to the maximum: November 20 was the first time that we saw so many cops demonstrating in Paris (5). Further, the union leaders (who organised this demonstration with the prefecture of police) took care to place the police contingent right in the middle of the demonstration. Thus, many workers and students didn't want to march behind the forces of repression; they preferred not to join this masquerade and remained on the pavements. In particular, it was a good means to dissuade the students, obliged to kick their heels on the kerbs for three hours in the rain, from making their "junction" with the workers.

At the time of his televised intervention of November 29, "omnipresident" Sarkozy rendered "homage to all social partners" saluting ALL the unions for "their sense of responsibility" and specifying that he "had need of them for the reforms" (6) (or, more to the point, he had need of them in order to facilitate all the attacks foreseen for 2008). He knows what he's talking about and, for once, let's say that he wasn't lying.

The strike of transport workers of November 2007 has confirmed once again what revolutionaries have affirmed for numerous decades: ALL the unions are not organs for the defence of the interests of the working class, but instruments of the bourgeoisie.

Sofiane (November 30)

(1) Particularly see Marianne no. 553, "Why Sarkozy wants to save the CGT, itself giving the game away: "There is a form of co-production between the government and the CGT to show its muscles". It's true that its own troops took it badly that it had played the role of "traitor".

(2) One of the reasons that the movement was "suspended" (as Bernard Thibault said), resided in the fact that the CGT had "negotiated" some "advances" regarding the arduous nature of this particular work, allowing some crumbs to be thrown: increases of wages at the end of a lifetime's work. That don't butter the parsnips: everyone knows that wages and buying power will be much lower by then! Another trick in order to justify the return to work and try to keep things intact because the bourgeoisie still had need of the CGT. If the government hadn't foreseen "giving" this charity, the boss of the CGT wouldn't have been able to say: "there have been some advances". And this pittance had equally been discussed in advance, through telephone calls destined to sharpen and adjust measures to allow the CGT to continue its work of undermining. Thus, well before the meeting of the CGT and the government, Thibault had already announced the return to work. This shows clearly that the announcements made by the bosses and the government in the "negotiations" were only a snare.

(3) Some delegations of students went around Paris and in the provinces to appeal for what they called the "junction" with workers, "a convergence of struggles".

(4) In fact, the students did not send any delegations into the commissariats or the other services of the Ministry of the Interior to make any "junction" with the cops because they themselves had been able to see in practice that these functionaries of the police were not on their side.

(5) Even the right-wing union, "Alliance", close to the UMP (and which had struck up La Marseillaise at the beginning of the demonstration) was massively present at the side of the UNSA union (close to the Socialist Party).

Last week, the government of Sarkozy/Fillon/Hortefeux/Pécresse and consorts (with the silent support of the Parti Socialiste and the various leftists) has crossed the Rubicon of shame and brutality. After the armed pursuit of immigrants across its borders in support of the policy of selecting "immigrants of choice" ("l'immigration choisie"), they are now savagely attacking striking students. This ferocious repression was meted out to students fighting the law on privatising the universities (called LRU). Some university vice-chancellors, lackeys of capital, took the vile decision to call in the CRS and the riot police, in the name of ‘democracy' and ‘liberty', to take back the campuses seized and occupied in Nanterre, Tolbiac, Rennes, Aix-Marseille, Nantes, Grenoble...

Capitalist order and terror!

The repression in Rennes and especially Nanterre has been particularly disgusting.

Having called in vigilantes armed with police dogs, the vice-chancellors of the universities have let hundreds of CRS occupy the grounds: the student demonstrators have been evicted by cops with batons and teargas. Several have been arrested and some wounded. The CRS took its brutality as far as grabbing the spectacles (symbolic of students who read books!) of one student in Nanterre and smashing them. The Sarkozy-ist media, servant of capital, has reported and justified the repression with the words of the university vice-chancellors. On 13th November, on the television programme 20 Heures on Channel 2, we heard the vice-chancellor of Nanterre University give the following justification: "This is not struggle, it is delinquency". Another hysterical servant of capital, the vice-chancellor of the Rennes University had no scruples declaring that those who rebel are "terrorists and Khmer Rouge"!

Clearly, the ex-Security Chief of France, ‘Nicolas le Petit', is determined to "power clean" the French universities today and to ‘stigmatise' the children of the working class as ‘hooligans', as ‘a rabble', as ‘delinquents' (as the vice-chancellor of Nanterre has said). For all those behind this ‘policy' (for Madame Pécresse, on 7th November on LCI: "the occupations are political actions") they are just ‘terrorists'. At the very moment when Alliot-Marie gave the instruction to the cops to attack the occupied campuses, her ‘friend' Madame Pécresse has pushed cynicism to its limits declaring on TV that she wanted to "reassure students" (sic!).

The workers in both the public and private sectors must understand this message: all those who embark on ‘illegal' and ‘unpopular' strikes (and we can expect the media and Télé-Sarkozy to pump this propaganda out on a daily basis), all those, like the workers in the SNCF and in the RATP who dare to ‘take commuters hostage' will be declared ‘terrorists' and ‘trouble-makers' disrupting ‘public order'.

The real ‘yellow peril' is not so-called "Khmers Rouges" at Rennes University. It is the ‘wreckers', the strikebreakers in the repressive machinery who beat and gas the young generations of workers with the assistance of informers and boot-lickers, namely the university vice-chancellors. The real ‘terrorists', the real criminals are those in government who carry out the dirty work of this class of gangsters: the decadent bourgeois class. Their order is that of relentless TERROR.

However, this class of criminals isn't satisfied with sending its mad dogs and its CRS hatchet men against the striking students. In certain universities taken back from the students by the cops, they have gone as far as ‘confiscating' the student strike funds. For example, in Lyon on 16th November, the students who occupied the campus had raised a collection of a few hundred euros. The CRS, armed to the teeth, seized control of the campus, and the University Administration itself confiscated the cooking materials brought by the students and seized their strike fund. It is shameful and disgusting! The morals of petty bourgeois thugs are just as bad, if not worse, than those of the ‘wreckers' from the suburbs, manipulated by the bourgeois state into attacking student demonstrators during the movement of spring 2006 against the CPE (first job contract), stealing their mobile phones!

This is the real face of parliamentary democracy: ‘public order' equals the order of capital. It is the order of terror and truncheons, of cops and the media. It is the order of lies and of manipulation by Télés-Sarkozy! It is the Machiavellism that seeks to divide and rule over us. It is the order of those who seek to turn us against each other with the strategy advocated by the former Villepin/Sarkozy government in the spring of 2006: using violence to weaken the struggle!

Solidarity between students and railways workers is the way forward

The savage repression against the students is a shameful attack on the whole working class. The vast majority of students fighting against privatising the universities and selection procedures based on ability to pay are the children of the working class and not the well-meaning petit bourgeoisie, as certain parts of the media and socio-ideologues of capital would have us believe. Many of them are children of public sector workers or of immigrant stock (especially in the universities in the suburbs, like Nanterre or Saint-Denis). The proletarian nature of the students' struggle against the Pécresse law has been clearly demonstrated by the fact that the strikers succeeded in broadening their demands: in most occupied universities, it's not just the withdrawal of the LRU, but also the defence of the special pensions' arrangements, the rejection of the Hortefeux Law and of Sarkozy's policy of "immigrants of choice", the rejection of the medical exemptions and of all the attacks of the government against the whole of the working class that's included in their platform of demands. They have supported the need for SOLIDARITY to unify the workers' struggles against the corporatist divisions and against ‘negotiations' advocated by the unions conducted company by company, sector by sector. The students have given a living expression to this solidarity. Hence, several hundred students in Paris and elsewhere have participated in the rail workers' demonstrations (particularly on 13th and 14th November) in the struggle against the threat to the special pensions' provisions. In some towns (Rennes, Caen, Rouen, Saint-Denis, Grenoble), this solidarity from the young generations of the working class has been warmly welcomed by the rail workers who have invited them to participate in their general assemblies and have conducted some joint actions with the students (like those at the exits of the motorways where students and workers have allowed cars to pass freely through the toll booths while explaining the aims behind their actions). Hence, today there are some students and some rail workers who reflect, discuss, act and eat together. In some universities (run by human beings and not by hysterical hyenas who hunt with the wolves), students have united with teachers and administrative workers, like in Paris 8 -Saint-Denis.

The proletarian nature of the students' struggle is further confirmed by the fact that having occupied the universities, the students aren't content to be there to hold general assemblies and conduct political debates open to all who want to participate (yes, Madame Pécresse, humans are gifted with language and they communicate politically, unlike the apes, as demonstrated by researchers, working in the ‘centres of excellence'!). On some campuses, striking students have used the facilities to invite in immigrants without identity papers.

And it is because this active solidarity risks spreading further, that the Sarkozy/Fillon government (and its ‘iron ladies', Pécresse, Alliot-Marie, Dati and other "Mi-putes, Mi-soumises"["hangers-on"?] has decided to send in its cops to recover control from the working class. The French bourgeoisie wants the same policy as Thatcher had. It wants to outlaw all solidarity strikes, like in Great Britain, so it will have its hands free to launch even more brutal attacks in 2008 after the municipal elections. And it is in the current test of strength and the use of repression that the dominant class and its strongman, Sarkozy, are attempting to impose the ‘democratic' order of capital.

The movement of solidarity the students and some rail workers are engaged in shows that the lessons of the struggle against the CPE haven't been forgotten despite the deafening electoral campaign of the recent presidential election. The solidarity between the students in struggle and a section of the workers from the SNCF and the RATP shows the way forward. Every worker, employed or unemployed, French ‘by birth' or ‘immigrant', public sector as much as private sector, must get involved. It is the only way of building a balance of forces against the bourgeoisie's attacks and its decadent system that has only one future to offer the new generation: unemployment, precarious working, poverty and repression (today, the batons and teargas, tomorrow the bullets!)

If in 2006 French Security Chief, Sarkozy, didn't send in the CRS against the students occupying their places of education, it's not because he had less moral scruples this time round. It was basically because he was a candidate for the presidency and didn't want to lose support from that part of the electorate in education in the universities. Now that he has his electoral mandate, he wants to show muscle and to rule in the name of the whole French bourgeoisie who still find it hard to accept the withdrawal of the CPE in 2006 (didn't he show his true colours the day after the election declaring: "the State mustn't back down"?). He wants to show the clique of Villepin that he will not back down himself (because as Raffarin said, "the street mustn't rule"). The cynicism of the public announcement, in the name of ‘transparency', that his salary would increase by 140%, at the same time as his intransigence in all the attacks against the living standards of the working class, is a real provocation. In rolling his shoulders, and ‘thumbing his nose' at the working class, the message he wants to send is: "it is unacceptable to challenge the privileges of the bourgeoisie. I have been elected by the French electorate, which gives me ‘carte blanche' to do what I want!" But beyond the personal interests and ambitions of this sinister individual, it is the whole capitalist class that Sarkozy represents: force is the law of capital. The ‘arm wrestling' with the rail workers has one single purpose: to inflict a crushing defeat on the whole working class by erasing the sentiment that was left by the movement against the CPE, that only struggle pays. That is why Sarkozy has no intention of giving way to the rail workers and that he wants to transform the universities into policed fortresses.

But what comes out of the ‘arm wrestling' between the government of Sarkozy/Fillon/Pécresse and the working class, is that the struggle has already begun to pay: the expression of solidarity between rail workers and the students that has begun to draw other parts of the working class (particularly the workers in the universities) behind it, will mean there is a lasting trace of consciousness, just as in the struggle against the CPE. Like all workers' struggles that have an international effect, it is a step on the way to the future overthrow of capitalism. The main gain of the struggle is the struggle itself, it is the experience of the living and active solidarity of the working class on road towards its emancipation, and towards the emancipation of the whole of humanity.

All workers, ‘French' and immigrant, public and private sector; students in college and school; the unemployed: there is one common combat against the government attacks! Down with the police state! Against the terror of capital, for the solidarity of the whole working class!

Sofiane (17 November 2007)

The "Operation"

The Turkish army launched an operation to eradicate the PKK, or in other words launched the war again. We see that this bloody cycle is being repeated once again since Turkey went into Iraq for the first time in 1983.

Whose War is This?

The tale that the war is being waged to stop "terror" is nothing but a lie. Had it been true, this could have been done by the "operations" launched since 1983. Also, the Turkish state has acted as if this matter had not existed in the last years when the PKK[1] was weak, and Tayyip Erdogan[2] had said that terror was about to be finished himself on television. What is more, Talabani and Barzani, who have been declared enemies now, have cooperated with and been an ally of Turkey militarily for a long time. Turkey has been running military operations with those forces for a long time and still continues to do so regardless. The real reason of this war is nothing but the establishment of the new control trying to be created in the Middle East accordingly to the new alliance formed by Turkish imperialism and the United States. What the alliance which was conducted through MHP[3] between the "secular" high ranking bureaucracy and the "democratic" AKP[4] expresses under "veil" is that a side had been been chosen in the imperialist arena. The side chosen is that of USA in putting United States' undisciplined allies in line and trying to maintain the control of oil against rival imperialist states China, Russia and Iran. AKP which has been faltering for a long time finally declared this was the side it took by pushing the authorization for war through parliament. Thus, this war is simply the first step of Turkish imperialism's preparations for the next war and polarization.

Because this war is a result of the cycle of wars capitalism is in. The capitalist state has created this war not out of its own choice but because of the the desperate dead-end it has entered. Since World War I capitalism has done nothing but create wars in the entire world. All "national liberation wars", every war between countries that happen for this or that reason are conducted to destroy the accumulated capital and of course the worker population of the enemy country.

The So-Called Supporters of "Peace"

The hypocritical calls for peace made by the DTP[5] and the left liberals from their comfortable chairs doesn't in any way serve the war being ended. Because the war is not caused by the lack of the application of a "democratic solution" or the bad intentions of the bureaucracy but the desperation of capitalism. What is worse is that the calls for democracy by those circles will only serve to weaken a possible working class opposition to the war, pulling workers who oppose the war to fight for the imperialist states that are represented as the more "democratic", "kind hearted" and "peaceful" side against the "evil", "bureaucratic" and "aggressive" side. All these "democratic" capitalist dreams won't serve ending the war but pulling the workers to the side of the "righter" side.

Class War is the Only solution

This war is not the war of people who try to survive by working. This war is not the war of those whose living standards have been dropping with economical crises, those who have been rotting with unemployment, those who are worked to death in shipyards and under ladders, those who wait for retirement between 9 o'clock to 6 o'clock or those desperately struggling to live in the dumpsters of cities where they have been dragged to go from their villages. This war is neither the war of workers, unemployed, housewives and students who are either future workers or future unemployed, nor is the war of the soldiers who are dying in the battlefront. Quite the contrary, wars increase problems like misery, unemployment, poverty and social decomposition created by the crises of capitalism. The effect of this "operation" will be beyond the villages being bombed, the soldiers who are dying in the battlefront or further explosions in the big cities, and will show itself in the deepening misery under the name of nationalism and in the deepening social decomposition.

What will stop this war is non other than the solidarity of Turkish and Kurdish workers who have been deceived for the interests of the bosses and capital for the last 25 years. What ended World War I was the world revolutionary wave, the soldiers in the battlefronts and the workers behind the fronts standing against their own rulers instead of their class brother and sisters from other countries. What prevented a possible third world war in 1960s was, similarly, the determination and spirit of struggle of the working class in the entire world. Today too, the working class, no matter how defensive it is right now, can't remain silent on the capitalist barbarism developing against it!

AGAINST ALL EXPLOITERS WHO SUPPORT "PEACE" OR WAR,

LONG LIVE CLASS SOLIDARITY!

LONG LIVE WORKERS INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY!

[1] PKK - Kurdistan ‘Workers' Party, the main Kurdish nationalist armed group operating in Turkey.

[2] Current Prime Minister and leader of AKP

[3] MHP - Nationalist Movement Party, a fascist party which got 14% in the last elections, also known as the Gray Wolves

[4] AKP - Justice and Development Party, the ruling center-right party in Turkey which has roots in a marginalized parliamentary Islamist party.

[5] DTP - Democratic Society Party, the Kurdish nationalist party with 20 MPs in the Turkish parliament.

At the beginning of December there was the spectacle of the Bali Conference held under the auspices of the UN. “It is the first such meeting since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that evidence for global warming was ‘unequivocal’. The two-week gathering in Bali, Indonesia, will also debate how to help poor nations cope in a warming world. The annual high-level meeting, organised by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), is under pressure to deliver a new global agreement on how to cut rising greenhouse gas emissions” (BBC News [8]). There was wrangling over targets for carbon emission reduction, about who should be paying for all of this, about how to apportion ‘fault’ (along the lines of ‘you’re a bigger polluter than I am’), and everyone pointing their fingers at the USA that was painted as the main ‘villain’ for not agreeing to binding limits.

The ending of the meeting proved to be quite dramatic “As talks overran their scheduled close by more than a day, delegates from the EU, US and G-77/China embarked with UN officials on a series of behind-the-scenes consultations aiming to break the remaining deadlock. The EU and US agreed to drop binding targets; then the EU and China agreed to soften language on commitments from developing countries. With delegates anxious to make a deal and catch aeroplanes home, the US delegation announced it could not support the amended text. A chorus of boos rang out. And a member of Papua New Guinea’s delegation told the US: ‘If you’re not willing to lead, please get out of the way.’ Shortly after, the US delegation announced it would support the revised text after all. There were a number of emotional moments in the conference hall - the UN’s top climate official Yvo de Boer in tears after being accused by China of procedural irregularities, and cheers and hugs when the US indicated its acceptance” (BBC News [9]).

So, after this drama, what has been achieved? The main achievement seems to have been an agreement ... to have more talks in two years time. It’s been described as a ‘roadmap’ setting out the ground for further talks, and preparing the way for an international carbon trading scheme. This will, literally, allow richer countries to exchange money for ‘hot air’: it’s a get-out clause for the biggest polluters. Poorer countries, with less advanced technology, are being paid to pollute.

There is an insoluble contradiction between, on the one hand, the necessity to produce commodities at the cheapest possible rate and sell them, and on the other controlling pollution from economic activity. At the World Economic Forum at Davos world leaders expressed their concerns over arresting the decline in economic growth and what measures can be taken, and at Bali they considered measures that will constrain growth.

This was recognised explicitly by George Bush when he stated that he would never sign any Treaty on carbon emissions if it meant the cost of American jobs. Of course, this doesn’t prevent American corporations closing US production and farming it out, principally to China. Recently the Indian Prime Minister visited China. While China has now become the world’s biggest carbon emitter and India the 3rd biggest emitter by about 2015, they have no intention of cutting back. As Prime Minister Singh put it, when in Beijing, it was others who “squandered the earth’s resources” in the use of fossil fuels, going back to the time of the Industrial Revolution. So, India and China are not going to curtail the development of their economies for the sake of the environment, and countries like the US and Australia partly justify their refusal to curb emissions through citing the examples of China and India.

It is only the working class which holds an alternative perspective for the future of the world. Against the nation state – the highest form of development under capitalism – there is the possibility of a world human community. Only a different social and economic system can even begin to attempt to mitigate the effects of unproductive and polluting activity. Only then could the latest technology be put in place across the world for the collective benefit of humanity. Only then could we stop unproductive activity and gear all activity towards fulfilling the needs of human beings as opposed to the bank accounts of the capitalists. Graham 29/01/08

The repression of the working class is a feature of all capitalist regimes, whether ‘democratic' or ‘dictatorial'. The bourgeois class uses terror to impose its social order on the exploited. In Russia, the overtly criminal nature of the social, economic and political system explains the permanence of state repression against the working class. The whole economy is in the hands of clans of oligarchs who control the major companies and the regional and national governments. The sole aim of economic life is to line the pockets of this mafia that is the ruling class. Most of the bosses and state bureaucrats, ex-KGB or out and out gangsters, know that they could easily lose their positions tomorrow because of the endless factional warfare, which is why they aim to make the maximum amount of cash in the shortest possible time. Hence they need to suck as much profit as possible from the working class, using all available means, from the legalism of the ‘right to work' revised in 2001 in order to make virtually any strike longer than 24 hours illegal and the systematic condemnation of strikes by the courts, to the violence of the police or armed militias against militant workers.

Greetings to the workers' response!

Braving this repression, the workers' struggles which have arisen in the recent period have shattered the media myth of a contented population united behind an adored Putin. "If the month of December is to be remembered for anything, it won't be for the electoral campaign or the political intrigues in the Kremlin, but because of the upsurge of workers' struggles" (Moscow Times, 6.12.07).

A wave of strikes, the first major expression of working class militancy for nearly a decade, has, since last spring, swept through the country from eastern Siberia to the Caucasus, involving numerous sectors such as the oil region of Khanty-Mansiysk in the far north, building sites in Chechnya, a wood processing factory in Novgorod, a hospital in the Tchita region, housing maintenance services in Saratov, fast-food outlets in Irkutsk, the General Motors-Avto VAZ car factory owned by Togliatti, or a large metallurgical factory in Karelia. The strengthening of repressive measures during the summer, aimed at holding back the tide of struggles, had little effect.

In November, the dockers of the port of Tuapse in the Black Sea (4-7 November), then those at the port of Saint-Petersburg (13-17 November) went on strike, while on 26 October the postal workers came out for the first time since 2001, as well as the workers of GouP TIK (energy sector). The railway drivers (RZH) threatened to strike for the first time since 1988 "the big wave of strikes unfolding in Russia has not slowed down. From one enterprise to another, work stoppages have been succeeded by blockades while other strikes threaten to break out in enterprises still working...The autumn of 2007, with the regime, in the campaign for elections to the legislature, talking about the achievement of an era of stability and prosperity, has been marked by a powerful rise of ‘proletarian consciousness'" (Vremia Novostiei, cited by Courrier International no, 892).

If for the moment the strikes remain limited to particular enterprises or regions, they still express the response of the working class to the galloping deterioration of its living conditions. The unbearable inequalities in society, the insolent luxury exhibited by the oligarchs and the company managers when the majority of workers are hardly able to eat three meals a day, is exacerbating the discontent. Above all, if the question of wages has been at the heart of these struggles, it's because wages are being devoured by the dramatic rise in inflation, with 50-70% rises in food prices, and another 50% rise envisaged this winter.

In the face of this situation, the Russian Federation of Independent Unions, the heir of the old Soviet confederation, pro-government and hostile to any struggle, has been too discredited to play the role of containing the proletarian struggle in the interests of the ruling class. It is even seen as the "most energetic adversary of the movement of the workers" (Moscow Times, 29.11.07). This is why, with the aid of the western trade unions, a part of the Russian bourgeoisie is trying to exploit the Russian workers' illusions in the idea of ‘free' trade unions, ‘class struggle' trade unions, setting up new structures like the RPLBJ railway union, the Zachita Truda federation or the Interregional Union of Automobile Workers, founded on the initiative of the Ford union committee and regrouping the independent unions of several large enterprises.

We've seen the latter at work in the strike at the Ford factory in Saint-Petersburg in November-December, where the majority of the 2200 workers came out for a 30% wage rise (average wage 550 euros). This struggle has helped to break the black-out on workers' struggles in Russia.

The management initially organised a lock-out with the aid of the anti-riot police (the OMON). Under the impulsion of the trade union, the workers came in their hundreds every day to picket the factory gates, with no perspective other than to ‘hold out' in the face of a management that rejected any negotiation. After a month, with the strike running out of steam, the exhausted workers had to go back without winning anything, conceding the management's conditions: no negotiations till the strike was over.

By isolating the workers in ‘their' factory and limiting solidarity from other sectors to messages of sympathy and financial support, the independent unions inflicted this heavy defeat on the workers.

The whole experience of the working class for decades shows that there is no form of trade unionism that operates in favour of the workers, that it is a weapon of the ruling class. The trade unions are organs of the capitalist state whose function is to block the need for unity, solidarity, extension, and, in the future, internationalisation of the workers' struggle. What matters to the working class is not to reconstruct new unions. Its future lies in developing confidence in its own strength and its own means of struggle such as the control of the struggle through general assemblies and its extension to other sectors of the working class.

Igor 25.1.08

A certain Cleto, who presents himself as a "comrade who agrees with the positions of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party" [1]made a critique, in the "Comunistas Internacionales"[2] discussion forum, of our article ‘Notes for a History of the Communist Left' (originally published in International Review 9) that the moderator of the forum had published.

In this article we examined the first period (from 1943 to 1948) of the Internationalist Communist Party, during which this organisation, which claimed a continuity with the communist left, made two serious mistakes in our opinion: establishing contacts with the partisan groups[3], and participating in the 1948 elections[4].

Lies and distortions or political disagreements?

Cleto begins by accusing us of "lies and distortions". His text nonetheless confirms everything we said: he acknowledges that the ICP participated in partisan groups, that a part of the Turin section participated in the insurrection organised by the Committee of National Liberation with all the forces of the Italian bourgeoisie with the exception of the fascists who hadn't yet changed their colours, that the ICP participated in the elections of 1948.

For the debate to be fruitful, one must begin by distinguishing between the facts and the political interpretation that one can make of them. The facts are clear and obvious, and Cleto can't deny that. However, his analysis and his interpretations differ from ours. These differences don't give him the right to accuse us of "lies and distortions"... unless he believes that all those who don't share his interpretation are liars...

Is it idealist to be intransigent in the defence of proletarian principles?

Let's examine the question more deeply. Cleto claims that we are blinded by a "shallow idealism", prisoners of "fantasies" that have nothing to do with the "real class struggle", that we live in an "enchanted castle", which leads us not to "understand the dialectic of historical facts" and to "discredit the activity of those who risk their lives on the altar of communist militancy."

Stalinists and Trotskyists often justify their politics in the name of "realism" and the sacred need "to be with the masses", qualifying all revolutionary positions as "theoretical infantilism". They present themselves as defenders of communism, only to say that they are "forced" to support all sorts of imperialist wars, of "national liberation" movements, of bourgeois fractions "in order to stay with the masses".

What is surprising is to hear this type of argument coming from someone who calls himself a left communist. We must put things back in their place, because what differentiates the communist left from all other political currents is precisely the defence of the coherence between the proclaimed principles and the means by which they are defended.

Cleto asks: "While the masses are shedding their blood for the class enemy's causes (the Popular Front or the Resistance), what should communists do? Should they stay in their little closed circle writing meticulous, scholastic analyses of the mistakes the masses are making?"

When workers take sides in a war between bourgeois factions, they lose all their strength; they become pawns, open to being manipulated at will. They shed their blood for their exploiters and oppressors. Faced with such a situation, only revolutionary principles can allow the workers to rediscover their class autonomy and to fight capitalism in a decisive way. To accept the terrain of partisan struggle in 1944-45, namely that of nationalism and imperialism, under the pretext of "convincing the masses", is to make sure that they remain stuck in the vicious circle of war and capitalist exploitation. Only the "little closed circle" of "meticulous analyses" could help the workers come out of the informal trap in which they had let themselves get caught.

In 1914 capitalism was able to unleash the First World War due to the support of social democracy and the unions, who convinced the workers that they had to accept death at the front and sacrifices at home in order to defend some "just cause" or another. For the Germans it was about ending Tsarist barbarism, while for the allied camp, which included the sinister Tsarist regime, the objective was to end the Teutonic dictatorship of the Kaiser!

What did revolutionaries do? Did they accept the terrain of national defence under the pretext of "staying with the masses"? No! A thousand time no! They waged a fight to defend internationalist principles, advocating an intransigent struggle for the world proletarian revolution. The internationalist minority (Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, Bordiga ...) "deviated from the masses", stayed "in their little closed circle" and wrote "meticulous analyses" on the errors of the masses. Due to this activity they contributed to the workers' practical criticism of their errors, to their rediscovery of their strength, their solidarity, thus preparing the conditions for the revolutionary wave that began in 1917.

Was Lenin idealist?

When Lenin returned to Russia in April of 1917 and defended the need to guide the revolution which began in February towards the seizure of power and the struggle for socialism, he faced a strong opposition from the Bolshevik Party, which was still being led by Stalin, Kamenev, and Molotov. These men supported the Provisional Government whose stated objectives were to pursue the war and to lead the revolution towards the dead-end of bourgeois democracy. During the debates on Lenin's positions which took place within the Party, Kamenev accused Lenin of being an "idealist" and of "separating himself from the masses". Lenin answered: "Comrade Kamenev contraposes to a 'party of the masses' a 'group of propagandists'. But the 'masses' have now succumbed to the craze of 'revolutionary' defencism[5]. Is it not more becoming for internationalists at this moment to show that they can resist 'mass' intoxication rather than to 'wish to remain' with the masses, i.e., to succumb to the general epidemic? Have we not seen how in all the belligerent countries of Europe the chauvinists tried to justify themselves on the grounds that they wished to 'remain with the masses'? Must we not be able to remain for a time in the minority against the 'mass' intoxication? Is it not the work of the propagandists at the present moment that forms the key point for disentangling the proletarian line from the defencist and petty-bourgeois 'mass' intoxication?"(Lenin, ‘Letters on tactics')

In another text of the same era, Lenin put an end to the perpetual accusations of idealism against his position by saying: "This seems to be 'nothing more' than propaganda work, but in reality it is most practical revolutionary work; for there is no advancing a revolution that has come to a standstill, that has choked itself with phrases, and that keeps 'marking time'" (Lenin, ‘The tasks of the proletariat in our revolution', better known as ‘The April Theses')

Perhaps Cleto thinks that Lenin was also an "idealist" who "disdained coming down to the masses because they weren't pure communists". We believe that this contribution by Lenin is an essential inspiration for the activity of revolutionaries. In his response to Kamenev, Lenin reminds him that "the bourgeoisie maintains itself in power not only by force but, also by virtue of the lack of class-consciousness and organisation, the routinism and downtrodden state of the masses."

The working class is the bearer of communism[6], but it is also an exploited class whose submission is most often maintained through the dominance of bourgeois ideology. The revolutionary nature of the working class expresses itself particularly in its ability to produce communist minorities from its midst, who attempt to express the principles of the class, its goals and the means to achieve them.

The task of these minorities is not to run behind the masses, following them into all the numerous and contradictory situations they go into. This means sticking with the proletariat as the revolutionary class, and not simply sticking to the "sociological proletariat", which goes through different stages in class consciousness. In the text mentioned earlier, Lenin reminded Kamenev that it is better to "remain with one friend only, like Liebknecht, and that means remaining with the revolutionary proletariat, than to entertain even for a moment any thought of amalgamation with the party of the Organising Committee"[7].

The working class is not a blind mass requiring doses of communist recipes without its knowledge. This reveals at its core, a manipulative vision, a profound contempt for the working class. Workers aren't afraid of criticismof their mistakes. Rosa Luxemburg said of the proletariat that "its tasks and its errors are both gigantic: no prescription, no schema valid for every case, no infallible leader to show it the path to follow. Historical experience is its only school mistress. Its thorny way to self-emancipation is paved not only with immeasurable suffering but also with countless errors. The aim of its journey - its emancipation depends on this - is whether the proletariat can learn from its own errors. Self-criticism, remorseless, cruel, and going to the core of things is the life's breath and light of the proletarian movement." (Junius Pamphlet)

What were the positions of our political ‘fathers'?

Cleto mentions the position of the Italian Communist Left vis-a-vis the Popular Front and the1936 Spanish War saying: "The question which our political fathers asked themselves - with regards both to Spain and the partisan struggle -- a question that the ICC (and its derivatives) never bother to ask themselves, because that is totally alien to their idealist method and their understanding of communist militancy: how to bring together principles on the one hand, and the masses in motion, prone to merciless struggle and the worst sacrifices, on the other?"

Cleto gives the impression that Bilan held the same position in 1936 that the ICP did in 44-48. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In our book 1936, Franco y la Republica masacran a los trabajadores (Franco and the Republic massacre the workers), which is based on Bilan's texts, we point out that Bilan upheld "idealist" politics: the intransigent defence of principles.

A few years earlier, Bilan (Bilan 5, ‘ Principles, weapons of the revolution') debated with the Left Opposition who evoked -- as Cleto's "political parents" unfortunately also did in 1948 -- the need not to "cut oneself off from the masses." The title of the Bilan article is significant: ‘Principles, weapons of the revolution'. It denounced "the militant who expresses a position of principle then quickly adds that this position would be valid if all workers were communists, but for now, he is forced to take the concrete situation into account, especially the mentality of the workers". He comes out with "arguments" for justifying this capitulation: "The problem on each occasion is posed by raising the question: is there a matter of principle here? If you reply in the negative, you are then led by your assessment of the situation , pulled into conjectures about the advantages you might be able to draw from the struggle, since even Marx and Lenin , however intransigent they may have been on questions of principle, didn't hesitate to throw themselves into the struggle to win over as many allies as possible, without ensuring as a precondition that the social nature of these struggles enabled them to be a real support for the revolutionary struggle".
 

Faced with these positions, Bilan's defence was that "The Party must scrupulously remain loyal to the political theses it has developed, because not doing so would hinder its advance into a revolutionary struggle", concluding categorically that "both social antagonisms and the conscious work of left fractions contribute to prepare the proletarian victory: the proletariat will only return to the path of struggle on the basis of its principles and its programme."

1948: the regression of the ICP on the electoral and parliamentary question

The Communist Abstentionist Fraction formed in October 1919, which preceded the Italian communist left, renounced electoral and parliamentary mystification. One of its most remarkable militants, Bordiga, put forward the richest and clearest arguments for this position and struggled against the degeneration of the Communist International, attacking one of the latter's worst errors: "revolutionary parliamentarism"

This is why the fact that the Internationalist Communist Party tossed away that heritage and advocated participation in the electoral farce, basically endorsing the political configuration of the Italian democratic state around a Christian Democratic government and a Stalinist opposition, was a veritable regression.

Nevertheless Cleto defends this line with rather unconvincing arguments of his own: "What is one to make of the elections of 1948? Simply that it was an attempt to insert ourselves into the whole mood of political excitement in which the working class had allowed itself to get trapped, in order to make our positions better known, taking advantage of the window of opportunity that electoral propaganda offered; but nobody had any illusions in some sort of rebirth of revolutionary parliamentarism: whoever claims otherwise is either a liar or clueless. In its pamphlets, in its press, the Party called for abstention by explaining it politically and it added 'if you must vote, then vote for us'"

Calling on the masses to abstention and at the same time calling on them to vote doesn't offer them any clarity whatsoever and could only just show the confusion of the Party itself. Giving the Party the task of "inserting ourselves into the whole mood of political excitement in which the working class had allowed itself to get trapped" (an excitement that was fed by the bourgeoisie so that everyone would accept its democratic state) can only confirm what we have said: a revolutionary organisation can work during a period of "excitement" but must contribute to the development of the consciousness of the masses, to help them free themselves from precisely that "excitement."

Cleto also says that one can take advantage of "the window of opportunity that electoral propaganda offered" and proclaims with a certain arrogance that this is not revolutionary paliamentarism , accusing those who disagree of being liars or ignorant. Our critic must not be aware of the "Resolution on the Communist Parties and Parliamentarism", adopted by the 2nd Congress of the Communist International in March of 1920, which proclaimed "revolutionary parliamentarism". In it one reads: "Participation in election campaigns and revolutionary propaganda from the parliamentary rostrum is of particular importance for winning over those layers of the workers who previously, like, say, the rural toiling masses, stood far away from political life." What is the difference between the positions of Cleto and the 3rd International? How is this position different from the ones used by the Trotskyists to justify their participation in the electoral mystification?

The sentimental argument

"Our comrades contacted the partisan groups, risking their lives in order to try to make them understand the political error they had fallen into. They organised and participated in strikes against the war - right in the middle of the war!-and many of them paid for this revolutionary militancy with their lives, gunned down or sent to Nazi extermination camps. How dare the ICC allow itself to publicly express such aberrations on the terrible experiences of our comrades?"

Our criticism of the ICP is obviously not about the organisation of and the participation in strikes. What we categorically reject is the policy (what Cleto calls "contacting the partisan groups") consisting of practicing "entryism" into a counter-revolutionary military organisation of the worst kind, established under the control of the Allies and the SP and CP. A bourgeois military organisation based on voluntary recruitment offers no propitious terrain for spreading revolutionary principles and tactics, quite unlike the official army into which workers are drafted by force. This is why the heroism of the militants who were sent to infiltrate the ranks of the "partisans", and the persecution the militants suffered, cannot be used as arguments to justify such a policy. The only criterion to analyse this policy is whether it responds to the situation without betraying proletarian principles and proletarian methods of struggle. Blending everything can only introduce confusion.

Cleto needs to reflect on the fact that the groups of the extreme left of capital justify their anti-fascist policy, their policy of national liberation, their policy of support for one imperialist camp against another by invoking the deaths, the tortures, the imprisonment suffered on behalf of these bourgeois causes. The Chilean opposition to Pinochet has never ceased reminding us of its dead and tortured. The Peronists, the Montoneros, the and the Trotskyists do the same with the disappeared and the tortured under the Argentinian dictatorship. They profit from the bloodshed as if it was a sum of capital, the interest on which serves to justify further policies of impoverishment and repression against the workers and the exploited, as in the case of Bachelet and the Kirchners. The French Stalinist party presented itself after the Second World War as the party of the "100,000 who were shot". This emotional blackmail allowed them, among other things, to sabotage the great Renault strike in 1947 by proclaiming that "the strike is a weapon of the trusts". The 100,000 who were shot were used by their chief, Maurice Thorez, to call on the French workers to "pull in their belts" to get the French economy going again.

Principles are weapons of the revolution

The bourgeoisie treats the intransigent defence of principles as fanaticism and fundamentalism. For its part, it is the class of pragmatism, of Machiavellian manoeuvres and combinations. Bourgeois politics has become a repulsive spectacle of unnatural alliances, in which all kinds of ideological contortions are commonplace. This is what has produced such general disgust for ‘politics'.

But the proletariat has no reason to hide things, to cover up its own principles and methods of struggle. There is no contradiction between its historic interests and its immediate interest, between its principles and its daily struggle. The specific contribution of revolutionaries is to develop a form of politics in which principles are coherent with practice and don't contradict each other at each moment. For the proletariat, practice is the intransigent defence of class principles, because it is these which give it the perspective that can take humanity out of its present impasse, it is these which orient its immediate struggles towards the revolutionary future. As our comrades of Bilan affirmed, principles are the weapons of the revolution.

ICC 28.10.07

Annex: Cleto's text

The comrades who adhere to the political positions of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party have long been used to the distortions, not to say the lies, put about by he ICC. I have however decided not to allow to pass with impunity the comments by the ICC at the end of the account ‘Notes for a history of the communist left' published in the discussion forum on 26 September. Naturally I expect to hear a response from the ICC but I would like first to excuse myself to the members of this forum for not having replied sooner: I don't have a lot of time and I prefer to devote it to the real class struggle and not to the fantasies of the ICC. The ICC projects its dilettantish idealism into the past, deforms history, justifies its characteristic idealism and, what's worse, discredits the activity of those who risked their lives on the altar of communist militancy.

Blinded by its idealism, the ICC is not even capable of reading what is clearly written, and still less of understanding the dialectic of historical facts. How can you say that our comrades in 43-45 had the same position as the minority which went off to Spain? Our comrades tried to put into practice a living marxism and not a marxism of kitchen recipes, attempting to lead the partisans (most of them proletarians, illusorily convinced that they had to combat Nazi-fascism to prepare the ground for the proletarian revolution) towards class positions. They were thus not shedding their blood for a bourgeois cause, and what they did they were doing in extremely difficult conditions, threatened both by the fascists and the Stalinists. The question which our political fathers asked themselves - with regards both to Spain and the partisan struggle -- a question that the ICC (and its derivatives) never bother to ask themselves, because that is totally alien to their idealist method and their understanding of communist militancy: how to bring together principles on the one hand, and the masses in motion, prone to merciless struggle and the worst sacrifices, on the other? While the masses are shedding their blood for the class enemy's causes (the Popular Front or the Resistance), what should communists do? Should they stay in their little closed circle writing meticulous, scholastic analyses of the mistakes the masses are making?, disdaining to come down into the struggle because the masses are not...pure communists (if they were, what need would there be for the Party or even for ICC-type propaganda?), or should they translate their principles into action so they can be understood and taken up by the masses?

Of course they will risk making errors, but these are the errors of those who live in real life, and not in the storybook world of an enchanted castle where everything is right because it is never verified by reality.

Our comrades contacted the partisan groups, risking their lives in order to try to make them understand the political error they had fallen into. They organised and participated in strikes against the war - right in the middle of the war!-and many of them paid for this revolutionary militancy with their lives, gunned down or sent to Nazi extermination camps. How dare the ICC allow itself to publicly express such aberrations on the terrible experiences of our comrades?

In April 1945, when the proletariat in Turin participated in the insurrection and a part of the section in Turin participated with them, totally independent from the Committee For National Liberation, without any frontist intentions and without any illusion in the partisan struggle, when the war was coming to an end and the Allies were at the gates of Turin, was this an error? This is perhaps the kind of error committed by those who live within the class struggle, the kind of error that the ICC would never commit!

What is one to make of the elections of 1948? Simply that it was an attempt to insert ourselves into the whole mood of political excitement in which the working class had allowed itself to get trapped, in order to make our positions better known, taking advantage of the window of opportunity that electoral propaganda offered; but nobody had any illusions in some sort of rebirth of revolutionary parliamentarism: whoever claims otherwise is either a liar or clueless. In its pamphlets, in its press, the Party called for abstention by explaining it politically and it added 'if you must vote, then vote for us.

[1] IBRP: www.ibrp.org [12]. On the origins of the IBRP and our organisation and the different ways the two groups see their continuity with the Italian communist left, see the polemic on the origins of the ICC and the IBRP in International Reviews 90 and 91.

[2] espanol.groups.yahoo.com/group/comunistasinternacionales

[3] These were guerrilla groups dominated by the Stalinist party; their activity consisted in harassing the Nazi-fascist armies on behalf of the rival imperialist camp.

[4] In International Review 46 and 37 we published the analysis of the Second Congress of the ICP (1948) published in Internationalisme, the organ of the Gauche Communiste de France, a group which we are descended from.

[5] Revolutionary defencism, openly advocated by the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries - and indirectly supported by the Bolshevik Central Committee - consisted of keeping Russia in the imperialist war because ‘now that Russia was a democracy the situation had changed'.

[6] Which doesn't mean at all that the workers have to declare themselves to be ‘pure communists', or that to make the revolution every individual worker has to recognise himself as a communist.

[7] i.e. the Mensheviks.

The last five years have witnessed an international development of the class struggle. These struggles have taken place in response to the brutality of the capitalist crisis and the dramatic worsening of living and working conditions across the world. Today, entering a new stage of the crisis, announced by the property crisis in the United States, we can expect a intensification of these struggles. In some of the countries where workers' conditions are most miserable - Egypt, Dubai, Bangladesh - we have already seen the germs of future mass strikes. In Europe reappeared in 2006 with the protests of students in France a proletarian protest movement with a mass character and tendencies towards self organisation.

At this moment, in Germany, we are witnessing the beginning of a new stage in this development. In a leading industrial country of the old capitalist heartlands, a simultaneity of labour conflicts threaten to snowball into a real wave of workers' struggles.

A new year of discontent

The year 2008 began with the German railway company Deutsche Bahn (DB) being obliged to grant an 11% wage rise and a one hour reduction of the working week to the train drivers. This was the result of months of smouldering conflict during which neither the outlawing of nation wide railways strikes nor the division of the DB workforce by the trade unions was able to erode. This was followed by the mobilisation in the Ruhr area around the closing of the Nokia mobile phone production. A day of action in solidarity with the Nokia employees in Bochum saw the mobilisation on the street of workers from countless different sectors and the sending of delegations from different parts of Germany. In particular, the workers at the Opel car plant in Bochum went on strike in support of the "Nokianer" that day.

By that that, the annual ritual of the annual wage negotiations had already begun. The rolling strikes by steel workers was followed by work stoppages by tens of thousands of public sector workers all over the country. By mid March, the doctors from the municipal hospitals were also taking to the streets, demanding, like so many other employees, a 12% wage increase.

But it is above all the unlimited all-out strike of local transport workers in Berlin which, since the end of the first week of March, has demonstrated that, this year, the wage negotiation rounds are directly challenging the capitalist offensive against the working class. This strike of 10.000 workers - already the largest and longest of its kind in post war German history - has manifested a combativity and determination which initially took the bourgeoisie by surprise. This conflict escalated at a moment when the German railways made a last attempt to back out of the concessions it had been obliged to make, and when the negotiations in the public sector were on the verge of breakdown. In the latter sector, the state is "offering" a 5% wage "increase" over 2 years to its employees, demanding in return an extension of the working week of two hours! In Berlin, where the whole of municipal transport is on strike except the suburban trains (S-Bahn, owned by the DB) the perspective suddenly opened of these latter employees, and the whole public sector, going on strike, not only in Berlin, but across the country! The ruling class had to pull the emergency brake.[1] The railway company gave in hours before the resumption of a national general strike of train drivers. At the same time, the federal and municipal employers and the trade union Verdi called in mediators in the public sector conflict, meaning that strikes there in the coming weeks are illegal. In this way, the government, the employers and the trade unions isolated the strike at the Berlin transport company (BVG).

But the potential for the simultaneity of workers' struggles to objectively pose their inter-linkage flows not alone from the general massive discontent about the fall in real wages. There is also an accumulation of mass redundancies. A few days after Nokia, the bankruptcy of the semi-state bank of the province of North-Rhine-Westphalia, the WestLB, was averted through a 2 billion Euro state salvaging operation. The cost for the employees: 2000 lay-offs, one third of staff, and massive wage cuts for the remainder. The same state which has handed out billions to prop up other credit institutes like the IKB in Düsseldorf or the provincial bank of Saxony is now telling public sector workers that there are no funds available to meet wage demands!

But in addition to the victims of the present property market earthquake, in the past weeks a number of industrial companies - Siemens, BMW, Henkel (Persil) - have announced record profits, and at the same time mass redundancies. The old lie to workers in companies in difficulty - that restoring profitability through "sacrifice" will save their jobs - has been shattered by reality.

These unprecedented attacks have led not only to first expressions of resistance this year: Nokia, but also the demonstrations of miners in the Saarland against pit closures[2]. They also help to undermine the propaganda of the ruling class. In the aftermath of the "national unity" campaign of the trade unions and the political class against the Finnish Nokia company, one of the favourite jokes of popular comedians and cabarettists concerns the horrible Finnish capitalist who run Siemens and the WestLB!

The politicisation of struggle

One of the most significant signs of the present maturation of the situation is the beginning of a more overt, conscious politicisation of the workers' struggle. Recent developments give us three important examples.

1. The role of the Opel car plant in Bochum in the recent conflict at Nokia. It is true that the employees of Nokia felt demoralised and intimidated by the provocative brutality with which the shutting down of the plant was announced. It was to a large degree the massive intervention of the Opel workers at Nokia, calling on them to struggle, and promising to join any eventual strike, which made possible the mobilisation which took place. Already in 2004, a one week wildcat strike at Opel in Bochum prevented the closing down of their own plant. Today, the "Operaner" are determined to generalise this lesson to workers at large: workers resistance and solidarity pays! What we see here is the emergence of combative vanguards in big workers' concentrations, who are aware of their weight in the class struggle, and determined to throw it in for the benefit of workers at large. Another such concentration is that of Mercedes-Daimler, which already in the 1990s through a large scale strike prevented the cutting of sick leave payments by the Kohl government. In 2004 the Daimler workers who took to the streets in Stuttgart and Bremen against cuts in wages and benefits declared that they were struggling not only for themselves, but for all workers. We should also recall that Germany is still a country of huge companies and industrial concentrations, with millions of millions of highly skilled workers.
2. The beginning of open confrontation between the workers and the left-control led organs of capital is concretised by the BVG transport strike in Berlin. This strike is not only in reaction to the present loss of real wages in face of rising inflation. The workers are also rebelling against the consequences of the wage agreement of 2005, which resulted in general wage cuts of 12%, a horrific worsening of working conditions, and the "outsourcing" of staff at even worse conditions. A deal which Verdi, the main trade unions in the sector, still vehemently defends. Being aware that the new wage "offer" the bosses were going to make would be a provocation for the workforce, Verdi scheduled a day of protest in advance, to take place in a Saturday towards the end of February in order to cause as little disruption as possible. But when the workers heard that their wages were to be frozen at the level of 2007, with increases only offered to those employed since 2005, they went on strike 24 hours before schedule, without waiting for union permission. Such is the indignation, not only about the factual wage cuts, but also in face of the obvious attempt to divide the workers, that Verdi has been obliged to abandon its search for a "cordial, negotiated settlement" and call an all-out strike. This strike has also led to an open confrontation with the "Red-Red" left coalition of Social Democracy and the left wing "Linkspartei" which rules Berlin. The latter party, which emerged from the Stalinist SED which once ruled East Germany, and is now expanding into former West Germany with the help of the former leader of the SPD, Oskar Lafontaine, denounces the strike as an expression of the "privileged mentality" of "pampered" West Berlin! This is going on at the very moment when powerful fractions of the German bourgeoisie are trying to establish the party of Lafontaine and Gysi as a fifth parliamentary force capable of diverting workers' discontent back onto the electoral terrain. No wonder that evening for evening the news on TV manages not to even mention a strike which is creating chaos in the capital city of the country!
3. First internet blogs are appearing, where for instance railway workers express their admiration for and solidarity with the BVG strike. This is all the more important since in sectors like those of railway workers, pilots or hospital medical staff, where the weight of corporatism is particularly strong, the bourgeoisie is responding to the growing dissatisfaction with the established DGB trade unions through profiling pseudo-radical, but strictly corporatist unions. This is done not only to contain combativity in a union framework and prevent self organisation, but also to counteract political radicalisation. The train drivers' unions, GDL, presently the favourite of political leftism, is in fact a caricature of narrow parochialism and non-political conformism.

Growing role of the german proletariat

The German bourgeoisie has for decades been proud of its system of so-called wage negotiation autonomy, a strictly defined legal framework within which, on the basis of sectoral and regional division of the workers, bosses and trade unions impose the will of capital. Nevertheless, 2008 is not the first time in post war Germany that the working class has begun to put in question this bourgeois framework. From the September strikes of 1969 to the massive struggle at Ford Cologne in 1973, wildcat strikes contested the "agreements" imposed by unions and bosses. This autonomous intervention of the class was above all provoked by the consequences of inflation. Nor is it the first time that there have been workers' mobilisations and class solidarity in response to plant closures. In particular the struggle at Krupp Rheinhausen in 1987 has remained in the collective memory of the class.

But today we have both phenomena together. Inflation and the accumulation of the effects of years of real wage cuts have led to a generalised anger. Lay-offs and mass unemployment, while initially often having an intimidating effect on combativity, provoke an increasingly profound reflection about the nature of the capitalist system.

The present struggles are thus the continuation of those of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, and need to consciously appropriate their lessons. But they are not only a continuation. They are also a deepening of this tradition of struggle. After 1968, Germany participated in the international recovery of class struggle. But it still lagged behind other countries on account of the particular brutality of the counter-revolution, and the initially greater capacity of Germany to resist the worst effects of the capitalist crisis.

As opposed to this, the German proletariat is presently beginning to join its class sisters and brothers in France and other countries at the head of the international class struggle.

Weltrevolution. March 14 2008.

[1] In recent years the "public hand" in Berlin broke with the negotiation "community" of the German provinces (Länder) in order to conduct wage negotiations on its own, and thus isolate the state employees there from their colleagues elsewhere. Background is the contemporary German specificity that the capital is not only the largest, but also the poorest major city in the country.

[2] For years now, mining in the Saar region has regularly provoked earthquakes often leading to considerable damage to property. Until now, this never bothered the ruling class. Now, all of a sudden, such an occurrence is providing a pretext to close down all remaining mines in the province.

Last autumn, at the height of the movement against the law on the ‘Liberties and Responsibilities of Universities'(1), 36 universities were ‘disrupted' (in the journalists' terminology) by picket lines, blockades or occupations. These methods have often provoked long and passionate debates inside the general assemblies. (GAs). Let's leave to one side the groups who oppose any ‘disruptions' to the colleges, and who actually support the planned reforms of the government, in the name of sacrosanct ‘individual liberty' and the ‘student rights'. Much more interesting for us are the discussions between the students who won't accept the attacks without putting up a fight and who are trying collectively to decide the best methods of the struggle for them. Blockading the college? Totally? With picket lines? Do we turn it into an occupation?

These questions aren't just a matter for young people and students. As struggles develop, the same questions are posed more and more by the whole working class: how do we conduct our struggles? Do we need a picket? What kind of picket? Should we occupy the factory?

We won't pretend we can answer all these questions with a ready-made, magic recipe applicable to every new case of struggle, with its particular conditions and the choices it has to make! But by examining examples of blockading and occupation, we can better understand that it is absolutely necessary to extend the strike and, on the other hand, show how isolation is always a death trap.

Unity and solidarity are the main concern of the students

In the movement against the CPE in the spring of 2006, the issue that was omnipresent was the blockade. Indeed this type of movement depends on some disruption to the smooth running of the universities. If students don't attend lectures - even on a large scale - would anybody be bothered? Would anyone worry if the lecture theatres were empty? Probably not, not even senior lecturers!

However, over and above this simple imperative, in the blockades of the colleges in 2006 and in 2007, some students expressed a profound sense of solidarity and need for unity: "We are not blockading the university for the fun of it or because we are bored with our studies! The strike is the best way for us to make ourselves heard. Striking breaks the accepted logic of work and allows us all time to organise ourselves together democratically. But if the strike is not to be an isolated action carried out by a small group of people, the blockade is quite important. It enables everyone to miss lectures and hence to find time to join in the mobilisation. In addition, the blockade lets students escape from the pressures of their studies or their exams and actively participate in the movement without being penalised for it. The blockade is the democratic means that makes it possible for everyone to get involved!" (Read the blog: https://antilru.canalblog.com/archives/le_blocage/index.html [16]). For example, by preventing lectures from taking place, grant-holding students are able to participate in the GAs and the demonstrations without worrying that their grants will be withheld for ‘non-attendance', which is what one student stated openly to Libération journalists on November 12th 2007: "If there isn't a blockade, there won't be any movement. Otherwise grant-holding students just wouldn't demonstrate."

We have heard many times over the odious accusations from respected university governors, broadcast across the media, calling the students who participate in the struggle ‘Khmers Rouges' and ‘delinquents' The bourgeoisie may spit venom, but behind the blockades, there wasn't a powerful minority trying to impose its views (physical force, moreover, lay more with the governors, as is clear from the number of injuries suffered following the CRS incursions) or to imprison students in ‘their' colleges. Quite the opposite; the students demonstrated a clear and collective desire for the struggle to broaden out by calling for as wide and lively a discussion as possible. Hence, much more than the blockades themselves, the attitude behind them is what provided the movement against the CPE in particular with all its vitality and its strength. As we have already written in May 2006 in our ‘Theses on the students' movement': "the strike in the universities began with blockades. The blockades enabled the most conscious and combative students to show their determination and above all to attract large numbers of their comrades to the general assemblies where a considerable number who hadn't understood the significance of the government's attacks or the need to fight back were convinced by the arguments in the debates."

The extension of its struggle is vital for the working class

The power of the working class is exposed to the broad light of day when it develops a clear sense of its unity and solidarity. This is why all struggles must be animated by a concern for extension to other workers. After a long struggle in 2006 and 2007, the workers in the big spinning and weaving factory complex, Mahalla al-Kubra's Misr, situated in the north of Cairo, Egypt, finally succeeded in achieving a victory. An episode from this struggle shows clearly the workers occupying their factory to protect themselves from the fierce repression of the Egyptian state.

On 7 December 2006, 3000 women workers, protesting at the non-payment of the bonuses they'd been promised, crossed the factory to their male colleagues who still had their machines running. The women were singing out loud: "Where have all the men gone? There are only women here". Little by little, 10,000 workers started assembling in the Mahalla's Tal‘at Harb Square located right outside the entrance to the factory. The Egyptian bourgeoisie didn't lose any time: anti-riot police were quickly deployed around the factory and in the town. Facing the threat of repression, small groups of strikers decided to occupy the factory. 70 workers could have been trapped. Confident in what it was doing, the state decided to place the anti-riot police outside the gates that same night. With 70 against the whole police pack, there could only be one winner. But these workers knew that they weren't really on their own. They started a loud banging on the steel barriers.

"We woke up everyone in the company and town. Our mobile phones ran out of credit as we were calling our families and friends outside, asking them to open their windows and let security know they were watching. We called all the workers we knew to tell them to hurry up to the factory...

The children from the junior schools and the students from the senior schools close by take to the streets in support of the strikers. The security forces were paralysed. Finally, after the factory had been occupied for 4 days, the government officials panicked; a bonus of 45 days pay was offered and assurances given that the company would not be privatised." (See https://en.internationalism.org/wr/304/egypt-germs-of-mass-strike [17])

So, by deciding to occupy their workplace, these 70 workers could have been expected to feel themselves cornered and at the mercy of the security forces. However, this handful of workers who had locked themselves inside the factory did not attempt to make this a siege, fighting alone against the odds and with no chance of winning. Just the opposite, they used the occupation as a rallying point, calling on their class brothers to join them in the fight. Several weeks of struggle demonstrated that class solidarity was being built little by little, that links were being established and that they would therefore be able to rely on the support of 20,000 fellow workers. Having built up this confidence, the workers were bold enough to call to all the workers they knew "to tell them to come to the factory straight away". The factory occupation was only one of the means of carrying out the struggle; it was the general dynamic towards the extension of the struggle that was the decisive element.

Isolation is always a death trap

No method of struggle in itself is a panacea. Blockades and occupations can be quite unsuitable, depending on the circumstances. Worse than that! When they are under the control of the unions, they are always used to divide the workers and to lead them to defeat. The strike of the miners in Great Britain in 1984 is one tragic illustration of this.

At this time, the oldest proletariat in the world was still one of the most militant. For many a year it had a record number of strike days. On two of these occasions, the state was forced to withdraw its attacks. In 1972 and in 1974, the miners had actually created a balance of forces in which the working class had the upper hand, departing from the logic of sectoralism and corporatism and instilling the strike with the dynamic of extension. In small groups or in hundreds, they drove to ports, to steelworks, to coal depots, to company headquarters, to erect a blockade or to convince the workers they met to join in the struggle. This method of struggle would be famously described as ‘flying pickets' and symbolised the strength of workers' solidarity and unity. Hence, the miners were able to paralyse the whole economy, bringing production, distribution and the burning of coal, the most common source of energy in the factories at the time, to a near total halt.

After coming into government in 1979, Thatcher was determined to inflict defeat on a working class she considered too combative for her liking. The plan for doing that was simple: it would entail isolating the miners in a long, drawn-out strike. Over several months the British bourgeoisie prepared for battle. Stocks of coal were built up to prevent shortages. In her memoirs, Thatcher states "It was the responsibility of Nigel Lawson, who was made Energy Minister in September 1981, to - continually and without any provocation - build up the coal stocks that would allow the country to hold out. We would be hearing the words ‘hold out' a lot in the following months." When things were finally ready, the brutal announcement of 20,000 redundancies in the coal industry was made in March 1994. As expected, the miners' reaction was electric; from the first day of the strike, 100 pits out of 184 stopped working. The unions immediately erected a ring of steel around the strikers. This strategy aimed to prevent any risk of ‘contamination'. The rail unions and seamen's' unions platonically declared support for the strikers, but otherwise the miners were left to cope alone. The powerful dockers' union settled for calling strikes, but at a later date, one for July when some pits were closed because of holidays, and the other in the autumn which was then cancelled only a few days later! The TUC refused to support the strike at all. The electricians' union and the steelworkers' union came out against the strike. In short, the unions actively sabotaged every possibility of a joint struggle. But it was the miners' union (NUM) in particular that rounded off this dirty work by keeping the miners locked up in sterile and interminable blockades of the coalmines and coal depots (for over a year!). Having amassed large stocks of coal, the bourgeoisie didn't need to worry that production would become paralysed. It would only worry if there were an extension of the struggle to different sectors of the working class. It was necessary at all costs to avoid the miners deploying flying pickets everywhere to discuss and convince the workers from other sectors to join them in the struggle. The NUM uses all its energy to contain the strike in the mining sector. To avoid flying pickets being sent to the gates of the neighbouring factories, the mineworker's energies were directed towards blockading the pits and the coal depots. With the heavy policing put in place, the NUM was able to lead the miners into set pitched battles and violent confrontations with the armies of well-equipped police, and the biased media reporting meant that this becomes both an obstacle to and further distraction from the need to extend the struggle to the other sectors.

The NUM took great care to avoid calling a national strike, giving each region the chance to decide whether to join the struggle or not. Some pits continued working and were surrounded by cordons of police. The same NUM branded these working pits ‘the haunt of the scabs'. From March 1984 to March 1985, for a whole year, the life of thousands of mineworkers and their families was going to revolve around the single question of blockading ‘their own' pits, the coal depots and those pits that continue working. Blocking coal production and distribution became the one and only goal, a single-issue campaign for the union leadership. The flying pickets had their wings clipped; instead of ‘flying' factory to factory, they were rooted to the same spot, outside the same pits and depots, day after day, week after week, then month after month. The only outcome is worsening tensions between strikers and non-strikers: sometimes fights erupted among the miners.

This time the miners were isolated from their class and divided amongst themselves and they became an easy prey. Thanks to the union sabotage, to the sterile and interminable blockades, to the grounding of the flying pickets, police repression could be stepped up. The balance sheet of the miners' strike of 1984/5: 7,000 injured, 11,291 arrested and 8,392 put on trial. Much more seriously, this defeat would be inflicted on the whole working class. The Thatcher government was able to enforce a whole series of attacks in every sector.

There are evidently no simple recipes for the class struggle. Every method of struggle (blockades, pickets, occupations) can sometimes be useful for the struggles, and sometimes a cause of division. One thing is certain, the strength of the working class lies in its capacity for unity and in its capacity to develop solidarity and hence to extend its struggle to every sector. It is this dynamic of extension of the struggle alone that terrifies the bourgeoisie and allows us to draw out, in broad terms, essential lessons from the experiences of the proletariat's struggles:

- pickets or occupations should never be the source of any closing off or retreat of the struggle, on the contrary, they are a tool for its extension;

- in order to be able to extend, opening out is vital. An occupied factory must be a place where workers from other sectors, retired workers, unemployed workers... can come to discuss and participate in the struggle. The pickets, themselves, must create the opportunities for discussing and convincing non-strikers to join the struggle. Flying pickets must focus primarily on the idea of extending the struggle to all sectors.

- it's not possible to use every kind of action at every moment. Especially when a struggle isn't extending and is stagnating, clearly facing a retreat, it is almost always pointless if the most combative and determined individuals try to stretch themselves to the limits of their endurance (physical and moral) with somewhat desperate occupations and blockades. What counts in this situation is to prepare the new struggles that lie ahead.

-    finally, when they use the actions of blockading, picketing and occupation, the unions are aiming to divide and isolate. Only by workers taking the struggle into their own hands can the struggle and solidarity develop!

Be that as it may, if we look beyond the role that occupying a factory or a picket line can play at any particular moment of a strike, it is in the street where the workers can assemble together en masse. It isn't for nothing that in May 2006, the steelworkers of Vigo, in Spain, who were occupying their factory and facing up to violent police repression, decided to organise their general assemblies and demonstrations in the streets in the town centre. Here, in the street, the workers of every sector, the retired workers, the unemployed workers, the workers' families... were all able to join the strikers and actively demonstrate their class solidarity with the struggle.   Pawel (24 January 2008)

(1) This law aims to reduce the cost to the state of higher education by concentrating its ‘financial effort' on some elite colleges, hence making the other universities under-resourced and unpopular.

Through the following communiqué, Internacionalismo - ICC's section in Venezuela, analyzes the events in South America, following the appearance of Colombian troops in Ecuadorian territory.

The events

In the early hours of Saturday 2nd March the Colombian army bombs a FARC camp located in Ecuadorian territory, a few kilometers from the Colombian border. The objective of the mission is to eliminate the guerrilla leader nicknamed Raúl Reyes, an important member of FARC's secretariat, who dies along with 16 guerrilla fighters. The president of Colombia (Álvaro Uribe), who followed the whole operation throughout the night, alerted the president of Ecuador (Rafael Correo) of the action, who reacted in a moderate manner after listening to the explanations of the Colombian president.

On Sunday, Correa has a change of mood and decides to expel Colombia's ambassador from Ecuador, ordering a strengthening of the military presence on the border with Colombia. On Monday, Ecuador decides to break diplomatic relations with Colombia, accusing president Uribe of being a "bellicose", after the director of Colombia's police declared that documents gotten through the computers of the guerrilla fighters showed that there were links between FARC and the governments of Ecuador and Venezuela[1].

On Sunday 3rd March, Chavez, in his television show called "Aló, Presidente", after accusing Uribe of being a "gangster and an imperialist lackey", and threatening to send a Russian jet-bomber Sukho if the Colombian president decided to carry out a similar action on Venezuelan territory, orders the retirement of the personnel in the embassy of Bogotá and the mobilization of 10 military battalions towards the border with Colombia. On Monday, the Venezuelan chancellor declares the expulsion of the ambassador of Colombia; also on that same day (even if not made official), the Venezuelan government orders the closing of the border with Colombia[2].

As expected, this situation has created tension in the region and concern within the population, mainly on the Colombian-Venezuelan border.

Chavez heightens tensions

The reaction of Venezuela's government has been disproportionate, for Colombia hasn't carried out any kind of military action on Venezuelan territory. The commentators point out that Venezuela's reaction has been greater than Ecuador, the "invaded" country.

It is speculated that Chavez, after the first moderate reaction of Correa (who shares the Chavist project of the "Bolivarian revolution"), pressured the Ecuadorian president to break relations with Colombia and demonstrate a united front against Uribe's aggressions.

This exaggerated reaction of Venezuela is not at all surprising. The leftist government of Chavez has developed a political strategy to position itself as a regional power, based on the power given by its oil, and with it, it exploits a deepening anti-Americanism in order to make use of the social and political problems of the countries in the region and the geopolitical difficulties of USA in the world. This position has led Venezuela to support politically and financially leftist groups and parties in the region, some of them that are already in power, as with the case of Evo Morales in Bolivia or Correa in Ecuador. Chavez's reaction and his pressure on Ecuador are no surprise, since Colombia's operation has revealed the support both countries give to the Colombian guerrillas, permitting the setting up of camps on their territories to evade the Colombian military. The decision of Venezuela's government to mobilize troops towards the border with Colombia was a response to the real possibility of the Colombian army attacking guerrilla camps in Venezuelan territory.

Chavez has had continuous political and diplomatic clashes with Colombia, which has been transformed into the USA's most important military base in the region, with the excuse of attacking the guerrilla and drug-trafficking, through Plan Colombia - which began in 2000.

As a way of trying to destabilize the Colombian government, Chavez has given increasingly open support to guerrilla organizations (FARC and ELN); he also gives political (and maybe financial) support to the Polo Democrático Alternativo (Democratic Alternative Pole), a Colombian leftist party that defends the Bolivarian project against the Uribist party in power.

The Chavez-Uribe confrontation has maintained itself more or less in an unstable equilibrium until November of the last year, when Chavez was considered as possible mediator for the "humanitarian exchange" of various hostages in the hands of FARC[3], for militants of that same organization. We should not forget that the inexplicable decision of the Colombian government of placing Chavez as a mediator for the exchange of hostages for FARC militants may be part of a strategy of the Colombian bourgeoisie and USA to know better the maneuverings of FARC and weakening it geo-politically, in the way that is happening right now.

It is a fact that the guerrillas have weakened due to Uribe's determined actions[4], a situation that explains the insistence of Chavez defending it as a fighting force, which would open the doors to its transformation into a political party. Colombia's recent action in Ecuador could form part of the necessity of blocking this last option and aborting the unilateral handing-out of hostages to Chavez, and to make public the links of the Venezuelan government and FARC. The Colombian government, making use of their intelligence (supported by highly advanced American military technology), has denounced many times the existence of guerrilla camps in Colombia's neighboring countries, particularly in Venezuela and Ecuador. In fact, some months ago, president Uribe had already denounced that the guerrilla leader Raúl Reyes was hiding in Ecuadorian territory. It seems like Colombia's government was just waiting for the right moment to eliminate him[5].

The US and the Colombian bourgeoisie know about the weakening of Chavez at the internal level, which was reflected by the defeat of the referendum in December 2nd of last year, the intention of which was to make re-election indefinite. The masses that put their hopes in him are becoming disillusioned. This is why Chavez's government is trying relentlessly to lead the population in an aggressive campaign against the exterior enemy (the US and now Colombia), as a way to turn the masses' attention away from their real everyday problems (lack of basic goods, crime, unemployment, etc).

USA's geopolitical strategy has been to leave Chavismo to debilitate by itself progressively, that is why the American government has avoided falling into continuous provocations; a situation that has lead Chavez to align his nationalist, rhetorical artillery against Uribe. The US and the "more conscious" bourgeoisies of the region know that the high oil profits will not be enough to sustain the voracity of the Bolivarian bourgeoisie (called the "Bolibourgeoisie"), which needs copious amounts of resources for their licit and illicit businesses (a product of the high level of corruption that reigns in the Bolivarian lines); at the same time, sustaining an anti-American geo-politics (which in the Cold War was financed by the USSR) costs many thousands of dollars. By the same token, maintaining the populist politics needs large amounts of spending - a reason for why these politics have weakened since 2006 (something that the most impoverished sectors are really feeling).

Due to the social unease[6], the confrontation against Colombia and the bellicose mobilizations have not had the support of Venezuela's population. The calls of Chavez, of the National Assembly and the high bureaucrats of Chavismo for the mobilization of the population towards the border, have been met with indifference, opposition to war or the thought that both governments should find a better way to solve their conflicts. The government has received the support of the recent-lumpen ex-bureaucrat Lina Ron, who has put her 2,000 supporters at the service of the "commander"!!; these form part of the paid henchmen that the chavismo uses to repress its opposition, and the masses or workers who protest or fight for their conditions. On the other hand, while the Colombian bourgeoisie has formed a united front at the side of Uribe; in the case of Venezuela, the sectors of the opposing bourgeosie and its parties have formed columns against Chavez.

There is another factor no less important that works against the bellicose tendencies of chavismo: the division in the armed forces - a reflection of the division that the different factions of the bourgeoisie have inculcated at the level of the civilian population. While it is not expressed in an open manner, it is evident that there are military sectors that are in disagreement with the relations the government has with the guerrillas: the latter have attacked the Venezuelan military forces on many occasions, leaving many military and civil deaths. According to the declarations of the recent minister of defense Raúl Baduel, who since last year has flipped-flopped to the Opposition, and who has an ascendancy in the armed forces, the government doesn't have the support of the middle ranks - the ones who are in charge of the troops.

The dynamic of decomposition

Even though various countries[7] and even the OAS itself try to lower the tensions in the region, it is evident that it is convenient for Venezuela to prolong the crisis. In this sense, the pressure on Ecuador will continue: at the moment that this communiqué is being written, President Correa finishes a visit in Caracas, a moment that him and Chavez used to light-up the flames of the conflict. After that, Correa goes to Nicaragua, a moment that president Daniel Ortega used to break diplomatic relations with Colombia.

It is possible that the conflict would not transcend the mediated scare-mongering of both sides. However, there exists a context of decomposition that makes it impossible to predict what can happen:

• The US, through Plan Colombia, has introduced factors of instability in the region that are irreversible: Colombia has been militarily equipped and has a highly trained armed force, which according the specialists, is about four times bigger than the ones of Venezuela and Ecuador together; supported by the most advanced war technology. A situation that creates a military imbalance in the region.
• With Uribe's decision of denouncing Chavez before the International Criminal Court for the financing of terrorist groups, it is possible that Colombia would use the recent events to support itself and continue denouncing and lowering the prestige of Chavez at the international level; for example, making public the support of the Venezuelan government for FARC and putting forward proof of guerrilla camps located in Venezuelan territory.
• The Chavistas, in their "forward-retreat", could use whatever means to justify a military confrontation with Colombia. In one of his recent declarations, Chavez threatened many Colombian enterprises with nationalisation.

Internacionalismo

March 2008.

NOTE: On Friday 7th March, at the same time of the reunion of leaders of various countries in Latin America in Dominican Republic, Uribe, Chavez, Correa, and Ortega ended hugging each other; which supposedly puts an end to the conflict. We all know that politicians are used to hugging each other while hiding a dagger for their adversaries. From our point of view, Uribe left really clear his plans against his adversaries, who did not have other option left except hugging him. It's possible that the tensions will lower themselves momentarily, but the confrontational situation is still present. Chavez needs his external enemy; in his support, Ecuador has decided not to restart, for now, diplomatic relations with Colombia.

[1] Some of the evidence found concerned the transference of $300 million and armaments from Venezuela to FARC. The evidence also pointed out that FARC gave $50,000 to Chavez in 1992 when the latter was in prison after his failed coup d'etat.

[2] Colombia is Venezuela's second most important commercial partner, just after the US. Through the border with Colombia comes 30% of the country's imports, and within them an important percentage of foodstuffs. Closing the border would heighten the scarcity of foodstuffs in the country, which has become deeper since the end of 2007. This fact is an expression of the irrationality and "forward-retreat" of Chavismo.

[3] The whole deal with the "humanitarian exchange" has been followed by a stream of hypocrisies from different factions of the bourgeoisie, because all of them try to make use of the situation (particularly Chavez and FARC) for their own self-service; many countries have formed part of this "humanitarian" party (like France). All of them don't really care about the lives of the hostages. We should also mention that many of the hostages form part of bourgeois institutions (parliament, political parties, etc.). We should denounce in a firm manner the exploitation of the masses' sentimentalism in favor of the bourgeoisie's geopolitical interests.

[4] FARC's numbers have diminished from 17,000 to 11,000 since Uribe became president in 2002. Close to 7,000 guerrilla fighters have died, and more than 46,000 elements from FARC, Army of National Liberation (ELN) and the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) have become demobilized. Source: El Nacional, 3-9-08

[5] According to the most recent news, the exact location of the guerrilla leader Raúl Reyes was obtained after he received a call from Chavez on his satellite phone.

[6] The protests of the population are becoming more frequent. In some cities there have been riots due to the scarcity of food. The protests against murders are more frequent. Since last year, workers have mobilized for better social conditions and wages: workers in sectors like oil, metal, tyre manufacturing, health, etc.

[7] One of the countries that can play an important role is Brazil, since Lula is the "friend" of all countries in conflict, particularly of Chavez. France, which has been seen meddling around because of the hostage Betancourt, has had an ambiguous position that has deserved critiques: first it lamented the incident due to the role that Reyes played in the mediation for the liberation of hostages, expressing a confusing attitude concerning FARC; afterwards, it found necessary to explain that its relation with Reyes only existed until the middle of last year. In recent declarations it "threatened" FARC to label them as terrorists if Ingrid Betancourt is hurt.

Fidel Castro, leader of the Stalinist regime in Cuba for many years, died on the 25th November 2016. As per usual, this has triggered a paroxym of praise and condemnation from the bourgeois media. In particular, those on the left-wing of capitalism's political machine, have taken the opportunity to reignite the myths about Castro and Cuban "socialism". For us, there is nothing to be praised in the brutal regime which, under the leadership of its Russian master, was an eager contributor to the butchery of workers around the world during the Cold War.

Accordingly, we are republishing an article written back in 2008 by a comrade from the Dominican Republic, when Castro retired as leader of the Cuban state. At a moment when the bourgeois world order seems to be lurching into a new phase of disorder and misery, it is more tempting than ever to seek solace in the false illusions of leftism. For this reason, it is vital that the working class understand the true nature of Castro and his ilk: counter-revolutionary imperialists that repressed and slaughtered workers around the globe in service to the brutal dictatorship of capitalism.

In the week of February 18th 2008, the Cuban "president", Fidel Castro, announced that he no longer aspired to lead the Cuban capitalist state. This has motivated the right wing bourgeoisie, through their speakers, to announce a complete end to communism and the end of the Cuban revolution. In the same way as they did with the fall of the Eastern Bloc, they try to confuse the workers, without realizing that they - the bourgeoisie - are celebrating their own burial. With their speculation on possible disappearance of the Cuban model, it is not the proletariat who loses - it is capitalism. On the other side of the fence, the left wing of capital, with sergeant Hugo Chavez at the front, assures us that the revolution continues. To counter this nonsense that aims to confuse the working class, we have to clarify a few things.

In January 1959 there wasn't a real social revolution in Cuba, but an exchange of ruling factions, with the ascent of leaders from the rural Castro-Guevarist and cienfuegist revolt to power, overthrowing sergeant Batista. Things turned around from the right wing of capital, manifested in the military dictatorship, to the left of capital; the latter spearheading a cluster of reforms and nationalizations, that far from elevating the level of consciousness and proletarian struggle, accommodated them to capitalism. By the same token, the promises of a change of situation for the majority felt short. There was a relative betterment in education and hygiene - which was made in the interest of Cuban capital since it exports to many countries educators and medics - but the rationing that has persisted through half a century demonstrates a dramatic lack of basic necessities. Anyone who wishes to acquire something minimally decent has to pay for it through the ridiculously high prices in special shops which cater for tourists or the black market. The privileges of an exploitative minority persist at a level even more ostentatious than in the times of Batista: the members of the so called "Communist" Party, the high-ranking military functionaries, etc. have access to all types of luxuries that deeply contrast with the deprivation and suffering of the majority.

In Cuba there wasn't a revolution. The regime changed hands, and the taking of power, instead of being made through parliament, was made through insurrection. Capitalism is still capitalism. They only changed their dress-code: the liberal clothes of suit and tie were replaced by the green uniform of men with beards.

Another aspect is the pretended "anti-imperialist" character of Mr. Castro. In the first place, any capitalist state in order to survive is necessarily imperialist, since it has to make others submit and has to supply itself with the military, economic, political, ideological and cultural means that would permit it to defend its interests in the midst of the world imperialist jungle. This is why in Cuba the majority of the country's resources are concentrated in the maintenance of a fairly powerful army, which has waged wars in Africa (for example Angola) under the pretext of "anti-imperialism." In the same manner, Cuba has promoted itself as a "socialist country" through a powerful propaganda apparatus. With these means - obviously limited because of the small size of the country- the Cuban regime has tried to carve its own niche in the struggle nations wage against each other.

Fidel is certainly taking advantage of the discontent with the USA, presenting this country as the great empire, due to the contradictions he had with this nation, but at the same time he denounced American imperialism, he praised soviet social-imperialism; now he supports the Bolivarian imperialism of sergeant Chavez. Please, tell me then if there is a bad imperialism and a good one; would it be something like a terrorist being dedicated to the suppression of terrorism?

At the beginning of the "Cuban Revolution" - 1959 and 1970 - it was Fidel Castro who, in that famous speech to the UN, confessed to not being a communist, but that his attempts of trying to get a reasonable deal with the powerful northern neighbor failed. Then, he changed his coat and allied to Russian imperialism. Consequently, the old Cuban "Communist" party was forced to merge with the "July 26 movement" and constituted itself as a new "Communist" Party that, since then, has ruled as the only party.

The Cuban regime has loudly proclaimed itself as "anti-imperialist" reducing the label of "imperialism" to exclusively the United States. Humanity is fed up with the savagery and destruction of Yankee imperialism; however imperialism is not combated by states that are supposedly "anti-imperialist," but through the independent and internationalist struggle of the proletariat. There is no such thing as "good" or "bad" imperialism. There aren't "good" states that pay allegiance to the law and "humanism" on the one hand, and states that have the monopoly on tyranny, militarism, and barbarism on the other. To combat imperialism through a state, in the way that Castro and the Bolivarian Chavez proposes to us, would be like trusting the fight against terrorism to a terrorist.

Another great lie that has been perpetuated is the one of "communist" Fidel or "socialist" Cuba. The first thing to evaluate in this case, is if in Cuba there exists surplus value, wage-labor, private property, and if there can exist in a capitalist world an island of socialism.

In Cuba there exists wage-labor and the exploitation of man by man. Instead of there being a classical capitalist class there is a bureaucracy that administers the state against the majority. What has happened was just a juridical change in property, changing it from particular to bureaucratic; the title of the property has passed from the particulars to the State, but it still is private property since the great majority is deprived of every medium of existence, and to survive has to accept working everyday in the conditions imparted by the Boss.  The only difference is that, while in other countries the boss is Mr. Someone from Company Something, in Cuba the boss is Mr. State.

Fidel Castro - and now Chavez, Morales etc. - reproduce the great Stalinist lie: making people believe that nationalizations were a step to socialism - trying to persuade that socialism in one country is a step towards socialism or a variant of socialism, while in reality, it is nothing more than a facet of capitalism: state-capitalism.

Vladimir, February 2008.

On March 8th, all the feminist groups once again commemorated International Women's Day with the full blessing of the radical petty bourgeoisie represented in the various left wing groups (the Socialist Party in particular). Once again this day, associated with the struggle of working women, will be perverted and transformed into a giant democratic and reformist masquerade. Like Labour Day (May 1st), March 8th has been recuperated by the bourgeoisie and has become an institution of state capitalism.

In the Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1887), Engels had already denounced the oppression of women in affirming that with the end of matriarchal societies and the rise of patriarchal society, woman had become "the proletarian of the man". In 1891, Auguste Bebel, in his Woman and Socialism continued the work of Engels in a profound historical study of the female condition.

From the end of the 19th century, the ‘woman question' was closely linked to the working class struggle for the emancipation of the whole of humanity. The conditions of poverty and exploitation suffered by women workers pushed them unavoidably into the vanguard of the proletarian struggle at the start of the twentieth century.

Women's struggle within the workers' movement in the twentieth century.

March 8th has its origins in the demonstrations of textile workers in New York that took place on March 8th 1857 and were suppressed by the police (though apparently there is no American workers' movement archive with any evidence of the event).

The international movement of socialist women emerged in Germany in the main party of the working class, the SPD, under the impetus of Clara Zetkin:[1] in 1890 she established the review Die Gleichheit (Equality), with the support of Rosa Luxemburg, which advocated the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, replacing it with a world communist society. Across the world, in both Western Europe and the United States, women workers were beginning to mobilise against their conditions of exploitation. They demanded the reduction of the working day, the same wages as men, the abolition of child labour and an improvement in their living conditions. Along with these economic demands, they also raised political demands, notably woman's right to the vote (though this political demand would subsequently be submerged into and confused with that of the bourgeois women's movement known as ‘the suffragettes').

But it was from 1907 in particular that women workers and socialists would find themselves in the vanguard of the struggle against capitalist barbarism faced with the harbingers of the First World War.

On August 17th of that year Clara Zetkin announced the first conference of the Women's Socialist International in Stuttgart. 58 delegates from all over Europe and the United States attended and adopted a resolution on women's right to the vote. This resolution would be adopted by the Stuttgart congress of the SPD that followed this conference. At the time when women's wages were a half that of male workers doing the same work, there were many women's organisations and the vast majority of them had been actively involved in all the workers' struggles at the turn of the century.

There were mass demonstrations of women textile workers in New York in 1908 and 1909. They demanded "bread and roses", (the roses symbolised improvements in living conditions beyond mere survival), the abolition of child labour and better wages.

In 1910, the Women's Socialist International launched an appeal for peace. On March 8th 1911, on International Women's Day, a million women demonstrated all across Europe. A few days later on March 25th, more than 140 women workers perished in a fire in the Triangle textile factory in New York owing to a lack of safety measures. This drama would further galvanise the women's revolt against their conditions of exploitation and against the denial to them of a political voice in parliament. In 1913, all across the world, women were demanding the right to vote. In Britain, the bourgeois ‘suffragettes' were also adopting a more radical stance. 

But it would be in Tsarist Russia, particularly, that the struggle of women would give an impetus to the revolutionary movement of the whole working class. Between 1912 and 1914, Russian women workers organised clandestine meetings and declared their opposition to the imperialist butchery. After war broke out, women from all across Europe would join them.

In 1915 the French army's open offensive at the front initiated a terrible butchery: 350,000 soldiers were massacred in the trenches.  At home, the women suffered increased exploitation in having to keep the national economy running. Reactions began to explode against the war and women were the first to mobilise. On March 8th 1915, Alexandra Kollontai[2] organised a demonstration of women against the war at Christiana, near Oslo. Clara Zetkin called a new Women's International Conference. This was a prelude to the Zimmerwald Conference that re-grouped all those opposed to the war. On April 15th 1915, 1136 women from 12 different countries assembled in La Haye.

In Germany, particularly from 1916, two of the greatest women figures in the western workers' movement, Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg, would play a decisive role in the foundation of the German Communist Party, the KPD. In the United States, Emma Goldman, anarchist militant (and friend of journalist John Reed, a founder member of the American Communist Party), led a bitter struggle against the imperialist war. In 1917 she would be imprisoned (and was considered to be "the most dangerous woman in the United States") before being expelled to Russia.

In Russia, it would be women workers who would lead the triumphant march of the proletariat to the revolution. On March 8th (February 23rd in the Gregorian calendar), women workers from the textile factories in Petrograd went on strike spontaneously and took to the streets. They demanded ‘bread and peace'. They called for their sons and husbands to be returned from the front. "Disregarding our instructions, the women workers from several mills went on strike and sent delegations to the engineering workers to ask for their support... It didn't occur to a single worker that this could be the first day of the revolution." (Trotsky History of the Russian Revolution). So the slogan ‘bread and peace' that was a spark to the Russian Revolution was initiated by the women workers of Petrograd, and it gave a lead to the workers from the Putilov factories and the whole of the working class to join the movement.

The recuperation of the women's movement by bourgeois democracy

It wasn't a gamble for the German bourgeoisie to grant women the right to vote on November 12th 1918, the day after it signed the Armistice. It was no surprise that in the country where the international movement of socialist women was born, in the country where the greatest female figures in the workers' movement at the start of the 20th century, Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin, were militants, that the ruling class would try and break the revolutionary spirit of women by granting this demand when parliament had become an empty shell for the working class. With capitalism's entry into its period of its decadence, it was no longer practical to struggle for reforms and for the right to vote, but only for the overthrow of capitalist order.

The First World War had opened a new period of history: "that of wars and revolutions", as the Communist International had declared in 1919.

From the beginning of the 1920s, the women's movement followed the course of the proletarian struggle; it entered a dynamic of reflux and was rapidly absorbed into the capitalist state. It would become more and more distinct and separate from the proletarian movement and become an inter-classist movement. The question of women's sexual oppression was raised independently of the conditions of women's exploitation in the mills and factories, sowing the illusion that women could indeed be emancipated within a society based on exploitation and the search for profit. From the start of the 1920s the women's ‘liberation' movement started to focus its attention on birth control and abortion rights, particularly in the United States. 

From the mid 1920s in Germany, the women's movement was rapidly derailed onto the terrain of the struggle against Nazism.

In the other European countries, notably France and Spain, women continued to demand the right to vote while allowing themselves to get sucked up into anti-fascism, an ideology that was going to lead to millions of proletarians being recruited into the Second World War.

The women's movement was very quickly recuperated by all kinds of agents of the capitalist state, such as the UFCS (Union Féminine Civique et Sociale) in France and the Catholic women's organisations that called for women to struggle not against the capitalist system as a whole, but against colonialism and fascism. 

Though women's right to vote was still not on the statute book in France, Léon Blum nevertheless introduced women into the government for the first time. On June 4th 1936, three women were appointed Under-Secretaries of State (Cécile Brunschwig, Irène Joliot-Curie et Suzanne Lacore). It was presented it as a ‘radical' move, allowing the left wing capitalist parties to mobilise large numbers of women behind the flag of the Popular Front and getting them involved in the preparations for the Second World War.

During the Occupation, large number of women joined the Resistance, notably behind the flag of the Stalinists of the PCF. De Gaulle would eventually reward their ‘bravery' and ‘patriotism' by granting them the right to vote on March 23rd 1944 so that they would be able... to elect their own exploiters from the right wing or the left wing. 

However, just when women obtained the right to vote in France, the PCF, with its sickening chauvinism, was glorifying in the Liberation of Paris. In 1945, women who had committed the crime of having sexual relations with the enemy (‘the boche') had their heads shaved. They were accused of having tarnished the Tricolor (the French flag) and of having ‘collaborated' with the enemy. They were forced to parade in public and exposed to public ridicule.

Feminism: a sexist and reactionary ideology

At the beginning of the 1970s, the women's movement no longer had any characteristics of the workers' movement. The Women's Liberation Movement was the new voice of feminism and rejected any idea of women joining political parties. In the name of ‘anti-chauvinism', men were forbidden to attend many of their meetings. The movement called itself ‘autonomous' and strengthened the illusion that it was only women that were oppressed, not by the capitalist system, but by men in general. They contributed to a sexist viewpoint whereby feminists didn't just demand the same ‘rights' as men but considered men as their enemies, their real oppressors. Numerous ‘feminists' took up the Don Quiotesque struggle for women's ‘sexual liberation' without the least consideration for the economic foundations of their oppression. The feminist movement had broken definitively with the tradition of the women's struggle inside the workers' movement. It had become a reactionary ideology of the petty bourgeoisie that has no historical perspective, and had blossomed on the streets of May 68. And it's no accident that the feminists had chosen the colour mauve as their emblem, the same colour as that of the ‘suffragettes' at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1975 the feminist movement incorporated prostitutes who were demanding the right to continue selling their bodies "freely" (living off men's sexual impoverishment) without having to suffer police repression.

A mascarade in the service of capital

In 1977, the United Nations gave official recognition to International Women's Day and adopted a resolution inviting each country to dedicate the day to the celebration of ‘women's rights and international peace'. As regards to the ‘peace', it's enough to refer to the numerous massacres that are perpetrated under the aegis of the great democratic powers to show what value is served by noble ‘resolutions' from the den of the imperialist brigands that is the UN. As regards the international day for women's rights, it is nothing but a charade to mystify working class women and to deflect them from struggling as workers exploited by the capitalist class.

In France it was the left (and the PS in particular) with Mitterrand as President that became the main advocate of feminist ideology. In 1982 under the Mauroy government with its Minister for Women's Rights, March 8th became an institution of the bourgeois democratic state.

Since then, every fraction of the left of capital has contributed to creating a multitude of feminist associations that serve to dissolve women workers into the mass of women ‘in general', to involve them in campaigns where women from all layers and classes of society can make common cause as ‘women' without distinction of their class interests.

Today's electoral campaigns (with Hillary Clinton as a candidate for US president, following that of Ségolène Royal in France) want us to kid us into believing that having women in charge of government could possibly bring an end to the brutal attacks against the working class. They would also have us believe that a woman head of state would mean fewer barbaric wars; ‘a woman' would be less ‘violent', more ‘humane' and more ‘peaceful' than men.

All this chatter is nothing but pure mystification. Capitalist domination isn't a problem of sexuality but of social class. When bourgeois women take control of the state, they carry out exactly the same capitalist policies as their male predecessors. They would all follow in the steps of the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, who is remembered for her leadership in the Falklands War in 1982 and for having let 10 IRA hunger strikers demanding political prisoner status die around the same time. They all  behave the same, like Sarkozy's associates, Michèle Alliot-Marie, Rachida Dati, Valérie Pécresse, Fadela Amara and their consorts. The bourgeoisie can't contemplate any difference between the sexes in the management of its national economy. And the boss of the bosses' organisation, Laurence Parisot, also does a good job for the bourgeoisie, as her predecessors from the ‘stronger sex' did before him.

In 1917, immediately before the October Revolution, Lenin wrote:

"During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, receiving their teachings with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say, and to surround their names with a certain halo for the ‘consolation' of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time emasculating the essence of the revolutionary teaching, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarising it" (State and Revolution).

What happened to the revolutionaries has happened to May 1st. And it has happened to March 8th (international women's day) just as it happened to May 1st.

One of the most pernicious weapons of the bourgeoisie, as the dominant class, is its capacity to turn the symbols that once belonged to the working class in the past back against it. Thus it was with unions and workers' parties as it is with May 1st and international women's day.

Since the end of prehistory, women have always suffered the yoke of oppression. But this oppression cannot be abolished under capitalism. Only the arrival of a world communist society can offer women this perspective. They can only free themselves by actively participating in the general movement of the working class to emancipate the whole of humanity.

Sylvestre (12/02/08)

[1] Clara Zetkin, born in 1887, was actively involved in the foundation of the Second International. Faced with the opportunism gangrening the life of her party, the SPD, Clara Zetkin allied herself with her friend Rosa Luxemburg on the left wing of the party. She participated in the revolutionary movement against the First World War. In 1915, she was a founder member of the Spartakist League at the side of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. She was a delegate of the Communist International at the Tours Congress when the French Communist Party was founded.

[2] Alexandra Kollontaï, born in 1872, was one of the more senior female figures in the Bolshevik Party in 1917. Having joined the Menshevik Party after the Russian Social Democracy congress in 1903, she fought against the war from 1914 and rejoined the party of Lenin in 1915. She participated in the Russian Revolution and was the first woman in the world to have a role in government after the October Revolution. Thanks to her activity and to the revolutionary women workers' movement, voting rights and equal wages were won in Russia and in 1920 the right to abortion. From 1918, Alexandra Kollontaï more and more opposed the direction of the Bolshevik Party and was be involved in the foundation of an internal fraction, the Workers' Opposition, in 1920.

We want to reaffirm our statement entitled: "The student movement in Venezuela: the young try to break free from the false alternative between Chavism and the opposition" 8/7/07

At our public meetings, via e-mails and forums (one of them being Revleft[1]), we have received criticism as much from outside as inside Venezuela. We are accused of giving a proletarian character to a petty-bourgeois movement with nothing to do with a real proletarian struggle, or of supporting the children of the rich of the country who oppose the Chavist regime.

We reaffirm our position for the following reasons:

- we explicitly entitled our article "student movement" in order to differentiate this movement, from the mobilisation of the students in the last decades (mainly before the rise of Chavismo) which were characterised by violent confrontations with the police, burning of cars, etc. The May 2007[2] movement was marked by a radical difference to those movements: it avoided the sterile confrontations that the leftists and anarchists applaud;

- the most noticeable difference with the past movements was the central role played by the assemblies that took place in various universities at the beginning of the movement. Some secondary school students also participated in the assemblies, where the actions to be taken and how to carry them out were debated. The assemblies were open to participation by lecturers and workers from the universities, and in some students sympathetic to the government participated;

- another important feature of the movement at its beginnings was the effort to distance itself from the politics of polarization that have flourished during the Chávez government. The movement was not only strongly critical of the government; during various events called by the students it also refused to take the word of the leaders of the sectors opposing Chavismo;

- the movement was the real expression of the social discontent that exists in Venezuelan society. The demands of the movement were fundamentally political, denouncing unemployment, poverty, the level of crime, etc[3]. The student movement in some ways was the prelude to more important expressions of social discontent during 2007 and into 2008: at the level of the working class there were struggles (oil, health, railway construction in the central region of the country, tyre makers, SIDOR steel workers, etc); also at the level of the workers in Chavismo's so-called "missions" such as in the Barrio Adentro in the health sector, which demanded fixed contracts and less precarious working; and the population in general (including those sympathetic to Chavismo), confronted with the lack of services, high levels of crime, the lack of housing, the scarcity of food, etc;

- in our position we showed that proletarian factors were expressed within the movement, in part due to the fact that many students at the public and private universities are children of proletarian families, and also many of them are working for formal or informal wages, in order to pay for their studies and to help their families. Those who wanted to deny this factor pretend that the majority of students are from the rich classes of the country. Official statistics disprove this. 75% of university students in the country attended public universities which are free (from long before Chávez came to power) and to which only children from families on lower incomes have access. For reference, at the Central University of Venezuela, the most important in the country (with nearly 13% of all those who graduate in the country's universities), more than 90% of the students come from the Municipio Libertador which takes in the central-western region of Caracas, where more than 60% of the capital live, the majority on low incomes[4]. An important percentage of the students in this municipality also study in the private universities. Unless they have scholarships, many of their families have gone into debt in order to pay for their studies;

- rather than trying to look at the student movement from the sociological point of view or from that of past student mobilisations, the reality is that it is the economic crisis in Venezuela (as in other countries) that has made the poor poorer, and impoverished the middle layers, and has led a situation where if their children manage to graduate from university, for the most part they are unable to get a job paying more than a qualified worker. This situation has got worse under the Chavista regime and its "Socialism for the 21st Century" which seeks to massively extended poverty and precariousness, through "levelling" society downwards;

- according to the incessant campaigns of the government, based on the typical methods of the left, society is divided by social struggles between "the poor and the rich"[5], thus hiding the fundamental division of society: between the proletariat and capital. Behind the campaign that says that university students are the children of the rich is the necessity for the government to try and increase its control of the universities in order to put in place its populist project of the massification of higher education, which it has not been able to impose until now because this sector is controlled by opposition forces and because of the discrediting of the government within the universities. It is possible that many of the critics of our position have been influenced by sympathy for Chavismo, a government that condemns and tries to criminalise any movement of genuine protest.

In no way do we deny that the student sector, due to its characteristics, is strong penetrated by petty bourgeois ideology. However no social movement, including by the workers, is free from the penetration by bourgeois or petty bourgeois ideology, which in Venezuela is expressed through the poison of polarization between fractions of capital, which is aimed at derailing genuine discontent towards capitalist aims. The future development of student movements and other social movements will depend upon their capacity to unite with workers' struggles.

Faced with the absence of widespread workers' struggles in Venezuela (though we are seeing the beginnings of this) the movement of the students was diluted into the bourgeois confrontation between the government and opposition, into the choice between declaring itself in favour or against the constitutional reform proposed by Chávez in 2007. Today, various leaders of the movement are candidates in the coming mayoral and governorship elections to be held in October 2008.

Nevertheless, this does not negate the characteristics that the movement had in May 2007, nor will it stop the development of new movements in this sector, since the economic and social crisis is not only continuing but worsening at an accelerating pace.

Internacionalismo, April 2007

Section of the International Communist Current in Venezuela

[1] See www.revleft.com/vb/venezuela-student-discussion [24]

[2] Before we published our position, a leaflet in support of the movement was distributed by a sympathizer of the ICC, a student of the Central University of Venezuela, which we have published on our website: https://en.internationalism.org/wr/307/ven-students-leaflet [25]

[3] The opposition media highlighted more the demands against the closure of the RCTV television channel or for freedom of expression; whilst the official media criminalised the movement, accusing it of being promoted by the "oligarchy" and "imperialism"

[4] According to the figures of the Planning Office of the University Sector in 200; see www.cnu.gov.ve [26].

[5] One has to ask in which universities do the children of the Bolivarian bourgeoisie study. Many of them for certain study in the best private universities in the country and abroad, faced with the progressive deterioration of education in the public universities.

We are publishing here an article from the Turkish group Enternasyonalist Komünist Sol (EKS), which analyses the different imperialist interests and rivalries underlying the Turkish army's recent incursions into northern Iraq. We consider it important for several reasons: first and foremost, by offering a clear analysis on an internationalist basis, it strikes a blow against both Turkish and Kurdish nationalism, in a region where the propaganda campaigns of all the competing bourgeois factions are doing their utmost to stoke nationalist hatreds so as to use the workers and poor masses as cannon fodder in their own sordid struggles for power and influence; second, it gives a voice to the feelings of indignation and revolt among the workers in Turkey who have been conscripted into this bloody conflict, and gives the lie to the bourgeoisie's claims, in Turkey and elsewhere, about universal popular support for the war.

Turkish ımperialism’s latest adventure in northern Iraq

According to the official statement, 10,000 Turkish troops crossed the border into Northern Iraq on 21st February. Bloody clashes took place within Turkish borders during the invasion. The death toll of the operations which lasted for eight days is controversial: the Turkish Armed Forces claim that 24 of its soldiers died while they killed 237 PKK[1] members while the PKK claims that 9 of its people were dead, and it is claimed both by the PKK and the press connected to the local Northern Iraqi Kurdish authorities that more than a hundred soldiers from the Turkish Armed Forces died and have been hidden in hospital morgues. If one thing is certain, it is that hundreds of workers' children have been forced to slaughter each other in these eight days. This is not the first war conducted by the Turkish Armed Forces in Iraq. During its imperialist war against the PKK, Turkey has entered Iraq 24 times, including invasions with 7,000 troops in 1983, 15,000 in 1992, 35,000 in 1995 and 1997 and 10,000 in 1998. The Turkish army was bombing Iraq already prior to the latest invasion, and had 2,000 soldiers in its bases in Northern Iraq. However, there was a difference between the latest heated conflict and past imperialist invasions conducted by the Turkish state. While in the past Turkish imperialism conducted its operations in Iraq freely, comfortably and without the slightest negative reaction from the Saddam regime and even organized some operations with the open support of the Peshmerga[2] forces, this time Turkish imperialism had created the possibility of a more serious and total war with the local authorities by launching this bloody operation. Mesud Barzani[3] had said "if the Turkish army targets Kurdish civilians or civil structures, we will order a wide and general resistance" and the Kurdish parliament had voted for closing the bases of the Turkish Armed Forces in Northern Iraq which hosted 2,000 soldiers. Had Turkey stayed in Iraq longer, a much more serious war could have started. The only reason behind Turkish imperialisms invasion of Iraq was not attacking the PKK. The claim that this was a war against ‘terror' was nothing but a lie, as none of the ‘operations' that were launched before had any effect in this respect.

Then why did Turkish imperialism enter Iraq this time? The government spokesman Cemil Cicek had declared that the ‘operation' will continue until PKK was destroyed, and the government had said that the target was Kandil mountain[4], that they were to stay there until the time where they won't have to invade Iraq again and that the army was not going to leave until ‘the job was done'. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan had to change his address to the nation speech which said "the operation continues with determination" hours before he was to make the speech when he learned that the Turkish Armed Forces had withdrawn early in the morning, indicating clearly that this situation was a surprise for the government. Why did Turkish imperialism immediately return when they were claiming that no one can intervene in their invasion of Iraq?

In order to answer those questions, it is necessary to put Turkey's latest war in Iraq in its place within the conjuncture of world imperialism and examine the function of this war from this perspective. As is well known, relations between the Turkish government and America were quite tense prior to the operation, over America's support of PKK's Iranian wing, PJAK against the Iranian regime and the possibility of the recognition of the Armenian genocide by the US. The war on top of all these issues made relations even worse as America was not happy with the possibility of the only piece of rock (Kurdistan) it has been clinging on to in the Iraqi quagmire falling apart. This was the reason why the US constantly repeated that Turkey should leave Iraq in a very short period of time. Even if the fact that the Turkish army immediately ended the operation a day after the meeting between the authorities representing the American government and the General Buyukanit, chief of staff of the Turkish army is not enough proof to show that the order to end the operation has came from the Americans, the fact that both Turkish and American authorities have been very careful in constantly denying the existance of such a situation is enough to prove its existence. Nevertheless, the Kurdish government in Iraq had accused the Americans about Turkey's invasion, and had claimed that America had allowed this operation, and they were not really mistaken in their grouching.

The principle problem of America in the region is against Russia's close ally, Iran. All the forces involved in this situation, Turkish Armed Forces and the PKK who have been clashing in Iraq, or other forces such as the factions of Barzani or Talabani[5] for whom clashing with each other, or with the Turkish army or the PKK is a possibility, are in the end of day allies of America, at least allies of America against Iran locally and Russia globally, despite the possibly different roles they would play or possibly different distances they would try to conserve in future conflicts, their side at the end of the they seemed set. Thus, as much as the Americans did not want the last ‘stable' piece of Iraqi territory to be ruined, they did not want those forces which were either involved in open war or had serious tensions among each other to focus on destroying each other, or to turn their back on the US because of their internal conflicts. PKK activity in Northern Iraq was creating further tensions between Turkey and the Kurdish autonomous government, whose imperialist interests were already clashing, and was creating the possibility of Turkey and Iran establishing closer relations with each other due to their common fight against the PKK. In the current situation, PKK was for the most part useful to the US inasmuch as it fought against Iran and the US naturally preferred the PKK to focus on Iran rather than Turkey. If we examine the geographical locations of the PKK camps in Northern Iraq, we can see that the Camp Zap taken over by the Turkish Armed Forces was very close to Turkish borders and the city of Hakkari[6] and it was very suitable for crossing the Turkish borders. However Kandil mountains, claimed by the Turkish government to be the main target, are near the Iranian border and Zap is quite distant from Kandil. The fact that the Turkish Armed Forces directly moved towards Zap indicates that the target was never Kandil but, quite the contrary, to push the PKK towards Kandil, in other words towards Iran. In this sense assuming that Turkish imperialism invaded Iraq with America's permission and that not just the end but the whole conduct of war developed according to American wishes would be logical.

Nevertheless, it is necessary to look deeper in world imperialist relations for understanding the contradiction between the governments words and the Turkish Armed Forces' actions. Both the AKP[7] government and the Turkish military bureaucracy are on the same point in regard to working with and orienting towards the "West" rather than other imperialist powers such as Russia, China or Iran, however those two different wings want to have closer relations not with the same but with different "West"s. Those two "West"s are the United States and Europe. Obviously, prior to the invasion, the government and the Turkish Armed Forces seemed to have reached a compromise and made a peace. MHP[8], which is close to the army and state bureaucracy and of course which has always been deeply connected with the United States had saved the AKP from troubling situations at two critical issues: the election of the president[9] and the constitutional matter of the legalization of head scarf in the universities and just afterwards, the army and the government had begun a war, hand in hand. There was, at least, the ground for thinking that there had been some sort of agreement between the army and the state. The government had crushed the opposition in the elections and was doing rather well against the state bureaucracy and was taking bureaucratic institutions one by one. The only fact that could indicate that such alliance had not truly taken place during the war was the conflict between the traditional state institutions and the state institutions in which the government is effective that found a reflection on the press, and the army, unsurprisingly, had stopped commenting on this issue some time ago. The AKP government might have thought during the war that they had reached a compromise with the Army, but in reality there had been no compromise and agreement between the two factions, at least there hasn't been any according to the army. At the end of the war, the army managed to give the first succesful response to the victories AKP had been taking against other factions of the bourgeoisie, and had stroke a truly strong blow against the AKP for the first time. The government was either not informed sufficiently in regards to the operation, or they were misinformed, in any way they thought they were acting together with the Turkish Armed Forces but they were alone in thinking this. AKP appearing as the loyalist supporter of the war was going to decrease their influence amongst Kurds[10] living in Turkey and the declarations they have given before the retreat were going to make them look seriously contradictory, ineffective and weak.

It was not only the Turkish government who was struck a blow following this war, also the faction of the European Union[11] which strives to be more distant from the US was hit by a wave, albeit quite a small one. We can recall how in 2003, the Turkish government got closer with Europe when the AKP government refused to send soldiers to the locations which the US wanted them to send soldiers in Iraq, which was quite similar to the response of some European states. Also Refah Party[12] , which the AKP is rooted in was supported by Germany against the traditionally pro-American Turkish Armed Forces which was unsurprisingly supported in that conflict by the Americans as well. As for about Turkish's invasion of Iraq, European authorities declared that they "understand the need of Turkey to protect it's population from terrorism" and the bourgeois media in Europe declared the war to be disgraceful for the US. Not only this, but the "Socialist Workers" Party of Spain, currently in power, had declared that in case they win the elections, they were going to support Turkey on the Cyprus question. The fact that Turkey immediately retreated after Americans told them to do so showed the influence of the US in the region again, while disproving some of the things said in the European press about the invasion. In this perspective, it is significant that Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan emphasized the relations with Germany right after talking about the war, and said that Germany is number one in Turkey's foreign trade and that relations between Turkey and Germany are beyond classic diplomatic relations. Also the stances of Europe and America during the latest conflict between the bureaucratic bourgeoisie and the AKP government over the law suite against the AKP is significant, in which while the European power were talking about the importance of democracy and freedom and declaring themselves to be against the law suit, American authorities were emphasizing the importance of secularism.

The stance of the leftists in Turkey should be mentioned here. With the end of the cold war and the deepening of the crisis the left is becoming increasingly confused about which nationalists to support and the invasion of Northern Iraq by the Turkish army showed this clearly. The "Workers" Party[13] having decided that Turkey is an oppressed nation has dived straight into social chauvinism, open co-operation with the MHP, and support of the state. The TKP (Turkish Communist Party), with its slogan of ‘Don't let the Americans divide our country' seems to be going in the same direction. All this talk of ‘our country' is hardly surprising from an organization which has organized a ‘Patriotic Front'. Let us be very clear on this question. This is not ‘our country'. Workers do not own this country, just as they don't own any of the other ones. The bourgeoisie are the owners and masters of this country. Workers have no interest at all in joining fronts to protect the property of the rich. As for the rest of the left, the recent invasion of Iraq brought forth mainly liberal whining from the majority of them. They, in a manner that was beneath contempt talked about democracy, and letting the Kurds have their rights while remaining afraid to condemn the state. It is as if they were begging the Turkish state, dripping with the blood of national minorities from its birth in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide to its most recent invasion of Northern Iraq, to be nice to people. Finally of course there were the ‘extremists' who rejected support for the Turkish state and advocated instead support for the PKK. According to them, the cause of socialism is best served by having young Kurdish boys and young Turkish boys kill each other in the mountains. In reality, there is no difference between these ‘left' nationalists, and the ‘left' nationalists who support the Turkish state. Neither of them have anything to offer the working class but more deaths and suffering. Both of them tried to pull the working class into giving up its own interests to fight for the interests of the nation. In the process of this they both worked as an active force in creating divisions within the working class. They both mobilized workers to die for the nation, one on behalf of the Turkish state, and the other on behalf of an idea of ‘Kurdistan', but in reality of the foreign states backing them. The communists bring a different perspective to this. For us, the workers have no country. It is not about choosing which nationalist gangsters to support but about trying to rebuild, however slowly, an independent movement. A movement that ultimately will be able to resist the Turkish states drive towards war.

Workers' revulsion against the war

The twenty fifth adventure of Turkish imperialism in Norther Iraq ended, leaving hundreds of corpses in only eight days. Nevertheless, the war between the PKK and the Turkish Armed Forces continues to force workers to slaughter fellow workers in Turkey. All factions involved, including the military-bureaucratic bourgeoisie, the private bourgeoisie, the PKK leaders and the Kurdish bourgeoisie hope to gain from this imperialist war and are trying to gain the upper hand against their rivals who they can't fight directly. Both the invasion of Iraq and the war continuing in Turkey is a war of the bourgeoisie, and even though Turkey has retreated from Iraq for now, this war continues to drag Turkey and the Middle East in general towards imperialist barbarism. The victims of this bloody and barbaric war are the Kurdish and Turkish workers who are forced to kill each other, die or lose the ones they love despite the fact that they have common interests. The only force than can end this war, just like the only force that can end all imperialist wars in the world, is the working class. Neither pacifism, nor democratic struggle or begging for the bourgeoisie with it's bloody ends to find a solution can end wars. Wars are a part of capitalism and they will end only when workers "turn the imperialist war into revolutionary civil war" as they have done while stopping the First World War. Thus it is necessary to examine the reaction of the working class in regards to this war, especially of the sections of the working class that has been suffering the most: those who are forced to fight and the families of those who die.

The grandfather of the soldier Bayram Guzel, who died in November 2007 said: "They die and die, always the children of the poor fellows. The families of the poor fellows burn. The hands and arms of the poor are short so they hit us in the back and make us carry the carriage. Why aren't the children of the bosses and generals being ‘martyrs'!". The mother of Burak Okay who died in September 2006 said "My son couldn't even kill flies and they made him go to the mountains to kill human beings. My son is no martyr and he died in vain. I do not accept sacrificing my son". The father of Cengiz Evranos who died in the same month said: "I am not saying ‘all for the good of the country'[14]. Politicians: send your children to Darbogaz too". The mother of Sahin Abanoz who died in April 2006 said: "There is a differentiation between the rich and the poor. Is there a single child of a parliamentary deputy [in the battlefield]? Is there a single child of a president? They only lined up and sent the children of the poor, the children of the unfortunate." The children of a soldier who had been among the first victims of the war between the PKK and the Turkish armed forces in 1980 said: "My neighbors look with condemning eyes, because I am not putting up a flag in my balcony. They don't know that the Turkish flag in the house was not bought from a store with money or came as a promotion with a newspaper; they gave it from my father's coffin. How can I hang that flag? And how many square metres of flags, marches of how many people or how many jingoistic speeches can ease my pain? No I have not put up a flag and I will not put up one. Maybe martyrs don't die for millions, but fathers, sons and brothers die for some of us. And they die in such a way that the pain of it never ends. I don't know how others are doing, but if I had another father, I would never ever sacrifice him for this country."

A soldier, whose ‘service' finished in 1998 says in an anonymous interview: "When you look it from Tunceli, the man [officer] gets double the wage he would normally get. Why should they want to declare an end to the ‘state of emergency'[15] Such good money! He does three years service when it officially is two. So he thinks if I die I die but I make good money. In my opinion, the stopping of this war should not be left in the hands of those people (...) All regimes that will cause the war to continue should be broken. Capitalism itself if this is what it takes." Someone who has been a soldier in Van in 1997 explains the soldiers feelings by saying "Everyone had a down on the rich" and than says "If I have to be a soldier again, I will do what I wanted to do but couldn't, I will run away. I will definitely return that green uniform and being under orders (...) I hate who this war is conducted for and who gains from this war." Someone who was a soldier in 1996 in Bingol says in an anonymous interview: "The PKK is dirty against its people from whose shoulders it has risen as much as the Turkish army, state, other forces or the police are dirty (...) One develops an antipathy against both sides (...) The politicians don't want a solution either. The was has created its profits, this slow war that has been going on for 13-14 years created its own institutionalization which could make the war go on for another 14 years. This is a business, it is a business for the PKK as well." Someone who was a soldier in Siirt in 1995 says: "I wanted to know who my enemy was before I went there. Now I finished this questioning. Who is my enemy? The ruling class of course, who else could it be? (...) I clarified myself on who has been continuing and who has been feeding from this war. The officers wanted the war to continue, they were making good money out of it." Someone who has been a soldier in Mardin in 1992 says "I haven't seen any children of the rich over there, they only and always send the children of the poor. Lots rebelled against this in my time, asking why they don't see the children of the rich there, I think those who rebelled were correct."

The bourgeoisie fears this reaction of soldiers who are sent to die or the families who are expected to say ‘all for the good of the country' when their children die, and they try to hide it, condemn it at all costs, and intimidate those who express it. Not only that, sections of the ruling class try to use those reactions, and pull those voicing those reactions to the war to this or that faction of the bourgeoisie. The working class voices raised against the war is not a point raised by daily and generalized class struggle in Turkey yet. The ruling class is trying to silence, hide, sabotage daily working class struggles just like it is trying to do with those voices against the war, and they are also trying to control daily class struggles through the unions and even use and manipulate them for the purposes of this or that faction of the bourgeoisie as well. However, those attempts of the bourgeoisie fail to hide the fact that class struggle is rising in Turkey as it is rising in the whole world nor do they destroy the possibility of the working class getting through all the obstacles the bourgeoisie is trying to plant in its way. Even this possibility is enough to seriously scare the ruling class, as when the children of workers who the leaders of the Turkish Armed Forces or the PKK send to death understand that the enemy is not the proletarians they are forced to face but those who give the orders, and when the working class starts acting and struggling unified independently and internationally, those who will be overthrown is none other than the bourgeoisie.

Enternasyonalist Komünist Sol

[1] PKK, Kurdistan ‘Workers' Party, mainly active in Turkey but also in Iraq and Iran.

[2] In other words the armed forces of the Kurdish part of Iraq.

[3] Mesud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Kurdistan regional autonomous government.

[4] Located near the Iranian border, Kandil is said to be the main base of the PKK.

[5] Celal Talabani, Kurdish politician who is the leader of Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the current president of the Iraqi state.

[6] A border city with high PKK activity and an overwhelmingly Kurdish population who have been subjected to the most horrible forms of state repression.

[7] The center-right and Islamic ruling party in Turkey, similar to Christian-Democrats in Europe.

[8] The main Fascist party, also known as Grey Wolves.

[9] A small note on the parliamentary system in Turkey: the president is elected by the parliament rather than the elections and the AKP had been unable to elect a new president when the old one, Ahmet Necdet Sever finished his term due to a legal procedure regarding the number of people who should be in the parliament in the day when the president is elected. Indeed why they pushed for early elections, which they won easily.

[10] AKP had done extremely well among Kurds in the last elections, getting almost as much votes as the Kurdish nationalist Democratic Society Party (DTP) from predominantly Kurdish cities.

[11] It is important that this article highlights the existence of different factions within the European Union bourgeoisie, which is far from united on the attitude to adopt towards Turkey, and in particular towards Turkish entry into the EU (ICC note).

[12] Refah Party (Welfare Party) was an Islamacist Party which lost it's significance following the rise of the AKP.

[13] "Workers" Party, is an ultra-nationalist Turkish Maoist (or possibly "ex" Maoist although they still upheld Mao) and pro-China organization.

[14] ‘All for the good of the country' is a common nationalistic slogan which the state wants to hear from the family of dead soldiers.

[15] There is a constant and officially declared ‘state of emergency' in some predominantly Kurdish cities.

The article that we are publishing below has been sent to us by the comrades of the Internasyonalismo group in the Philippines. It shows us the true worth of the crocodile tears shed by the Filipino ruling class, both in power and in opposition, for the suffering of the population as a result of a food crisis which is the result, not of poor harvests but of the capitalist economy's insatiable thirst for profit no matter what the cost. And the cost is paid both in the immediate by the working class and the poverty stricken masses struck by the massive increase in food prices, but also in the long term as the cynical irresponsibility of the capitalist class increasingly ruins the ecological system on which humanity's food production depends.

The article's analysis concentrates on the role of bio-fuel production and the degradation of the rice producing areas by over-farming. One point should be added in our view: the role played by the diversion of speculative capital from the US and European housing markets into the commodities markets - and in particular the futures markets for food. According to Jean Ziegler, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, while the use of grain for bio-fuels is the major culprit in the rise in food prices, 30% of the rise can be directly attributed to speculation on the commodities markets.[1]

The world food crisis hit the center stage of media attention only very recently, but it is a phenomenon that has been building steadily for decades. The food riots from Haiti to Bangladesh, from Pakistan to Egypt may have brought forth the issue of the soaring costs of basic commodities to the forefront of the world's attention, but the fact remains that they were all direct result of years of accumulated ravages of capitalism. For a time, national governments like the Arroyo regime tried to ignore the signs of the looming crisis, even when the prices of rice in public markets have soared to a 34-year high in the Philippines. The Philippine president even quipped that there was no such thing as rice shortage because it is "a physical phenomenon where people line up on the streets to buy rice. Do you see lines today?".[2]

The world is in the midst of an unprecedented worldwide food price inflation that has driven prices to their highest levels in decades. The increases affect most kinds of food, particularly the most important staples like corn, rich and wheat. According to UN Food and Agriculture Organization, between March 2007 and March 2008 alone prices of grains increased 88%, oils and fats 106%, and dairy 48%. A World Bank report on the other hand pointed out that in the 36 months ending last February 2008, overall global food prices increased by 83% and it expects most food prices to remain well above 2004 levels until at least 2015.[3]

In Thailand, the most popular grade of rice that sold for $198 a ton five years ago was quoted at a record high of more than $1,000 per ton on April 24, 2008 and it is expected to continue to rise according to traders and exporters due to tight supply.[4] The same phenomenon is repeated all over the world. In the Philippines alone, from the retail price of 60 US cents a kilo a year ago, the price of rice rose up to 72 US cents a kilo today. And in a country where 68 million of its 90 million inhabitants live on or under US$2 a day,[5] this has become a nightmare of horrific proportions.

The world food crisis is the inevitable result of the permanent crisis of capitalism since the late 1960s. Various national economies battled to stay afloat in a world of intense competition and capitalist profiteering in an already saturated world market. As a result, governments adopted economic policies that are geared towards encouraging the growth of industries that will inject more dollars into their respective economy rather than meeting the needs of their people. Combine that with unsustainable use of natural resources and the onslaught of industrial production for profit that is aggravating pollution levels and the emission of green house gases worldwide, humanity is now faced with the accumulated concoction of capitalist recipe for its own destruction.

In the field of agricultural production, the use of nitrogen and the over-aeration of soils to boost capitalist agricultural productions have destroyed the total productivity of the once fertile centers of agricultural production. And while it is true that the application of advanced farming methods at the onset of green revolutions worldwide brought about initial increases in productivity, we have also seen the gradual drops of agricultural production in many parts of the world. According to a report by the London-based Institute of Science in Society:

"In India, grain yield per unit of fertilizer applied decreased by two-thirds during the Green Revolution years. And the same has happened elsewhere.

Between 1970 and 2000, the annual growth of fertilizer use on Asian rice has been 3 to 40 times the growth of rice yields [8]. In Central Luzon, Philippines, rice yield increased 13 percent during the 1980s, but came at the price of a 21 percent increase in fertilizer use. In the Central Plains, yield went up only 6.5 percent, while fertilizer use rose 24 percent and pesticides jumped by 53 percent. In West Java, a 23 percent yield increase was accomplished by 65 and 69 percent increases in fertilizers and pesticides respectively.

However, it is the absolute drop in yields despite high inputs of fertilizer that finally punctured the Green Revolution bubble. By the 1990s, after dramatic increases in the early stages of the Green Revolution, yields began falling. In Central Luzon, Philippines, rice yields rose steadily during the 1970s, peaked in the early 1980s, and have been dropping gradually since. Similar patterns emerged for rice-wheat systems in India and Nepal.

Where yields were not actually declining, the rate of growth has been slowing rapidly or leveling off, as documented in China, North Korea, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

Since 2000, yields have fallen further, to the extent that in six out of the past seven years, world grain production has fallen below consumption."[6]

The penchant for profit of a decadent system that is caught up with its own web of contradictions has resulted in the destruction of natural soil fertility to the point of exhaustion. While it is true that the world economy still produces more food than the world needs, a lot of what is produced and distributed through global capitalist trade perishes before it reaches the market and when it does arrive, millions of people just cannot afford to buy it anymore. In the final analysis, the endpoint of this crisis is the pauperization of the working class and the subjugation of the greater portion of humanity into abject poverty and destitution. Capitalism after all is primarily concern about accumulation of surplus value and never the satisfaction of the needs of society.

The "Rice crisis" in the Philippines

According to Arturo Yap, the Secretary of the Department of Agriculture of the Philippines, "We don't have a food crisis but, rather, a rice price crisis. All of us are looking for innovative solutions in our countries - how to address not only the issue of supply but also the issue of prices, how to [ensure] that poor families can eat." He said there are 5 five critical reasons behind the current "rice" situation in the Philippines that the government needs to address: First, there is a supply largely affected by an increased demand resulting from rising population; Second, the effects of climate change; Third, the booming demand for bio-fuels; Fourth, continuous conversion of agricultural lands to non-agriculture use; And finally, there is a neglect of irrigation facilities.

At first glance, one may find the so-called causes of the Philippine "rice" crisis as valid on its own. But the fact is behind it all is the undeniable truth that the very framework from which those enumerated causes arose is the ultimate caused of them all - the capitalist framework of production worldwide. First, the supply that is supposed-to-be affected by the increased of demand from rising population is but an excused of the fact that what has been produced by the world capitalist economy is more geared towards the production of surplus value than the satisfying of the needs of humanity. Second, the effect of climate change to agricultural production is by itself also a direct result of the capitalist framework of production. For instance, it is not industrialization itself that is responsible for changes in climate patterns, but "capitalism's overriding quest to maximize profits and its consequent disregard for human and ecological needs, except insofar as they coincide with the goal of wealth accumulation."[7] There is no doubt that there has been an appalling degradation of the environment at the hands of a world capitalist system driven by the relentless quest for profits and economic expansion. But the fact is, all bourgeois states, including the Philippine state that is recognizing the heavy costs of environmental degradation, are the same states that are protecting the profit motives of their respective national capitals and their political puppets to sabotage research and development of more environmentally friendly alternative fuel sources to power industrial production. Third, the so-called adverse effect of the booming demand for bio-fuels to agricultural production is by itself an outcome of all the states' policy, including Arroyo's government, to search for alternative fuels to ease the burden of the their industries' dependence on foreign oil supply. In addition to this, lowering the cost of oil expenses for "social" purposes also increases the capacity of each state for military production and war. It is not as much as environmental concerns that drives the policy of bio-fuels development, but the need of each national capital to insulate itself against the rising prices of crude oil in the world market and even to the extent of "aiding" the war efforts of all bourgeois states. It is interesting to note that as early as the Second World War, bio-fuels have already been used in the war efforts of both the Allied and Axis powers like the United States and Nazi Germany. In the case of the Philippines, logic of redirecting farm produce from the table to the needs of the bio-fuels industry is in consonance to the efforts of the Philippine government to produce more high value cash crops that can help sustain its own quest for additional sources of dollar revenues. Fourth, the continuous conversion of farmlands into subdivisions, golf courses, malls and industrial complex is also a direct result of government policies in agriculture, especially in the Philippines. The decades old Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) of the Philippine government was both a failure and a disaster. It is not only that CARP is a mystifying and reactionary program of the Filipino bourgeoisie that is supported by some Leftist organizations, but also because it is not an economically viable program. In the age and time where intense capitalist competition in the world market destroys small agricultural producers due to high cost of farming and rising debt, farmers are either forced to abandon their lands or submit themselves to precarious arrangements as contract growers of big corporations, a practice that is prevalent in Mindanao region of the Philippines.[8] As to the perennial problem of the utter neglect of irrigation systems in the Philippines, it is more a question of government mismanagement and corruption, an expression of the decomposition of ideological forms in capitalist decadence, where self-indulgence and the "every man for himself" mentality reigns supreme.

As what can be expected from a bourgeois state confronted with a crisis of great magnitude in stage of capitalist decadence, the Philippine state through the Arroyo regime responded to the crisis in the form of active state intervention - a move that is supported and fiercely advanced by all Leftist formations in the Philippines together with their effort to call for a legislated wage increase. As the pangs of the crisis intensifies, so as the mystifying efforts of the state to contain it. The Left and Right of the capital are one in raising the specter that "only the state" can save the workers and the poorest of the poor from the pangs of hunger and destitution. They completely ignore the fact that the state that they encourage to intervene more is the very organ that imposes the bourgeois dictatorship that is protecting the very source of enslavement and suffering - capitalism. In trying to be more "radical" in form and substance, various leftist currents pressed for the absolute and aggressive control of the state to society.

The Leftists "criticism" that what the state is doing is "not enough" - "raising" budget for agriculture, giving "rice subsidy" to the "poorest of the poor" and the state competing with private traders in buying and selling rice - and that it lacks "political will" clearly show that the former want absolute state control. They even go to up to the point of brandishing their age-old dogma of party dictatorship and totalitarianism - the complete and all encompassing control of the state like the so-called socialist countries that they defended as the "remnants" of the October Revolution.

There is no solution to the crisis within capitalist system

The Right and Left of the capital are one in advancing programs of mystification that hides the fact that there is no solution to the crisis within the system. The contradiction between the forces and the relations of production is already at its peak. No reformist and temporary interventions by the state can alter the fact that whatever solution it can formulate within the bulwarks of capitalism will only lead to more intense crisis and destruction of the environment. Every effective solution that it can formulate will only mean a much heavier burden to the working class and the toiling masses. Even if the state will exercise absolute control of the economic life of society, the crisis will continue to intensify as a result of the saturation of the world market and inability of the population to absorb the excessive production of commodities within a system that owes its life to competition and profit. History has already proven that state capitalism and totalitarianism are futile reaction of capital faced with permanent and intensifying crisis. The fall of USSR and Eastern Europe in 1990s bears witness to this fact.

The solution of the crisis is not within the dying system but outside of it. It is in the hands of the only revolutionary class bearing the seed of future communist society - the working class. The solution is not within the bulwarks of capitalism, nor is it in the path of reforms and peaceful transformation of capitalism to socialism. The solution is not within absolute control by the state of economic life of society, but in the destruction of capitalism itself along with the bourgeois state that serves as it machinery of domination.

In other words, the solution of the food crisis is destroying the system of production based on market and profit and establishing a system based on the absolute production for human needs. And the first step towards this direction and toward the revolutionary transformation of society is not in the legalistic and reformist approach of various leftist organizations, nor is it in the hands of an absolutist state intervention. It is not through the peaceful and "legalistic" road of "lakbayan" (protest caravans and long marches) popularized by Leftist formations in the Philippines. It is not through the road of trade unionism either. It is in the hands of the working class itself[9] that is confronting the attacks of the capital in its own terrain through its own unitary organs of struggle - the workers' assemblies, the prefiguration of the workers' councils.

Workers of the world, unite! It is only through this path of class unity that will usher in the inevitable culmination of the proletarian movement: the world proletarian revolution.

Internasyonalismo, 7th May 2008

[1] See the Environment News Service for a report in English, or the United Nations site for a report in French.

[2] Gil C. Cabacungan Jr., Arroyo warned on rice crisis, Philippine Daily Inquirer, March 24, 2008.

[3] "The rising trend in international food prices continued, and even accelerated, in 2008. U.S. wheat export prices rose from $375/ton in January to $440/ton in March, and Thai rice export prices increased from $365/ton to $562/ton. This came on top of a 181 percent increase in global wheat prices over the 36 months leading up to February 2008, and a 83 percent increase in overall global food prices over the same period.(...) The observed increase in food prices is not a temporary phenomenon, but likely to persist in the medium term. Food crop prices are expected to remain high in 2008 and 2009 and then begin to decline as supply and demand respond to high prices; however, they are likely to remain well above the 2004 levels through 2015 for most food crops" (Rising Food Prices: Policy Options and World Bank Response, p. 2, our emphasis).

[4] "Bangkok, April 24 - Benchmark Thai rice prices leapt more than 5 percent to a record high above $1,000 a tonne on Thursday, and traders in the world's top exporter warned of further gains if buyers Iran and Indonesia step into the market". (Reuters, Thai Rice Climbs to New Record Above $1,000 a Tonne, 24/04/2008 - posted on Flex News)

[5] National Statistics Office, 2006 Family Income and Expenditure Survey, Released Date: January 11, 2008.

[6] "Beware the New ‘Doubly Green Revolution'", ISIS Press Release 14/01/08

[7] Como, "Imperialist chaos, ecological disaster: Twin-track to capitalist oblivion", International Review n°129 - 2nd Quarter 2007, p.2

[8] "The Soyapa Farms Growers Association employs 360 contract workers, both adults and children. The association was formed at the initiative of Stanfilco six years ago, when it convinced members to grow bananas. It's not a cooperative-each grower retains ownership of their individual plot, and each has an individual contract to sell their bananas to Dole." (Banana War in the Philippines - Posted on July 8th, 1998 by Melissa Moore at www.foodfirst.org [33]).

[9] "That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves, that the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule." (The International Workingmen's Association, General Rules, October 1864, our emphasis).

It is no coincidence that the hunger revolts are erupting now, since the sharp rise in food prices is not a natural disaster but a result of the sharpening of the capitalist crisis.

Conditions worsen for workers in all countries

Since the new world wide financial crisis began, the living conditions for the working class throughout the world have drastically worsened.

Whereas in previous phases of sharpening of the crisis the workers in peripheral countries were hit much harder and faster than the workers of the industrial countries, we can see now that the workers of the industrial centres and the periphery have to suffer simultaneously - even if still at different degrees - from the impact of the crisis.

Whether in the USA, where each month some 200,000 people lose their homes due to the sub-prime crisis, where thousands are losing their jobs and faced with rising food and energy prices, whether in Europe where prices of many staple foods have risen between 30-50%, or in the "emerging countries" such as China or India, where food prices have also been rising sharply, or in the peripheral countries, never since 1929 have so many people been threatened by the effects of the crisis in such a short span of time. But even in 1929 the threat of hunger did not spread so rapidly to the poor masses in capitalist periphery. And yet we are only at the beginning of this descent. Rising oil prices have bloated the production and transport costs, which have been passed on to consumers in food prices, and the the prices of rice, wheat, corn have risen in most countries by 50-100%, in some cases even doubling or trebling in price, with a drastic acceleration during the past few weeks in particular, the consequences for workers, farmers and the masses of unemployed in peripheral countries have been particularly brutal.

While price rises of 30-50% of food prices and energy in industrial countries confronting many workers, in particular the unemployed and ‘working poor' with problems of making ends meet, the doubling or so of basic food stuffs in the peripheral countries world poses the danger of starvation. Since more than one billion people live with less than $1 a day, and since many of them have to spend up to 90% of their income on food, such a tremendous rise of food prices is immediately threatens them with starvation.

This catastrophic, life-threatening situation has led to a series of hunger revolts and strikes with demands for higher wages etc. For fear of explosions of protests in Vietnam and India, the governments of these countries - both rice exporters - have suspended the export of rice. Kazakhstan - eighth biggest grain exporter - has threatened to suspend its grain exports. In the Philippines the government has threatened to condemn those who hoard rice to life imprisonment! As a consequence there is a growing shortage of food stuffs, because basic crops start getting hoarded or their export breaks down. Even in the USA major retailers in New York, in areas of New England, and on the West Coast are limiting purchases of flour, rice, and cooking oil as demand outstrips supply. There are also anecdotal reports that some consumers are hoarding grain stocks. It is only a question of time before a wave of even bigger prices increases reaches the USA, Europe and East Asia.

The fear of starvation has been a nightmare which has accompanied - and spurred on - the ascent of humanity from its beginnings. The root cause of this danger has always been the relative primitiveness of the productive forces of society. The famines which periodically afflicted pre-capitalist societies were the result of an insufficient understanding and mastery of the laws of nature. Ever since society has been divided into classes, the exploited and the poor have been the main victims of this backwardness and the fragility of human existence flowing from it. Today, however, where an additional 100 million human beings are threatened by starvation practically overnight, it becomes increasingly clear that the root cause of hunger today lies in the backwardness, not of science and technology, but of our social organisation. Even the representatives of the official institutions of the ruling order are obliged to admit that the present crisis is "man made". During its ascendant period, capitalism, despite all the misery it caused, believed itself to be capable, in the long run, of liberating humanity from the scourge of famine. This belief was based on the capitalism's ability- indeed its imperious need as a system of competition - constantly to revolutionise the forces of production. In the years that followed World War II, it pointed to the successes of modern agriculture, to the development of the welfare state, to the industrialisation of new regions of the planet, to the raising of life expectancy in many countries, as proofs that, in the end, it would win the "battle against hunger" declared by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. In recent times, it has claimed, through the economic development of countries like China or India, to have saved several hundreds of millions from the clutches of starvation. And even now, it would have us believe that soaring prices world wide are the product of economic progress, of the new wealth which has been created in the emerging countries, of the new craving of the masses for hamburgers and yoghurt. But even if this were the case, we would have to ask ourselves about the sense of an economic system which is able to nourish some only at the price of condemning others to death, the losers of the competitive struggle for existence.

But in reality, the exploding hunger in the world today is not even the result of such a despicable "progress". What we see is the spread of starvation in the most backward regions of the world and in the "emerging countries". Across the world, the myth that capitalism could banish the spectre of hunger is being exposed as a wretched lie. What is true is that capitalism has created material and social preconditions for such a victory. In doing so, capitalism itself has become the main obstacle to such a progress. The mass protests against hunger in Asia, Africa and Latin America in the past weeks reveal to the world that the causes of famine are not natural but social.

The Causes of the Present Crisis

The politicians and experts of the ruling class have put forward a series of explanations for the present dramatic situation. These include the economic "boom" in parts of Asia, the development of "bio-fuels", ecological disasters and climate change, the ruining of agrarian subsistence economy in many "underdeveloped" countries, a speculative run on foodstuffs, the limitations on agricultural production imposed in order to prop up food prices etc. All of these explanations contain a grain of truth. None of them, taken in isolation, explain anything at all. They are at best symptoms - murderous symptoms - which, taken as a whole, indicate the root causes of the problem. The bourgeoisie will always lie, even to itself, about its crises. But what is striking today is the degree to which governments and experts are themselves incapable of understanding what is going on, or of reacting with any semblance of coherence. The helplessness of the apparently almighty ruling class becomes increasingly clear. What is striking about the different explanations put forward - apart from their cynical and hypocritical character - is that each fraction of the ruling class seeks to draw attention to that aspect which most closely touches its own immediate interests. An example: A summit meeting of G8 politicians called on the "Third World" to react to the hunger revolts by immediately lowering their customs duties on agricultural imports. In other words, the first thought of these fine representatives of capitalist democracy was to profit from the crisis in order to increase their own export chances! Another example: The present "debate" within Europe. The industrial lobby has made an outcry about the agricultural protectionism of the European Union, the ruin of subsistence farming in the "Third World" etc. And why? Feeling threatened by the industrial competition of Asia, it wants to slash the agricultural subsidies paid by the European Union, which it feels it can no longer afford. The farming lobby, for its part, sees in the hunger revolts a proof of the need to increase the subsidies. The European Union has seized the occasion to condemn the extension of agricultural production at the service of "renewable" energy - in Brazil (one of its main rivals in this area).

The partial "explanations" of the bourgeoisie, apart from being the cynical expression of rival particular interests, only go to hide the responsibility of the capitalist system for the present catastrophe. In particular, none of these arguments, and not even all of them taken together, can explain the two main characteristics of the present crisis: its profoundness, and the sudden brutality of its present acceleration.

Depth of the capitalist crisis

Whereas in the past hundreds of millions of Chinese only had very little to eat (the famous "iron rice bowl), now there is a bigger consumption of meat, dairy products and wheat. Growing demand for more meat and milk means cattle and poultry feed crops take over agricultural lands, feeding far fewer mouths from the same acreage. This is the main explanation put forward by many fractions of the bourgeoisie. This proletaranisation of a part of the peasant masses, which has radically transformed their way of life, and integrated them into the world market, is assumed by the ruling class to be identical with a great improvement of their condition. But what remains to be explained is how this improvement, this lifting of millions out of the clutches of starvation, itself in turn has led to: its opposite. The president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, recently declared that rising prices were destroying all the more recent progress made in the "struggle against poverty".

Bio-fuels. Replacing petrol by wheat, corn, palm oil, etc. has indeed led to dramatic shortages of food staples. Not only is the "pollution" balance sheet of bio-fuels negative (recent research shows that bio-fuels increase air pollution by discharging more harmful particles than normal fuel, not to mention the fact that some bio-fuels need almost as much oil as energy input as the energy they produce), but their global ecological and economic consequences are disastrous for the whole of humanity. Such a change of cultivation of wheat, corn/maize, palm oil etc. for production of energy instead of for food is a typical expression of capitalist blindness and destructiveness. It is driven in part by a futile attempt to cope with rising oil prices, and in part - especially for the United States - by the hope of reducing its dependence on imported oil in order to protect its security interests as an imperialist power. Far from explaining the crisis, the bio-fuel scandal is a symptom - and an active factor" - of its depth.

Export subsidies and protectionism. On the one hand there is agricultural overproduction in some countries and a permanent "export offensive"; at the same time other countries can no longer feed themselves. Competition and protectionism in agriculture have meant that as with any other commodity in the economy more productive farmers in industrial countries must export (often with government subsidies) large parts of their crops to "Third World" countries and ruin the local peasantry - increasing the exodus from the country to the city, swelling international waves of refugees and leading to the abandonment of land formerly used for agriculture. In Africa for example many local farmers have been ruined by European chicken or beef exports. Mexico no longer produces enough food staples to feed its population. The country has to spend more than $10 billion annually on food imports. "Left" propagandists of the ruling class, but also many well meaning but misguided or badly informed people, have called for a return to subsistence farming in the "peripheral" countries, and the abolition of agricultural export subsidies and protection of their own markets by the old capitalist countries. What these arguments fail to take into consideration is that capitalism, from the outset, lives and expands through the integration of subsistence farmers into the world market, meaning their ruin and their -often violent - separation from the land, from their means of production. The recovery of the land for the producers is only possible as part of a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism itself. This will mean nothing less than the overcoming of private property of production for the market and of the antagonism between city and country, the progressive dissolution of the monstrous mega-cities through a world wide and planned return of hundreds of millions of people to the countryside: not the old countryside of rural isolation and backwardness, but a countryside newly invigorated by its integration with the cities and with a world wide human culture.

While the bourgeois media list these above mentioned factors, they try to prevent the unmasking of the deeper root causes. In reality we are witnessing not least the combined, accumulated consequences of the long-term effects of the pollution of the environment and the deeply destructive tendencies of capitalism in agriculture.

Capitalism destructiveness in agriculture and the environment

Several destructive tendencies have become undeniable.

• Due to the pressure of competition traditional farming practices have receded and farmers have become dependent on chemical fertilisers, pesticides and artificial irrigation. The International Rice Research Institute warns that the sustainability of rice farming in Asia is threatened by overuse of fertilisers and its damage to soil health.
• "Monoculture cash crops became the norm; yield was doubled, but at the expense of using 3 times as much water by accessing groundwater using electric pumps. This and fertiliser pollution has caused widespread damage to soil and water"[1] By now some 40% of agricultural products are the result of irrigation; 75% of the drinking water available on the earth is used by agriculture for this purpose. Planting Alfalfa in California, citrus fruits in Israel, cotton around the Aral Lake in the former Soviet Union, wheat in Saudi Arabia or in Yemen, i.e. planting crops in areas which do not provide the natural condition for their growth, means an enormous waste of water in agriculture.

The massive use of ‘hybrid seeds' poses a direct threat to bio-diversity.[2]

In many areas of the world, the soil is getting more and more polluted or even totally poisoned. In China 10% of the land area is contaminated and 120,000 peasants die each year from cancers caused by soil pollution. One result of the exhaustion of soil through the ruthless drive for productivity is the fact that in the Netherlands, the "agricultural power" house in Europe, foodstuffs have an extremely low nutritional value.

And global warming means with each 1°C increase in temperature, rice, wheat and corn yields could drop 10%. Recent heat waves in Australia have led to a severe crop damage and drought. First findings show that increased temperatures threaten the capacity for survival of many plants or reduce their nutritional value.

Despite of new farm land being won for farming, the world usable agricultural land is shrinking due to leaching, erosion, pollution and exhaustion of the soil.

Thus a new danger is cropping up - which mankind might have imagined was a nightmare of the past. The combined effects of climate-determined drought and floods and its consequences on agriculture, continuous destruction and reduction of usable soil, pollution and over-fishing of the oceans will lead to scarcity of food. Since 1984 world grain production, for example, has failed to keep pace with world population growth. In the space of 20 years it's fallen from 343kgs per person to 303kgs. (Carnegie Department of Global Ecology in Stanford)

The folly of the system means that capitalism is compelled to be an over-producer of almost all goods while at the same time it creates scarcity of food staples by destroying the very basis in nature of the conditions of their growth. The very roots of this absurdity can be found in capitalist production: "Large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a squandering of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country" (Marx, 1981, p. 949; see also Marx, 1977, p. 860) "It is not only world trade but also capitalist production developed on the basis of the town-country division of labour that feeds back into agriculture: Large-scale industry and industrially pursued agriculture have the same effect. If they are originally distinguished by the fact that the former lays waste and ruins labour-power and thus the natural power of man, whereas the latter does the same to the natural power of the soil, they link up in the later course of development, since the industrial system applied to agriculture also enervates the workers there, while industry and trade for their part provide agriculture with the means for exhausting the soil. (Marx, 1981, p.950) Marx, K. (1981). Capital: Vol. III. New York: Penguin).

Brutal acceleration of the crisis

Since the collapse of the housing speculation in the USA and other countries (Britain, Spain etc.) many hedge-funds or other investors look for alternative possibilities of placing their money. Agricultural crops have become the latest target of speculation. The cynical calculation of speculation in times of severe crisis: foodstuffs are a "safe bet", since they are the last thing which people can "afford" to do without! Billions of speculative dollars have already been placed in agricultural companies. These colossal speculative sums have certainly speeded up the price hikes in agricultural products, but they are not the actual root cause. We can assume even if the speculation ceased, price rises of agricultural products will continue.

Nevertheless, this insight into the role of speculation (which is a red herring if taken in isolation) gives us a clue about the real interconnections in the contemporary world economy. In reality, there is a direct connection between the "property crisis" and the earthquake taking place in world finance, and the food price explosion. The world recession of 1929, the most brutal in the history of capitalism to date, was accompanied by a dramatic fall in prices. The pauperisation of the working masses at the time was linked to the fact that wages, in the context of mass unemployment, fell even more dramatically than other prices. Today on the contrary, the world wide recession tendencies which are becoming manifest are accompanied by a general surge of inflation. The soaring prices of foodstuffs are the spearhead of this development, intricately linked to the rising cost of energy, transport and so on. The recent churning of hundreds of millions of dollars into the economy by governments in order to prop up the failing bank and finance systems has probably contributed more than any other factor to the recent world wide inflation spiral. It also does this by revealing the mountains of debt upon which the "crisis management" of recent decades has to a large extent been founded, so undermining business "confidence".

The working masses of the world are caught in a two sided iron vice. Whereas on the one hand global unemployment exercises its relentless downward pressure on wages, soaring prices on the other hand eat away the value of the little the proletarians still earn.

The present day sharpening of the world wide and historic crisis of world capitalism turns out to be a many headed hydra. Alongside the monstrous property and finance crisis which continues to smoulder at the heart of capitalism, there has already appeared a second monster in the form of soaring prices and starvation. And who can tell which others may soon follow? For the moment, the ruling class still appears stunned and somewhat helpless. Its day to day reactions reveal the attempt to increase state control over the economy and to coordinate policy internationally, but also the sharpening of competition between the capitalist nations. The soothing words of policy makers are aimed at disguising from the world, and even from themselves, the feeling of progressively losing any control over what is happening to their system. A development which confronts the ruling class with a twofold danger: that of the destabilisation of entire countries or even continents in a spiral of chaos, and the danger, in the longer term, of a revolutionary upheaval that puts capitalismitself into question.

The Responsibility of the Proletariat.

Because of these destructive effects of capitalist mode of production on agriculture and the environment humanity is in fact confronted with a race against time. The more capitalist destruction ravages the world, the more the basis of survival of humanity is threatened. However, the drastic worsening of the economic crisis and the speculative effects on food prices are forcing the masses of workers, unemployed and peasants to react immediately. Their struggle is on the one hand a defensive struggle for being able to survive, but at the same time it poses the necessity to eradicate the root causes of their life-threatening situation.

ICC

[1] This is taken from an interesting article on libcom by Ret Marut. ("A world food crisis; empty rice bowls and fat rats, https://libcom.org/news/a-world-food-crisis-empty-rice-bowls-fat-rats-16042008 [37]).

[2] "This is a commodified seed - engineered so it cannot reproduce itself and can only grow with the aid of chemical fertilisers. So farmers are locked into dependency on the multi-national companies selling them this seed. In indigenous agriculture, a cropping system includes a symbiotic relationship between soil, water, farm animals and plants. Hybrid agriculture replaces this integration at farm level with the integration of inputs such as seeds and chemicals. The indigenous cropping systems are based only on internal organic inputs. Seeds come from the farm, soil fertility comes from the farm, and pest control is built into the crop mixtures. In the hybrid package, yields are intimately tied to the purchased inputs of seeds, chemical fertilisers, pesticides and petroleum, and intensive irrigation.. If farmers become dependent on hybrid seed, this biological diversity and local adaptation will be lost. Such commercialisation of traditional farming techniques often puts tremendous economic pressure on farmers - in India, 10,000 farmers have committed suicide in the past year, mainly due to debt worries...The substitution of chemical fertilisers for organic methods of returning nutrients to the soil, such as composting, crop rotation and manure creates lifeless dusty soils prone to soil erosion. An estimated 24 billion tonnes of soil are eroded from the world's agricultural land each year. Dust levels in the lower atmosphere have tripled in the last 60 years" (Ret Marut, op.cit.).

Never have so many countries been hit by workers' struggles at the same time. This is testimony to the strength and militancy of the working class on an international scale. Faced with the black-out of the bourgeois media, here are just a few examples, only going back to the beginning of 2008. This article should be read in conjunction with ‘Workers' struggles multiply all over the world' in World Revolution 314.

Europe

Belgium: in March, strikes at Ford in Genk, in the post at Mortsel against temporary contracts; public transport strike in Bruxelles and wildcat strikes at BP petrochemicals and in the logistical enterprise Ceva against lay-offs.

Greece: three 24 general strikes since the beginning of the year against the ‘reform' of pensions by a conservative government re-elected in September 2007 on the promise that it wouldn't touch pensions. In fact it is now proposing a 30-40% cut in pensions, raising of the retirement age past 65 for men and 60 for women, cancelling of retirement dates already in place. The strikes were also against the ‘reform' of social security (fusion of funds, reduction in the number of security funds and abolition of help given to low-paid workers). These strikes paralysed the main economic activities of the country: transport, banks, post, telecom, railways, etc. On the last one, 19 March, millions of people joined demonstrations.

Ireland: strike by 40,000 nurses for over 15 days at the beginning of April, demanding a 10% increase and a reduction of the working week to 35 hours. Struggle by Aer Lingus pilots in response to new working conditions following the opening of a new terminal in Belfast. Wildcat strike, against the advise of the unions, by 25 bus drivers in Limerick calling for a new wage contract.

Italy: in the Naples region, the Fiat factory at Pomigliano came out on strike on 10 April in protest against the ‘externalisation' of 316 jobs (a practise which the workers fear will become the norm).

Russia: the bauxite mines were occupied by 3000 workers for over a week. They were calling for a 50% increase in their wages and the re-establishment of social benefits that had been suppressed recently. This movement had a lot of sympathy throughout the country and the support of the local population. The management granted a 20% wage increase and a part of the social benefits.

Switzerland: in Bellinzone (Tessin) a month-long strike by 430 mechanics against the suppression of 126 jobs at CFF Cargo. After a demonstration in Berne in which other workers took part, the restructuring plan was abandoned on 9 April.

Turkey: the war in Iraqi Kurdistan did not prevent the outbreak of a massive strike among the 43,000 workers in the shipyards of Tuzla on the Marmara sea. Following a demonstration on 28 February, which was met by police repression, several thousand workers went on strike for two days and held a ‘sit-in' at the shipyard. This was attacked by the police who beat up workers and carried out 75 arrests. "Our lives have less value than their dogs" the workers shouted in anger, demonstrating their intention to fight for their dignity. The workers only went back to work after the arrested strikers had been released and after they had obtained some promises from the management regarding their demands (improvements in hygiene and safety, guarantees on social payments, limitation of the working day to 7 and a half hours...). On May Day there were violent clashes between the police and demonstrating workers in Istanbul.

Africa

Algeria: three days of ‘illegal' strikes in the civil service on 13 April (1.5 million wage earners) for a wage increase and a rejection of the new wage structure. Strike by 207 cement workers at Hammam Dalaa in the M'sila region, with a platform of 17 demands about their working conditions.

Cameroon: several strikes between November 2007 and March 2008 against the inhuman working conditions in the palm oil plantations run by Socapalm, linked to a Belgian company and the French Bolloré family.

Swaziland: at the end of March, threat by 16,000 textile workers to come out on strike to obtain better wages and bonuses in this former South African ‘bantustan'

Tunisia: On 6 and 7 April, after the general strike and explosion of anger of January 2008, which was brutally repressed (over 300 deaths), a new wave of repression and arrests in the mining zone of the Gafsa basin, directed at workers struggling against redundancies; on 10 March, strike at the telemarketing firm Teleperformance which employs 4000 workers.

Americas

Canada: wildcat strike at the pork processing plant Olymel in the Vallée Jonction. Less than a year after the unions accepted a 30% cut in wages and a 7 year freeze in exchange for guarantees about job security, a spontaneous walk-out by 320 workers in one workshop following disciplinary action against a worker who arrived late for work. The management got the unions to call for a return to work and an end to slow-downs in production; soon after, 70% of the workers decided in a general assembly to stage an indefinite unofficial strike from 20 April.

USA: the screen writers' strike is well-known, but there has also been a militant strike by 5000 MTV workers [40] ; in Detroit and Buffalo, on 26 February, strike by 3650 UAW workers at Axle and Manufacturing Holding (supplying parts to General Motors and Chrysler) against a reduction in wages and benefits; work stoppages against the war in Afghanistan and Iraq by dockers on the west coast on 1st of May.

Mexico: 11 January, strike at the country's biggest copper mine in Cananea (in the province of Sonora in the north) for higher wages and improvements in safety and health. This strike was declared illegal and was violently attacked by the police and special forces (20-40 wounded, a number of arrests). The courts finally recognise the legality of the strike; on 21 January there was a new strike involving 270,000 miners.

Venezuela: massive strike by the steel workers [41] (steel is the country's second largest industry) in the Guyana province. The workers encounter harsh repression at the hands of the state controlled by that ‘champion of 21st century socialism', Chavez.

Asia

China: 17 January, revolt by workers employed by Maersk in the port of Machong. In the single region that comprises Canton, Shenzhen and Hong Kong, which contains 100,000 firms and employs 10 million workers, there has been at least one strike a day involving 1000 workers since the beginning of the year!

Emirates: after making some concessions in the wake of the massive revolt by the building workers in Dubai [42] , an ‘exemplary' repression was meted out: six month prison sentences and expulsion of 45 workers for ‘inciting strikes'. But the struggle has had its impact: 1300 building workers in the neighbouring Emirate of Bahrain, suffering the same atrocious working conditions, came out on strike for a week at the beginning of April. They quickly won a wage increase because the threat of contagion in the region was so great. There are over 13 million foreign workers in the six Gulf Emirates.

Israel: wildcat strike by baggage handlers employed by El Al in march; strike by stock exchange employees in Tel Aviv for wage increases and against extra hours and casual contracts, causing considerable instability on the county's financial markets.

ICConline, May 2008.

As we showed in other articles of our press, towards the mid-1960s there developed an international movement of protest against the Vietnam War and against the first signs of a worsening economic situation. In many countries it carried the germs for putting into question the existing order. The movement in Germany started quite early, and it was going to have a major international impact.

Opposition outside of bourgeois parliament

While more and more demonstrations were organised from the mid-1960s on, above all against the war in Vietnam, the protests took on a new dimension when on December 1st 1966 a grand coalition government made up of CDU/CSU and SPD was formed in Bonn, and barely one week later on December 10th Rudi Dutschke called for the formation of an "Extra-Parliamentary Opposition" (APO). As the biggest ‘left' party joined the government, this resulted in a lot of disappointment and a turn away from the SPD. While the SPD was busily campaigning for participation in elections, protests were more and more taking to the streets. At the beginning of this movement there were considerable illusions about bourgeois democracy in general and about Social Democracy in particular. The idea was that since the SPD had joined the government there was no longer a major force of opposition in parliament, so this opposition would have to be organised from the streets. With the increasingly obvious role of Social Democracy as a force which supported the system from within the Grand Coalition, the "extra-parliamentary opposition" was more directed against recuperation through bourgeois democracy, against participation in parliamentary elections and in favour of direct action.  This orientation was an important element in the slow process of the ending of social peace.

A new generation resists

The ruling class saw itself compelled to put the SPD into government as a reaction to the reappearance of the economic crisis after the boom that followed World War Two. After the long-lasting economic miracle, economic growth suddenly fell sharply in 1965. Even if the drop in growth still began from a high level, and the growth rates at the time would be seen as dream figures today, something of historical importance had happened. The economic miracle of the post-WW2 period was over. There was a first wave of job cuts and perks such as payment above the negotiated wages were cancelled. Even though all these measures appear extremely ‘soft' in comparison to today's austerity cuts, they were a real shock for the working class. The nightmare of the crisis had reappeared. But even though the crisis had reappeared all of a sudden, the working class did not yet react with a big wave of strikes. However, between 1965 and 67 some 300,000 workers participated in different struggles. A wave of protests in the whole of the country began with a wildcat strike in December 1966 in the Faber and Schleicher plant at Offenbach, which made printing machines. The workers demanded the dismissal of a foreman who was reproached for using "bullying" methods.  In addition conflicts over working time erupted at the ILO works in Pinneberg close to Hamburg in September 1967. Almost all of these struggles turned into wildcat strikes. They contributed significantly to the change of mood, in particular amongst young workers, especially amongst trainees (at the time there was no big youth unemployment; most young people gained some working experience). While previously for years the ideology of ‘social partnership' and the image of a benevolent paternalist state had been widespread, now the first cracks in the ‘social peace' appeared. With hindsight these small strikes were only heralds of a bigger rupture which was to occur in Germany in 1969.

Yet with these hesitant, not very spectacular actions the working class in Germany had sent an important message, which also gave an impulse to the protest movement of the students. Even though the workers in Germany did not take a leading position internationally through their defensive struggles, they became part of the movement at an early stage.

But it was not so much the immediate severity of the first austerity cuts which sparked off the movement. The stirrings of a new generation could also be felt. After the deprivations of the economic crisis in the 1930s and the years of hunger during and after the war, after the brutal exhaustion of the workforce during the post-war reconstruction period with its long working hours and very low wages, a higher level of consumption had begun to develop, but at the same time these new sweat shop conditions had a horrifying effect, in particular on younger workers. A general, still unclear feeling cropped up: "we can't believe that this was it. We need something else than just consumer goods. We do not want to become as exhausted, worn-down, and burnt-out as our parents". Very slowly, a new, undefeated generation of workers appeared which had not lived through the war and which was not willing to accept the capitalist treadmill without any resistance. The search for an alternative, which was still undefined and unclear, had begun.

Behind the protest movement - the search for a new society

The formation of an ‘extra-parliamentary opposition' at the end of 1966 was only one step in a bigger stirring amongst the young generation, in particular the students. From 1965 on, even before the economic crisis broke out, more and more general assemblies were held in universities, where heated debates were held over ways and means of protest.

Following the example of the USA, in many universities discussion groups were set up as a counter pole to the ‘established' bourgeois universities; a ‘critical university' was formed. In these forums there were not only members of the SDS (Socialist Students League of Germany), who decided on all kinds of spectacular anti-authoritarian forms of protests. During that first phase of the movement an old tradition of debate, of discussion in public general assemblies partially revived. Even though many felt attracted by the urge for spectacular actions, the interest in theory, in the history of revolutionary movements re-surfaced, and with it the courage to think about overcoming capitalism. Many people expressed the hope for another society. Rudi Dutschke summarised this in June 1967 in the following manner: "the development of the productive forces has reached such a point of evolution that the abolition of hunger, war and domination has become a material possibility. Everything depends on the conscious will of the people to make history, which they have always made, but now this must become a matter of conscious control". A number of political texts of the workers' movement, in particular of council communism, were reprinted. The interest in workers' councils grew enormously. On an international scale the protest movement in Germany was considered to be one of the most active in matters of theory, the most keen on discussions, the most political.

At the same time a large part of the protesters, such as Rudi Dutschke, initially criticised Stalinism on a theoretical or at least on an emotional level. Dutschke saw Stalinism as a doctrinaire deformation of genuine Marxism which had turned into a new ‘bureaucratic' ideology of domination. He demanded a thorough-going revolution and a struggle for the renewal of socialism in the eastern bloc.

State repression creates indignation

In order to protest against the visit of the Shah of Persia in West Berlin thousands of demonstrators gathered on the streets on June 2nd 1967. The German bourgeois democratic government, which unconditionally supported the bloody dictatorial regime of the Shah, was fiercely determined to keep the demonstrations under control by police violence (using truncheons and squads to snatch demonstrators). During the violent demonstrations the student Benno Ohnesorg was murdered by a shot in the back by a plainclothes policeman (afterwards he was acquitted). This murder of a student provoked a tremendous indignation amongst the politicised youth and gave the protest movement additional dynamic. Following this state repression, discussions at a congress, which was held one week after Benno's death on June 9th 1967 on the topic "University and Democracy", revealed a growing gap between state and society. At the same time another component of the protest moved more and more into the foreground.

The movement against the war

Following the same dynamic as in the USA, demonstrations and congresses against the Vietnam war had started in 1965 and 1966. On 17/18th February 1968 an International Congress against the War in Vietnam was held in West Berlin, followed by a demonstration with some 12,000 participants. The escalation of war in the Middle East around the Six Day War in June 1967 and above all the Vietnam war brought the images of war back home. Barely 20 years after the end of WW2 the new generation, most of whom often had not experienced WW2, or only as small children, were then being confronted with a war, which unmasked the whole barbarism of the system (permanent bombardment above all of the civilian population, use of chemical weapons such as Agent Orange, massacre at My Lai: more bombs were dropped on Vietnam than during the entire second world war). The new generation was no longer willing to sacrifice its life in a new world war - therefore all over the world, above all in the USA and in Germany, more and more people demonstrated against the war in Vietnam.

However, the contradictory and confused character of the movement can be seen through a very wide spread basic idea of the time which was voiced by Dutschke in a clear manner. He and many others in the SDS believed that the US war in Vietnam, the emergency laws in Germany and Stalinists bureaucrats in the Eastern Bloc, despite of all the differences, had one thing in common - they were all elements in a world wide chain of authoritarian rule over powerless citizens. The conditions for overcoming capitalism in the rich industrial countries and the 3rd world, according to them, were different. The revolution would not be made by the working class in Europe and the USA but by the impoverished and oppressed people of the ‘periphery' of the world market. This is why so many politicised people felt attracted by the ‘anti-imperialist' theories, which praised national liberation struggles as a new revolutionary force, although in reality they were nothing but imperialist conflicts - often in the form of proxy wars in which the peasants were sacrificed on the altar of imperialism.

Even though many young people were fascinated by the so-called national liberation struggles in the 3rd world and supported the Vietcong, Russia or China in demonstrations against the war, which means they did not defend a fundamentally internationalist position, it became nevertheless tangible that the basic unease about war was increasing and that above all the new generation could not be mobilised for a new confrontation between the two blocs. The fact that the ruling class in the front line state of Germany was facing increasing difficulties to mobilise young people for a global imperialist slaughter was particularly significant.

The spiral of violence sets in

Already from 1965 there were many demonstrations against the planned emergency laws which gave the state many rights to step up militarisation and repression. The SPD, which had joined the coalition with the CDU in 1966, remained faithful to the policies it first practised in 1918/1919[1] . After the assassination of Benno Ohnesorg in June 1967 smear campaigns against the protesters, in particular against their leaders were intensified. The German mass tabloid Bild-Zeitung demanded: "Stop the terror of the young Reds now". At a pro-America demonstration organised by the Berlin Senate on February 21st 1968, participants carried slogans saying "Enemy n° 1 of the people: Rudi Dutschke". During that demonstration a person watching the demo was mistakenly taken for Rudi Dutschke; participants of the demonstration threatened to beat him up and kill him. One week after the assassination of Martin Luther King in the USA the smear campaign in Germany finally reached a peak with the assassination attempt against Rudi Dutschke on April 11th, the Thursday before Easter.  Between April 11-18th, there were riots mainly directed against the printing czar Springer (the demonstrators shouted "Bild-Zeitung participated in the assassination"). Two people got killed, hundreds were injured. A spiral of violence set in. In Berlin the first Molotov-cocktails were thrown: a police agent put them at the disposal of demonstrators who were ready to commit violence. In Frankfurt the first big department store was set on fire.

Despite a march on Bonn on May 11th 1968 with more than 60,000 participants, the coalition government of the CDU-SPD hastened to adopt the emergency laws.  

Whereas in France in May 68 the student demos were pushed into the background by the workers' strikes and the working class returned to the stage of history, the protests in Germany were already at a crossroads in May 68.

A wave of workers' strikes only erupted over a year later in September 1969 - not least because most of the proletarian protesters in 1968 lacked a point of reference.

While some of the protesters turned towards violent actions and others, above all student activists, flung themselves into the construction of leftist organisations with the goal of ‘better reaching the workers in the factories', many proletarian protesters rejected these options and started to withdraw.

We shall continue the 2nd part of this article [43] with the events after 1968. Weltrevolution, May 2008.

[1] How successfully the German bourgeoisie in 1918-1919 already used smear campaigns in the media and provocations in in order to present the radicals as violent terrorists and isolate them can be seen in the book by Uwe Soukup,  How Benno Ohnesorg Died.

We are publishing below a series of four articles translated from the Turkish by the comrades of Enternasyonalist Komünist Sol, all dealing with the recent strike at Türk Telekom. Readers will remember that we have already published an article on this subject (the second in this series), entitled "Victory at Türk Telekom" which covered the end of the 44-day strike by 26,000 workers, which ended with a 10% wage increase. We are now able to publish the complete series of the articles published on the subject by EKS: the first was written at the beginning of the strike and analysed briefly the forces in the conflict, while the second covered the end of the strike which it considered as a victory for the workers.

The two articles that followed were published as part of a debate within EKS as to the real nature of the end of the strike: comrade Temel argues that whatever the appearances the strike was in reality a defeat, while comrade Devrim's reply returns to the original analysis of the strike and to comrade Temel's criticisms to conclude that whatever its weaknesses, the strike was on the contrary a victory in both economic and in political terms.

We think that the debate expressed in these articles is an important one for the working class as a whole. Not only do they raise general questions about what constitutes a victory for the workers and what does not, but they do so in a general context which should draw the attention of workers and communists all around the world. For most workers in the world's big industrial centres, imperialist war is an ever-present backdrop to our lives - a permanent reminder of the enormous lie of the "peace and prosperity" that we were promised after the collapse of the Eastern bloc - but it is not an immediate issue in our daily lives. For Turkish workers however, the question of war and the attitude to adopt towards war is an immediate, burning issue: the Turkish ruling class has been conducting a more or less permanent war against its own Kurdish population since the 1980s and the military operation authorised at the end of 2007 is by no means the first time that the Turkish army has conducted incursions into Northern Iraq (Kurdistan). Moreover, unlike the US or British armies fighting in Iraq the Turkish army is made up in large part of conscripts and the horror and brutality of war is a daily trauma for the workers whose sons, brothers, fathers and husbands are fighting and dying in this bloody but little reported conflict (see the report from EKS on the invasion of Iraq [46], published on our website). The attitude of the Turkish workers in struggle is thus of the greatest importance for workers and communists internationally, and we want here to comment on some of the arguments put forward in the different articles, with a view to contributing to the debate.

Temel begins by asking "...if the necessary environment for a strike to occur in Telekom was ready", and it is certainly true that revolutionaries need to have some assessment of the balance of class forces (are the workers in a more or less favorable position against the bosses for example?) when agitating in the struggle. However, the criteria for judging the strength of the strike are certainly open to question:

1. The strike "wasn't prepared sufficiently before". But as the answer to Temel's article says, how could we expect this to be the case under decadent capitalism when the unions - the only really permanent organisations to exist within the working class - are on the side of the bosses? Temel does not ask how one should go about preparing a strike. While in general we agree with Devrim's answer to this point, we should say that there is perhaps an underestimation of what may be possible in the present situation. In the present conditions of the working class' growing distrust for the unions - which we think in general is a world wide phenomenon - many strikes end leaving small groups of workers dissatisfied with the unions and wanting to prepare themselves more effectively for the next strike. During the 1980s this gave rise (at least in Western Europe) to the creation of "struggle committees" in some workplaces, where the most advanced, politically conscious workers could meet to discuss, to draw the lessons of the previous strikes, and prepare the intervention of a radical nucleus of workers in the mass meetings of strikes to come. This kind of "preparation" is indeed possible today, and pushing for or even taking part in the creation of such groups of militant workers is an important part of revolutionary intervention in such situations.
2. The workers "only won 10%". It is true that with inflation running at 9.8% in 2007 (according to the CIA world factbook) a 10% rise is not much. But it is certainly better than nothing, which is what they would have had without a strike, or than the 4% originally offered - especially in a period of deepening economic crisis.

These questions are common to most strikes in industrialised countries today. But the most important issue in our view is the reaction of the Telekom workers to the war. Here it is necessary first of all to avoid a false debate: the Telekom workers did not strike directly against the war, nor in our view would this have been possible without a far greater degree of militancy and class consciousness than exists in the present period. We need only consider what it means for masses of workers to strike consciously against the bourgeois state's military operations: in effect, it means that the working class is calling into question the power and the right to rule of the bourgeoisie, and this can only happen in a revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situation precisely because it poses the issue of power. In the situation in Turkey today the real question is whether workers are ready to renounce the struggle in defence of their own interests in the interests of the bourgeois war machine. We agree entirely with the reply to Temel when it says that "If there had been a spontaneous return to work in order to maintain the Telecom system in times of war, it would have been an absolute disaster. This didn't happen. In fact workers stayed on strike despite being told the media, and various members of the political class that they were acting against the national interest. This is to be applauded". That workers' should continue to defend their interests despite the war frenzy of the bourgeois media is not enough to prevent war in itself - the Turkish army invaded Kurdistan despite it - but it puts a brake on the generalised outbreak of imperialist war. It is the indispensable foundation for the development of a deeper consciousness within the class of the antagonism between the interests of the bourgeois nation and their own. 

Finally, we want to express our wholehearted appreciation of and agreement with the spirit in which this debate has been and is being conducted by the comrades of EKS: "discussions of the real issues that face workers in a struggle can only add to the development of the communist organisations", and we would add, more broadly, to the development of the consciousness and self-awareness of the proletariat as a whole.

ICC

Part two: the first debates on state capitalism in the Bolshevik party

In the first part of this article, we looked at the criticisms which Rosa Luxemburg made of the early policies of the Bolshevik party after the October revolution, emphasising that Luxemburg always made these criticisms from a standpoint of unflinching support for the Russian revolution. In this second part, we look at some of the debates that arose inside the Bolshevik party, which was faced with a totally unprecedented historical situation: the establishment of a proletarian power at the level of an entire country. These debates expressed the fact that, far from being the monolith portrayed both in ‘anti-Bolshevik' and Stalinist mythology, the Bolshevik party in 1918 was still very much a living organism of the proletariat.

Almost simultaneously with Luxemburg's criticisms, the first important disagreements arose within the Bolshevik party about the direction of the revolution. This debate - provoked in the first instance by the signing of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, but subsequently moving on to the forms and methods of proletarian power - was carried out in a completely open manner within the party. It certainly gave rise to sharp polemics between its protagonists, but there was no question of minority positions being silenced. Indeed, for a while, the "minority" position on the signing of the treaty looked as if it might become a majority. At this stage, the groupings who defended different positions took the form of tendencies rather than clearly defined fractions resisting a course of degeneration. In other words, they had come together on a temporary basis to express particular orientations within a party that, despite the implications of its entanglement with the state, was still very much the living, breathing vanguard organism of the class.

Nevertheless, there are those who have argued that the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty was already the beginning of the end, if not the end, for the Bolsheviks as a proletarian party, already marking their effective abandonment of the world revolution (see the book by Guy Sabatier, Brest-Litovsk, coup d'arrêt à la révolution, Spartacus editions, Paris) And to some extent the tendency within the party that most vociferously opposed the treaty - the Left Communist group around Bukharin, Piatakov, Ossinski and others - feared that a fundamental principle was being breached when the representatives of the Soviet power signed a highly disadvantageous "peace" agreement with a rapacious German imperialism rather than committing itself to a "revolutionary war" against it. Their views were not dissimilar to those of Rosa Luxemburg, although her main concern was that the signing of the treaty would retard the outbreak of the revolution in Germany and the West.

In any case, a simple comparison between the Brest-Litovsk treaty in 1918 and the Rapallo treaty four years later shows the essential difference between a principled retreat in the face of overwhelming odds, and a real marketing of principles which paved the way towards Soviet Russia being integrated into the world concert of capitalist nations. In the first case, the treaty was debated openly in the party and the Soviets; there was no attempt to hide the draconian terms imposed by Germany; and the whole framework of the debate was determined by the interests of the world revolution, rather than the "national" interests of Russia. Rapallo, by contrast, was signed in secret, and its terms even involved the Soviet state supplying the German army with the very weapons that would be used to defend capitalist order against the German workers in 1923.

The essential debate around Brest-Litovsk was a strategic one: did the Soviet power, master of a country that had already been exhausted by four years of imperialist slaughter, have the economic and military means at its disposal to launch an immediate "revolutionary war" against Germany, even the kind of partisan warfare that Bukharin and other Left Communists seemed to favour? And secondly, would the signing of the treaty seriously delay the outbreak of the revolution in Germany, whether through the "capitulationist" message it sent out to the world proletariat, or more concretely through providing German imperialism with a life line in the East? On both counts, it seems to us, as it did to Bilan in the 1930s, that Lenin was correct to argue that what the Soviet power needed above all was a breathing space in which to regroup its forces - not to develop as a "national" power but so that it could make a better contribution to the world revolution than by going down in heroic defeat (as it did, for example, by helping to found the Third International in 1919). And it could even be said that this retreat, far from delaying the outbreak of the revolution in Germany, helped to hasten it: freed from the war on the Eastern front, German imperialism then attempted to launch a new offensive in the west, and this in turn provoked the mutinies in the navy and army that sparked off the German revolution in November 1918.

If there is a principle to be drawn from the signing of the treaty, it is the one drawn by Bilan: "The positions of the fraction led by Bukharin, according to which the function of the proletarian state was to liberate the workers of other countries through a ‘revolutionary war', are in contradiction with the very nature of the proletarian revolution and the historic role of the proletariat". In contrast to the bourgeois revolution, which could indeed be exported by military means, the proletarian revolution depends on the conscious struggle of the proletariat of each country against its own bourgeoisie: "The victory of a proletarian state against a capitalist state (in the territorial sense of the word) in no way means a victory of the world revolution" (‘Parti-Etat-Internationale: L'Etat prolétarien', Bilan no.18, April-May 1935). This position had already been confirmed in 1920, with the debacle around the attempt to export revolution to Poland on the bayonets of the Red Army.

The position of the Left Communists on Brest-Litovsk - especially in the "death rather than dishonour" way that Bukharin defended it - was not therefore their strong point, even if it is the position that they are best remembered for. With the conclusion of "peace" with Germany, and the suppression of the first wave of bourgeois resistance and sabotage that arose in the immediate aftermath of the October insurrection, the focus of the debate shifted. The breathing space having been won, the priority was to determine how the Soviet power should set about consolidating itself until the world revolution had moved on to its next stage.

In April 918, Lenin made a speech to the Bolshevik central committee that was subsequently published as The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Power. In this text he argues that the primary task facing the revolution - assuming, as he and many others did, that the worst moments of the civil war were behind rather than in front of the new power - was the task of "administration", of rebuilding a shattered economy, of imposing labour discipline and raising productivity, of ensuring strict accounting and control in the process of production and distribution, of eliminating corruption and waste, and, perhaps above all, of struggling against the ubiquitous petty bourgeois mentality that he saw as the ransom paid to the huge weight of the peasantry and of semi-mediaeval survivals.

The most controversial parts of this text concern the methods that Lenin advocated to achieve these aims. He did not hesitate to make use of what he himself termed bourgeois methods, including: the use of bourgeois technical specialists (which he described as a "step backwards" from the principles of the Commune, since in order to "win them over" to the Soviet power they had to be bribed with wages much higher than that of the average worker); the recourse to piecework; the adoption of the "Taylor system" which Lenin saw as "a combination of the refined brutality of bourgeois exploitation and a number of the greatest scientific achievements in the field of analysing mechanical motions during work, the elimination of superfluous and awkward motions, the elaboration of correct methods of work, the introduction of the best system of accounting and control, etc" (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol 27, p 259). Most controversial of all, Lenin, reacted against a certain degree of "anarchy" at the level of the workplace especially where the factory committee movement was strong and was disputing control of the plants with the old or the new management. He therefore called for "One man management", insisting that "unquestioning subordination to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of processes organised on the pattern of large-scale machine industry" (p269). This latter passage is often quoted by anarchists and councilists who are keen to show that Lenin was the precursor of Stalin. But it must be read in the proper context: Lenin's advocacy of "individual dictatorship" in management did not at all preclude the extensive development of democratic discussions and decision-making about overall policy at mass meetings; and the stronger the class consciousness of the workers, the more this subordination to the "manager" during the actual work process would be "something like the mild leadership of a conductor of an orchestra".(ibid)

Nevertheless, the whole orientation of this speech alarmed the Left Communists, particularly as it was accompanied by a push to curb the power of the factory committees at shop-floor level and to incorporate them into the more pliant trade union apparatus.

The Left Communist group, which was extremely influential both in the Petrograd and Moscow regions, had established its own journal, Kommunist. Here it published two principal polemics with the approach contained in Lenin's speech: the group's "Theses on the Current Situation" (published by Critique, Glasgow, as a pamphlet in 1977), and Ossinski's article "On the construction of socialism".

The first document shows that this group was by no means animated by a spirit of "petty bourgeois childishness" as Lenin was to claim. The approach is profoundly serious, beginning by trying to analyse the balance of forces between the classes in the aftermath of the Brest-Litovsk treaty. Certainly, this reveals the weak side of the group's analyses: it both clings to the view that the treaty has dealt a serious blow to the prospects of revolution, while at the same time predicting that "during spring and summer the collapse of the imperialist system must begin" - a piece of fortune-telling that Lenin rightly lambasts in his reply to this document. This contradictory stance is a direct product of the false assumptions the Lefts had made during the debate over the treaty.

The strong side of the document is its critique of the use of bourgeois methods by the new Soviet power. Here it must be said that the text is not rigidly doctrinaire: it accepts that bourgeois technical specialists will have to be used by the proletarian dictatorship, and does not rule out the possibility of establishing trade relations with capitalist powers, although it does warn against the danger of "diplomatic manoeuvering on the part of the Russian state among the imperialist powers", including political and military alliances. And it also warned that such policies on the international level would inevitably be accompanied by concessions to both international and "native" capital within Russia itself. These dangers were to become particularly concrete with the retreat of the revolutionary wave after 1921. But the most immediately relevant aspect of the Lefts' criticisms concerned the danger of abandoning the principles of the commune state in the Soviets, in the army, and in the factories:

"A policy of directing enterprises on the principle of wide participation of capitalists and semi-bureaucratic centralisation naturally goes with a labour policy directed at the establishment among the workers of discipline disguised as ‘self-discipline', the introduction of labour responsibility for the workers (a project of this nature has been put forward by the right Bolsheviks(, piecework, lengthening of the working day, etc).

The form of state control of enterprises must develop in the direction of bureaucratic centralisation, of rule by various commissars, of deprivation of independence from local Soviets and of rejection in practise of the type of ‘Commune state' ruled from below...

In the field of military policy there must appear, and can in fact be noted already, a deviation towards the re-establishment of nationwide (including the bourgeoisie) military service...With the setting up of army cadres for whose training and leadership officers are necessary, the task of creating a proletarian officer corps through broad and planned organisation of appropriate schools and courses is being lost from sight. In this way in practise the old officer corps and command structures of the Czarist generals is being reconstituted" (‘Theses...').

Here the Left Communists were discerning worrying trends that were beginning to appear within the new Soviet regime, and which were to be rapidly accelerated in the ensuing period of War Communism. They were particularly concerned that if the party identified itself with these trends, it would eventually be forced to confront the workers as a hostile force: "The introduction of labour discipline in connection with the restoration of capitalist leadership in production cannot essentially increase the productivity of labour, but it will lower the class autonomy, activity and degree of organisation of the proletariat. It threatens the enslavement of the working class, and arouses the dissatisfaction both of the backward sections and of the vanguard of the proletariat. To carry this system through with the sharp class hatred prevailing in the working class against the ‘capitalists and saboteurs', the communist party would have to draw its support from the petty bourgeoisie against the workers and therefore put an end to itself as the party of the proletariat" (ibid).

The final outcome of such an involution, for the Lefts, was the degeneration of the proletarian power into a system of state capitalism:

"In place of a transition from partial nationalisation to general socialisation of big industry, agreements with ‘captains of industry' must lead to the formation of large trusts led by them and embracing the basic branches of industry, which may with external help take the form of state enterprises. Such a system of organisation of production gives a base for evolution in the direction of state capitalism and is a transitional stage towards it" (ibid).

At the end of the Theses, the Left Communists put forward their own proposals for keeping the revolution on the right path: continuation of the offensive against the bourgeois political counter-revolution and capitalist property; strict control over bourgeois industrial and military specialists; support for the struggle of the poor peasants in the countryside; and, most importantly, for the workers, "Not the introduction of piece-work and the lengthening of the working day, which in circumstances of rising unemployment are senseless, but the introduction by local economic councils and trade unions of standards of manufacture and shortening of the working day with an increase in the number of shifts and broad organisation of productive social labour.

The granting of broad independence to local Soviets and not the checking of their activities by commissars sent by the central power. Soviet power and the party of the proletariat must seek support in the class autonomy of the broad masses, to the development of which all efforts must be directed". Finally, the Lefts defined their own role: "They define their attitude to the Soviet power as a position of universal support for that power in the event of necessity - by means of participation in it...This participation is possible only on the basis of a definite political programme, which would prevent the deviation of the Soviet power and the party majority onto the fateful path of petty bourgeois politics. In the event of such a deviation, the left wing of the party will have to take the position of an active and responsible proletarian opposition".

A number of important theoretical weaknesses can be discerned in these passages. One is a tendency to confuse the total nationalisation of the economy by the Soviet state as being identical with a real process of socialisation - ie as already part of the construction of a socialist society. In his reply to the Theses, ‘Left wing childishness and the petty bourgeois mentality' (May 1918, CW, vol 27), Lenin pounces on this confusion. To the statement in the Theses that "the systematic use of the remaining means of production is conceivable only if a most determined policy of socialisation is pursued", Lenin replies: "One may or may not be determined on the question of nationalisation or confiscation, but the whole point is that even the greatest possible ‘determination' in the world is not enough to pass from nationalisation and confiscation to socialisation. The misfortune of our ‘Lefts' is that by their naïve, childish combination of words they reveal their utter failure to understand the crux of the question, the crux of the ‘present situation'...Yesterday, the main task of the moment was, as determinedly as possible, to nationalise, confiscate, beat down and crush the bourgeoisie, and put down sabotage. Today, only a blind man could fail to see that we have nationalised, confiscated, beaten down and put down more than we have had time to count. The difference between socialisation and simple confiscation is that confiscation can be carried out by ‘determination' alone, without the ability to calculate and distribute properly, whereas socialisation cannot be brought about without this ability" (p333-4). Here Lenin is able to show that there is a difference in quality between mere expropriation of the bourgeoisie (especially when this takes the form of statification) and the real construction of new social relations. The Lefts' weakness on this point was to lead many of them into confusing the almost complete statification of property and even distribution that took place during the War Communism period with authentic communism: as we have shown, Bukharin in particular developed this confusion into an elaborate theory in his Economics of the Transformation Period (see International Review no.96). Lenin, by contrast, is much more realistic about the possibility of the besieged, depleted Russian Soviet power taking real steps towards socialism in the absence of the world revolution.

This weakness also prevents the Lefts from seeing with full clarity where the main danger of counter-revolution comes from. For them, "state capitalism" is identified as a central danger, it is true, but this is seen rather as an expression of an even greater danger: that the party will end up deviating towards "petty bourgeois politics", that it will line up with the interests of the petty bourgeoisie against the proletariat. This was a partial reflection of reality: the post-insurrectionary status quo was indeed one in which the victorious proletariat found itself confronting not only the fury of the old ruling classes, but also the dead weight of the vast peasant masses who had their own reasons for resisting the further advance of the revolutionary process. But the weight of these social strata made itself felt on the proletariat above all through the organism of the state, which in the interests of preserving the social status quo was tending to become an autonomous power in its own right. Like most of the revolutionaries of their day, the Lefts identified "state capitalism" with a system of state control that ran the economy in the interests either of the big bourgeoisie, or the petty bourgeoisie; they couldn't yet envisage the rise of a state capitalism which had effectively crushed these classes and still operated on an entirely capitalist basis.

As we have seen, Lenin's reply to the Lefts, ‘Left wing Childishness', hits the group on its weak points: their confusions about the implications of Brest-Litovsk, their tendency to confound nationalisation with socialisation. But Lenin in turn fell into a profound error when he began to laud state capitalism as a necessary step forward for backward Russia, indeed as the foundation stone of socialism. Lenin had already outlined this view in a speech delivered to the executive committee of the Soviets at the end of April. Here he took issue with the best intuition of the Left Communists - the danger of an evolution towards state capitalism - and went off in entirely the wrong direction:

"When I read these references to such enemies in the newspaper of the Left Communists, I ask: what has happened to these people that fragments of book-learning can make them forget reality? Reality tells us that state capitalism would be a step forward. If in a small space of time we could achieve state capitalism in Russia, that would be a victory, How is it that they cannot see that it is the petty proprietor, small capital, that is our enemy? How can they regard state capitalism as the chief enemy? They ought not to forget that in the transition from capitalism to socialism our chief enemy is the petty bourgeoisie, its habits and customs, its economic position...

What is state capitalism under Soviet power? To achieve state capitalism at the present time means putting into effect the accounting and control that the capitalist classes carried out. We see a sample of state capitalism in Germany. We know that Germany has proved superior to us. But if you reflect even slightly on what it would mean if the foundations of such state capitalism was established in Russia, Soviet Russia, everyone who is not out of his senses and has not stuffed his head with fragments of book-learning, would have to say that state capitalism would be our salvation.

I said that state capitalism would be our salvation; if we had it in Russia, the transition to full socialism would be easy, would be within our grasp, because state capitalism is something centralised, calculated, controlled and socialised, and that is exactly what we lack; we are threatened by the element of petty bourgeois slovenliness, which more than anything else has been developed by the whole history of Russia and her economy... " (Works, 27, p293-4).

There is in this discourse a strong element of revolutionary honesty, of warning against any utopian schemes for rapidly building socialism in a Russia which has hardly dragged itself out of the Middle Ages, and which does not yet enjoy the direct assistance of the world proletariat. But there is also a serious mistake, which has been verified by the whole history of the 20th century. State capitalism is not an organic step towards socialism. In fact it represents capitalism's last form of defence against the collapse of its system and the emergence of communism. The communist revolution is the dialectical negation of state capitalism. Lenin's arguments, on the other hand, betray the vestiges of the old social democratic idea that capitalism was evolving peacefully towards socialism. Certainly Lenin rejected the idea that the transition to socialism could begin without the political destruction of the capitalist state, but what he forgets is that the new society can only emerge through a constant and conscious struggle by the proletariat to supplant the blind laws of capital and create new social relations founded on production for use. The "centralisation" of the capitalist economic structure by the state - even a Soviet state - does not do away with the laws of capital, with the domination of dead labour over living labour. This is why the Lefts were correct to say, as in Ossinski's oft-quoted remarks, that "If the proletariat itself does not know how to create the necessary prerequisites for the socialist organisation of labour, no one can do this for it and no one can compel it to do this. The stick, if raised against the workers, will find itself in the hands of a social force which is either under the influence of another social class or is in the hands of the Soviet power; but the Soviet power will then be forced to seek support against the proletariat from another class (eg the peasantry) and by this it will destroy itself as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Socialism and socialist organisation will be set up by the proletariat itself, or they will not be set up at all; something else will be set up - state capitalism" ("On the construction of socialism", Kommunist 2, April 1918). In short, living labour can only impose its interests over those of dead labour through its own efforts, through its very struggle to take direct control over both the state and the means of production and distribution. Lenin was wrong to see this as a proof of the petty bourgeois, anarchist approach of the Lefts. The Lefts unlike the anarchists, were not opposed to centralisation. Although they were in favour of the initiative of local factory committees and Soviets, they were for the centralisation of these bodies in higher economic and political councils. What they saw, however, was that there was no choice between two ways of building the new society - the way of proletarian centralisation and the way of bureaucratic centralisation. The latter could only lead in a different direction altogether, and would inevitably culminate in a confrontation between the working class and a power which, even though born out of the revolution, had increasingly estranged itself from it.

This was a general truth, applicable to all phases of the revolutionary process. But the criticisms of the Left Communists also had a more immediate relevance. As we wrote in our study of the Russian communist left in International Review no.8.

"Kommunist's defence of factory committees, Soviets and working class self-activity was important not because it provided a solution to the economic problems facing Russia, still less a formula for the ‘immediate construction of communism' in Russia; the Lefts explicitly stated that ‘socialism cannot be put into operation in one country and a backward one at that' (cited by L Schapiro, The Origins of the Communist Autocracy, 1955, p137). The imposition of labour discipline by the state, the incorporation of the proletariat's autonomous organs into the sate apparatus, were above all blows against the political domination of the Russian working class. As the ICC has often pointed out, the political power of the class is the only real guarantee of the successful outcome of the revolution. And this political power can only be exercised by the mass organs of the class - by its factory committees and assemblies, its Soviets, its militias. In undermining the authority of these organs, the policies of the Bolshevik leadership were posing a grave threat to the revolution itself. The danger signals so perceptively observed by the Left Communists in the early months of the revolution were to become even more serious during the ensuing Civil War period".

***

In the immediate aftermath of the October insurrection, when the Soviet government was being formed, Lenin had a momentary hesitation before accepting his post as chairman of the Soviet of People's Commissars. His political intuition told him that this would put a brake on is capacity to act in the vanguard of the vanguard - to be on the left of the revolutionary party, as he had been so clearly between April and October 1917. The position that Lenin adopted against the Lefts in 1918, though still firmly within the parameters of a living proletarian party, already reflected the pressures of state power on the Bolsheviks; interests of state, of the national economy, of the defence of the status quo, had already begun to conflict with the interests of the workers. In this sense there is a certain continuity between Lenin's false arguments against the Lefts in 1918, and his polemic against the international communist left after 1920, which he also accused of infantilism and anarchism. But in 1918 the world revolution was still in the ascendant, and had it extended beyond Russia, it would have been far easier to correct its early mistakes. CDW

Introduction by the ICC

The recent "candlelight demonstrations" in South Korea, against the newly elected government's decision to allow the import of beef from the United States (banned some years ago over fears of BSE), reached enormous proportions in June, with up to one million people on the streets of Seoul. Clearly, there is more to these demonstrations than a concern for public health, however real this may be. The general degradation of workers' living conditions, with full-time permanent work contracts being increasingly replaced by precarious and part-time working is a world wide phenomenon that has struck Korean workers hard. The newly installed government of Myung-bak Lee has moreover shown itself particularly arrogant and heavy-handed in launching a series of attacks on workers' livelihoods and living conditions. In addition, the Free Trade Agreement signed with the USA in 2007, by eliminating tariffs on agricultural imports from the US, is an immediate threat to the very existence of Korea's small farmers and peasants. The fact that this agreement has been signed by an openly "liberal", "pro-capitalist" government (Myung-bak Lee is an ex-CEO of Hyundai) has inevitably boosted a tendency towards anti-Americanism, which is itself merely a form of nationalism.

The article which we are publishing below has been sent to us by a comrade of the "Left Communist Group" (LCG), previously known as the "Socialist Political Alliance" which our readers will remember organised the Marxist Conference held in October 2006 in Seoul and Ulsan. We strongly welcome this article, for several reasons.

Firstly, as we have said on several occasions, the specific historical experience of the workers' struggles in Korea, added to the weight of the very real difficulties of language and the inaccessibility of texts from the workers' movement in the rest of the world not only on the working class in general, but also on those militants who are working to develop an internationalist perspective in this period of renewed class struggle. The effort by the LCG comrades to develop an internationalist perspective both on these events and on South Korea's history during the last 30 years, and above all to place these within the international context of the world wide class struggle, is thus of critical importance in our view. The fate of the class struggle, the fate of the communist revolution, will not be decided in Korea any more than in any other one country. The development of an internationalist viewpoint in this article is thus something to be strongly saluted.

Secondly, the article shows clearly the danger of the workers' action being "dissolved into street festivals or bourgeois politics" and failing to establish itself on a class basis where the independent action of the working class is able to give a clear lead to the other non-exploiting strata in society. This problem, again, is by no means unique to South Korea. And we want to emphasise our agreement with the LCG comrade when he says that "Even the June Struggles of 1987 were to be a painful historical experience of surrender through achieving direct voting, an illusion of bourgeois democracy and dropping the masses' explosive demands for struggles". Contrary to what we are often told, the struggle for bourgeois democracy does not open up opportunities for the struggle and organisation of the working class. The history of South Korea, as of other countries subjected to military dictatorship like Brazil, shows that precisely the opposite is the case. The establishment of democracy has allowed the flourishing of the bureaucratised trades unions which have since proven to be the first saboteurs of the class struggle.

Thirdly, the article is quite right to pose the question of what lay behind the illusion in June 1987 "that the way which the bourgeois politicians chose would be the very way toward political democratization". In fact the different classes involved in the struggles during the 1980s had different goals, whether or not they were wholly conscious of the fact. For the purely democratic, national opposition to the military dictatorship, the establishment of a democratic government in South Korea is indeed the limit of its - bourgeois - aspirations, however much the reality represented by Myung-bak Lee may disappoint the sweet dreams of 1987! The goal of the working class, however, is not just the destruction of a military dictatorship but of the whole "state capitalist system" - and this is something that can only be done world wide. The fact, as the article points out, that "there was no revolutionary political force which would be together with and give orientations to the struggles" was not a Korean problem but an international problem, a local expression of the fact that the proletariat world wide has been as yet unable to develop a new International - whose existence would in itself be the expression of a development of a revolutionary struggle and consciousness within the class as a whole, world wide. It is our firm conviction that developing ties and common work among internationalists today, however insignificant this may appear in its immediate results, will be critical to the proletariat's ability to create a new International in the future.

Fourthly, in terms of the immediate perspectives of the struggle, we want to highlight the following points.

We agree entirely on the need for workers not only to organise at shop floor level but also to avoid being imprisoned in factory occupations and to make as much use as possible of street demonstrations to develop class solidarity and spread the movement. We agree also with the need for the workers to raise demands that are general to the class as a whole and avoid the trap - typical of trades union manoeuvres - of allowing specific demands, factory by factory or trade by trade, to splinter the movement.

We strongly agree also with the idea that the workers should "at the candlelight meetings (...) prepare actively places to discuss with one another and argue that the pains of workers reside not only in the health or educational problems but are related also to the entire living conditions of workers". The development of discussion groups and circles is a vital need both for workers to gain confidence in themselves and their own ability to organise independently, and to gain a broader political and international vision of their own activity.

Having said all this, there are also several points of disagreement which we think need to be submitted for debate, in South Korea and more generally in the internationalist movement.

The first of these, is the idea which seems to be expressed in the article's final paragraphs that there are separate tasks for "organised" (i.e. unionised) and "unorganised" (often precarious) workers. This is not, as we have said before, by any means a purely Korean problem. We are aware that the organisation of precarious workers is a major preoccupation for comrades in Korea today. In fact, a major difficulty for the working class world wide today is precisely how to confront the divisions created by the ruling class and maintained by the unions between permanent and precarious workers? The precondition for the movement to gain in strength is for precarious and permanent workers to recognise their common interests and to struggle together, in mass meetings open to all workers. The last way to set about this is for unionised and non-unionised workers to perpetuate these divisions and organise separately, still less to try to set up separate unions for precarious workers which will do nothing more than introduce yet another division in the class struggle.

The second point we want to emphasise is the absolute incompatibility between the workers' struggles and national struggles. We have had some difficulty with the translation of the sentence according to which "Through the general demands for the defence of living conditions of the working class even pure patriotism represented by Tae-gk-gi and Ae-guk-ga, the Korean national flag and anthem, could possibly be welded together and transformed into demands of the class". It is possible that we have translated this idea misleadingly, in which case we hope that the LCG comrades will correct us. However we want to state clearly and unambiguously here that it is absolutely impossible to "weld together and transform" patriotic demands into working class demands. Nationalism - patriotism - and internationalism are polar opposites: they express the interests of society's two main antagonistic classes and only one of them can be victorious over the other.

A final point, which would take too long to develop here, is the whole question of the struggle for "autonomous and democratic unions", which was certainly an important element in the struggles of Korean workers during the 1970s and 80s. In our view, the idea that it is possible to create such unions is an illusion - natural and understandable under the conditions prevailing at the time, but an illusion nonetheless. We think that militants in Korea need to ask themselves the question how it is that 20 years of struggle for "democratic and autonomous unions" has led to the creation of nothing but the bureaucratised unions, saboteurs of the class struggle, that the workers are facing today in Korea and the world over. To do so they need to draw not only on the experience of the class in Korea, but also on the experience of workers in other countries, notably in Poland after the massive strikes of 1980. For our part, we will do our best to participate positively in this debate.

ICC, July 2008

PS: After sending the comrades of LCG our presentation we received the following reply. We hope to publish the continuation of this correspondence as soon as possible. 

Dear comrades of the ICC

We deeply appreciate your English translation of our article. Concerning your introductory remarks, especially the second point on patriotism, we think there should be more clarification and explanation about the sentence you disagree. That means the possibility of transforming the attitudes of petit-bourgeois participants in the candlelight demonstrations towards bourgeois democracy into working class-based interests.

Demonstrations are continuing more than 70 days now. Demands and slogans are extending to opposition to neo-liberal policies of Lee government and fundamental issues of capitalism itself (...) We recognized the changing attitudes of petit-bourgeois participants toward class interests during one and half month. We expect the candlelight demonstrations persist until the clash between the mass and Lee government develop more violent mass movement. After observing the ongoing process of that movement, we will discuss the evaluation of the whole process.

Warmest communist greetings, LCG

Korea, 14th June,  2008. 

The June struggle led by the working class

Let's develop it into the great July, August, September workers' struggles, following the first ones in July, August, and September in 1987!!!

Let's heat this summer with the struggles of the working class which overcome the bourgeois democratic struggles

On the street of the 4.19 struggle in 1960, of the June struggle in 1987 and of the June 2008

With thousands of people demonstrating near the entrance of the Blue House I was on the street from 11 o'clock PM on May 31st to 6 o'clock AM on June 1st. I had participated already in many demonstrations but the experience at that time made me reflect on our history of the previous 50 years. It became also a measuring point for the orientation of the necessary gigantic struggles of the Korean working class in the future. On 19th April 1960 I had marched as an 18 years old high school student with other demonstrating people to Kyungmudae, the presidential residence at that time, shouting for the destruction of the dictatorship of president Seongman Lee. I was a Marxist teaching in the university when the streets struggles of June 1987 took place. After 48 years since my first demonstration I stood as a socialist activist all night long with the masses shouting for the retreat of the present president Myungbak Lee. 

The candle light mass meeting on May 31st differed from the previous ones in some points: the organized participation not only of thousands of university students but also the workers of the public sector; the participation of the precarious workers including the E-land trade union of precarious workers; the unified slogan of the meeting, "Myungbak Lee, retreat!" after such previous slogans as USA]!" and "negotiations are void!". The persistent attempt to break through and withdraw the announcement [of the beef contract with the toward the Blue House, the presidential residence enabled the demonstrating people to have control over that area near the House for 8 hours.

Incredibly 100 days after the start of the Lee government, a real capitalist one, the demonstrating masses are shouting on the streets for "the retreat of Myungbak Lee". The more incredible is the diversity and initiative of the masses engaged in the demonstrations. But that experience gave me also a precious chance to recognize the limits of the streets struggles and of the political struggles against bourgeois political power, which has not changed for almost 50 years.      

Streets struggle and the class character of the masses

The slogans of the April 19th Struggles in 1960, of the June Struggle in 1987 and of the struggles in June 2008 are the same ones: "destroy dictatorship!" and "government, retreat!". They contain the following demands: the destruction of Lee Sungman government which manipulated elections; the change of the indirect voting system into a direct one; and the retreat of  president Lee who is responsible to sign up the beef contract without gathering and considering the public opinions. All of the demands are elementary ones considering whether the government keeps the formality and procedures of the bourgeois democracy. Of course the demand of the masses in the candlelight protest is not limited only to the bourgeois democratic procedures. Health matters, the interests of stock farming capital in the USA, and class inequality related to meat consumption are connected in a complicated manner. But it is also real, that the people remain with such viewpoints as the nationalist one focusing only on the problem of the sovereignty, the humanist one considering it as only a problem of health, and the democratic one with the emphasis on the communication problem.

The heat of candlelight may come down, if the Lee government grants the masses decisive measures to relieve life including re-negotiation of the beef contract. These are the very fundamental limits of the street struggles of the masses from various social strata. 

Further, another limit of the bourgeois democratic struggles concentrated on the streets struggles is the fact that it is not based thoroughly on the class struggle on the level of the place of production. The April 19th revolution mainly made by the student movements enabled the bourgeois political forces to rise to power. But those revolutionary forces without being led by the working class were condemned to be deprived of power by force by the generals of the May 16th coup d'état. Even the June Struggles of 1987 were to be a painful historical experience of surrender through achieving direct voting, an illusion of bourgeois democracy and dropping the masses' explosive demands for struggles. This surrender was sealed with the deceptive June 29th declaration.

The candlelight protests too, which began in May and are still heating in June, are not based on the working class struggle on the workplaces. Even though hundreds of thousands of people of the masses express their demands in various ways, it is very possible for these expressions to be dissolved into streets festivals or bourgeois politics as long as they are contained in the form of shaking the Korean flag and singing "the first act of the constitution" or the songs from the 1980' movements. For the very reason we are now at an important turning point where we should instead of turning our history backward to 20 years or even 50 years ago overcome the limits of the June Struggles in 1987 and revive the sprits of the great July, August, September working class struggles. 

Capitalist developments in Korea and working class struggles

The government of the Democratic Party following the retreated Lee Sung-man government under the influence of the April 19th struggles was to be replaced by the Park Joeng-hee military fascist regime after the May 16th coup d'état. The regime led the Korean capitalist development into a developmental dictatorship. Such a military fascism was not a phenomenon unique in Korea but one of strategies for the accumulation of capital in the third world in the process of the capitalist reorganization of the world. During 60's the accumulation of capital was made mainly in the export industries and those needing a high degree of concentration of labour force. The representative examples were textile and electronics and the other axis  consisted in developing very polluting industry such as fertilizers, chemicals and oil refineries. The strategy of the Park regime for the economic development, the so called ‘miracle of the Han river' was based on the anti-working class strategy with the bloody exploitation and suppression of the working class. The class suffered from the long working time of 12 - 16 hours and inhumane working conditions. But the number of workers was doubled from 2 million in 1960 to 4 million in 1971.

Even under the repression against of workers' movements trade unions were built in Chung-Gye Clothing, Won-Pung wool spinning, and Dong-Il wool weaving etc. They became a base for the pro-democracy workers' movements in 1970's, in which female workers played a key role.

Like the general tendency of the process of the state capitalist development the priority was changed in the Korean capitalist development from light industries to heavy industries increasing the ratio of production sectors in the industry from 43.9% in 1972 to 55.2% in 1978. Even under deadly exploitation und repression male workers in heavy industry developed strong struggles against their exploitation: the workers struggle in Han-Jin trade and the burning of KAL by 400 workers in September 1971; the struggle of 2,500 workers of Hyundae Heavy Industry in Ulsan in September 1974; the struggles of mine workers in Sabuk, of Dong-Guk Steel Works and of In-Choen Iron Works in April 1980; the strike struggle of Daewoo Motors in 1985 and the great struggle of workers in July, August and September in 1987. The number of workers strikes increased strongly from 130 in 1969 to 1656 in 1971, and then 666 in 1974. Under the influence of You-Sin regime the working class struggles of 1970's could not avoid having reformist and trade unionist limits of struggling only for the increase of wages or the improvement of working conditions.

Under conditions of the world crisis after the oil shock in the middle of 1970's the Korean economy grew more and more slowly since 1978 with the sinking capacity utilisation rates of plants and big price increases. Against such situations workers developed struggles for the improvement of working conditions, the payment of delayed wages, the construction of the democratic trade unions and the democratizing of trade unions. After the protest movement in Kwang-Ju in 1980 the number of workers' strikes was 2.168, ten times bigger than that of 1979. Even under the government of Choen Du-Whan such struggles as Taxi drivers struggle in Daegu and the successful struggle of Daewoo Apparel workers for the construction of trade unions in 1984 appeared continuously and were followed by the Gu-Ro allied strike. It was the first solidarity strike of workers in the same area and marked a new turning point in the local solidarity strike. 

Limits of the June struggle, and the great July, August and September struggles of workers in 1987

Historically no revolution has ever been successful without the class struggle - never only with the struggles of the citizens and the masses. When we speak of the year of 1987, we speak of the triumph of bourgeois democracy which had been repressed under military fascism. The slogan, "destroy military dictatorship!", for which many sacrificed their lives, did not mean just to achieve  political democracy through direct voting rights. Rather, it implied the possibility of destroying the very basis of the military dictatorship, that is, the state capitalist system which had permitted the birth of the immense [number] of working class  However, it was not aware enough that even the bourgeois democratic procedure could be accomplished only when the working class would play a key role as the subject to cut the chains of terrible exploitation and repression. The street struggles with the political reforms for bourgeois election preceded to find themselves at their highest point in the June Protest Struggle. So despite of their explosive combativity the meetings and demonstrations on the streets all over the country in June 1987 were condemned to get absorbed overnight in the scene of bourgeois elections. An illusion was dominant that the way which the bourgeois politicians chose would be the very way toward political democratization.   

Through out the history of the class struggle we know that only when the economical struggles of the working class precede political struggles then the letter can achieve their goals really. In fact the June Protest Struggle as a nationalist movement led by petit bourgeoisie was very limited from the point of view of the class. It is also true that the struggle didn't open a revolutionary way led by the working class toward the destruction of the capitalist system. But it opened a political space to the class and planted the confidence in and hope of struggles.

From July to September in 1987 there was a big wave of strikes all over the country with 40 strikes per day totalling a number of 3.327 strikes. Striking workers amounted to 1,22 million: 37% of 3.33million workers hired in small or middle-size companies with more than 10 employees and 75,5% of workers in large companies with more than 1000 employees. The number of strikes during these three months was more than twice higher than the sum of strikes during the preceding 10 years. In 55% of companies which had experienced strikes at that time trade unions were built. All over the country a  total of 1.162 trade unions were built and the popularisation of autonomous and democratic trade unions took place.

Such a great struggle of workers was an inevitable product of the capitalist development in Korea. Regarding subjects of struggles there was a characteristic change from female workers employed in the small or middle-size companies of the light industries to male workers employed in the large companies of heavy chemical industries. Their demands included the humane dealing with workers, the increase of wages, and the achievement of democratic trade unions. In these struggles workers went on ‘illegal strikes' through occupying and sitting in their workplaces without paying attention to legitimate procedures mentioned in the labour law and developed powerful street struggles. Further, workers during these struggles established the general assembly democracy in which decisions were made in participation of normal workers as members of trade unions and according to their decisions. However there was no revolutionary political force which would be together with and give orientations to the struggles. But also the gains of the June Protest Struggle were condemned to be stolen by the bourgeois political forces. So the struggle failed in rising to a higher level only to be disarmed by capital and state power. 

The present political situation and the orientation of the great struggle of the working class  

As we have seen above, the street struggles which have appeared and the demands put forward for the achievement of bourgeois democracy in the April 19th struggle in 1960, the June struggle in 1987 and in the struggle in June 2008 are very similar and have the same structure: They appeared at first as bourgeois political struggles which precede the massive struggles of the working class at workplaces. And they enabled the replacement of a bourgeois government by the other, through which the seizing power by the rising working class was to be delayed. The class was to be subjected to the bourgeoisie in the capitalist system which was developing to a higher level than the previous one. After the April 19th ended up as an uncompleted revolution because of the May 15th coup d'état, and then the June Protest Struggle in 1987 enabled the conservative political forces of the bourgeoisie to keep power over workers for more than 20 years, now we are witnessing once again unexpected street struggles of the masses.

Despite of all these similarities now in 2008 we can see the explosive potential of the class struggle in totally different objective and subjective political situations.

Firstly, the present political situation is different from that of the 40 year long history of the underdeveloped countries or the third world countries with a priority of achieving bourgeois democracy. Now it is the period just around the corner of the big crisis facing the destructive danger of the decadent capitalism. The worldwide working class including Korean workers is becoming victim of a terrible repression and exploitation, subjected to barbarism. A little bit lagging behind but with some remaining achievements of struggles for the advancement of bourgeois nationalism the Korean society had to confront head-on a government with the  capitalist, Myungbak Lee as the president. Now Korean society has separated from nationalism and radical nationalism which had diluted the class struggle between capital und labour and entered into the historical period for struggles for the survival and victory of the working class. The price increase of raw materials including oil, the explosive price rises, the weakness of the dollar, the bubble of real estates etc are symptoms of the crisis of the world capitalism.  The privatization of the public sectors, the rationalization of structures, the polarisation between classes represent the last, desperate attempts of capital to retrieve the fall of profit rate. From this point of view the present political situation concerning the beef import problem is not a simple agenda. But it is a complicated political situation, in which the general crisis of capitalism influences in a determining manner all spheres of the life of workers.

Secondly, in fact the masses participating in the candlelight meetings can be regarded neither as a clearly defined proletarian subject nor as a petit bourgeois one. The students of middle school and high school or university students are future workers produced by Korean capitalism. The petit bourgeoisie of the self-employed which are discontent with the president Myungbak Lee in a wide sense can be included in the reserve troops of the unemployed. It is highly possible for the demands of the masses of the candlelight meetings to be combined with the demands for survival of the working class. Their street struggles have already pushed the Lee government into the corner and been achieving some concessions. Through the general demands for the defence of living conditions of the working class even pure patriotism represented by Tae-gk-gi and Ae-guk-ga, the Korean national flag and anthem , could possibly be welded together and transformed into demands of the class.

What is then in this political situation to be done by the working class and socialists?

First, all of the organized workers must not only organize from shop floor level at their workplaces up to the struggle of a general strike against capital and all measures of the state which devastate workers' life but they must also make the general strike successful which is already planned by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions and other trade unions. With the occupation of the workplaces the general strike struggle must paralyse the capitalist production and circulation as well as make itself wide spread amongst the unorganized workers and develop through powerful street struggles into an offensive mass struggle.                     

Second, all of the unorganized workers, unemployed workers, precarious workers and future workers including students must with the demands of the class at workplaces actively take part in the candlelight meetings. And at the candlelight meetings they must prepare actively places to discuss with one another and argue that the pains of workers reside not only in the health or educational problems but are related also to the entire living conditions of workers. Together with the organized workers struggling on the streets after the general strike they must raise the demands of the class at workplaces up to the demands of the whole class.

Third, in order that a general strike and the working class and struggles of the masses can be realized powerfully from root basis up, all socialists must devote themselves fully in propagating and agitating contradictions of capitalism and socialist perspectives and alternatives for the overcoming of the capitalist system. Reminding themselves of the historical lessons which we drew from the problems caused by the absence of political centre for leading the class struggle, they also should not neglect to get prepared to build a minimum leading centre  for struggles.

We must do our best to make the struggles of this summer 2008 be such an example to the worldwide working class as the 68' revolution in France or the "hot summer" of 1969 in Italy. Let's criticize in front of the masses the limits of the bourgeoisie trying to make the summer struggle in 2008 turn back to the June struggle in 1987 thoroughly. Let's declare proudly to the working class in the world that confronting and struggling against capitalism and capitalist governments is a duty of the working class for the opening of the new world of the emancipated labour.                 

OSC

"Through press and parliament, television and trade union apparatus, all factions of the bourgeoisie are screaming with one voice: the lorry drivers, sewerage workers, ‘public sector' employees, Leyland car workers, dockers and dustmen are endangering the health of the ailing British economy with their strikes and militant actions...Just like the lorry drivers in Belgium and Holland, oil workers in Iran, steelworkers in Germany, miners in America and China, or the unemployed steelworkers in the North of France, the workers in Britain are an­swering the onslaught of capitalism world-wide crisis by refusing to bow before the ‘national interest', and are instead putting their own class interests first".

This sound very familiar: the resurgence of the international struggle of the working class - see our article One class, one struggle [53] for a summary of the recent development of international struggles - along with the government calling on workers to accept sacrifices in their pay and conditions for the good of the economy. Clearly today is not the same as 30 years ago: then the economic crisis had only been developing for 10 years; now it has been ravaging capitalist society for 40 years and the working class has another 30 years of experience. However, just as the lorry drivers then refused to accept the government's call to prostrate themselves on the alter of the national economy today the Shell workers have struggled against similar calls.

As the article shows the 1978 strike was characterised by its wildcat beginnings and widespread solidarity. The Shell delivery drivers' strike did not start as a wildcat, but it has been characterised by expressions of solidarity from drivers in other companies, including what would appear a fairly widespread response by drivers in several delivery firms in Scotland faced with the disciplining of 11 drivers who refused to cross picket lines.

On Monday 16th June the BBC Website reported that: "Tanker drivers from different companies have ended their protest outside the Grangemouth fuel depot on the final day of a four-day walkout by Shell drivers.

The action came after 11 drivers employed by Scottish Fuels were reportedly suspended for refusing to cross the picket line". No more details were given but it is clear that the potential for an escalation of the strike influenced the unions' and bosses' decision to put an early end to the struggle.

Today the media and politicians hold up the Winter of Discontent as a threat to the workers: 'your strikes in the 70's led to Thatcher's savage attacks'. But for the working class we have to take inspiration from these struggles and the workers' refusal to accept the capitalist logic that they should bear the brunt of the crisis. As the last 30 years have clearly demonstrated at the cost of millions of jobs and deteriorating living and working conditions, if we accept sacrifices today the capitalist state will be back demanding even more tomorrow. We have no choice but to struggle to defend our living and working conditions

Phil (July 2008)

THE LORRY DRIVERS' STRIKE

Through press and parliament, television and trade union apparatus, all factions of the bourgeoisie are screaming with one voice: the lorry drivers, sewerage workers, ‘public sector' employees, Leyland car workers, dockers and dustmen are endangering the health of the ailing British economy with their strikes and militant actions.

It's true!

Just like the lorry drivers in Belgium and Holland, oil workers in Iran, steelworkers in Germany, miners in America and China, or the unemployed steelworkers in the North of France, the workers in Britain are an­swering the onslaught of capitalism1s world-wide crisis by refusing to bow before the ‘national interest', and are instead putting their own class interests first.

We salute these 'wreckers' of the capitalist system!

The crisis is not of our making and it won't go away if we stop struggling. It's not the working class which stands to benefit from the division of the world into arbitrary nation states, which viciously compete for an ever-shrinking slice of the world market: a competition which inevitably leads to even greater recession, depression and finally world war, like those wars of 1914 and 1939. The increasing rivalry between capitalist nation states and the misery it brings to the sick and elderly, to the vast majority of society, can only take place at the expense of the proletariat. It's workers' wages and living standards which are depressed in order that countries can make their commodities cheaper and their war machines more effective. So when workers refuse to accept austerity and instead strike for their own demands, when they weaken the ability of nation states to wage competition and war, they offer a way out of the barbarism into which the ruling class has plunged humanity over the past six decades.

Through our struggles we learn that workers, in fact, collectively produce the world's wealth and objectively control its produc­tion and distribution. The strike by 35,000 lorry drivers demonstrated the power we have to bring the capitalist state to its knees and the potential power and ability we have to replace this rotten system with our own re-organisation of the world to the benefit of all. But through our struggles, we also learn that this will be a long and arduous process, fraught with many traps and pitfalls. The lorry drivers' strike demonstrated this as well.

TGWU vs THE LORRY DRIVERS

We can see exactly who our enemies are when the Tories and the CBI bay for our blood, when the army breaks our strikes (as it did the firemens1 and the tanker drivers in Northern Ireland). But the Labour Government didn't call a State of Emergency when faced by the defiant lorry drivers. Is this because it is a workers' government? No! Callaghan said it quite openly: why call in the army and make us fight even harder when the trade unions could break the strike more effectively? When the trade unions can ensure--against the wishes of the workers--that the state continues to get its essential supplies; when the trade unions limit our effective picketing, apologise for our strikes, stop them spreading, and falsify our demands.

The lorry drivers didn't wait for official union 'permission' to defend their living standards when faced with what was in effect a wage-cutting offer from the bosses, but swept out on unofficial strike which, through their militancy and class solidarity, quickly spread throughout the entire country. Their determination to use their class strength was reflected in the militant use of mass, flying pickets which ensured that the strike was effective, and in their calls to other sectors of the class such as the dockers to support the struggle. The pickets spread not merely to lorry-haulage firms, but to ports, factories were supplies were normally delivered and even, in some cases, to entire towns, which were ringed by determined workers. Yet while many strikers recognised the need to organise their own actions, free from the dictates of the union bosses, and oblivious to the hysterical reaction from the state's press, they didn't recognise that this apparatus extended directly into their ranks via the shop stewards-vital cogs in the state machine.

At first the union bureaucrats ignored the strike, hoping it would soon peter out with­out strike pay, and left it to the shop stewards to keep a tight reign on things. And sure enough, everywhere the pickets went there was a shop steward insisting that he should control the strike, that the workers' action had no effectiveness unless it was kept within the trade union cage. So the first thing that went by the board was the drivers' ability to control their strike, to ignore the divisions between 'private' drivers, state drivers, 'hire and reward' drivers, and between drivers and other sectors of the working class. The second thing that went out the window was the demand for less working hours. "Not realistic" said the stewards, reminding drivers to keep within the bounds of what the state considered permissible, to consider the state's needs and not their own. But this was just the start.

When it became clear to the bourgeoisie that merely limiting, containing and controlling the strike was not enough-that it had to be sabotaged and ended-the stewards called for the strike to be made official. That is, they demanded the help of the rest of the state to crush the strike, despite the fact that many drivers recognised they were better off 'on their own', and opposed this move. Transport and General Workers Union boss,

Moss Evans, laid it on the line when he said the strike was being made official in order to control, and then end it, as quickly as possible. So that the state should function smoothly, so that the strike should be in­effective, the stewards and full-time officials worked hand-in-glove. They devised and imposed 'rules1 about who should picket and where. Along with the rest of the state, they said workers should only picket firms "directly involved11 and thus helped invent the concept of "secondary pickets11 which were outside the law. Who ever heard about 'secondary1 pickets before this strike? But along with the rest of the bourgeoisie, the unions went along with--and were at the head of-this attempt to control one of the workers1 most effective weapons.

Then the stewards and officials joined hands with the government directly, in the so-called Emergency Committees, to draw up a list of supplies and goods that could by-pass the pickets and prevent the country grinding to a halt. From No.10 Downing Street, to the local stewards, a direct link was forged with the sole aim of rendering the strike useless and defending the national interest. To add insult to injury, lorry drivers were invited to participate in the 'enforcement1 of these supply codes-the destruction of their own strike--in the name of workers' democracy and participation in the struggle, demands so beloved by the Trotskyists and other Left apologists of capital. Again many drivers fought against these attacks, tearing-up union-signed 'dispensations', and refusing to let the goods go through. Finally, the stewards broke the unity of the strike by negotiating with each local region separately, setting drivers who had 'won' a settlement against those who hadn't, and sowing immense confusion about the aims and future of the strike.

THE NEED FOR WORKERS' AUTONOMY

The lessons are clear. The unions and Labour Government worked together--just as they did to impose the social contract--in order to defuse and defeat the strike as quickly as possible. It was the drivers' militancy and class initiative that forced the Govern­ment to give ground on the wage claim- driving another nail in the coffin of the 5%-while the unions worked against the strike right from the start. That's why the Labour Party won't heed Margaret Thatcher's stupid calls to curb the power of the unions. For Labour knows that strong unions are essential for controlling the working class.

The mass, permanent organs of struggle (the unions) that workers fought to build last century when capital could afford to give real reforms have in this period of crisis become fetters, barriers to the advancement of workers. As the crisis becomes deeper, the unions have even less chance to hide the fact. In the 1974 miners' strike, stew­ards could put themselves forward as the most militant workers, the highest flying pickets, in order to gain control over the angry workers and to lead them back to the promised land of a Labour Government, and the austerity of the social contract. But today, Labour is already in power and has once again demonstrated its anti-working class nature. With the economy even worse off, stewards must act even more to halt our struggles; they can afford to show us even less of the leash.

The unions divide the class and ensure that our anger is spent, not fighting collectively, but by allowing the Ford workers, the Vauxhall workers, the bakery workers, health service workers, steelmen and miners to take on the state one-by-one. This is a recipe for defeat and demoralisation. Meanwhile, the whole bourgeoisie, from right to left, screams at us that unions are our organisa­tions-that steward-controlled committees which function to save the national capital are in fact workers' Soviets. These are lies!

Workers Soviets or councils, regrouping workers irrespective of trade or pay, private or public sector, cannot grow out of organs of the bourgeois state, like the trade unions. They are the form which workers will use to clarify how best to struggle against the state, and they are the means--the real power in the land-to enforce this struggle.

Such organs will only grow out of struggles which are controlled and spread by workers themselves, with elected and revocable delegates responsible to the mass of workers, not to the unions and the state. The lorry drivers' strike shows not just the possibi­lity of such autonomous struggles, but the real pressing need for them.

KT (Winter 1978)

Once again, the Caucasus is ablaze. At the very moment that Bush and Putin were sampling little cakes in Beijing and standing side by side at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, that supposed symbol of peace and reconciliation between peoples, the Georgian president Saakashvili, the protégé of the White House, and the Russian bourgeoisie were sending their troops to carry out terrible massacres against the population in Georgia/South Ossetia. This war has seen a new round of ‘ethnic cleansing' on both sides and it is difficult to estimate the number of victims, but it seems to be in the thousands and a large part of them are civilians.

A new demonstration of the barbarism of capitalist war

Each camp accuses the other of being the warmonger or claims that it was forced to act because its back was against the wall. The local population, whether of Russian, Ossetian, Abkhazian or Georgian origin, whose towns and villages have been bombed, burned, pillaged and destroyed has become the hostage of all the bourgeois nationalist factions; all of them face the same massacres and atrocities. The workers cannot choose between their exploiters. They need to carry on fighting for their own class interests and reject all nationalist and warmongering slogans, whether it's "defend our Russian brothers in the Caucasus" or "defend the people who have confidence in Russian aid" or "God save the territorial integrity of Georgia"...all these slogans only serve the interests of one capitalist gang or the other, who are all looking for cannon-fodder.

A new demonstration of the barbarism of capitalist war

Responding to a series of provocations by the Russian bourgeoisie and its separatist factions in Ossetia, the Georgian president Saakashvili thought he could act with impunity by mounting a brutal invasion of the tiny province of South Ossetia on the night of 7-8th August, sending in Georgian troops supported by aircraft and destroying the town of Tskhinvali, the 'capital' of the pro-Russian separatist province.

While Russia sent in the militias it controls in the other focus of separatism in Georgia, Abkhazia, taking over the Kodori gorge, Russian forces replied directly and ferociously by intensively bombing several Georgian towns (including the port of Poti and its naval base on the Black Sea which was reduced to ruins, and above all Gori, the majority of whose inhabitants had to flee following massive air-raids). Russian tanks quickly occupied a third of Georgian territory, even threatening the capital as Russian armoured vehicles advanced to within a few dozen kilometres of Tbilisi. Several days after a cease-fire was signed there has been no sign of Russian troops pulling back. There were scenes of horror and murder on both sides. Practically the whole population of Tskhinvali and its surrounding area (30,000 refugees) were forced to flee the combat zone. Throughout the country, the number of terrified refugees, deprived of everything, rose to 115,000 (the majority of them from Gori) according to the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees.

This conflict has been brewing for a long time. South Ossetia and Abkhazia, regions infested by smugglers and traffickers of all kinds, are self-proclaimed pro-Russian republics in which Russia has exerted permanent control. For nearly 20 years, since Georgia's declaration of independence, they have been the theatre of all sorts of pressure, conflicts and killings. The use of Russian minorities in Georgia to justify an aggressive imperialist policy is reminiscent of the policies of Germany, not only in the period of Nazism (the episode of the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia) but throughout the 20th century. As a specialist in Le Monde put it on 10th August, "South Ossetia is neither a country nor a regime. It is a mixed company formed by Russian generals and Ossetian bandits to make money out of the conflict with Georgia".

Resorting to extreme nationalism and military adventurism has always been a favourite way for the bourgeoisie to regulate internal problems. Although the Georgian president was triumphantly elected by 95% of the population in the wake of the "Rose Revolution" in the autumn of 2003 against the old "Soviet" leader Shevardnadze, he had problems getting re-elected at the beginning of 2008 despite the active support of the USA, having been discredited by his record of fraud and his autocratic way of ruling. This unconditional partisan of Washington took over a state which from its creation in 1991 had been a bridgehead for the USA's New World Order under Bush Senior. This probably led him to overestimate the support he could count on from the western powers in this latest adventure, especially the USA. For its part, Putin's Russia laid a trap into which Saakashvili fell head first, providing Moscow with an opportunity to flex its muscles and restore its authority in the Caucasus (which has been a real thorn in Russian's side for a long time); but this was essentially in response to the encirclement of Russia by NATO forces, which has been a reality since 1991. This encirclement reached an unacceptable level for Russia with the recent requests of Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO. And above all, Russia cannot tolerate the anti-missile shield due to be installed in Poland and the Czech Republic. Not without reason, Moscow sees these installations as being aimed not at Iran but at itself. Russia has taken advantage of the fact that the White House, whose military forces are bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, has its hands tied at the moment, and has launched this counter-offensive in the Caucasus, not that long after re-establishing - at considerable cost - its authority in the atrocious, murderous wars in Chechnya.

But the responsibility for this war doesn't only lie with the most direct protagonists. All the imperialist powers who are today shedding hypocritical tears about the fate of Georgia have blood on their hands, whether it's the USA in its two wars in the Gulf, or France with the role it played in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, or Germany which triggered the terrible war in the Balkans in 1992.

The masks are falling! It's clear that the end of the Cold War and of the old blocs has not brought any sign of an ‘era of peace and stability' in the world, whether we are looking at Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans or the Caucasus. The dismantling of the old Stalinist empire has only resulted in unleashing new imperialist appetites and a growing military chaos. Georgia has been a major strategic prize which has led many forces to court it over the last few years. Formerly a mere transit corridor for Russian oil from the Volga and the Urals in the Stalinist period, the Black Sea after 1989 became the royal road for exploiting the wealth of the Caspian sea. In the middle of this zone, Georgia has become a major crossroads for Caspian Sea oil and gas from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan; since 2005, it has been traversed by 1,800 km of the BTC oil pipeline built under the direct patronage of the Americans and linking the Azeri port of Baku to the Turkish terminal at Ceyhan, passing through Tbilisi. This pipeline has by-passed Russia in transporting oil from the Caspian. For Moscow, there is the imminent threat of seeing Central Asia, which concentrates 5% of world reserves of oil and gas, emerge as an alternative to Russia in supplying Europe with gas. All the more so because the European Union is dreaming of building a 330 km gas pipeline, baptised Nabucco, parallel to the BTC oil pipeline and directly linking the gas fields of Iran and Azerbaijan to Europe via Turkey. Meanwhile Russia, whose new president Medvedev is a former boss of Gazprom, is planning to respond by setting up a gigantic rival project which will reach Europe via the Black Sea, at an estimated cost of 20 billion dollars.

Towards a new cold war?

The two former bloc leaders, Russia and the USA, are once again facing each other off, but in a context of inter-imperialist relations very different from the period of the Cold War when the discipline of the blocs could be relied on. At the time, we were always being told that the conflict between these two blocs was above all the expression of an ideological struggle: the struggle of the forces of freedom and democracy against totalitarianism, identified with communism. Today, we can see how much those who promised ‘a new era of peace and stability' were trying to fool us, and it is clearer than ever that the confrontation between these powers is no more than a bestial struggle for sordid imperialist interests.   

Today, relations between nations are dominated by ‘every man for himself'. The ‘cease-fire' in Georgia has simply codified the victory of the Kremlin's masters and Russia's military superiority. It means a humiliating semi-capitulation by Georgia, whose territorial integrity is no longer certain, to the conditions dictated by Moscow.  The parody of a ‘peace-keeping force' in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, exclusively made up of Russian troops, amounts to an official recognition of the permanent implantation of Russian occupying forces in Georgian territory. Russia has taken advantage of its military advantage to re-install itself in Georgia to the great chagrin of the ‘international community'.

This is a new and shattering reversal for Georgia's patron, the American bourgeoisie. Although Georgia has paid a heavy tribute for its allegiance to the US (a 2,000 strong contingent sent to Iraq and Afghanistan), Uncle Sam has in return given it no more than moral support and verbal condemnations of Russia, without lifting a finger to defend it. The most significant aspect of this weakening is that the White House has no plan to offer as an alternative to this ‘ceasefire' and has had no choice but to swallow the European ‘peace plan': worse still, this is a plan whose conditions have been dictated by Russia itself. Even more humiliating is that Condoleezza Rice had to go to Georgia to get the Georgian president to sign it. This speaks volumes about America's impotence and the decline of the world's leading power. This new proof of its decline can only further discredit it in the eyes of the world and is a real worry to states that are counting on its support like Poland and Ukraine.    

While the USA displays its powerlessness, Europe is showing how far ‘every man for himself' has gone. Faced with the paralysis of the Americans, ‘European diplomacy' went into action. But it is significant that it was the French president Sarkozy who was the mouthpiece for this as the acting president of the European Union, although most of the time he speaks only for himself, devoid of any coherence and a champion of short-term navigation on the international scene. Once again, Sarkozy has rushed in to have his say in the conflict in order to get some reflected glory. But the famous ‘French peace plan' (he wasn't able to keep up the illusion that this was a big national or European diplomatic success) is just a ridiculous simulacrum which hardly hides the fact that its conditions have simply been imposed by Russia.

Europe can draw little profit from this situation because its positions and interests are so diametrically opposed. How could there be an ounce of unity in its ranks, with Poland and the Baltic states, viscerally anti-Russian, being fervent defenders of Georgia, while Germany, opposed to US efforts to control the region, is one of the most resolute opponents of Georgia and Ukraine joining NATO? Although Angela Merkel has made a spectacular volte-face in assuring the Georgian president of its support, it's because she was forced to do this because of the growing unpopularity of Russia, acting in Georgia as though it was conquered territory. The point remains that Europe looks like a free-for-all with France trying to be the Lone Ranger, at the same time trying to square the circle by offering its good services to Putin, and with Britain quickly rallying to the defence of Georgia in order to oppose its main rival Germany.

As for the benefits drawn by Russia itself, they remain very limited. Certainly it is strengthening its imperialist position in the short term, not only in the Caucasus but on the world scene. The Russian fleet is master of the region's seas and threatens all other shipping. But although it is tightening up its immediate position in the Caucasus, this military victory won't be enough to dissuade the USA from setting up its anti-missile shield on European soil: on the contrary, it is pushing the White House to accelerate the project, as can be seen by the accord recently signed with Poland to install the shield on Polish soil. In revenge the joint chief of the Russian military command has threatened Poland, saying it would be the first target of a nuclear attack.

Russian imperialism is less interested in the independence or annexation of South Ossetia or Abkhazia than in finding itself in a position of strength for the negotiations about the future of Georgia. But at root, its war-like aggressiveness and the huge military means it has set in motion in Georgia are reviving the old fears of its imperialist rivals and it is diplomatically more isolated than ever.

No power can hope to be able to control the situation and the shifting and changing alliances we are now seeing are the expression of a dangerous destabilisation of imperialist relations.

There can be no peace in capitalism

What's not in doubt is the fact all the powers, large and small, are trying to play a role in the diplomatic game in a region of the world which concentrates major geo-strategic interests. All the powers are responsible for this situation. With the oil and gas of the Caspian and the existence of a number of Turkish-speaking countries in Central Asia, the vital interests of Turkey and Iran are also involved in this region, but in fact the whole world is implicated. It's all the easier to use people as cannon fodder in the Caucasus because this region is a multi-ethnic mosaic: for example, the Ossetians have an Iranian origin... It's easy for this or that power to stoke up the fires of nationalism when things are so fragmented. Russia's past as an oppressive power also weighs heavily in the balance. All this prefigures more serious and more widespread imperialist tensions in the future: we have seen the disquiet of the Baltic states and especially Ukraine, which with its nuclear arsenal is a military power of a very different stature than Georgia.

This war increases the risk of destabilising the region but has inevitable consequences on the global balance of imperialist forces. The ‘peace plan' is just sand in the eyes and contains all the ingredients of a new military escalation in the future, threatening to set light to a whole series of powder-kegs from the Caucasus to the Middle East.

We are seeing a growing number of inflammable situations in a number of areas of the planet: Caucasus, Kurdistan, Pakistan, Middle East, etc. Not only have the imperialist powers once again shown their inability to solve the problems behind these situations - their actions only serve to make the conflicts even more explosive. This demonstrates once again that capitalism has nothing to offer except military barbarism and massacres which make hostages of a growing part of the world's population. The sinister dance now going on in Georgia is only one part of the monstrous witches' Sabbath that capitalism is inflicting on the world.

It's not by demanding more democracy, more respect for human rights, or even getting the imperialist bandits to stick to their international agreements, that this situation can be brought to an end. The only way to end war is to end capitalism. And this can only come about through the struggle of the working class. The only allies of the workers are other workers, across all frontiers and nationalist fronts. The only way for the workers of the world to show their solidarity towards their class brothers and sisters, whether they are Russian, Georgian, Ossetian or Abkhazian, or towards the victims of all the wars which infest the planet, is to unite their forces and develop their struggles towards the overthrow of this system. Against the murderous nationalism of the bourgeoisie, their only rallying cry can be the Communist Manifesto's "Workers have no county! Workers of the world, unite!"

ICC, 17/08/08.

• Denunciation of the entirely capitalist and imperialist aims of the various national government and of their rapacious nature, especially the big powers
• No support to either of the camps in this capitalist and imperialist war
• Calling on the workers of all belligerent countries to show their class solidarity across frontiers and to wage a struggle against their respective exploiters

This is why we give our full support to the essential parts of this statement.

We want however to say that the slogans addressed to the soldiers at the end of document (disobeying officers' orders, turning their guns against them, etc), while perfectly correct from a historical point of view (they were put in practice in the Russian revolution of 1917 and the German revolution of 1918) cannot be an immediate possibility, since there does not exist, either in the region or on the international scale, sufficient force or maturity in the struggle of the working class. In the present context, an attitude of this type by the soldiers would expose them to the worst kind of repression without being able to count on the solidarity of their class brothers.

This said, we salute the comrades of the KRAS for their intransigent defence of internationalism and the political courage they have shown for some years in particularly difficult conditions, with regard both to police repression and the weight of the mystifications, especially nationalist ones, which continue to weigh on the consciousness of the workers of Russia, a result of the Stalinist counter-revolution which reigned there for decades. We have made a few minor corrections to the English of the original version as published on www.libcom.org [59]

NO TO THE NEW CAUCASIAN WAR!

The eruption of military actions between Georgia and South Ossetia threatens to develop into a large-scale war between Georgia supported by NATO on the one hand, and the Russian state on the other. Thousands of people have already been killed and wounded - principally, peaceful inhabitants; whole cities and settlements have been wiped out. Society has been flooded with muddy streams of a nationalist and chauvinist hysteria.

As always and everywhere in conflicts between states, there is not and cannot be a righteous side in this new Caucasian war - there are only the guilty. The embers which have been fanned for years now have caused a military fire. The Saakashvili regime in Georgia keeps two thirds of the population in poverty, and the greater internal discontent in the country this causes, the more it desires to find a way out from the deadlock in the form of a ‘small victorious war' in the hope that it can write everything off. The government of Russia is full of determination to keep its hegemony in the Caucasus. Today they pretend to be the defender of the weak, but their hypocrisy is abundantly clear: in fact, Saakashvili only repeats what the Putinist soldiery did in Chechnya 9 years ago. Ruling circles of both Ossetias and Abkhazia aspire to strengthen their role as exclusive allies of Russia in the region, and at the same time to rally the impoverished population around the tested torches of the ‘national idea' and ‘saving the people'. Leaders of the USA, the European states and NATO, on the other hand, wish to weaken the influence of their Russian rivals in the Caucasus as much as possible to ensure control over fuel resources and their transportation. Thus, we became witnesses and victims of the next coil of the world struggle for power, oil and gas.

This fight does not bring to working people - Georgians, Ossetians, Abkhasians or Russians - anything, except for blood and tears, incalculable disasters and deprivation. We express our deep sympathy to the friends and relatives of the victims, to the people who have been left without a roof over their head and without any means of subsistence as a result of this war.

We shouldn't fall under the influence of nationalist demagogy which demands unity with ‘our' government, flying the flag of ‘defending the homeland'. The main enemy of the ordinary people is not their impoverished brothers and sisters on the other side of the border or of other nationalities. Their enemies are the rulers and bosses of all kinds, presidents and ministers, businessmen and generals, those who generate wars for the sake of multiplying power and riches. We call on the working people in Russia, the Ossetias, Abkhazia and Georgia to reject the bait of nationalism and patriotism and to turn the anger on rulers and the rich on both sides of the border.

Russian, Georgian, Ossetian and Abkhazian soldiers! Do not obey the orders of your commanders! Turn your weapons against those who sent you to war! Do not shoot the soldiers of your ‘opponents' - fraternise with them: a bayonet in the ground!

Working people in the rear! Sabotage military efforts, leave to go to meetings and demonstrations against the war, organise yourselves and strike against it!

No to the war and to its organizers - rulers and rich men! Yes to solidarity of working people across borders and the front lines!

Federation of Education, Science and Technical Workers, CRAS-IWA

(August 2008)

Disappointend hope

In the first part of our article on May 68 in Germany [61] we showed that behind the movement we could see a broader movement of a new generation for an alternative to capitalism. The rejection of the war in Vietnam, the refusal to submit without any resistance to the needs of capital, the rising hope for a new society- all these were important factors which motivated a lot of young people, students and workers, to articulate their protest. But as strong as the hope for a new society had been, the disappointment and perplexity when this first wave of protest receded in the summer of 1968 were no less strong.

Whereas in France the mass strike of the workers had given rise to a feeling of solidarity, of cohesion amongst workers and students in their struggle against the government, the workers in Germany had not yet appeared massively on stage in spring 1968. Following a wave of protests against the assassination attempt on the famous student leader Rudi Dutschke in April, and after the demonstrations against the adoption of the emergency law in summer 1968, the student-dominated movement ebbed away. Unlike France, the students in Germany were not immediately replaced as the spearhead of the struggles by the working class. Only after the September strikes in 1969 did the working class in Germany enter onto the stage on a more massive scale.

Hundreds of thousands of young people looked for a point of reference, an orientation and a lever for overcoming this society. It was a tragedy of history that this young generation, amongst whom many had started to see themselves as opponents of the capitalist systems, was recuperated and their initial movement of protests rendered harmless.  We want to try to explain why this happened.

The working class had resurfaced but the class struggle was not yet a ‘welding force'

Even though the working class in France had staged the biggest strike in history in May 1968, this first massive reaction of the working class was not yet able to brush aside all the doubts about the working class which had prevailed for years.

Possibly even more than Paris for France, Berlin was the centre of the students protests in Germany. Not the city of Berlin as it is today, the capital of Germany, but the enclave of West Berlin in the middle of East Germany. Many protagonists of the time were driven by vague ideas such as establishing some sort of council republic in West Berlin which would be a step towards transforming both East as well as West Germany.

But how unrealistic this idea was can be seen by looking at the special situation of the enclave in the cold war of the time, since it was in a certain sense a microcosm of the difficulties facing the resurgence of the class struggle. On the one hand West Berlin was a central stage for the leftists. Being a resident of West Berlin meant that you were exempted from military conscription. On the other hand the ‘west sectors' of Berlin had always been centres of anti-communism, which still drew on the romance of the Berlin air-lift. Above all, nowhere else in the ‘western world' was the inhumane face of Stalinism so well known through people's own experience. In such an atmosphere the use of words such as ‘socialism' and ‘communism' coming from the mouth of a student provoked a deep suspicion especially among older workers. Unlike in France, in West Berlin the students were met not so much with sympathy or indifference but with hostility. As a result, the first wave of protestors felt profoundly insecure.

Therefore it is understandable that many of them started to look for alternative revolutionary forces - outside of Germany, even outside of the industrial countries. This reaction was in no way specific to Germany but it developed a specific form in Germany.

1968/69 was also the peak of the protest movement against the war in Vietnam, involving hundreds of thousands of young people around the world. Forms of "anti-imperialist" nationalism, such "Black Power" in the USA, were mistakenly presented as a part of international solidarity and even as "revolutionary class struggle". This helps us to understand the paradox that a movement which initially was directed against Stalinism partially turned again towards Stalinism. Because the first appearance of the working class had not yet pulled so many people into its orbit, many young people became receptive towards ideas which were a real perversion of their original motivations. The influence of leftist organisations would have a disastrous and destructive effect, with a high number of the victims of these organisations coming from the younger generation.

The disastrous role of the left and leftists

For the leaders of the movement of 1967-68 some sort of revolution seemed to be around the corner. But when the expected quick transformation failed to happen, they had to admit that their forces had been too weak to bring this about. The idea occurred to them to found ‘the' revolutionary party - almost as a sort of panacea. As such the idea was not wrong. Revolutionaries have to join forces and to organise in order to have a maximum impact. The problem was that they were cut off from the historical experience of the working class due to the social democratic, Stalinist and fascist counter-revolution which had lasted for decades. They knew neither what a proletarian party was nor how and when it should be founded. Instead they saw the party as a kind of church, a missionary movement, which would 'convert' bourgeoisified workers to socialism. Moreover the strong weight of the petty bourgeoisie had a considerable impact on the students. Rather like Mao in China during the Cultural Revolution - they thought - they wanted to ‘purge' the workers of their ‘embourgeoisement'. Rudi Dutschke and other leaders of the time described how at the beginning of the movement revolutionary students and young workers met and established contact in the youth centres of West Berlin, and how the young workers afterwards refused to take part in this sectarian turn, alien to this world.

This disorientation of the new generation was also exploited by the leftist groups, which were commonly called ‘K-groups' (Kommunist groups) that were spreading at the time. The large and varied number of leftist groups on the rise in Germany - there were dozens of organisations, from Trotskyists and Maoists to ‘spontaneists' - acted like a gigantic catch-all for the political sterilisation of the younger generation.

Even though in Germany after 1968 more than half a dozen Trotskyists groups cropped up, these groups attracted fewer people in Germany than in France, mainly because the working class in Germany had hardly made its reappearance. Trotskyism is not less bourgeois than Maoism. But since it originated in a proletarian opposition to Stalinism, the working class is more in its focus than with the Maoists, which displays a certain peasant romanticism.

In Germany it was above all the Maoist groups that flourished. At the end of 1968/69 the KPD/Marxist-Leninist Party was founded; in West Berlin, in 1971 another KPD was founded as a rival to that party. In 1971 as well the Communist League (KB) was founded in northern Germany; in 1973 the KBW (Communist League, West Germany) was set up in Bremen. These groups succeeded in attracting several tens of thousands of young people. The Maoist groups reflected a phenomenon which had taken a special form in Germany. Because in Germany many young people reproached the older generation for being responsible for the crimes of Nazism and in general for World War II, Maoism could benefit from this guilt complex. Moreover, Maoism acted as an organiser and fervent propagator of the ‘peoples' wars'. Maoism claimed to be the defender of the oppressed peasants of the Third World and wanted to mobilise them in wars of ‘national liberation' against the USA. Since peasants were considered to be the main revolutionary force in society, Maoism acted as an agent recruiting cannon fodder for war.

However, the fact that contempt for their own fathers drew them into an idealisation of the new leaders (Mao, Uncle Ho, Che, Enver Hoxha) did not disturb the supporters of Maoist groups very much, because this corresponded to the need of a part of that generation to "look up to someone", to search for a "model", even a "father figure" in order to replace the rejected older generation. Maoism had given birth to such monstrosities as the Cultural Revolution - in the mid 1960s in China, millions of workers and people who were considered to belong to the "intelligentsia" or who had some sort of higher qualification were sent to the countryside in order to learn from the peasants. All this meant a terrible humiliation and debasement. Maoism also distinguished itself by a particularly repulsive rejection of any kind of theoretical approach. Its distinguishing feature was the cult of leaders and the parroting of slogans with a Mao-bible in hand.

Moreover, the Maoists revived the "Proletcult" (iconisation of the blue collar worker) as propagated by Stalinism in the 1920s. The slogan was to go and work in factories in order to learn from the workers and to set up a vanguard organisation. This was other side of the coin of reproaching the working class for being "embourgeoisified".

Whereas beforehand many young people had started to deal with history and theoretical questions, now the K-groups did all they could with the help of "schools of Marxism" to destroy the thirst for theoretical deepening by perverting the relationship between theory and practice. The dogmatism of the leftists would have disastrous consequences.

On the one hand the K-groups drove their members into frenzied activism and on the other hand they indoctrinated them with so-called courses on Marxist theory. Thus after 1968 tends of thousands of youth saw their initial opposition to the system being distorted and recruited for activities which in reality contributed to maintaining capitalism. It was hard to resist this sectarian pressure. Finally, many young people were driven away from politics altogether and felt nauseated by it. According to estimates some 60,000-100,000 young people in West Germany were involved in some way or other with leftist groups in Germany. We have to view them as victims recruited by the leftists for a bourgeois policy and as people who got "burnt" by these groups.

It was one of the paradoxes of the history of the time that the "official" Stalinists, who fought openly against the revolutionary aspirations of 1968, were still able to seize the opportunity in order to establish a certain presence in Germany. In spring 1969 the German Communist Party (DKP) was founded, which was composed to some extent of members of the KPD who had been banned in the early 1950s. In the early 1970s this party - including its many sub-branches - had some 30,000 members. One reason for the increased membership was that many of its members believed that the party, which was supported and financed by East Germany, would be able to act as a counter-weight to the West German state; and they also believed that the support for Moscow would strengthen an "anti-imperialist" position against the USA. After an initial rejection of the totalitarian and Stalinist societies in Eastern Europe by the young generation, we now had the paradox that a part of them were being recuperated by the arch-Stalinist DKP.

Moreover, the very few left communist voices which existed at the time, were viciously opposed by the different leftist groups. For example if someone denounced the "national liberation" movements as proxy wars between the imperialist block and if you propagated the class struggle on all sides, i.e. if you defended a resolute internationalist stand, or if you spoke up against antifascism and called World War II a war of bandits on both sides you not only violated a taboo but came up against the combined hostility of all the leftists.

Even though they were not exposed in the same way to the influence of the leftists, a very heterogeneous milieu of 'spontaneists', also developed its activities: squatting in empty houses; campaigning for kinder gardens or against nuclear power plants. This meant that a large part of the young generation became involved in partial struggles. The perspective flowing from these struggles and the consequences of these activities was that their perception of capitalism became very limited and was reduced to one partial aspect instead of seeing the inter-related nature of these problems within the capitalist system.  Later these partial movements were a fertile breeding ground for the activities of the Green Party, which via a number of projects for ecological reform had a strong impact on many young people, and this led to the integration of many of them into state run "reform projects".

Terrorism - another dead end

Another dead end which part of the searching generation of the time ran into was terrorism. Driven by a mixture of hatred and indignation about the system - prisoners of their own impatience and the belief that exemplary actions could "shake the masses" - these elements were drawn into violent attacks against representatives of the system, but they were also infiltrated by state provocateurs using them for the sordid interests of the government. From March 1969 the first small bombs started circulating, distributed by agent provocateurs. In West Berlin on November 9th 1969 there was the first attack against a Jewish Centre: for some members of these movements this was part of the struggle against Zionism as a new form of fascism. Receptive to manipulation, parts of this movement were turned into propagandists for the national liberation movements (often Palestinian terrorists), which were ready to train them in their military camps and which demanded a total submission and discipline. In May 1970 the Red Army Fraction (RAF) was founded; "Revolutionary Cells" started their activities after 1973. Their number of supporters and sympathisers seems to have been quite big - the underground paper Agit 883 claimed to have printed 10,000-12,000 copies a week. However, for capitalism and the state, these people were never the lethal danger that they had hoped to be. Instead the state used their activities to justify the strengthening of its repressive apparatus.

Social Democracy and the Welfare State - a new catch-all

In the mid 1960s the long post war boom, praised as an economic miracle, drew to an end. Slowly the crisis started reappearing. Because the boom had come to an end unexpectedly, the first symptoms of the crisis were not yet so explosive and brutal, and there were still many illusions that an energetic intervention by the State would allow the economy to be kick-started again. Drawing on these illusions the SPD started promising that with the help of Keynesian measures (massive state expenditure through debts etc.) the crisis could still be brought under control. The SPD put this slogan at the centre of its electoral campaign. The hopes of many were placed in the "helping hand" of the state, led by social democracy. Moreover, the first austerity cuts of the capitalists, in comparison to today's austerity cuts were still quite "soft". These circumstances also help us to understand that the protests were seen by one current of the movement of the time as a rejection of the society of "abundance" (an idea spread by the Situationists)[1]. All this helps to explain a certain delay in the unfolding of the class struggle in Germany and it contributed to the fact that the working class in Germany was still somehow "slumbering" until September 1969. In addition, the state could still offer many "reforms" - in particular after the SPD took over the leading role in the social-liberal government formed in autumn 1969 - and pump money into the economy. The welfare state, which was still expanding heavily at the time, helped to tie a lot of students (many of whom received government grants) and workers to the state, and so their resistance against the state was broken down.

On a political level in 1969 the SPD was campaigning for participation in the upcoming elections. Whereas previously the protest movement had placed the emphasis of its activities on "extra-parliamentary opposition", social democracy managed to drag a considerable part of the young generation to the polls. As in 1918/19, 50 years later social democracy was helping to cushion social tensions. The SPD still had a strong influence at the time, managing to increase its membership by 300,000 (amongst them many young people) between 1969 and 1972. Many saw the SPD as a vehicle for the "march through the institutions" (entryism into State institutions). For many, participation in its youth branch, JUSO, in reality meant the beginning of a career in the state apparatus.

A task that links the generations

40 years after the events of 1968 an international comparison shows that apart from France these events received a lot of media coverage in Germany as well. If the media have dealt so intensively with these events, it is because something is smouldering in this society. Even if those who took part in the movement at the time and who in the meantime have made a big career in the state apparatus or elsewhere, feel ashamed of their activities or want to stay silent about them, those who at the time aimed at a new society, free of exploitation, can see themselves confirmed that their original project still remains valid and still needs to be implemented. The whole tragedy of the events was that because of the historical weakness of the working class in Germany at the time, the construction of a revolutionary counter-pole was particularly difficult. The young generation, which had started the movement, was quickly sterilised and their attempts neutralised.

Today a new generation is beginning to put the fundamentals of this society into question. Since 1968 society has sunk into a much deeper crisis and more open barbarism. Those who participated in 68 and who have not been recuperated by the system, many of whom are already at retirement age, have every reason and also the possibility to offer assistance to the young generation today and to join this struggle for the overthrow of capitalism. It is a struggle which must encompass all generations. In 68 the generational ‘conflict' had very big consequences. Now it would be a double tragedy for the elder generation if it did not succeed in supporting the present young generation in its struggle.  

In a third part we will deal in particular with the unfolding of the September strikes in 1969. TW, 11/7/08.

[1] Proletarianisation amongst students was not yet as advanced at the time. In comparison to that period the proportion of working class children amongst students is much higher today. While at the time petty-bourgeois and bourgeois influence were still bigger, today proletarian conditions of existence prevail amongst students. At the time almost unknown, now almost all students are confronted with youth unemployment, unemployment amongst their parents, pauperisation, the prospects of a job with precarious working conditions etc. While at the time many could hope for a career through their job, today most fear unemployment and insecure working conditions.

ICC introduction

As we have already pointed out in several articles published in the International Review and in our territorial press, the events in France during May 1968 were only part of a much broader movement around the world.

We are publishing here an article from a comrade in Japan, which demonstrates clearly that this broader movement also had its counterpart there, despite the specific and difficult historic particularities of that country.

The future proletarian revolution will be internationalist and international or it will be nothing. It is one of the greatest responsibilities of internationalists around the world today to place their local experience firmly within the framework of world events, to understand the movement of the working class in any one place as being only a part, an expression of a greater whole, and to contribute to an international debate within the working class on the lessons of past events for the future of the struggle against a moribund capitalism. We therefore salute comrade Ken's effort to place the events of 1968 in Japan in both a historical and a global context. We support his conclusion wholeheartedly: "We would be satisfied if this brief summary reflection upon the Japanese "68" could assist in some way in the international coordination of the global working class (this was the most important thing then, and the most important thing now)."

There are several points in the article which are for us ambiguous either due to difficulties in translation or because of our own ignorance of Japanese history. We will highlight just some of them here, because we think that they are important elements for debate both among Japanese internationalists and more generally:

1. It is clear that the workers' struggles saw many new features during this period: attempts at self-organisation, even at self-management, many of which had their parallels in Europe for example. It was inevitable at the time that the workers' should be influenced by the "socialist" and "communist" (ie Stalinist) parties and by trades unionist ideas; this seems to have given a certain importance to the SOHYO union. However it is unclear to us to what extent SOHYO was an expression of a real workers' movement in the form of wildcat strikes for example, which got derailed into an impossible attempt to set up a new union, or whether it was an attempt by the left fractions of the ruling class to create a more "radical" structure that could channel workers' discontent and struggles. What are the lessons to be drawn from the SOHYO experience in terms of organising workers' struggles today? What comparisons can we make with other workers' struggles around the world, particularly the massive strikes in Poland 1980?
2. It is clear to us from talking to comrades in Japan that the degeneration of political infighting between the principle leftist groups and sects (which has apparently left as many as 100 dead and more than a thousand seriously injured over the years) has been profoundly traumatic for the political milieu in general. What lessons are to be drawn from this? Why is it that the "New Left" has been "forced into stagnation" as the comrade says? It seems to us that the new generation in Japan 1968 suffered from two handicaps: on the one hand, a tendency towards anti-American nationalism as a result of Japan's situation as a militarily occupied country, and on the other the lack of any left communist tradition which could serve as a reference point: the works of Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Gorter are virtually unknown and the left communist tradition represented by the Italian left is unheard-of.
3. The comrade in one part of the text speaks of the "Vietnamese-Indochinese revolutionary war" and "revolutionary solidarity with the people of Vietnam and Asia". From our point of view, the war in Vietnam was an imperialist confrontation between the USA and the Vietcong, who were backed up either by China or Russia. Only very few young people who opposed the war in Vietnam developed their rejection of the war into a real internationalist position which rejects the participation in any imperialist war and calls for the class struggle against both sides in an imperialist conflict. It was a real tragedy of history, that all across the globe many young people were drawn into support of national liberation struggles, thinking that this would reinforce the struggle against "imperialism". Now with 40 years hindsight, it is vital to come to a deeper understanding of the nature of these wars at the time. Which balance sheet can be drawn of these so-called national liberation struggles?

We have wanted to keep this introduction as brief as possible, in order to reduce the problems of translation. There are clearly other questions raised in this article which it would be necessary to discuss, however we think that the three we have raised above are probably the most important. We hope that the publication of this article, with our comments, in English and in Japanese, will encourage an international debate that will contribute to a better understanding of the "Japanese ‘68" and a strengthening of the internationalist milieu in Japan itself. In this sense, "The world gets wider, but also smaller"!

ICC, 20 July 2008

Background History

The dissident movements which managed extraordinary significance in post-war history during the struggle against the AMPO (Mutual Cooperation and Security) treaty between the United States and Japan, and yet appeared to stagnate in the period immediately afterward, in fact maintained a constant mass base in the student self-governing organizations which had spread to universities across the country. In 1965, after a similar struggle against the treaty for normalization between Japan and the Republic of Korea (ROK), the political season of the anti-war movement follows not long after, characterized by the struggles of the Zengakuren and the Zenkyoto and the 1970 anti-AMPO and Okinawa struggles.

Within the workers' movement, the SOHYO (General Council of Trade Unions of Japan) established itself in the course of leading the Mitsui Miike coal strike of 1959-60, which was the most important labor dispute in the post-war period, together with its participation in the struggle against AMPO in 1960, raising the demands for peace against war as well as a variety of democratic demands.

Besides the existing parliamentary parties, i.e. the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) and the Japanese Socialist Party (JSP), the student/worker organizations under their influence, and those trade unions under SOHYO, there were a variety of sects and organizations such as the Japan Communist League (BUND, the main section of the Zengakuren during the AMPO struggle in 1960), and the Japanese Revolutionary Communist League （under the Japanese Trotskyist Federation） which organized and participated in struggles.

These groups were organizations brought together through a critique of the USSR and Stalinism in the wake of the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and critiques of the Japanese Communist party line

National university struggles, the Zenkyoto

As opposition to the Vietnam war grows on a world scale, the struggle in universities accelerates in Japan.

Nihon University, May 1968

Struggles are waged against student fee increases at Keio University in 1964, Waseda University in 1965 and Chuo University in 1966.

In 1968, the medical department at Tokyo University enter an indefinite strike against the "Doctor Registration law" (which would have extended the internship period of graduates by 2 years and introduced strict hierarchies in the workplace). A Student-body Struggle Committee (Zenkyoto) is assembled, an indefinite strike is declared and barricades set up by 10 academic departments. The next year in 1969, 8500 riot police attack the striking students, and the barricades at Yasuda lecture hall, among others, are cleared by force. More than 600 people are arrested inside Tokyo university. The University entrance exams of the same year for Tokyo University are cancelled as a result.

At Japan's largest private university at the time, Nippon University (Nichidai), instructor tax evasion in connection with unfair student entrance policies, as well as the discovery of over 2 billion yen (roughly 100 million dollars) of fees that have gone unaccounted for, sparks student struggle. In 1968, after an armed confrontation between right-wing/athletics students, an indefinite barricade strike is launched across the university. Over 35,000 people and students attend a mass negotiation session that the university director is forced to attend.

The student movements and the Zenkyoto came to be symbolized by these twin struggles at Todai and Nichidai University, and the movement spread to over 300 universities and high schools across the country. Blockades using barricades and student strikes continued up until the dawn of the 1970s, connecting with the anti-war movement, the anti-AMPO movement and the struggle in Okinawa which were peaking in the same period. These movements would take to the streets in columns.

The decisive difference between the Zengakuren and the Zenkyoto during the anti-AMPO struggles of the 1960s lies in the question of organization.

The Zengakuren is organized as its abbreviated name implies, an "All-Japan Federation of Students' Self-Governing Associations", being supported by a vertical organization beginning at the university level, down to department, to class, to individual (automatic membership for all students). In this sense, the Zengakuren was created in accord with the character of the "Potsdam Self-governing Associations" i.e. the top-down democratization brought about by the American occupying forces.

On the other hand, the Zenkyoto was premised on an extremely broad, free participation, quite the opposite of the self-governing associations, the Zengakuren or the party sectarians, and endeavored to be a mass movement based on direct democracy. From the start the Zenkyoto was a pluralist organization with a deeply parliamentarist character, centered around particular struggles. The majority of its constituents were known as ‘non-sect radicals', i.e. those who did not affiliate with particular political sects.

The movement against the war in Vietnam

Bearing the fruits of the 1960 AMPO, anti-war and anti-base struggles as well as the struggle against the ROK normalization treaty, a movement against the war in Vietnam began in Japan as well.

In 1965, an organization called Beheiren (meaning "Citizen's Union for Peace in Vietnam") was established. With no constitution nor member system of any sort, the movement depended on the independent initiative of its members, and spread nationally, eventually constituting over 300 groups.

The student movement at large, the Zengakuren, the Socialist Party, labor unions such as SOHYO and anti-war youth organizations were central to the movement, and a variety of struggles were developed against the war.

October 1967, sees the first phase of the struggle over Haneda airport and a struggle to prevent the then prime minister Eisaku Satou from visiting Southern Vietnam. In the melee, a Kyoto University student dies.

The same month: International anti-war day. Demonstrations and meetings held across the country to which 1.4 million people attend.

November, second phase of the struggle over Haneda airport (struggle to prevent the prime minister from visiting the US). Fierce fighting between the Zengakuren and riot squads over 10 hours. Nationally, more than 300 arrestees on this day alone.

January 1968, struggle to prevent the American nuclear submarine Enterprise from docking at Sasebo harbor.

February, mass meeting to prevent the construction of a new airport at Sanrizuka (now known as Narita International Airport). Farmers against the airport and students fight together for the first time. 3000 people battle the riot police.

February to March, struggle against the opening of Ojino war hospital. Physical struggles overflow into Tokyo city.

April, Okinawa day struggle. 250,000 people participate nationally. Subsequently, a ‘destructive activism prevention law' is passed against the Revolutionary Communist League (Chuukaku-ha) and the Communist League.

(May general strike in Paris)

October, unified international anti-war action. 4.5 million people participate nationally under the slogans of "against the war in Vietnam, for the return of Okinawa, stop the AMPO agreement". The Communist League and the Socialist Student's League attack the defense department; the Socialist Party, the Socialist Youth Liberation fraction attack the Diet and the American embassy and rush inside. The Chukaku-ha Socialist Student League (4th international) along with other people occupy Shinjuku station which is the critical supply point for American fuel tankers. Tens of thousands of people hold a mass meeting outside and around the station. The two national rail unions go on a limited strike. The Japanese government indicts participants for incitement to riot.

April 1969, Okinawa day struggle.

September, mass meeting establishes a national Zenkyoto federation. 26,000 students in 178 organizations at 46 universities nationwide meet in Tokyo.

October, international anti-war day. The Socialist Party, Communist party and SOHYO march together with 860,000 people. Under stiff conditions of repression, the various parties of the New Left engage in armed struggle around Tokyo. Police departments and police boxes are attacked. Tactics escalate with the organized use of molotov cocktails as well as explosives. Over 1500 people are arrested.

In the same month, the national rail workers, followed by 4 million industrial workers in 67 unions plan a 24 hour strike in November.

These struggles continue into the anti-AMPO struggle and the Okinawan struggle of 1970.

The worker's movement and other struggles

At the height of the 1960s economic expansion, the Japanese workers' movement moved into a period of constant growth centered around the Socialist Party, the Communist party and the SOHYO union, while engaging with a variety of political problems such as the place of the Soviet Union and the "Socialist Bloc", the progress of the anti-imperialist (anti-American) struggle and nationally, the AMPO, Okinawa and anti-war struggles. Labor disputes and strikes spiked after 1968 (in terms of numbers of disputes and participants), peaking in 1974. In this period, the national spring labor offensive of 1974 (2,270,000 workers in 71 unions on strike, winning a 32.9% increase in wages), the 1975 strike for the right to strike (led chiefly by the KOROKYO [Federation of Public Corporation and Government Enterprise Workers'Union] and the national railway unions), described as the second largest post-war struggle, and other struggles were fought.

The New Left sects raised objectives such as "creating a class-based workers movement", and set about intervening in existing workers' vanguards and creating left-wing factions within them. These sects also aimed for an independent direction involving the organization of unorganized lower class workers as well as those working at smaller corporations, creating regional labor unions, and attempting autonomous production and self-management.

In 1965, the Socialist Party-affiliated Anti-war Coordinating Committee (established to oppose the war in Vietnam and stop the Japan-Korea normalization treaty) managed to expand on a large scale under the slogans of "autonomy, originality and unity" without involving labor unions or top-down organizations, however this expansion was riven with the hegemony struggles of sects in the same way as the Zenkyoto movement not soon afterwards.

While the anti-AMPO, anti-war/anti-base struggles, the Okinawa struggle and the Sanrizuka struggle were constantly fought, the New Left sects began to devote their energy to single-issue struggles such as immigration struggles (for a refugee recognition law as well), solidarity with Koreans and Chinese people living in Japan, solidarity with the people of the ASEAN countries, the women's liberation movement, the Buraku liberation movement and movements of the handicapped.

Organized at the same time were regional struggles, anti-pollution struggles such as the fight against the Minamata disease (where mercury from a local factory poisoned thousands), the anti-nuclear movement, environmental movements, day laborer struggles (at Sanya, Kamagasaki and so on) as well as the ongoing struggle against the emperor system.

The fruits of "68"

Today, the post-war power structure, the so-called "1955 system", has "collapsed". We have moved from the one-party dictatorship of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to a two-party system that includes the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). The Socialist Party, which acted a left foot of the political rule of the bourgeois, has dismantled, the diet seats of the Japanese Communist Party have decreased severely and the influence of the existing left organizations has dropped quite remarkably.

The Japanese-American system is all the more powerful and American bases or institutions exist at 135 locations nationally (20% of the main island in Okinawa is occupied by the US army). Troop dispatches to the Iraq war and "threats" from the DPRK have served as pretexts for the accelerated reform of the peace constitution centered around "article 9".

In terms of a workers' vanguard, SOHYO has dismantled and merged with RENGO (the Japanese Trade Union Confederation). New Left sects which had worked towards the creation of "revolutionary workers' parties to replace the Socialist/Communist parties" and a "class-based worker's movement" are being forced into stagnation.

Considering this, it is important to decipher the meaning of 1968, which served as a junction in world history. For ourselves, the Japanese working class, it is particularly meaningful to draw up a balance sheet of Japan's "68" from the perspective of the international communist movement.

1. The accomplishments and the limits of the JCP during both the period when the Japanese branch of the COMINTERN was active, and the post-war period in which it was legalized, seeking "sovereign independence in defense of scientific socialism" and shifting to a parliamentary road.
2. Criticism of Stalinism and the JCP and their result, the New Left and the birth and stagnation of Japanese Trotskyism.

With these questions in the forefront, to what extent does Japan's "68" fought above all by students and young workers connect with the French and American "1968s", the "Prague spring", the Italian "Hot Autumn" of 69, the huge Polish strike developed over the winter of 70 to 71 which gave birth to "Solidarity", and the Vietnamese-Indochinese revolutionary war?

These are questions we must continue to examine.

Japan's "68" was a struggle which questioned the real meaning of "post-war democracy", which included struggles by workers and students for themselves, and refused the future proposed by the existing left, Stalinists and the Socialists. It was a new struggle in which the Japanese working class attempted to shape the future by asserting its own hegemony. This "68" was a collection of struggles in search of proletarian internationalism, in particular revolutionary solidarity with the people of Vietnam and Asia, which attempted to realize a truly peaceful world in which prejudice, repression and exclusion of any sort was eradicated.

In the end, its ascendant period was unable to exceed the framework of rapid democratization and parts of the movement turned to mere terrorism. Unable to win the support of over 50 million workers, the aims of the struggles went largely unrealized and remain unfulfilled today.

However we are conscious of the systematic changes to Japanese politics, economy and society after "68".

Abolition of the foreigner registration and fingerprinting law (obligation of all foreigners on Japanese soil to be fingerprinted). Enactment of the "Gender Equal Opportunity Law". Slowly growing support for eliminating barriers for the handicapped and normalization (this country only formalized a law against discrimination towards the handicapped in 2004 (!) with the "Handicapped Law". This law states that "No person may engage in any conduct which infringes on the rights and well-being of a handicapped person because that person is handicapped"). Unlike that time in which the struggle against the Minamata disease was waged, today officials and companies stumble over each other to announce the themes of ecology, energy-saving and post-pollution. Movements for human rights, environmental preservation and regional struggles have transformed into NGOs and NPOs (non-profit organizations), which organize towards those goals. And so on.

Things that seemed at the time so unrealizable have to a certain extent been realized (disregarding to what ends they are used). Of course most of these gains have been "democratic" demands and symbolize nothing other than compromises and harmony with the enemy class. Recognizing the prevalence of class collaboration in the situation of Japanese capitalism at present can help us move towards real victories without our guard down.

However, "68" as a social movement still bears effects even today. The seeds of "68", which went beyond a framework of counter-power and resistance culture to spread to all of society, will certainly continue to foment changes in the future.

Thirty years after the crossroads of 68, we would be satisfied if this brief summary reflection upon the Japanese "68" could assist in some way in the international coordination of the global working class (this was the most important thing then, and the most important thing now).

To all our comrades who struggle in Europe:

The world gets wider, but also smaller. We await real opportunities to organize alongside you.

(23/03/2008 Ken)

The open letter published here is in response to the interview between Loren Goldner and the Korean group Sanosin, concerning the history and present condition of the communist left. In a very brief exchange of mails, Loren has not objected to the publication of the letter, considering that "Your letter is fair and I see no need to respond at this time".

ICC to Loren Goldner, 05/07/08

Dear Loren, 

We recently read with considerable interest your interview with the Sanosin group in Korea. We would like to emphasise first of all our agreement with you when you state that "It's important to understand that in the general reaction against vanguardism, Bolshevism, Trotskyism, there's also a relatively large milieu in England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain in which people call themselves anarchist, libertarian communist, anarcho-communist and other combinations that I think could be fairly seen as part of a broadly left communist mood.".

Actually we would go further than this, and we think that it is useful to distinguish more clearly the different traditions that partake of this "left communist mood". While there are certainly some from the anarchist or perhaps more specifically anarcho-syndicalist tradition (the KRAS in Russia for example, which is a part of the CNT-AIT) who are open to the ideas and positions of the left communists on the basis of a shared internationalism, there are others who consider that the left communist tradition, far from being anti-Bolshevik, in fact represents the continuation of revolutionary internationalist Bolshevism (ie the tradition of the Bolshevik party as it was when the workers took power in 1917 in Russia).

This aspect of the left communist spirit is by no means confined to the European countries you mention. It also extends to countries in Latin America (you may for example have seen the reports on our web site of our public meetings in Brazil held jointly with comrades of the Oposiçao Operaria group or on our own account [69]); to the Philippines (see for example the report on our web site from the comrades of the Internasyonalismo group concerning the food crisis [70]; you might be interested to see that thanks to these comrades we have also been able to open a site in Tagalog [71]); and to Turkey (we have published several texts on our site by the left communist group Enternasyonalist Komünist Sol). We don't propose to go into the reasons for this in depth here - we would happy to discuss it another time should you wish.

This "left communist mood", and a fraternal spirit of cooperation, was also present at the conference in Korea in 2006. As you said at the time, in your mail to us after the conference, "everyone else appreciated the comradely atmosphere which prevailed throughout". In our view this is something that should be encouraged. You would describe yourself as a "left communist" in the interview with Sanosin - though as you know of course, left communism covers a number of different currents with some pretty substantial differences on questions ranging from political organisation to the national and union questions. Perhaps we could make one brief point about this. In your text, you put forward the idea that "What left communism is, in my opinion, in addition to what I said, just to re-emphasize it, was the one important current that rejected the universal application of the model of the Russian revolution". In our view, two things above all distinguish the left communists: they were the first and have remained the most consistent opponents of Stalinism; and they have remained internationalist including during the most difficult moments of the last world war. It is this question above all, the question of internationalism and a developing awareness around the world that the problems posed by a world wide economic crisis and looming ecological disaster simply cannot be resolved within the national framework, that accounts in large part for the "left communist mood" of which you speak.

Given this new situation, this new openness to the ideas and principles of the communist left, we think it is particularly important that the groups and militants who represent this current should maintain the spirit of fraternal cooperation and debate which presided, as you say, at the 2006 conference. With this in mind, we would like to take up some of your comments about the history of the communist left and about the ICC in particular, which we think are somewhat inaccurate.

On the question of the Italian Left and the Spanish Civil War, you say "for the Bordigists, really nothing important happens without the party. For example, during the Spanish revolution of 1936-1937, they said "There's no revolution, because there's no party." And they actually split at that time. Some of the Bordigists went and fought in Spain, others stayed in Europe and said "This is a battle between factions of the bourgeoisie." So there's a kind of excessive view of the importance of the party in my opinion". We presume that by "Bordigists" here, you mean the group which published Bilan in France during the 1930s. However, this group (to which the ICC traces its own origins incidentally) could certainly not be called "Bordigist", at least not in the sense that the word has today. Moreover, the position of the Bilan group was not such a caricature as you seem to think. As we say in our book on the Italian Left, for the Italian Left Fraction "If the party did not exist it was ‘because the situation had not permitted its formation'." (p94 of the English edition).[1] In other words, there is a dialectical relationship between the development of class consciousness among the mass of the workers, and the development of political organisations which are themselves an expression of this class consciousness.

Given the emphasis you place on the history of the communist left, we also find it surprising that - while you urge the comrades of Sanosin to visit the site where Philippe Bourrinet has published his own versions of the Italian Left and the German Left (inaccessible by the way at time of writing), you fail to mention the fact that it is the ICC which has undertaken to publish in English and French the histories not only of the Dutch-German and Italian left communists (the latter also in German), but also of the left-communists in Russia (the Miasnikov group in particular - this last book should shortly be published in Russian and French by the way) and in Britain. Don't you think that this at least deserved a mention? It is true that the Russian and British traditions have left less of a trace, but they nonetheless have their importance, in particular in the case of Russia as a means of better understanding the struggle within the Bolshevik party itself against the Stalinist counter-revolution.

In fact, it seems to us that you have a bit of a "blind spot" when it comes to what the ICC has to say in general. "The ICC lives only in its own world"; "I read many of the texts and I considered the ICC in particular to be very weak in critique of political economy. They have a certain kind of Luxemburgist analysis which I don't think it is as good as Luxemburg herself. And I don't think they have really developed at all to take account of the evolution of capitalism in the last 50 years, possibly more. The ICC thinks basically that nothing new ever happens". But is this really justified? Let us offer just two counter-examples:

The first concerns Korea - which you mention having discussed in 1982 with one of our militants. But have you read the analysis of the boom in Korea and the other Asian "dragons" [72] which we cited in our report on the 2006 conference? Certainly the analysis contained here may be different from your own: the process described in this article has nothing to do with an "evolution" of capitalism and everything to do with the spread of American imperialist power, however we think it hardly justifies the claim that "the ICC thinks that nothing ever changes".

The second concerns the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989. Perhaps it is worth quoting what we wrote in January 1990: "Everywhere (except in Romania at the time of writing), changes are happening daily, any one of which, only a few years ago, would have brought in the Russian tanks. This is not as it is generally presented, the result of a deliberate policy on Gorbachev's part, but the sign of a general crisis throughout the bloc, at the same time as Stalinism's historic bankruptcy. The rapidity of events, and the fact that they are now hitting East Germany, the central pillar of the Eastern bloc, is the surest sign that the world's second imperialist bloc has completely disintegrated.

This change is by now irreversible, and affects not just the bloc, but its leading power, the USSR itself. The clearest sign of Russia's collapse is the development of nationalism in the form of demands for "autonomy" and "independence" in the peripheral regions of central Asia, on the Baltic coast, and also in a region as vital for the Soviet national economy as the Ukraine.

Now when the leader of an imperialist bloc is no longer able to maintain the bloc's cohesion, or even to maintain order within its own fron­tiers, it loses its status as a world power. The USSR and its bloc are no longer at the centre of the inter-imperialist antagonisms between two capitalist camps, which is the ultimate level of polarisation that imperialism can reach on a world scale in the era of capitalist decadence.

The disintegration of the Eastern bloc, its disappearance as a major consideration in inter-imperialist conflict, implies a radical calling into question of the Yalta agreements, and the spread of instability to all the imperialist constellations formed on that basis, including the Western bloc which the USA has dominated for the last 40 years. This in its turn will find its foundations called into question." (International Review n°60).

As far as the perspectives for the class struggle were concerned, we wrote that: "We are entering a completely new period, which will profoundly modify both the present imperialist constellations (the Western bloc will also be affected, though to a lesser degree and at a less frenetic pace, by convulsions and instability; this is inevitable to the extent that its main reason for existing - the other bloc - has disappeared) and the conditions in which the class has fought up to now.

At first, this will be a difficult period for the proletariat. Apart from the increased weight of democratic mystifications, in the West as well as in the East, it will have to understand the new conditions within which it is fighting. This will inevitably take time (...)"

How many people in the communist left were able to say, barely weeks after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, that this meant not only the disintegration of the USSR's imperialist bloc but of the USSR itself, increasing rivalries and clashes of interest between the USA and its "allies", and a long and difficult period for the class struggle and its revolutionary minorities (which did indeed last throughout the 1990s)? Is this the reaction of an organisation that "lives in its own world"?[2]

The same "blind spot", and an unfortunate lack of interest in historical accuracy, seems to hold true when you describe our analyses of the class struggle. You say, for example, that "I don't remember the exact dates but they [ie the ICC] thought that the mid 1980s was a period of very intense class struggle, at least in Western Europe and United States. When in fact it was a period of tremendous working class defeat". We would point out in reply that "intense class struggle" and "tremendous defeat" are by no means contradictory. Indeed, if the wave of "intense class struggle" that followed 1917 in Russia had not ended in a "tremendous defeat" then we would certainly not be discussing these issues today because we would be too busy building a communist society! And it seems to us hard to deny that the 1980s were indeed a period of "intense class struggle": let us mention only the British miners' strike in 1985 (followed by the massive strike at British Telecom not to mention the complete shutdown of the London subway system by a strike in 1989), the French rail workers' strike in 1986, the massive strikes in Belgium in 1983 and in 1986, the strikes in Holland which were the biggest since 1903, the strike in Denmark in 1985 which was the biggest the country had ever seen... Was the ICC wrong to engage its militants to the utmost of our energies to defending a left communist perspective in these struggles?

In this respect, we think it worth setting the record straight on the only concrete example you give: "Former members of the ICC have told me about being sent to some city in France or Belgium with huge bundles of newspapers and arriving at a scene and absolutely nobody was there". This sounds very much like our intervention at the end of the massive French steel workers' strike in the Lorraine region in 1979, where as far as we were able our militants had been present throughout, speaking at the steelworkers' mass meetings on more than one occasion. Following the mass demonstration in Paris which in reality marked the end of the movement, we considered it necessary to try to hold a street meeting in the town of Longwy, which had been at the heart of the movement, in order to try to encourage the workers to draw the lessons of the strike and in particular the role of sabotage played by the unions and the PCF (French "Communist" Party, ie the Stalinists). This was something of a risky business, since in those days the Stalinist-dominated CGT union would generally greet our presence at factory gates with physical violence, hence the decision to send a large cohort of militants to the town. In the event, the steelworkers were too demoralised and exhausted by the defeat to have the heart for such an effort - our meeting was held in the town square but it hardly drew a crowd. But was it not the duty of a communist organisation at least to make the effort?

To conclude on this point, it is worth quoting Luxemburg's words (Order reigns in Berlin) written on the eve of her assassination in 1919: "This contradiction between the demands of the task and the inadequacy of the pre-conditions for its fulfilment in a nascent phase of the revolutionary development results in the individual struggles of the revolution ending formally in defeat. But the [proletarian] revolution is the sole form of ‘war' - and this is also its most vital law - in which the final victory can be prepared only by a series of ‘defeats'! (...) The revolutions have until now brought nothing but defeats, but these inevitable defeats virtually pile guarantee upon guarantee of the future success of the final goal". 

A lack of concern for historical accuracy is all the more regrettable when it gives rise to statements which in our view are simply misleading. Towards the end of the interview, you say: "I really recommend this website which is a website of... It's called libcom.org -libertarian communist. They have really interesting coverage of struggles all over the world. There is one place you can see a lot of these. They even allow the ICC to participate in their debates but everybody just kind of laughs at the ICC". We will answer this simply by repeating what we have already written to the Sanosin comrades: "we would certainly agree that it is worth looking at the libcom.org site (and even participating in the debates). However, LG presumably does not follow the debates very closely since otherwise he would be aware that people do not generally "laugh" at the ICC - though they certainly do not always agree with us. But don't just take our word for it. You can find ICC militants and sympathisers interventions in the discussions on libcom under the following "handles" amongst others: alf, beltov, baboon, alibadani, demogorgon303, LongJohnSilver. During the CPE struggle in France the articles from our French section were posted on libcom, and a libcom member has recently translated our Venezuelan section's article about the steel strike against the Chavez [73] government.".

This trivialisation of debate seems to us all the more regrettable in that your interview raises many questions which are important both for the comrades in Korea and more generally, questions that we ourselves are currently debating with comrades around the world and which we would be glad to take up with you should you wish to engage with us. Certainly one of the most important of these is the union question: what do the unions represent in the present period, and what if any are the possibilities of working within them? We don't propose to take up the argument here, but we would like to point out one very basic error on the question (unless of course we have misunderstood your meaning, in which case we hope you will correct us). Towards the end of the interview you refer to the situation in Britain around World War I as follows:

"The English working class did have a series of radical explosions both before and after World War I . From 1908 to 1914 was a whole series of syndicalist strikes in England and in Scotland and in Ireland and many English capitalists thought the game was over, that the revolution was there.

And then right in the last year or two of World War I and up into 1919, a further mass strike wave occurred throughout Great Britain.

To the point that as you may know Lloyd George, who was the prime minister in 1919, met with the head of the Trade Union Council and said "If you people want power, it's yours." They were ready to give up!

The bourgeoisie understood the power of the working class better than the working class did in that particular moment".

What exactly is meant by this? Surely you cannot seriously believe that Lloyd George (one of the most devious politicians ever produced by the British ruling class) intended for one moment to hand power over to the TUC? Or that the leaders of the TUC - who had supported the war throughout and had acted as the recruiting sergeants of British imperialism for the biggest slaughter the working class had ever suffered - would have wanted to take power even if Lloyd George had handed it to them on a plate? As for the idea that the British ruling class, at the head of the biggest empire that the world had ever seen and confronted with no physical threat to its rule should be "ready to give up" power... to be blunt this is simply nonsense, both historically and generally. Historically, the British ruling class in 1919 was not faced with imminent revolution; more generally, ruling classes (and especially the bourgeoisie) never simply "gives up" power without a fight.

If any kind of useful debate is to take place about the nature of the trades unions and the question of how to organise the struggle in the decadent period of capitalism, then in our view a much more rigorous foundation is necessary as a starting point. 

Lastly, since your interview with Sanosin is posted on your web site, we ask you to consider this as an open letter: we have written with the intention that this letter should be published, and we would like to ask you to publish it on "Break their haughty power". We will also send the letter to Sanosin, since the questions raised here originate in your interview with them.

We would prefer, however, that you should have the opportunity to reply and if necessary correct any points you may think to be mistaken before publication.

We look forward to hearing from you 

Fraternal greetings, JD for ICC

[1] Here is what we wrote to the comrades of Sanosin in this respect: "...in our view it is incorrect to call [the Bilan group] ‘Bordigists': although Bordiga had played an important role in the left of the Italian Communist Party, and the Bilan group considered themselves to be in that tradition, there was no such thing as Bordigism at the time (Bordiga himself was in internal exile under the Mussolini regime in Italy), and above all the Bilan group certainly did not hold to some of the almost mystical ideas that Bordiga developed in the 1950s about the ‘unchanging' nature of the communist programme (on the contrary, a major part of the group's purpose was to learn the lessons of the Russian revolution and develop the communist programme on this basis), or about the role of the party. LG is also wrong to say that the Italian and Dutch Left Communists "hated" each other. Bordiga and Pannekoek corresponded before World War II (though they did not agree), and Italian left communists (as well as French left communists some of whom had belonged to the Bilan group originally) took part in a conference organised by Dutch left communists after 1947 (see the article in n°132 of the International Review [74]). The situation changed during the 1950s as some of the Italian left communists came more and more under Bordiga's influence, whereas the Dutch left communists moved more towards what is known today as "councilism". It seems to us that LG is adopting here a rather superficial and inaccurate view of the history of the left communist groups."

[2] Incidentally, since you think that we "can't intelligently discuss the nature of the post WWII boom", we'ld be interested in your opinion on the article which discusses precisely that subject, published in n°133 of the International Review [75].

We have received the report reproduced below on police repression in Japan, from a comrade on the spot.[1]

We declare our solidarity with those workers and students who have been arrested in a brutal wave of repression that gives the lie to the myth of bourgeois democracy in Japan: the ruling class has revealed its true face in unleashing the riot police on demonstrators and activists in a particularly violent manner. One of the most striking aspects of the events in Kamagasaki is that the workers there were protesting not over bad wages and working conditions but seem to have been concerned first and foremost with defending their dignity as workers and human beings: police brutality "brought over 200 workers to surround the police station and demand that the police chief come out and apologize".

Over and above this declaration of basic solidarity, however, we feel it not only necessary but a part of this expression of solidarity to make some comments on the events described in the article.

First of all, it is clear that the insolent parading of the world's leaders in Hokkaido this year, as in Heiligendamm (Germany) last year, is a legitimate cause for anger especially amongst the politicized youth around the world. This anger, and the desire to fight for a better world without the class exploitation, poverty and brutality that the G8 leaders symbolize, is justified and understandable. There is however a danger in the polarizing of demonstrations against the G8 summits and similar events like the Davos meetings of the world's rich on the basis of nothing more than "anti-capitalism": it can easily lead to a tendency to obscure the real class lines that separate a proletarian response from the response represented by various leftist organizations which tout an "anti-capitalism" that is in fact nothing of the kind, but only a remake of the discredited political state capitalist ideology that reigned in terror over the USSR and the Eastern bloc until its collapse in 1989. This is something that comrades and workers everywhere need to consider, though without more detailed knowledge about the organizations involved (the Rakunan Union or the "workers' organizations" mentioned in the article for example: in our view the Chuukaku-ha organization has nothing to do with working class politics) we will limit ourselves to these comments and will not enter here into any considerations regarding the positions of particular groups.

Secondly, we want to emphasize our profound agreement with this statement in the article: "it is important to explore the possibilities of spreading the antagonism of the Kamagasaki workers to the larger population of exploited people in order to imagine doing away with this power structure once and for all". While it is clear from the events described that the fighting in Kamagasaki[2] was above all a matter of workers' self-defense against police violence, the danger for the Kamagasaki workers is that they end up being simply ghettoized by the very violence with which they try to defend themselves. For an effective class defense, the largest mass participation of as many workers as possible is necessary, not simply in fighting but in organizing independently of all political parties and trades unions in order to bring the pressure of a more massive movement to bear against the state. How can this be done? We will certainly not pretend that there are any easy answers, but the question is - as the comrade says - essentially one of spreading a political reflection more broadly within the working class and politicized youth not just on the immediate issues but on how to do away with the whole of capitalist exploitation world wide.

One of the most important questions that such reflection has to take up is this: how to build up a real pressure against the state? Does such a pressure come about through military clashes - in which the police and the army are expert and specialized or does it come about through a massive mobilization of all exploited and oppressed? History has shown that when it comes to resisting armed attacks by the state, the state has only ever been forced to retreat through massive proletarian mobilization - through strikes, through street demonstrations, etc. Mobilising on a mass scale means posing the question who can offer solidarity? For example when in 1980 in Poland the Polish and Russian ruling class threatened to send the army against the striking workers in Gdansk the railway workers in Lublin did not call for armed fighting with the forces of repression, instead they threatened to paralyze the railway lines through massive strikes thus cutting a vital supply line for the Russian army between the Soviet Union and the then East-German front-line state. The Russian and Polish state had to give in because of the threat of the extension of the strikes.

In this sense, there is a danger which we feel the article misses, when it seems to express the idea that the best answer to the riot situation is to come and join it ("Visitors to Kamagasaki from near and far have over the past five days participated and found their own struggle in riots fought by total strangers."), since this can potentially offer the forces of repression the ideal opportunity to create a "ghetto of violence" separated and alienated from the rest of the workers. Not only in Japan but in many other countries the ruling class prefers to provoke violent clashes and to push workers into these in order to avoid a real movement of extension the struggles and the indispensable reflection in the class. In the question of violence, organization is critical: there is a world of difference between the spontaneous, uncontrolled violence of the riot, and the violence exercised by the working class acting as a conscious force independently organized in its own mass assemblies.[3]

ICC

Over the past week and a half, an unprecedented political crackdown has been enacted in advance of a series of economic summits around the country. Despite this, the brave workers of Kamagasaki stood up against the stiff security environment in riots against the brutal beating of a day laborer over the past five days. The twin situations of repression and revolt deserve to be examined in more detail. 

Repression

In the run-up to the series of summits, over 40 people were arrested in pre-emptive sweeps of broad left and anarchist groups.

On May 29th, 38 people were arrested at Hosei University in Tokyo at a political assembly against the G8. These large-scale arrests were carried out by over 100 public security agents after the students staged after a march across campus protesting the summits.[4] All of the arrestees are still jailed, and among them are apparently some leadership of the Chuukaku-ha Leninist organization, one of the largest organizations of its kind in Japan.

On June 4th, Tabi Rounin, an active anarchist from the Kansai region, was arrested on accusation of having his address registered at a location other than where he was living. When arrested, his computer, cell phone, political flyers and more was taken from him; these items were used when detectives interrogated him, asking him about his relationship to internationals possibly arriving for the G8, as well as his activity around Osaka. He would be the first obviously political arrest masked as routine police work.[5]

On June 12th, an activist from the Kamagasaki Patrol (an Osaka squatter and anti-capitalist group), was arrested for allegedly defrauding lifestyle assistance payments. This person has been constantly followed by plainclothes police and even helicopters during demonstrations. Clearly, his arrest was planned with the idea of keeping him away from the major anti-summit mobilizations and he will be held without bail for the maximum of 23 until the summit is over. The office of an anarchist organization called the Free Worker was raided in order to look for 'evidence' in this comrade's case.

The same day the Rakunan union in Kyoto was raided, with police officers searching their offices and arresting two of their members on suspicion of fraudulent unemployment insurance receipt. One of these two arrested are accused of funneling money received from unemployment insurance to the Asian Wide Campaign, which was organizing against the economic summits.[6]

In the meantime, Osaka city mobilized thousands of police with the pretext of preventing terrorism against the summit, setting up inspection points and monitoring all around the city. But the strengthened state high on its own power inevitably deployed it in violence, and turned the day laborers of southern Osaka against it in riot.

Revolt

Kamagasaki is a traditionally day laborer neighborhood that has experienced over thirty riots since the early 1960s. The last riot in Kamagasaki was sparked in 1990 by police brutality and the exposure of connections between the police and Yakuza gangs.

The causes this time were not much different. A man was arrested in a shopping arcade near Kamagasaki and taken to the Nishinari police station where he was punched repeatedly in the face by four detectives one after another. Then he was kicked and hung upside down by rope to be beaten
some more.

He was released the next day and went to show his friends the wounds from the beatings and the rope. This brought over 200 workers to surround the police station and demand that the police chief come out and apologize. Later people also started demanding that the four detectives be fired.

Met with steel shields and a barricaded police station, the crowd began to riot, throwing stones and bottles into the police station. Scraps with the riot police resulted in some of their shields and equipment being temporarily seized. The riot stopped around midnight with the riot police being backed into the police station. The next day they brought over 35 police buses and riot vehicles into the Naniwa police station with the intention of using these against the rioters.

During the riot, the police surveilled rioters from the top of the police station, from plainclothes positions and from a helicopter. Riot police with steel shields were deployed all around the neighborhood in strategic places to charge in when the action kicked off. The workers' organizations which by the second day were maintaining the protest had chosen a good time to do so because the police department proved unwilling to unleash the direct, brutal charges seen in the 1990 riot due to the international spotlight focused on them. On Saturday a police infiltrator was found in the crowd, pushed up against a fence and smashed in the head with a metal bar.
The riot has lasted since the 13th and every night there is a resumption of hostility between the day laborers and the cops. Workers so far refuse anything less than the fulfillment of their demands in light of the police brutality incident. Despite the call from more ‘moderate' NGOs to ‘stop the violence' there has been no let-up in hostility towards the police, although the real level of violent confrontation is not as strong as the weekend of the 13th-15th. The riot has been characterized by the participation of young people as well as the older day laborers in confrontation with the police. As the guarantors of everyday exploitation under capitalism who have to assertively maintain the constant dispossession of the urban working class, the police have many enemies. This they are finding out every night.[7]

Over the past couple of days there have been points where more than 500 people have gathered and rioted around the neighborhood. Police have responded mainly by defending the Nishinari police station, their home base, while getting back up from the local Naniwa police station, which has a riot countermeasure practicing lot, and holds tens of anti-riot vehicles. Despite this mighty arsenal, the police were perhaps surprised when they deployed their tear gas cannon on the first day only to be met with cries of joy and laughter. The use of force no longer has any spell of intimidation, it is simply expected.

Still, the combined brutality of the police and their riot vehicles has netted over 40 arrests (including of many young people), many injuries and even blinded one worker with a direct shot of tear gas water to his right eye.

The struggle here is inevitably limited by the particular situations of day laborers, who are dispatched to their job sites and have no direct access to the means of production that standard wage workers would. This prevents them from for instance calling political strikes against police brutality, and hitting powerful interests in the city where they really hurt. As workers deprived of these means to struggle, the day laborers will always have the riot as a method not only of collective defense but for also forcing concessions from the city in the form of expanding welfare access, creating jobs, backing off of eviction campaigns etc. While these are more or less important gains strictly in terms of survival, it is important to explore the possibilities of spreading the antagonism of the Kamagasaki workers to the larger population of exploited people in order to imagine doing away with this power structure once and for all.

It is unclear exactly where the situation is headed, but we can know for sure that the real repression in Kamagasaki will arrive after the summits have ended and the focus is off of the Japanese government. Then we will see the raids, the arrests and the scapegoating of particular individuals for the righteous outburst of class violence that these riots are. Instead of quietly accepting their fates as people to be trampled upon, the participants have directly attacked the wardens of wage labor who guarantee the violence of everyday slum life.

Overall, the ongoing repression against those involved in organizing against the G8 summit as well as Kamagasaki should not convince anyone that the ruling class here is once again afraid of the working class. In repressing certain left groups organizing against the economic summits, the Japanese government is more interested in preventing a movement from emerging that starts to question capital at the macro level, than actually attacking an existing one. On the other hand in Kamagasaki, the state tries to deny the possibility of antagonism in a major metropole and the visibility of this revolt, for fear of it spreading. This is why most news reports have blacked out the ongoing riots in Kamagasaki. The concreteness and universality of the Kamagasaki revolt truly threatens to expand beyond the borders of police violence. Visitors to Kamagasaki from near and far have over the past five days participated and found their own struggle in riots fought by total strangers. The ruling class fears and knows that it cannot control this horizontal sympathy and the real practice of revolt that accompanies it.

[1] The text was sent to us in June - we have not published it earlier because we wanted to give the comrade who wrote it the possibility of answering our introduction, and we hope that the debate on the points raised here will continue.

[2] See also the previous article on events in Kamagasaki [79].

[3] ICC Note : see our theses on "Terror, terrorism and class violence [80]"

[4] https://hosei29.blog.shinobi.jp/Date/20080531/ [81]

[5] Tabi Rounin was thankfully released after a week in jail, and is back home

[6] The Rakunan Union can be contacted at the following address:

Kyoto-fu Uji-shi Hironocho Nishiura 99-14 Pal Dai-ichi Biru 3F
Rakunan Union
Jiritsu Roudou Kumiai Rengou
TEL:0774-43-8721　Fax:0774-44-3102

[7]  Updates about the situation in Kamagasaki are being posted here (Japanese) [82]

Politicians and economists no longer have the words to describe the gravity of the situation: "at the edge of the abyss", "An economic Pearl Harbor" "A tsunami on the way" "The 9/11 of finance"[1]...only the reference to the Titanic is missing.

What exactly is happening? Faced with the unfolding economic storm, a number of agonising questions are being raised. Are we going through a new crash like 1929? How did it come to this? What can we do to defend ourselves? And what kind of world do we live in? 

Towards a brutal deterioration in our living conditions

There can be no illusions on that score. On a planetary scale, in the months to come, humanity is going to see a frightful deterioration of its living conditions. In its recent report, the International Monetary Fund has announced that between now and early 2009 50 countries are going to join the grim list of countries hit by famine. Among them are numerous countries in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and even Asia. In Ethiopia, for example, 12 million people are already officially on the verge of death from starvation. In India and China, these so-called new capitalist Eldorados, hundreds of millions of workers are about to be hit by brutal poverty. In the USA and Europe as well a large part of the population is facing unbearable deprivation.

All sectors of activity are being affected. In the offices, the banks, the factories, the hospitals, in the hi-tech sectors, in the car industry, in building or distribution, millions of redundancies are on the cards. Unemployment is about to hit the roof! Since the beginning of 2008 and in the USA alone, nearly a million workers had already been thrown onto the street. And this is just the start. This wave of redundancies means that housing yourself, eating, and taking care of your health is going to be increasingly difficult for working class families. This also means that for the young people of today capitalism has no future to offer them.

Those who lied to us yesterday are still lying to us today!

This catastrophic perspective is no longer hidden by the leaders of the capitalist world, the politicians and the journalists who serve the ruling class. How could they? Some of the biggest banks in the world have gone bust; they have only survived thanks to the hundreds of billions of dollars, pounds and euros injected by the central banks, i.e. by the state. For the stock markets of America, Asia and Europe, it's a never-ending dive: they have lost $25 trillion since January 2008, or the equivalent of two years of the USA's total production. All this illustrates the real panic that has seized the ruling class all over the world. If the stock markets are crashing today, it's not just because of the catastrophic situation facing the banks, it's also because the capitalists are expecting a dizzying fall in their profits resulting from a massive downturn in economic activity, a wave of enterprises going bust, a recession much worse than all the ones we've seen over the past 40 years.

The principal world leaders, Bush, Merkel, Brown, Sarkozy, Hu Jintao, have gathered together in a series of meetings and ‘summits' (G4, G7, G8, G16, G40) to try to limit the damage, to prevent the worst. A new summit is planned for mid-November, which some see as a way of ‘founding capitalism anew'. The only thing that equals the agitated state of the politicians is the frenzy of the experts of TV, radio and newspapers... the crisis is the number one media story.

Why such a barrage?

In fact, while the bourgeoisie can no longer hide the disastrous state of its economy, it is trying to make us believe that it's not a question of putting the capitalist system itself into question, that it's a question of fighting against ‘abuses' and ‘excess'. It's the fault of speculators! It's the fault of greedy bosses! It's the fault of tax havens! It's the fault of ‘neo-liberalism'!

To make us swallow this fairytale, all the professional swindlers are called into action. The same ‘experts' who yesterday were telling us that the economy was healthy, that the banks were solid... are now falling over themselves on the TV screens to pour out new lies. The same people who were telling us that ‘neo-liberalism' was THE solution, that the state had to step back from intervening in the economy, are now calling on the governments to intervene more and more.

More state and more ‘morality', and capitalism will be fine! This is the lie they are trying to sell us!

Can capitalism overcome its crisis?

The truth is that the crisis ravaging world capitalism today does not date from the summer of 2007, with the bursting of the housing bubble in the US. For over 40 years there has been one recession after another: 1967, 1974, 1981, 1991, 2001. For decades unemployment has been a permanent plague, and the exploited have been suffering from mounting attacks on their living standards. Why?

Because capitalism is a system which produces not for human needs but for the market and for profit. There are vast unsatisfied needs but they are not solvent: in other words, the great majority of the population does not have the means to buy the commodities produced. If capitalism is in crisis, if hundreds of millions of human beings, and soon billions, have been hurled into intolerable misery and hunger, it's not because the system doesn't produce enough but because it produces more commodities than it can sell. Each time the bourgeoisie gets round this problem by resorting massively to credit and the creation of an artificial market. This is why the ‘recoveries' always pave the way for even bleaker tomorrows, since at the end of the day all this credit has to be reimbursed, the debts have to be called in. This is exactly what is happening today. All the ‘fabulous growth' of the last few years has been based entirely on debt. The world economy was living on credit, and that now it's time to foot the bill, the whole thing collapses like a pack of cards. The present convulsions of the capitalist economy are not the result of ‘bad management' by the political leaders, of speculation by ‘traders' or the irresponsible behaviour of the bankers. All these people have done no more than apply the laws of capitalism and it is precisely these laws that are leading the system towards ruin. This is why the billions and billions injected into the markets by all the states and their central banks will change nothing. Worse! They are only piling debt on debt, which is like trying to put a fire out with oil. The bourgeoisie is only showing its impotence with these desperate and sterile measures. Sooner or later all their bail-out plans are bound to fail. No real recovery is possible for the capitalist economy. No policy, whether of the right or the left, can save capitalism because this system is racked by an incurable, fatal illness.

Against mounting poverty, solidarity and class struggle!

Everywhere we are seeing comparisons with the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s. The images of those times are still in our memories: endless lines of unemployed workers, soup-kitchens for the poor, factories closing everywhere. But is the situation today identical? The answer is NO. It is much more serious, even if capitalism, which has learned from experience, has managed to avoid a brutal collapse thanks to the intervention of the state and better international coordination.

But there is another key difference. The terrible depression of the 1930s led to the Second World War. Will the present crisis end up in a Third World War? The flight towards war is certainly the bourgeoisie's only answer to its insurmountable crisis. And the only force that can oppose this is its mortal enemy, the international working class. In the 1930s, the world working class had been through a terrible defeat following the isolation of the 1917 revolution in Russia and it allowed itself to be dragged into a new imperialist massacre. But since the major struggles that began in 1968, today's working class has shown that it is not ready to shed its blood on behalf of the exploiting class. Over the last 40 years it has been through a number of painful defeats but it is still standing; and all over the world, especially since 2003, it has been fighting back more and more. The unfolding crisis of capitalism is going to mean terrible suffering for hundreds of millions of workers, not only in the underdeveloped countries but also in the developed ones - unemployment, poverty, even famine, but it is also going to provoke a movement of resistance by the exploited.

These struggles are absolutely necessary for putting a limit on the bourgeoisie's economic attacks, for preventing them from plunging us into absolute poverty. But it is clear that they cannot stop capitalism from sinking deeper and deeper into its crisis. This is why the resistance struggles of the working class respond to another need, an even more important one. They allow the exploited to develop their collective strength, their unity, their solidarity, their consciousness of the only alternative that can offer humanity a future: the overthrow of the capitalist system and its replacement by a society that operates on a completely different basis. A society no longer based on exploitation and profit, on production for a market, but on production for human need; a society organised by the producers themselves and not by a privileged minority. In short, a communist society.

For eight decades, all the sectors of the bourgeoisie, both right and left, have worked hand in hand to present the regimes which dominated Eastern Europe and China as ‘communist', when they were no more than a particularly barbaric form of state capitalism. It was a question of convincing the exploited that it is futile to dream of another world, that there was nothing on the horizon except capitalism. But now that capitalism is so clearly proving its historic bankruptcy, the struggles of the working class must be animated more and more by the perspective of a communist society.

Faced with the attacks of capitalism at the end of its tether; to put an end to exploitation, poverty, and the barbarism of capitalist war:

Long live the struggles of the world working class!

Workers of all countries, unite!

International Communist Current 25.10.08

www.internationalism.org [85]

BM Box 869, London WC1N 3XX

[1] Respectively: Paul Krugman (the last Nobel Prize winner in economics); Warren Buffet (an American investor, nicknamed the ‘oracle of Omaha', so much is the opinion of this billionaire from small town Nebraska respected in the world of high finance); Jacques Attali (economic adviser to French president Nicolas Sarkozy) and Laurence Parisot (president of the French bosses' association)

Pun Ngai is professor at the Social Research Center of the Peking University and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. At present she is on tour in five European countries to present the book "DAGONGMEI - women workers from Chinas world market factories tell their story" (Arbeiterinnen aus Chinas Weltmarktfabriken erzählen) which she has published together with her colleague Li Wanwei from the Industrial Relations institute in Hong Kong[1]. The occasion for this series of public talks is not least the appearance of their book in German.

October 10 2008 Pun Ngai presented this book in Cologne. Given the importance of the economic and military rise of China in recent decades, and the questions posed in relation to the future of this "economic miracle" in the light of the present agonies of world capitalism, it was no surprise that there was a big turnout for the Cologne meeting.

The subject of study of Pun Ngai is migrant labour within China - the proletarianisation of 120 Million peasants during the last 25 years - in particular the conditions of the "Dagongmei", literally the "working sisters". Pun Ngai and Li Wanwei present a series of interviews with young working women who have come from rural areas to the industrial city of Shenzhen in Southern China, one of the first of the special economic zones created by the Chinese government to attract foreign capital. In her presentation, Pun Ngai gave examples from the personal experience of such workers.

But above all, she was concerned to place this experience in a more global context, to "make sense" of developments which, without doubt, are of world wide importance. She put forward two main arguments which are at the centre of her analysis of developments in China.

Production and reproduction of labour power

The first is the separation between the sphere of production, which takes place in the cities, and the sphere of reproduction in the rural areas. A large part of the labour power for the "world market" factories is recruited in the countryside. The reproduction costs of this labour are borne by the peasant families themselves, on the basis of tiny subsistence plots of land. This explains to an large extent why the wages in China can be so much lower than in the older and more developed capitalist countries of the West or in Japan, where wage labour is for the most part reproduced on the basis of the wage labour system (in other words: where wages have to cover not only the reproduction costs of the workers themselves, but also of their children, the future generation of proletarians).

However, as was pointed out in the ensuing discussion, this "secret" of capitalist development is no Chinese specificity, but provides the basis for similar developments elsewhere in Asia or on other continents. Many of those who came to this meeting were looking for an answer to the question why China seems to have been more successful in this development than most of its rivals.

Dormitory capitalism

Here, the second main idea put forward by Pun Ngai is of great importance. This is what she calls the dormitory system. In Maoist China, (as in Stalinist Russia, we might add[2]) the free movement of labour within the country was not permitted. In particular, the whole population was registered as being either urban or rural dwellers. A peasant needed permission to move to the city and visa versa. With the economic "reforms" from Deng onwards, this restriction of the movement of labour was maintained. At first sight, that is surprising, in view of capital's need for free movement of labour in order to thrive. But the maintenance of these regulations make of the migrants in the cities "illegals" in their "own" country, without insurance, health care or educational facilities. Nor do they have the opportunity to form working class communities of their own in the urban centres. They are obliged to live in dormitories owned by the bosses. As such they are constantly under the control of their employers. As Pun Ngai pointed out, they cannot refuse to sell their bodies without facing eviction and being sent back to their villages. They are at any moment at the disposal of the "just in time" production which the world market requires. Moreover, as the victims of this system themselves say, they are "instantly disposable", "throw away" workers who can be sent back to the countryside as soon as they are no longer required or when their health has been ruined.

16-year old girls applying toxic glue with bare hands

Pun Ngai compared this process of proletarianisation with that in the first industrial country, in Great Britain, as described by Friedrich Engels in his famous study of the conditions of the working class in Britain. While pointing out the existence of a number of similarities, she also underlined two differences. For one thing, in Britain the point of departure for the rise of modern capitalism was the violent separation of the producers from the means of production, of the peasants from their land. In China, the Maoist land reforms left the peasantry with tiny private plots of their own, enough to avoid starvation, but not enough to live on. For this reason, the migration of the rural poor is "voluntary", officially taking place in infringement of the laws of the state. Moreover, young women in particular are motivated by cultural factors (as was pointing out during the discussion) in fleeing the backward, patriarchal world of the village. Secondly, as has already been pointed out, there is the specificity (Pun Ngai called it an incompleteness) of this proletarianisation, that the workers are kept under the threat of being sent back to the countryside. She stressed the traumatisms caused by the insecurity of this "in between status", which in the long term is unbearable.

In reply to a question from the floor, she pointed out that the Chinese government is presently considering the possibilities of a land reform facilitating the acquirement of private land. But the meaning of this "reform" would not be to permit the peasantry to enlarge their plots, which would make subsistence farming more feasible, and thus put a break on migration from rural areas. What is planned is essentially the encouragement of large landed estates, which on the contrary would fan the flames of this migration and provide new supplies of cheap labour in the cities.

A new generation of workers

Concerning the effects of these historical developments on the working class, Pun Ngai distinguished between the first and second generation of migrants. The first generation still had the hope of saving money and returning home. The men could hope to modernise their plots of land, the women to set up a small shops. But for the vast majority, such dreams were never realised, and many of those who attempted them ended up in financial ruin. The first generation was traumatised by this experience, marked by despair and an internalisation of their anger.

As opposed to this, the motto of the new generation is "no regrets" about leaving their villages. They are determined never to go back. The energy of these workers is directed towards the future and the outside, expressing itself in collective class actions. According to official figures, between 1993 and 2005 the number of registered "collective incidents" per year increased from 10,000 to 87,000. In the past three years in particular almost all parts of the class have shared experiences of this type. Protests and petitions are directed not only towards the employers but also the state administration and the official trade union apparatus. Pun Ngai reported discussions where militant minorities of workers were saying: "We must search for a great ideal! We need new internal values!"

These ideas, she said, are becoming more widespread today. She also reported that the women workers in particular are in some cases starting to transform the dormitories into places of contact, dissent and organisation between workers.

Participants also posed more general political questions. Somebody wanted to know when she thought China would become a democracy. She replies that this was not really her concern, and that democracy was something which needs definition. Her concern is the development of what she called grass roots democracy in the class. In reply to the question if workers today refer positively to what the questioner called the "socialism" of Mao, and if they have learnt anything positive from this "socialist" education for their present struggle, she said that workers sometimes use quotations from Mao in order to legally justify certain demands towards the state. On the attempts to stir up patriotic feelings about the new "greatness of China" (for instance on the occasion of the Olympic games) among the workers she said that this was fostered both by the west (through its aggressive discourse) and by the Chinese rulers themselves, and is a negative factor against the working class.

Of course everybody wanted to know how Pun Ngai expected the present world wide financial crisis would affect China. She said that it was likely to cause widespread unemployment and increase poverty, given the country's dependence on exports. After several years of rising wages, not least under the pressure of workers militancy, this would be likely to diminish the "bargaining power" of many sectors of the working class.

So many questions were posed by the floor that in the end there was unfortunately no time for the foreseen general discussion. However, it was pointed out that the system of making labour power illegal but tolerated, and thus particularly cheap and pliable, is not specific to China, but is increasing all over the world, including Europe and the United States. The specificity of China is the scale on which this weapon is employed. The dormitories regularly house between 5,000 and 10,000 workers per unit. The agglomerations of these compounds often cover areas as large as average European size cities.

In conclusion we can safely say that those who came to the meeting were profoundly moved by the presence, the combativity and the clarity of analysis of a representative of the working class from China[3].

Capitalism means world economy. Through world wide interconnection and the development of the class struggle, capitalism, against its own will, is creating conditions for the unification of its own gravediggers.

[1] Pun Ngai has already, in 1995, published, in English, a book called "Made in China". Li Wanwei has published a thesis on: "The Dynamics of Restructuring and Relocation: The Case of Hong Kong's Garment Industry".

Both women are involved in the "Chinese Working Women Network" (www.cwwn.org [89]).

[2] South Africa under apartheid adopted a not dissimilar system with its "Bantustans".

[3] It should be noted that, as a result of the opening of China to the world market, left intellectuals there are becoming more acquainted with a wider range of Marxist literature, such as the works of Rosa Luxemburg.

Since we wrote the article ‘Are we reliving a crash like 1929?', the media has already changed its tone, no longer playing down the extreme gravity of the present economic crisis or its similarities with 1929. But it is important to put all the current talk about ‘the end of capitalism' into a clear perspective.

As the world's media documented the global financial crisis the IMF issued a report using less sensational language, but admitting the same recession. "The world economy is now entering a major downturn in the face of the most dangerous shock in mature financial markets since the 1930s." The IMF also knew that the future is looking difficult: "The situation is exceptionally uncertain and subject to considerable downside risks."[1]

Recent headlines have been more succinct when they have proclaimed the ‘disaster', ‘hurricane', ‘tsunami' or ‘tectonic shifts' that capitalism faces. Markets are in ‘turmoil', ‘meltdown' or ‘mayhem'. A head of an equities trading firm described a "horrendous, cataclysmic end-of-the-world environment."[2] A broker said "Nothing will be like it was before" as "The world as we know it is going down." [3]Some drew back from announcing Armageddon, but the French Prime Minister said the world was at least on the edge of the abyss. ‘Abyss' conjures up visions of the bottomless pit, primal chaos and catastrophe. For the religious, it can mean hell.

For once politicians and media were telling a sort of truth. They mostly don't think that we're going to have an exact replica of the Depression of the 1930s, but admit that capitalism's crisis will not be limited to the finance sector, and will go on to have its impact on industry, trade, jobs and all our lives. It will, as they say in the US, go from Wall Street to Main Street.

It is the end of an era, but not in the way they say

There has been a lot of propaganda surrounding this latest lurch in the crisis. With the massive intervention of the state around the world the demise of ‘neoliberalism' has been proclaimed by the Right and Left. Conservative Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, thought "laissez faire is dead"[4]. The Socialist Workers Party celebrated the end of Reaganomics and Thatcherism as "free market capitalism has imploded and "history sweeps away a failed ideology"[5]. Francis Fukuyama (who once declared that history was dead) even thought that "the Reagan era should have ended some time ago"[6].

What these remarks have in common is an idea that somehow the state has played a lesser role during the last 30 years, only re-asserting itself in this time of crisis. In reality the economic crisis is a crisis of state capitalism, within which ‘neoliberalism' was a particular ideology (supported by the Right and attacked by the Left with its own variety of state capitalist ideology). It was precisely because of the experience of the 1929 Crash that the already growing role of the state was accelerated. Official figures show that the US federal government was 3 percent of the economy in 1929, as opposed to 20 percent today - and that's not even beginning to account for all the areas of control that the 50 individual states and state bodies like the Federal Reserve have throughout the economy.

This is one of the essential lessons from capitalism's crisis over the last year. The bankruptcy of capitalism can't be hidden. The state has had to come up with plans to rescue banks, insurance companies, currencies and money markets. It has not acted to help out the working class in any way whatsoever. Also, the extent of the debt that was holding back a ‘crash' was only possible through the sustained intervention of the state and international economic bodies such as the World Bank and the IMF. With the massive injection of funds into the financial sector there will be even more likelihood of attacks on the living standards of the vast majority of the world's population, in a lethal combination of recession, growing inflation and unemployment, and government cuts.

It is the end of an era because material reality has shown the degree to which the economic crisis can get out of control. It has also demonstrated that capitalism is utterly reliant on the state. Most of those who set themselves up as opponents of ‘neo-liberalism' were supporters of the ‘protective' powers of the state. It's even clearer now that the state is there only to protect capitalism.

Watershed for capitalism

Lies are exposed by material reality. The so-called ‘celtic tiger' of the Irish economy has, in the face of the storm, gone the same way as the rest. India's ‘emerging' economy is not in such great shakes either as many sectors are already being impacted by the extent of the crisis. With the development of a recession China will suffer a sever contraction of the markets where it hopes to sell its goods.

More importantly it shows that capitalism is a global system. There's been a lot of talk about greedy bankers and the need for more regulation, but there's a general admission that we've been witnessing something that is ‘systemic', that is, it's a crisis of a world system.

Billionaire financier George Soros, looking at the economic policies pursued in recent decades said in a television interview that "This whole enormous construct is built on false conceptions," adding "You can go a very long way. But in the end, reality rears its ugly head and that's what happened now." [7] It rears its ugly head, and then reality bites.

Robert Zoellick the President of the World Bank[8] said that the crisis was a "man-made catastrophe" that would have real consequences for real people. He warned that "For the poor, the costs of the crisis could be lifelong," and for "The poorest and most vulnerable groups risk the most serious - and in some cases permanent damage". This is why he thought that "populations around the world will respond with anger and fear."

That is indeed the prospect that the latest stage in the crisis opens up. It should be compared with what happened after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

2007-08 in comparison to 1989-91

The wall came down in 1989. The countries of eastern Europe broke away from the USSR, which itself broke up into 15 parts in 1991. People like Fukuyama talked about the end of history, the end of communism, the end of the class struggle. What existed in eastern Europe was a particular stalinist form of state capitalism, and, history, as has unsurprisingly been revealed, had not come to an end. However, the working class was just a bystander while great events occurred, and the bourgeoisie conducted a whole campaign which put over the idea of a world in which there is no working class, just workers who are citizens like any others. This was one of the factors that led to disorientation in the working class throughout the 1990s.

But what about the crisis of 2007- 2008? How do Fukuyama and co respond to the bite of reality?

Fukuyama (in an article entitled "The Fall of America, Inc."[9]) admits that "The scale of the Wall Street crackup could scarcely be more gargantuan" and thought that "Washington failed to adequately regulate the financial sector and allowed it to do tremendous harm to the rest of the society." Accordingly "there is a growing consensus on the need to re-regulate many parts of the economy" and "The entire American public sector-underfunded, deprofessionalized and demoralized-needs to be rebuilt and be given a new sense of pride. There are certain jobs that only the government can fulfil." In the end he thinks that what was wrong with the centrally planned economies of eastern Europe was that they were "welfare states on steroids". For him "a certain vision of capitalism has collapsed" and all that the American model of capitalism has to do is "reinvent itself once again". So, after all that, all that was wrong with the economies of eastern Europe was the "steroids."

In the 1990s, with the collapse of the USSR, there were many in the West who behaved as though they had achieved a great victory, not only over the Russian bloc, but also over the working class. The crisis of 2007-08 shows the working class what that ‘victory of capitalism' actually amounted to. It's true that the economic crises of the past have not always led to mass strikes or revolution. The example of the 1930s is there for all to see. But today's open crisis, in its depth and obviously global nature, is a material reality that it will surely not be possible to ignore, or to disguise.

There was no end of ‘history', or end to the class struggle, as the ideologues of the 1990s claimed. But also, today, we are not witnessing the ‘end of capitalism'. Ruling classes across the world have looked into the abyss, seen catastrophe, and despite all manner of imperialist antagonisms, co-ordinated a response. There will be further massive attacks on the working class, continuing the offensive on wages, jobs, services, pensions etc. That's the only perspective that capitalism has, and if there is no resistance to it, capitalism will drag humanity not only towards the abyss of poverty but towards outright self-destruction. The only alternative can come from the working class in its struggles. These are limited at present, but have been slowly developing over the last five years. In the period to come workers will feel even more intensely the effects of capitalism's crisis, but, with some of the illusions from both Right and Left discredited, there is more possibility that not only workers' struggles but workers' consciousness of capitalism will grow. This will be at the basis of the mass strikes to come. Growing consciousness of the reality of capitalism also helps the understanding that it has to be overthrown by the revolution of the working class.  

Car 15/10/8

[1] Financial Times 8/10/8

[2] Baltimore Sun 14/10/8

[3] Spiegel Online 10/10/8

[4] Daily Telegraph 13/10/8

[5] Socialist Worker 11/10/8

[6] Newsweek 13/10/8

[7] Daily Telegraph 13/10/8

[8] Daily Telegraph 13/10/8

[9] Newsweek 13/10/8

In WR 309, we published a contribution from one of our close sympathisers (‘Baboon'):  ‘Baboon's revenge: marxism versus feminism on the origins of humanity [98] ', a report of a meeting presented by Chris Knight of the Radical Anthropology Group at the Anarchist Bookfair in London last October.

In our introduction we said that we felt that Baboon's contribution raised some interesting questions about human origins and early human society and that we hoped to come back to this at a later date.

Baboon's article is very critical of Knight's basic thesis, rejecting it as anarchist and feminist. Having recently read Chris Knight's major theoretical work Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of Culture (Yale University press, 1991), I feel that his work deserves rather more consideration, even if some of Baboon's key criticisms certainly express valid concerns.

Before saying anything about Knight's theory, some points about his political background. Knight is not as far as I can see an anarchist - rather he is basically a Trotskyist in political outlook. However, we should also bear in mind that he is a professional anthropologist and his work as such cannot be mechanically reduced to his politics. Furthermore, Knight does not espouse an overtly feminist ideology but sees his work in direct continuity with that of Marx and especially Engels. And while we are talking about general, historical questions, it is perfectly possible for academics who hold leftist views on more immediate political issues to make worthwhile contributions to marxist theory provided these contributions are evaluated in a critical manner from a proletarian perspective.

The basic problem raised in Knight's book is the role of woman in the transition from nature to culture. An important point of departure is Knight's rejection of the dominant trends in official anthropology, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, which for a long time has been dominated by functionalist, empiricist and relativist theories which have moved very far indeed from the evolutionist spirit of early anthropological studies, which saw the study of ‘primitive' and ‘exotic' human societies as a key to understanding the origins of humanity and its basic cultural institutions. These later schools tended to focus instead on the workings of particular social groups and aimed to understand their cultural forms (myth, ritual, kinship, etc) purely in terms of the ‘function' they perform for that particular group. The avoidance of ‘grand theories of origins' and of ‘sweeping generalisations' about human society, as Knight points out, was particularly useful for colonial administrators (and the anthropologists employed by them) who had to ‘deal' with tribal groupings and only sought to understand their institutions as a means to controlling them for the economic and political benefit of the Empire. We could add that this retreat into the small and the immediate is a reflection of a general trend in the bourgeoisie's thinking about society and history in its epoch of decline, since any genuine historical and social clarity can only remind the ruling class of the limitations and unavoidable demise of the mode of production it serves. In any case, Knight makes no apology for returning to the fundamental issue of the ‘transition from ape to man' and the origins of culture, which had been of such central interest both to the founders of scientific socialism and to the early pioneers of anthropology[1].   

At the same time, Knight's thesis is to some extent a riposte to the theories of the French structuralist Levi-Strauss, who represents a school of thought that is less coy than the Anglo-Saxons about posing the question of origins. According to Levi-Strauss, culture emerges from nature through a kind of social contract among the males in early or proto-human society: it is the men who agree among themselves to exchange females in a manner regulated by custom rather than simply imposing a hierarchy of physical force to establish access to the females. Following Engels, Knight argues that ‘woman' in the earliest human societies was not a mere passive object, a simple instrument for the satisfaction of male desire. In fact, Knight sees the transition from primate to human culture in an act of conscious social rebellion by the female of the species, the ‘sex strike', through which the females overturned the rule of the tyrannical male who had hitherto won the ‘right' to enjoy his female through his monopoly of physical force - a right which was not accompanied by any ‘duties' such as the provision of females with meat or a settled space to look after their young, since females were obliged to follow the male hunters, carrying their young with them, in order to then compete for sexual favours in exchange for a share of the kill. In Knight's ‘myth', the origin of human culture lies essentially in the discovery of the power of solidarity, through the females' collective refusal of sex until the males had brought home the bacon; in doing so, Knight speculates, the females won over the less dominant males, previously excluded from the ‘harem', who could more readily understand the value of forgoing the immediate satisfaction of consuming the product of the hunt.

Furthermore, Knight argues, the sex strike was reinforced by the ability of the human female to synchronise menstruation and establish it as a ‘period' in which sexual relations are banned, enabling the men to go off and hunt without fear of the females being enjoyed sexually by rival males. The idea is that this synchronisation was timed by the 29.5-day cycle of the moon, which in turn regulated the period of the hunt.

Alongside the whole complex of moon and menstruation myths and rituals, Knight refers to a number of very widespread institutions and beliefs which for him are an echo of this formative ‘event' (or rather, transformative process) in human history. Particularly important is the ‘own kill' rule which appears as a crucial basis for the distribution of the products of the hunt in numerous hunter-gatherer societies. According to this rule it is expressly forbidden for the hunter (almost invariably a male) to consume, either in part, or wholly, the products of his own kill (or at least certain forms of kill, usually the larger animals). These products must then be returned to the community through a variety of often extremely complex totemic/kinship laws[2].    

Knight also talks about the ubiquitous ‘myth of matriarchy': according to many hunting peoples, there was once a time when the women had the monopoly over the tribe's sacred rituals, until the men rebelled against this state of affairs and appropriated control of the sacred for themselves. In Australia, these myths are connected to the symbol of the Rainbow Serpent and to the practise of male incision and circumcision. For Knight, who does not doubt that tribal mythologies (especially in a society with such a vast period of continuity as that of the Australian aborigines) contain an important germ of historical memory, all these symbolisms are a remnant of a phase in which female power played a crucial role in the formation of culture, and represent a real attempt of the men to reappropriate control over social life: in later myths and rituals, the androgynous Rainbow Serpent may be presented as a power that punishes females who break tribal taboos, while practises which draw blood from the penis are seen as an attempt to gain the power of female menstruation by imitating it. Indeed, Knight talks about a male ‘counter-revolution' which at some point followed the ‘human revolution' led by the females. He even constructs a possible scenario in the case of Australia, in which this process corresponded to the transition away from the hunting of large animals who were becoming extinct as a result of climate change and human predation.

The principal merit of Knight's book, in my opinion, is that by seeking to return to the question of the origins of culture it offers an alternative to the dominant trend of blinkered anti-theoretical empiricism in anthropological theory. Knight sees himself as a sociobiologist, but one who has tried to take the findings of this approach out of the hands of those who have used it to develop deeply reactionary arguments about the ‘territorial imperative' and the inevitability of male domination. He does this by emphasising the central role not only of women but of solidarity in the evolution of the modern human being.

This said, Knight's book is stimulating as much for the arguments that seem convincing as for the questions it does not seem to pose or to answer satisfactorily. Some examples:

• - for Engels, the "world historical defeat of the female sex" which he talks about in Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State takes place as a result of the rise of private property and the gradual emergence of class divisions. For Knight, there is already a ‘male counter-revolution' at the most primordial level of human culture (as in the ‘paleolithic' culture of Australia, for Testart the epitome of primitive communism). The material basis of this counter-revolution is only partly dealt with and there is no attempt to explain why his views differ substantially from Engels on this point. Furthermore, Knight does not explain why different hunter-gatherer societies do not have the same degree of male monopoly of social life or the sacred as they do in the Australian tribes (although there as well there are many counter-tendencies to this);
• - One of Baboon's most important criticisms of Knight's thesis is that, apart from a couple of references in the book that are not followed up, he seems to show no interest at all in what for Marx and Engels was an absolutely central element in the emergence of the specifically human consciousness of the world: not only the question of reproduction, but the question of production, of labour, and the social relations which permit its development. Indeed, when Baboon raised the question of tool-making as a factor in the evolution of human consciousness, Knight described this as an "anti-woman" approach (as though the use of tools were the exclusive privilege of males). It is here that Knight seems to slip into a purely feminist approach, as there can hardly be a serious marxist account of human origins that doesn't at least acknowledge and assimilate the contribution of Marx, Engels, Pannekoek and others on "the role of labour in the transition from ape to man";
• - Baboon also takes exception to Knight's view of primate existence, challenging his tendency to see primate society as a ‘war of each against all'. In fact, marxist theorists have always see the existence of certain social instincts inherited from our animal ancestors as playing a key part in the development of human solidarity and moral feelings. Also questionable is Knight's view that human culture, with its characteristic elements of art, language, symbolism, etc, only emerged relatively recently (around 70,000 years ago, perhaps less), excluding previous forms of homo sapiens including the Neanderthals. A number of paleoanthropologists would not agree that Neanderthal man was totally devoid of culture;
• - One final point, although there could be many: Knight notes certain similarities between his scenario and Freud's ‘revolt against the primal father'. But he does not follow this up. For Freud, the inauguration of human culture also coincided with the inauguration of guilt and repression, a problem that Knight does not consider at all, at least not in this work. In my opinion (and however ‘symbolic' Freud's scenario in Totem and Taboo may be) a serious attempt to understand humanity's origins cannot do without a thorough engagement with the questions that Freud posed.

This text is an individual contribution, as was Baboon's, and I hope it will provoke further discussion of these issues.  

Amos 4/10/08

[1] In doing so, Knight is aware that in a certain sense he is constructing a myth or ‘Just-So' story, rather in the manner of Freud with his idea of the rebellion of the young males against the ‘Primal Father' who held the monopoly over the females, as expounded in Totem and Taboo. We are not asked to take Knight's scenario literally but as a model to be examined. 

[2] In his work Le Communisme Primitif (1986) the French anthropologist Alain Testart takes the own kill rule, or the rule of ‘what is mine is not mine but yours' as the key to understanding the social relations of primitive communism. Knight acknowledges Testart's work, particularly his investigation of the "ideology of blood" in primitive society, although he finds his ultimate explanation for this ideology "disappointing". I would agree with this; but it is unfortunate that Knight doesn't seek to investigate the key question posed by Testart's book - the definition of primitive communism as a mode of production. Knight uses the term in a rather loose manner throughout Blood Relations. 

The explosion of anger and revolt by the present generation of proletarianised young people in Greece is not at all an isolated or particular phenomenon. It has its roots in the world crisis of capitalism and the confrontation between these proletarians and the violent repression which has unmasked the real nature of the bourgeoisie and its state terror. It is in direct continuity with the mobilisation of the younger generation on a class basis against the CPE law in France in 2006 and the LRU ‘reform' of the universities in 2007, when the students from universities and high schools saw themselves above all as proletarians rebelling against their future conditions of exploitation. The whole of the bourgeoisie in the main European countries has understood all this very well and has confessed its fears of the contagious spread of similar social explosions with the deepening of the crisis. It is significant, for example, that the bourgeoisie in France has just taken a step back by suddenly suspending its programme of ‘reform' for the high schools. Furthermore, the international character of the protests and the militancy among university students and above all high school students has already been expressed very strongly.

In Italy, there were massive demonstrations on 25 October and 14 November behind the slogan "we don't want to pay for the crisis" against the Geimini decree, which is being challenged because it involves budgetary cuts in the education sector, resulting in the non-renewal of the contracts of 87,000 temporary teachers and of 45,000 teachers in the ABA (the main IT services company) and in reduced public funding for the universities.

In Germany, on 12 November, 120,000 high school students came out onto the streets [108] of the main cities in the country, with slogans like "capitalism is crisis" in Berlin, where they besieged the provincial parliament. The same in Hanover.

In Spain, on 13 November, hundreds of thousands of students demonstrated in over 70 towns against the new European directives (the Bolgona directives) for the reform of higher education and universities, spreading the privatisation of the faculties and increasing the number of training courses in the enterprises.  

Many of them see their own reflection in the struggle of the Greek students. There have been solidarity demonstrations and rallies in a number of countries following the repression inflicted on the Greek students - some of these solidarity demonstrations also faced more or less brutal repression.  

The scale of this mobilisation against the same kinds of measures by the state is not at all surprising. The reform of the education system being undertaken on a European level is part of an attempt to habituate young working class generations to a restricted future and the generalisation of precarious employment or the dole.

The refusal, the revolt of the new educated proletarian generation faced with this wall of unemployment, this ocean of uncertainty reserved for them by capitalism in crisis is also generating sympathy from proletarians of all generations.   

Violence by a minority or massive struggle against exploitation and state terror?

The media, which are the servants of the lying propaganda of capital, have constantly tried to deform the reality of what's been happening in Greece since the murder by police bullet of 15 year old Alexis Andreas Grigoropoulos on 6 December. They have presented the confrontations with the police as the action of a handful of anarchists and ultra-left students coming from well to do backgrounds, or of marginalised wreckers. They have broadcast endless images of violent clashes with the police and put across the image of young hooded rioters smashing the windows of boutiques and banks or pillaging stores.   

This the same method of falsifying reality we saw during the anti-CPE mobilisation in 2006 in France, which was identified with the riots on the city outskirts the year before. We saw the same gross method used against the students fighting the LRU in 2007 in France - they were accused of being "terrorists" and "Khmer Rouge"!

But if the heart of the ‘troubles' took place in the Greek ‘Latin Quarter' of Exarchia, it is difficult to make this lie stick today: how could this uprising be the work of a few wreckers or anarchists when it spread like wildfire to all the main cities of the country and to the Greek islands of Chios and Samos and even to the most touristy cities like Corfu or Heraklion in Crete?

The reasons for the anger

All the conditions were there for a the discontent of a whole mass of young proletarians, full of disquiet about their future, to explode in Greece, which is a concentrated expression of the dead-end into which capitalism is steering the present generation: when those who are called the "600 euro generation" enter into working life, they have the feeling of being ripped off. Most of the students have to get paid work in order to survive and continue their studies, most of it unofficial and underpaid jobs; even when the jobs are slightly better paid, part of their labour remains undeclared and this reduces their access to social benefits. They are generally deprived of social security; overtime hours are not paid and often they are unable to leave the family home until they are 35, since they don't earn enough to pay for a roof over their heads. 23% of the unemployed in Greece are young people (the official unemployment rate for 15-24 year olds is 25.2%) as an article published in France indicates: "these students don't feel in any way protected; the police shoot at them, education traps them, work passes them by, the government lies to them". The unemployment of the young and their difficulties in entering the world of work has thus created a general climate of unease, of anger and generalised insecurity. The world economic crisis is going to bring on new waves of massive redundancies. In 2009, 100,000 job-cuts are predicted in Greece, which would mean a 5% increase in unemployment. At the same time, 40% of workers earn less than 1,100 Euros net, and Greece has the highest rate of workers on the poverty line out of the 27 EU states: 14%.   

It's not only the students who have come out onto the streets, but also poorly paid teachers and many other wage earners facing the same problems, the same poverty, and animated by the same spirit of revolt. The brutal repression against the movement, whose most dramatic episode was the murder of that 15 year old, has only amplified and generalised feelings of solidarity and social discontent. As one student puts it, many parents of pupils have been deeply shocked and angered: "Our parents have found out that their children can die like that in the street, to a cop's bullet". They are becoming aware that they live in a decaying society where their children won't have the same standard of living as them. During the many demonstrations, they have witnessed the violent beatings, the strong-arm arrests, the firing of real bullets and the heavy hand of the riot police (the MAT). 

The occupiers of the Polytechnic School, the central focus of the student protest, have denounced state terror, but we find this same anger against the brutality of the repression in slogans such as "bullets for young people, money for the banks". Even more clearly, a participant in the movement declare: "We have no jobs, no money, a state that is bankrupt with the crisis, and the only response to all that is to give guns to the police"

This anger is not new: the Greek students were already mobilising in June 2006 against the reform of the universities, the privatisation of which will result in the exclusion of the least well off students. The population had also expressed its anger with government incompetence at the time of the forest fires in the summer of 2007, which left 67 dead: the government has still not paid any compensation to the many victims who lost houses or goods. But it was above the wage-earners who mobilised massively against the reform of the pension system at the beginning of 2008 with two days of widely followed general strikes in two months, and demonstrations of over a million people against the suppression of pensions for the most vulnerable professions and the threat to the right of workers to claim retirement at 50.

Faced with the workers' anger, the general strike of 10 December controlled by the trade unions was aimed at putting a damper on the movement; meanwhile the opposition, with the Socialist and Communist parties to the fore, called for the resignation of the present government and the holding of elections. This has not succeeded in channelling the anger and bringing the movement to a halt, despite the multiple manoeuvres of the left parties and the unions to block the dynamic towards the extension of the struggle, and despite the efforts of the whole bourgeoisie to isolate the young people from the other generations and the working class as a whole by pushing them into sterile confrontations with the police. Throughout these days and nights, the clashes have been incessant: violent charges by the police wielding batons and using tear gas, beatings and arrests in huge numbers.

The young generation of workers expresses most clearly the feeling of disillusionment and disgust with the utterly corrupt political apparatus. Since the end of the war, three families have shared power, with the Caramanlis dynasty for the right and the Papandreou dynasty for the left taking it in turns to run the country, involving themselves in all kinds of scandals. The conservatives came to power in 2004 after a period in which the Socialists were up to their neck in intrigues. Many of the protestors see the political and trade union apparatus as totally discredited: "The fetishism of money has taken over society. The young people want a break with this society without soul or vision". Today, with the development of the crisis, this generation of proletarians has not only developed a consciousness of capitalist exploitation, which it feels in its very bones, but also a consciousness of the necessity for a collective struggle, by spontaneously putting forward class methods and class solidarity. Instead of sinking into despair, it draws its confidence in itself from the sense of being the bearer of a different future, spending all its energy in rising up against the rotting society around them. The demonstrators thus proudly say of their movement: "we are an image of the future in the face of the sombre image of the past". If the situation today is very reminiscent of May 1968, the awareness of what's at stake goes well beyond it.

The radicalisation of the movement

On 16 December, the students managed to take over part of the government TV station NET and unfurled banners on screen saying "Stop watching the telly - everyone onto the streets!", and launched an appeal; "the state is killing. Your silence arms them. Occupation of all public buildings!" The HQ of the anti-riot police in Athens was attacked and one of their patrol wagons was burned. These actions were quickly denounced by the government as "an attempt to overturn democracy", and also condemned by the Greek Communist Party, the KKE. On 17 December, the building which houses the main trade union confederation of the country, the GEEE, in Athens, was occupied by proletarians who called themselves "insurgent workers" and invited all proletarians to make this a place for general assemblies open to all wage earners, students and unemployed (see their declaration on our site [109] ). They hung a huge banner on the Acropolis called for a mass demonstration the next day. That evening, fifty odd union bureaucrats and heavies tried to get the HQ back under their control but they ran away when student reinforcements chanting ‘solidarity', the majority of them anarchists, came from the University of Economics, which had also been occupied and transformed into a place for meetings and discussions open to all workers. The association of Albanian immigrants, among others, distributed a text proclaiming their solidarity with the movement, entitled "these days are ours as well!". There were repeated calls for an indefinite general strike from the 18th onwards. The unions were forced to call a three hour strike in the public sector on that day. 

On the morning of the 18th, another high school student, 16, taking part in a sit-in near his school in a suburb of Athens, was wounded by a bullet. On the same day, several radio and TV stations were occupied by demonstrators, notably in Tripoli, Chania and Thessalonika. The building of the chamber of commerce was occupied in Patras and there were new clashes with the police. The huge demonstration in Athens was violently repressed: for the first time, new types of weapons were used by the anti-riot forces: paralysing gas and deafening grenades. A leaflet against state terror was signed "Girls in revolt" and circulated in the University of Economics. The movement began to perceive, in a confused way, its own geographical limits: this is why it welcomed with enthusiasm the demonstrations of international solidarity that have taken place in France, Berlin, Rome, Moscow, Montreal or New York and declared "this support is very important to  us". The occupiers of the Polytechnic School called for an "international day of mobilisation against state murder" on 20 December; but to overcome the isolation of this proletarian uprising in Greece, the only way forward is the development of solidarity and of class struggle on an international scale.  

Iannis (19 December) 

As we put this article online we have learned that massive general assemblies are being held in the universities in Greece and that in these debates the students are comparing this movement to may 68 in France. We invite our readers to keep looking at our site which will aim to keep up with the evolution of the situation. They should also follow in particular the coverage on www.libcom.org [110]

We have just received the declaration below, originally posted on libcom by a comrade from Greece. While we don't know the background to these events they seem to us sufficiently important to be given the widest possible distribution. GSEE (General Confederation of Greek Workers) is the national trade union in Greece.

DECLARATION: We will either determine our history ourselves or let it be determined without us

We, manual workers, employees, jobless, temporary workers, local or migrants, are not passive tv-viewers. Since the murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos on Saturday night we participate in the demonstrations, the clashes with the police, the occupations of the centre or the neighborhoods. Time and again we had to leave work and our daily obligations to take the streets with the students, the university students and the other proletarians in struggle.

WE DECIDED TO OCCUPY THE BUILDING OF GSEE

• To turn it into a space of free expression and a meeting point of workers.
• To disperse the media-touted myth that the workers were and are absent from the clashes, and that the rage of these days was an affair of some 500 "mask-bearers", "hooligans" or some other fairy tale, while on the tv-screens the workers were presented as victims of the clash, while the capitalist crisis in Greece and Worldwide leads to countless layoffs that the media and their managers deal as a "natural phenomenon".
• To flay and uncover the role of the trade union bureaucracy in the undermining of the insurrection -and not only there. GSEE and the entire trade union mechanism that supports it for decades and decades, undermine the struggles, bargain our labor power for crumblings, perpetuate the system of exploitation and wage slavery. The stance of GSEE last Wednesday is quite telling: GSEE cancelled the programmed strikers' demonstration, stopping short at the organization of a brief gathering in Syntagma Sq., making simultaneously sure that the people will be dispersed in a hurry from the Square, fearing that they might get infected by the virus of insurrection.
• To open up this space for the first time -as a continuation of the social opening created by the insurrection itself-, a space that has been built by our contributions, a space from which we were excluded. For all these years we trusted our fate on saviours of every kind, and we end up losing our dignity. As workers we have to start assuming our responsibilities, and to stop assigning our hopes to wise leaders or "able" representatives. We have to acquire a voice of our own, to meet up, to talk, to decide, and to act. Against the generalized attack we endure. The creation of collective "grassroot" resistances is the only way.
• To propagate the idea of self-organization and solidarity in working places, struggle committees and collective grassroot procedures, abolishing the bureaucrat trade unionists.

All these years we gulp the misery, the pandering, the violence in work. We became accustomed to counting the crippled and our dead - the so-called "labor accidents". We became accustomed to ingore the migrants -our class brothers- getting killed. We are tired living with the anxiety of securing a wage, revenue stamps, and a pension that now feels like a distant dream.
As we struggle not to abandon our life in the hands of the bosses and the trade union representatives, likewise we will not abandon no arrested insurgent in the hands of the state and the juridical mechanism.
IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF THE DETAINED
NO CHARGE TO THE ARRESTED
SELF-ORGANIZATION OF THE WORKERS' GENERAL STRIKE
WORKERS' ASSEMBLY IN THE "LIBERATED" BUILDING OF GSEE
Wendesday, 17 December 2008, 18:00
General Assembly of Insurgent Workers

The banner hanging from the occupied building reads as follows: 

From labor "accidents"
to the murders in cold blood
State - Capital kill
No persecution
Immediate release
of the arrested
GENERAL STRIKE
Workers' self-organization
will become the bosses' grave
General Assembly of Insurgent Workers

During the summer of 2008, the ICC held two well-attended public meetings on the west coast, one in Los Angeles (July 19th) and in San Francisco-Oakland (July 26th). Both forums were only possible thanks to the local help of comrades sympathetic towards the ICC, who provided the meeting places and arranged local publicity. We are extremely thankful for this help. Both discussions were on "May ‘68 and the Resurgence of the Working Class Struggles Worldwide."

1. The ICC Public Forum in Los Angeles

In Los Angeles, the Public Forum was held at the ‘South California Peoples' Library'[1]. There were two presentations, the first by a local militant who drew up an assessment of 30 years of anarchist activism in the US, and the second by the ICC on the international impact of May ‘68 and the subsequent workers' struggles worldwide, heralding the ending of the counterrevolutionary period.

A lively discussion followed about the shared characteristic of both presentations to distance themselves from the violence provoked by the forces of state repression. It was argued that in the end the anarchist and black liberation movements in the past were extremely vulnerable to getting consumed by these violent temptations, ultimately wasting militant energies and resources in paying for costly legal defenses and fundraising.  In many instances violent incidents and actions involved were not acts of class violence by the proletariat, but were acts initiated by adventurists, provocateurs, or petty bourgeois individualists. Instead of effectively fighting the system by  linking the social problems to the struggle of the working class,  these movements dissipated militant energies, burnt comrades out, sent people to jail, without being able to construct organizations that can help to develop revolutionary perspectives.

One of the participants recalled how some years ago in Los Angeles, during an anti-globalization demonstration, protesters were prepared to attack the CNN studios, when he suddenly saw cops deploying their forces. He instantly realized it was a trap and helped to disband and saved a lot of innocent people from getting arrested. For him, this decision was a turning point, it made him reflect about the ineffectiveness of the violent confrontations. It made him think about breaking out of this self created ghetto mentality that frequently characterizes certain anarchist groups. But for some years he did not know how to do it, until he came across ICC analysis which seemed to contain more perspectives for the struggles. Linked to this was a discussion of the nihilist orientation, which isolates the generations and drives them to  dead-end partial struggles instead of bringing the generations together in their attempts to destroy capitalist exploitation, as was done by the French student movement in 2006, which invited unemployed workers, pensioners and urban and suburban youth to their daily general assemblies.

Linked to the first[2] and the second presentation[3] we also discussed the present struggles and their parallels and differences with May ‘68:  the development of a new period of struggles since 2003 and the importance of solidarity in those movements (i.e., NYC transit strike with demands concerning the future generation, etc), and the reemergence of consciousness through the development of discussion circles all over the world.[4] The ICC said it stimulates the life of discussion circles because the current historic period more than ever needs theoretical deepening and reflection within the working class. This is in sharp contrast to the leftists who suck the life out of these discussion circles in their role as the extreme left of the state capitalist apparatus in blocking the development of genuine class consciousness.

These political questions became even clearer in the clash of ideas with a Trotskyist sympathizer. At the end of the discussion someone invited the others to attend the first meeting of a newly created discussion circle in LA, an initiative that was welcomed by other participants[5].

2. The Public Forum of the ICC in San Francisco-Oakland

A week later another Public Forum was held at the Niebyl-Proctor Library[6] in Oakland, the area where there had been a historically significant wildcat strike just after the war in 1946.[7] Although it was a holiday period a wide range of the political milieu of the Bay Area showed up for debate, as was observed by one of the participants: "I did a headcount at one point and there were more like 25 people -- coming from a fairly wide variety of political perspectives which were: left communist, council communist, Marxist humanist, pro-situ, post-left anarchist, conventional leftist ( the rest must've been out electioneering) (...). Despite an infamous Bay Area crank claiming that there are no left communists in the Bay Area, close to a dozen of the people at the event would describe themselves as such. And several other local left communists didn't attend because they were  away on their summer holiday".

We received also some feedback from the same comrade about the presentation and the open discussion:"The presentation was quite good and flowed from an account of the working class upsurge in '68 through subsequent struggles to the radical possibilities for working class self-activity today. I agreed with nearly everything, but my only reservation is that I don't share the presenters version of decadence theory. Other than that, it was great fodder for discussion. And the discussion was equally spirited, comradely and interesting. With the exception of the very few very brief conspiracies of a fascist threat, most comments were insightful and affirmative of radical possibilities in the present. All in all a worthwhile forum".[8]

Although we cannot reflect the whole richness and variety of subjects that were brought up in the discussion, we would like to highlight some of the major points that were debated.

a) The Link between students' and workers' struggles

There was first a questioning of the role of the students in 1968 and today. Out of the discussion came a general agreement on the petit bourgeois character of the student revolt in the 1960s and its incapacity to join the workers movement in the US. Especially in the US as one participant said: "we had more free time than now and were much more implicated in the ‘civil rights' movement", which was in fact a democratic campaign and reinforced the illusions in the capitalist system.  In contrast, today many more students have been proletarianized, i.e. many have to combine study and work and are therefore capable of linking their struggles to the working class. In 2006 in France the student movement invited unemployed, pensioners and urban jobless youth to their assemblies; in 2006  in Chile and in 2007 in Venezuela they confronted the ‘left icons' of the bourgeois state (Bachelet and Chavez). This social context of proletarianization and the increased role of women in the struggle helped the movement avoid the trap of the ‘heroic' violence of the 1960s, and on the contrary helped to extend their movement towards the working class and the older generations.

b) How to characterize the workers' strike wave of the 1960's?

Another discussion focused on how to judge the strike wave that broke out in the 1960's. According to a comrade from ‘News & Letters', the 1956 uprising in Hungary was more ‘radical' than that in 1968, because it posed the ‘question of the content of socialism'. In the discussion we underlined the difference between ‘radical' and isolated uprisings during a period of counter-revolution, such as 1956, and the waves of struggles in after 1968 period, with their influence on each other, reaching a high point with the mass strike in Poland in 1980. All these struggles had in common the features of struggles in decadence (ever since 1902 in Holland, 1903 in Belgium and 1905 in Russia, as described by R. Luxemburg): spontaneous strikes, general assemblies, chosen strike committees, confrontations with unions, etc. These struggles spread all over the globe - in industrialized countries of both the western and eastern blocs, but also in the Third World like China, Mozambique, Angola, Algeria, Zimbabwe were they confronted the new ‘national liberation regimes', demystifying their so called ‘socialist character'.

c) How to Interpret the Economic Crisis?

There was an important contribution on "the falling rate of profit as the cause of the crisis and the margin of maneuver of the ruling class, installing the misery little by little in order not to put its system in danger. So slowly we are getting used to a miserable life affected by desindustrialization and globalization and its terrible exploitation in India and China".

The ICC pointed out that two factors were involved in causing the economic crisis: falling rate of profit, but also saturation of markets. Mass unemployment in the industrialized world, terrible exploitation in newly industrialized countries and the threat of mounting destruction of the planet make the overthrow of capitalism an absolute necessity, but it can only be accomplished by a class conscious proletariat, that has to seize political power before it can start to destroy the laws of capitalist production and  wage labor.

There was also some discussion on how to interpret the boom in China and its capacity to contain social unrest (even if there are violent outbursts, the social unrest does not yet threaten the system as such, and can derail many struggles there into anti-corruption fights).

d) Other questions and perspectives

A comrade who described herself as a council communist raised the question of the ‘usefulness of demands.' In response, it was argued that demands were the first necessary step in the struggle towards putting into question wage labor and the capitalist mode of production. In this effort the stakes are high and the proletariat has to face a treacherous enemy - the unions (its former class organs). The ICC emphasized the positive and hopeful features of the  class struggle since 2003, underlining in its very demands and actions the need for solidarity and open debate within the proletariat. Another comrade mentioned was the upsurge of discussion circles all over the globe: the tip of the iceberg in the emergence of a new generation of future proletarian revolutionaries. It is particularly important for the older generation of working class revolutionaries to pass the torch to this new generation with sufficient skill and patience and to be open to learning from the new generation as well.

This led to a discussion of the urgent  need for a ‘culture of debate', the need to end the period of monolithism so strong in 1968 ("I am right and you are totally wrong"), to deepen the question of ‘ethics' and ‘solidarity'[9] for the proletarian struggle.

Towards the end of the meeting, someone brought up the existence of difficulties and personal clashes between comrades [there had been in the past some members of the discussion circle in San Francisco accusing others in an inappropriate and unworthy manner]. The ICC responded that this is a real problem we have to address: we all bear the scars of the capitalist system's exploitation and dehumanization.  We have to learn to become more human and understanding of each other, to show more empathy and solidarity. In this sense we can learn from the younger generation. ‘The teachers must also be taught'. An appeal was made towards the younger comrades to learn from the recent events and bridge the gap between the generations.

At the end the ICC publications of ‘Internationalism' and ‘International Review' and some ICC pamphlets and books were passed through the room.[10]  

We want to thank the Niebyl Proctor Library and the members of the local discussion circle for their fraternal help and hope they continue their efforts to deepen their revolutionary understanding of how to fight this barbaric capitalist exploitation system. For us it was a boost to see so many comrades participate in a proletarian debate.

JZ, November 2008

[1] https://www.socallib.org/ [115]

[2] "... so I decided to leave the ghetto and look for a possibility to reach a wider perspective and came across the positions of the ICC, who has widened my scoop in the analysis of the world situation and defend internationalist approach for the workers' movement".

[3] "... I had the privilege to hear a communist spread the gospel according to Marx without reverting to Stalinist dogmatic lines. I was impressed with the down to earth non preachy style of presentation".

[4] References were made to the Orientation Texts of the ICC on ‘Solidarity & Confidence' Part 1 [116] and Part 2 [117]  and on ‘Marxism and Ethics [118]'

[5] For more information try to find out via : www.garyrumor.com [119]

[6] marxistlibr.org [120]

[7] One of the assistants had just organized a very interesting guiding tour about this major post war event in California the day before.

[8] Both quoted from the letter of H, July 30th .

[9] Reference was made to the Orientation texts published by the ICC on these subjects.

[10] There were also 2 others publications: ‘Out to the Wide' and ‘News & Letters'.

The factory occupation by 240 employees of the Republic Window and Door factory in Chicago, Illinois for six days in early December was the most dramatic episode in US working class history in recent memory. Even the afterglow of the Obama electoral euphoria and its sweet promises of "change" couldn't prevent the angry workers from turning to the class struggle to resist the worsening economic crisis and the growing attacks on their standard of living.

In light of the media campaigns that have celebrated and glorified the sit-in in Chicago, it is critically important for revolutionaries and class conscious militants to be clear on the meaning and significance of these events,. The New York Times exemplified this media blitz with a headline that declared "labor victory comes amid signs of growing discontent as layoffs spread." The Times further stated that the Republic workers "had become national symbols of worker discontent amid the layoffs sweeping the country."[1]  But the Times only got the story half right. Yes, the struggle demonstrated growing working class militancy in resisting the wave of layoffs that have culminated in more than 1.7 million workers being added to the rolls of the unemployed or underemployed in the last 11 months. But it was no "victory," not by a long shot, no matter how much the politicians, leftists, and the media celebrate what the workers supposedly "won."

The militancy of the workers is clear. According to media reports, the idea for the factory occupation originated with a factory union organizer after workers became suspicious when the company began removing machinery and equipment from the factory. (Unknown to the workers at the time the company had made the decision to shut down the factory and set up operations as Echo Windows LLC in Red Oak, Iowa, where wages and production costs are much lower.) On Dec 2nd the company announced that all workers would be laid off in three days with no severance pay and no pay for accrued vacation. Then they announced that medical insurance would be cut off. The workers responded with a unanimous decision to takeover the factory, potentially risking arrest for trespassing and holding control over the company's inventory of window frames.   

Workers organized their occupation in shifts, maintained order and sanitary conditions, banned alcohol and drugs, and immediately began to attract media attention. When rank and file workers spoke to the media they made clear that their struggle was a fight against layoffs and for their jobs and their ability to support their families. One worker said, "I worked here 30 years and I have to fight to feed my family." Another complained that his wife was about to give birth to their third child, but now there was no medical insurance. In a situation reminiscent of the working class support for the NYC transit workers struggle in 2005, the working class in Chicago and around the country responded with a strong display of solidarity, in the face of growing difficulties confronted by workers everywhere. People came to the factory with food and money to donate; everyone understood that this was round one in the fight against layoffs.

The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers Union (UE), a small (35,000 members nationwide), independent, non-AFL-CIO union that had been thrown out of the mainstream labor movement at the height of the cold war because of the union's links to the Stalinist Communist Party, quickly moved to derail the workers away from a struggle against layoffs onto the terrain of bourgeois legality. Instead of opposing the layoffs and the closing of the factory, the union demanded company compliance with a national law which mandates that the workers receive severance and accrued vacation pay in cases of plant closings - approximately $3,500 per worker. Left-wing and mainstream political celebrities, like Rev. Jesse Jackson and local congressmen and city aldermen, quickly jumped on the bandwagon, visited the occupied factory and voiced their support for the severance and vacation pay. Political leaders urged the local cops not to arrest the workers for fear of provoking a more widespread movement. Even President-elect Obama endorsed the factory workers struggle for the money that was "due" them.

After six days, this is precisely the "victory" that is being celebrated by the left and by the media: the banks funding the company reorganization plan have agreed to make sure the workers will get their $3,500 severance/vacation packages. While it's true that getting the money is better than nothing, the money won't last long and then the workers will be unemployed and without medical benefits. The workers who occupied the plant had made it very clear that what they wanted was to keep their jobs. But the derailment of workers' struggles is the key role that unions play for modern state capitalism. The principal job of the unions is to short circuit any possibility of politicization and generalization of workers' struggles, to block workers coming to a conscious understanding that capitalism has no future to offer.

What happened in Chicago strongly parallels what happened in the auto factory sit-down strikes of the 1930s. In those days the workers were fighting for wage increases and improved working conditions, but the United Auto Workers sidetracked the struggle into a fight for union recognition. In the 1970's, young workers employed by the Western Electric division of the Bell System sought to resist massive layoffs, only to be told that the union was prepared to fight for their severance and vacation monies to be paid in separate checks in order to minimize the tax bite. It's easy for the unions to "win" these masquerade victories, which in the end still leave the workers jobless and facing a disastrous future. This is not just an American phenomenon. Recent struggles involving factory occupations and severance payments have occurred in China as well, as the economic worsens.

The media and leftist glorification of factory occupations is yet another aspect of the defeat. True, factory occupations clearly reflect militancy and combativeness: a willingness for workers to resist and resort to "illegal" actions. However, the historical experience of the working class, dating back to the factory occupation movement in Italy in the 1920's and in France in 1968, demonstrates these occupations are a trap and have never been a good weapon for the class struggle. The critical weapon for the working class is to spread struggles to other workplaces and to other industries, to generalize struggles as much as possible, by sending delegations to other workplaces, by organizing mass meetings and demonstrations to draw all workers into the struggle. This transforms solidarity from passive "support" or sympathy or financial contributions, into an active solidarity of joint struggle. Factory occupations allow unions, as agents of the ruling class, to lock up the most militant workers in the plants, to isolate them from other workers, and thereby keep them from serving as active catalysts to spread the struggle outside union control.

Clearly there is an immense solidarity for the Chicago workers. But for the working class solidarity is the understanding that all workers, whatever the specificities of their job situation, share the same condition, the same fate, and the same way out.  We don't care what's "legal" or what's ‘fair' for the bosses. We care what's in the workers' interest, and this is that there are no more layoffs, no more throwing people out in the streets. Rather than stay locked up in their factory, it would have been better for the Republic workers to march from factory to factory in the Chicago area, to send delegations to other workplaces calling on workers to join the struggle, to demand no more layoffs, no more factory shutdowns. A struggle like that will never be hailed or celebrated by the mass media, the unions, the left politicians, or the president-Elect. It would denounced as a threat to capitalist order. The terrible state the working class finds itself in today makes it necessary to reject any idea of a "honeymoon" with the incoming Obama regime, any illusion that anything "good" can come from the new administration and requires a return to the class struggle.

J. Grevin, Dec. 15, 2008

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/13/us/13factory.html [122]

With the economic crisis now ravaging the planet, on 15 November there was a grand international meeting, which at the time was billed as a summit to 'change the world' and bring about a radical transformation in the rules by which capitalism operates. This extraordinary summit was attended by the members of the G8 (Germany, France, USA, Japan, Canada, Italy, Britain and Russia) plus South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, South Korea, Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey. It was supposed to create the bases for a new kind of capitalism, not only healthier but also more humane.

Back in September, when the world's stock markets were being swept by a real gale of panic, all the great and the good, Bush, Merkel, etc, announced with great ceremony the calling of a major international conference. Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France and of the European Union, even made a ‘radical' speech at the UN on 23 September, calling for a a ‘regulated' and ‘moralised' capitalism, even going so far as to demand the ‘re-founding' of capitalism.

This meeting has now taken place. The result? Nothing, or next to it. Even the international press has been obliged to recognise that the mountain gave birth to a mole hill. Evidently, no one was seriously expecting it to produce a more humane capitalism. Such a thing doesn't exist and the world leaders talk about it like parents talk to their children about Father Christmas. But even from the point of view of the struggle against the economic crisis, the results of this conference were particularly thin. Here are the conclusions, in the rather incomprehensible jargon of the initiated:

• - limiting the "pro-cyclical effects" of the current regulations for financial markets
• - aligning compatible norms on a world scale, particularly "for complex financial products"
• - making "derivative markets" more transparent so as to reduce "systemic risks"
• - improving "compensation practices"
• - evaluating the mandate, modes of governance and resource needs of international financial institutions
• - defining those institutions which have a "systemic importance" and whose collapse would threaten the entire world financial system, thus demanding coordinated action to prevent their failure

In short, playing at in-house fireman by supporting key financial institutions and the strategic sectors of the economy. Nothing that hasn't been done already.

The bourgeoisie isn't repeating the errors of 1929...but is still unable to get out of the crisis

Still, one thing should be recognised. It's true that today, unlike in 1929 (when the world's major states initially failed to react and allowed whole swathes of the economy to go to the wall), all the bourgeoisies of the world have rapidly mobilised themselves. By pumping in billions and billions of dollars, they are trying to save vital sectors like banks and large-scale industry...and, to this end, they have got together, tried to plug the most alarming gaps, tried to act in concert whereas in 1929 they did exactly the opposite (pulling in different directions, resorting to frenzied protectionism, closing their frontiers to foreign commodities, all of which served to aggravate the world crisis). It is this international mobilisation which has allowed them to prevent the brutal collapse of the financial system and the failure of the biggest banks, which has been the major fear of the economists in the last few months.

But while they have avoided the failure of the banking sector in particular, no real solution, no perspective for a lasting recovery, could have emerged from all the discussions that have taken place over these months, whether at the G7, the G8, or the G20.

The bourgeoisie is powerless. It can't regulate the historic crisis of its system because it is affected by a mortal disease: overproduction. This is why capitalism, which has been a system in decline for almost a century, is plagued by irreversible convulsions and has dragged humanity through a whole series of wars (the two world wars being the most powerful expression of this) and economic crises. The result of the G20 is a visible demonstration of this powerlessness: as the crisis rages, as famine threatens whole sectors of humanity, as unemployment and poverty explode in the world's most developed countries, all that the great powers of the planet can do is to vote for vague and abstract resolutions in favour of "stricter rules and better control over speculators and bankers". Even more ridiculous, these decisions by the G20 are not even applicable straight away but have to be discussed by a commission of experts whose conclusions will be discussed again on...April 30, 2009! Nothing can be hoped for from these summits.

The economists can prattle on about a second New Deal or a new Bretton Woods, but they are incapable of understanding what is really happening. A second New Deal? But the use of credit which, under Roosevelt's presidency in the USA, launched a policy of great public works between 1933 and 1938 and got the economy on the move again, has already been tried ten times over in the last few decades. States, companies, households are already staggering under the weight of unbearable and growing debt. No, there will not be a second New Deal! What about a new Bretton Woods then? In 1944, the setting up of an international financial system based on the dollar made it possible to stabilise exchange and make it more fluid, an essential basis for economic growth. But today there is no superpower in a position to stabilise world trade: on the contrary, we are witnessing the discrediting of the USA and its dwindling capacity to play the role of locomotive to the world economy. What's more, at the G20 all the other powers challenged American dominance, beginning with France and its spokesman Nicolas Sarkozy. And there is no new power on the horizon capable of playing this role, certainly not the so-called European Union, which is scored through by conflicts for the defence of entirely contradictory national interests. No, there will be no new Bretton Woods. At most there will be mini-measures to limit the damage. All of which will do no more than spread out the crisis over time and prepare the ground for even bleaker tomorrows.

Towards brutal impoverishment

The bad news about the economy and the redundancy plans raining down everywhere already enable us to see what these tomorrows will be like. All the international institutions, one after the other, foresee recession in 2009. According to the OECD, the Euro zone is going to see its level of activity fall by 0.5%. Britain will be harder hit, with predictions of -1.3%, and its economy will carry on diving the year after. For the USA, the Federal Reserve Bank predicts a negative growth of -0.2%, but Nouriel Roubini, the economist who is the most listened to on Wall Street because his predictions about the deterioration of the world economy over the past two years have been so spot on, thinks that it is perfectly feasible to envisage a nightmare scenario with a contraction of around 5% in the next two years, 2009 and 2010!

We don't know if this will be the case and it's useless to speculate, but the simple fact that one of the most reputable economists on the planet envisages such a catastrophic scenario reveals the disquiet of the bourgeoisie and the real gravity of the situation.

At the level of redundancies, the massacre in the banking sector continues. Citigroup, one of the biggest banks in the world, has just announced the elimination of 50,000 jobs when it has already slashed 23,000 since the beginning of 2008! Compared to this disaster, the recent announcement of 3200 job cuts at Goldman Sachs and 10% of the jobs at Morgan Stanley almost passed unnoticed. Let's recall that the financial sector had already destroyed more than 150,000 jobs since January 2008.

Another sector which has been hit really hard is automobiles. In France, Renault, the country's main car manufacturer, quite simply stopped production in November; no more cars are coming out of the plants, and that's on to of the fact that its assembly lines have already been running at 54% of their capacity in Europe[1]. PSA Peugeot-Citroen have just announced 3350 job cuts and new measures of technical unemployment.

But within the automobile sector, it's again the USA which offers the most alarming news: the famous Big Three of Detroit (General Motors, Ford and Chrysler) are on the verge of bankruptcy. If the US state doesn't keep them afloat, 2.3 to 3million jobs, many of them in supply and components, will be directly threatened. And in such a case, the workers laid off will not only lose their jobs but also their medical insurance and their pensions! Even if, as seems likely, the American state will pull a finance plan out of its pocket, there will still be very violent reorganisation in the months ahead, involving many lay-offs.

The result of all these attacks will evidently be a huge surge of poverty. In France, ‘Secours Populaire announced in September that there had been a near 10% increase in people living from soup kitchens, with the young being especially affected.

The prospect is not for a more human or moral capitalism as all the liars assembled in the G7, G8 or G20 would have us believe, but a capitalism that is more barbaric than ever, spreading hunger and misery in its wake.

In the face of the crisis and capitalist attacks, there is only one way forward: the development of the class struggle.  

Pawel 12.11.08

[1] This example shows the whole absurdity of the capitalist economy. On the one hand, the development of poverty, on the other hand factories operating at half capacity. The reason for this is simple: capitalism does not produce for human need but to sell and realise a profit. If a part of humanity doesn't have the wherewithal to pay, it can just starve. The capitalists prefer to close their factories and destroy unsold commodities than to give them away.

A. Economic crisis

Holding this congress in the midst of the credit crunch financial crisis there is absolutely no shortage of material about the state of the economy in Britain today. In this discussion it is essential to step back and take a long view of the economic crisis internationally and historically. Many bourgeois commentators in fact ask us to step back from predicting appalling consequences on the basis of the latest figure for stock market falls or whatever, show us a graph of some economic indicator over the last 10 years or so showing a fall in 2002, and think they have a convincing argument for the underlying health of the real economy. In fact when we take the long view it is not to pacify fears by pointing out that we survived the bursting of the dot.com bubble, but to place the recent events within the 40 year development of the crisis since the end of the 1960s (‘30 years of the open crisis of capitalism' IR 96,97,99), marked by an international slowing of growth rates decade on decade, increased unemployment, constant resort to debt and speculation as well as a series of recessions and the collapse of several bubbles. And this open crisis is a part of the history of capitalist decadence, the period in which it can only maintain itself through constant crises and convulsions - so today's economic crisis follows that of the 1930s, has the same root causes and is in fact a new expression of the same contradictions, which is why the bourgeoisie have been able to learn from it. "Since it entered into its period of decadence, capitalism has had to temper [its characteristics of ‘every man for himself' and the ‘war of each against all'] through the massive intervention of the state into the economy, put in place during the First World War and reactivated in the 1930s, notably through fascist or Keynesian policies. This intervention by the state was completed, in the wake of the Second World War, by the setting up of international organs such as the IMF, the World Bank and the OECD, and finally the European Economic Community ... in order to prevent the system's economic contradictions leading to a general disaster such as we saw with ‘Black Thursday' in 1929" (‘Resolution on the international situation' in IR 130).

The bases for the rates of growth that the bourgeoisie were so proud of two years ago were not new, but a continuation of a policy used to prevent the saturation of the world market from stifling the world economy. "They can be summed up as growing debt. At the present moment, the main ‘locomotive' of world growth is constituted by the enormous debts of the American economy, both at the level of its state budget and of its balance of trade. In reality, we are seeing a real forward flight which far from bringing a definitive solution to the contradictions of capitalism, can only pave the way to even more painful tomorrows, in particular through a brutal slow-down in growth, of which we have had many examples in the past 30 years. Right now, the threat to the housing boom in the US, which has been one of the motors of the US economy, and which raises the danger of catastrophic bank failures, is causing considerable disquiet amongst the economists" (‘Resolution on the international situation' from the ICC International Congress in May 2007, IR 130). The effects of the bursting of the housing bubble are already clearly more profound than the end of the dot.com bubble because it deeply affects capitalism's most important financial institutions.

The characteristics of the British economy

The once mighty workshop of the world in the 19th Century had been overtaken in industrial production by the USA and Germany by the early 20th Century. The article on the decline of British imperialism published in Bilan in 1934-5 (and reprinted in WR 312, 313) gives important depth to our understanding of the national situation. It shows how a decadent ruling class no longer able to dominate the world economically resorted to a parasitic existence, drawing surplus value from its empire around the globe while its industry declined relative to its competitors, particularly in the productivity it was able to achieve with outdated constant capital (for example at that stage British textile industries had 4 looms per man while Japan had 8 per man). Bilan drew out the specificities of British banking capital that contributed to this decline: "the process of the fusion of industrial and banking capital was never pushed so far in Britain... This lag, while it can explain the relative stagnation of the productive forces, can itself be explained by the existence for nearly a century of a highly centralised productive apparatus...and which allowed it to make use of credit for its expansion. The structural particularities of finance capital constitute both a weakness and a strength: a weakness, because, due to its intimate links with the mechanisms of world trade, it suffered form their perturbations; a strength because, cut off from production, it retains a greater elasticity of action in periods of crisis."

London is a major financial centre, and finance is a major part of the service industries that employ 80% of the workforce producing 75% of GDP. Of the 23% of GDP from industrial production, 10% is from primary energy production (gas, oil and the run down coal industry), which is unusually high for a developed country. A lot of industry was lost in the 1970s and 1980s particularly coal, steel and shipbuilding. The development from industry towards services and particularly banking has only increased since the last official recession in the early 1990s. After 10 years of industrial stagnation and recession, services are even more predominant. Between 2000 and 2005 banking assets increased by 75% largely based on housing. Assets of British banks are greater than GDP and their foreign liabilities a significant part of UK foreign liabilities.

Two years ago we characterised the British bourgeoisie's response to the crisis as one which had allowed it to keep its growth rates ahead of many of its European rivals by managing the crisis in spite of poor growth, rising inflation and hidden unemployment. The bourgeoisie had been unable to address low productivity and was therefore relying on increasing the absolute exploitation of the working class. But the British state had been particularly effective in defending the economy: "The Labour government has sought to manage the economy through the adoption of counter-cyclical policies. It has increased state spending to counter the global recession in the short-term, and to smooth out the decline in the long term." (‘Resolution on the British situation', WR 302). Government debt was 42% of GDP and clearly not balancing out the deficit over an economic cycle, as claimed through manipulation of the figures. Personal debt had risen 25% in 2 years to £1.25 trillion - and by summer 2007 was up to £1.35 trillion, more than GDP of £1.33 trillion. However, any expectation that the housing market, on which this debt bubble was based, could be managed to achieve a soft landing proved misplaced.

Overall the ‘health' of the British economy was based on spiralling government and personal debt on the one hand, and attacks on the working class on the other. In particular the British bourgeoisie had managed to bring in many attacks on benefits, health services and pensions ahead of many other European countries.

Return to nationalisations

The expressions of the credit crunch in Britain are only one part of the events going on internationally. In a year we have gone from the first run on a bank for over a hundred years, and the government's reluctance to encourage ‘moral hazard' by rescuing banks that lent unwisely, through the bail-out of Northern Rock, Bradford and Bingley, to £500 billion being made available to the banks. In short, a complete turn about. Even when the government has been trying not to spend the state's money it has been directly involved, as with Gordon Brown arranging a shotgun marriage between Lloyds and HBOS.

This rescue so far amounts to £387bn, consisting of £250bn bank debt guarantee, £100bn short term loans, and £37bn direct injection of capital into banks. It is comparable in size to both the US Paulson plan of $700bn, and total UK public spending of £618bn, particularly when you add in £119bn for Northern Rock and £14bn for Bradford and Bingley. Not to worry: "the bailout is capital, not current spending. It is not like the schools' budget to which it has been absurdly compared. It is simply a recomposition of government assets... If you borrow to acquire an asset, you have that asset to set against your borrowing and the net position is as before" - so says a comedy double act of Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot in The Times 21.10.08. The various capital injection plans around the world produced only a small temporary rise in the stock markets, which have continued to fall.

Nationalisation is, of course, not new; bank nationalisation today, just like nationalisation in the 1940s, allowed the state to take over and run, or run down, ailing industries in the interests of the national economy as a whole. The policy of state control of the economy was first noticed by revolutionaries in the First World War as a way of mobilising the resources of the economy for the conflict. It was reintroduced in the 1930s with the New Deal, Stalinism, Fascism etc, and then built up for the Second World War. The post-war Labour government nationalised health, railways, steel and coal with much ‘socialist' ideology but the resources of the state were needed to invest in a thoroughly rundown infrastructure. Similar rescues took place from time to time as necessary, for example British Leyland. The privatisations under Thatcher was a different state policy and could not really reverse the tendency to state capitalism nor, despite claims about monetary policy, to deficit spending which was still extremely high in the early 1990s.

This brings us to the question of what it means for the state to take responsibility for backing up the banks. It is clear what it would mean for the state to refuse - a run on the bank like Northern Rock last year; in such situations credit seizes up and the economy falls into slump and depression much like the 1930s. The rescue has no hope of preventing recession here any more than anywhere else - unemployment is already rising sharply, Brown and the governor of the Bank of England have now joined the Chancellor Alistair Darling in admitting we are heading into recession. The bailout does aim to keep the economy moving. But what does it mean economically for the state to even partially guarantee banks with assets way above GDP? If we look internationally we can already see that this policy is not available to countries which have particularly small economies in relation to bank debts, Iceland being a prime example. It is at the very least bound to increase inflationary pressures.

It may also have social consequences as the state takes on much more overt responsibility for direct attacks on the working class.

The international aspect

In the wake of this rescue plan, Gordon Brown has been bestriding the world stage, meeting George Bush and gaining the approval of EU leaders. It seems that the British plan to partially nationalise banks, rather than agree to buy toxic assets as in the US plan, and to try to spend their way out of recession, was the only game in town. Certainly we should not forget that London remains a vital financial centre whose bourgeoisie has a wealth of experience. The crisis has also seen efforts to co-ordinate on an international scale, such as the round the world lowering of central bank interest rates in October, numerous meetings - EU, G7, Asia-Europe, meeting called by Bush, etc.

However these meetings, even while they express its need for a degree of cooperation to keep trade going, never escape the expression of conflict, any more than the various GATT rounds could. And capitalism's beggar my neighbour attitude has also come into the open at times, even if it remains secondary for the present time: for instance in Europe we have seen governments competing on guaranteeing bank deposits, which is potentially important for drawing deposits away from banks in neighbouring countries that may seem risky by comparison; and Britain's use of anti-terror laws to freeze Icelandic assets in the face of its banking collapses, which has led to much protest. As the bourgeoisie have learned so much from the 1930s depression, and particularly the danger of protectionism and shutting down world trade in the wake of huge stock market falls, this is likely to remain a secondary tendency to be avoided at all costs - but we should not rule out the possibility that international coordination will not be successful.

Perspective of depression

The British economy, like the rest of the world, is descending into a recession. The latest quarter showed a fall in GDP of 0.5% affecting all areas of the economy: business services and finance down 0.4%, hotels and restaurants 1.7%, manufacture 1%, construction 0.8% and transport 0.6%. And this is only the beginning. The way the banking crisis has built inexorably over more than a year, the depth of stock market falls and the level of instability, the way it has affected every part of the globe, and the way the first signs of recession are affecting every area of the economy, all point to this being a long sustained and deep recession.

The early stages of this crisis have seen inflation growing steadily till the Consumer Price Index has risen to 5.2%. This has been partly driven by food and fuel prices, and the cost of mortgages, but is not limited to any particular items. The current fall in the price of oil, that OPEC has been unable to prevent, will not be enough to reverse inflationary pressures. In fact they are going to get worse as governments around the world cut interest rates and pour in borrowed money to try and stabilise their economies. We have the perspective of the return of stagflation, the combination of recession and inflation, as we saw in the 1970s.

The working class will have to pay

Whenever we look at the attacks we have to bear in mind what has already been lost. Unemployment of about 1,000,000 became normal in the 1920s (see the Bilan articles), lasted until the war, and returned to those levels at the end of the 1970s. Although it has officially come back down to around 1 million officially since the early 1990s it is common knowledge that this has been achieved only by manipulation of statistics and not in reality.

So when we see the highest rise in jobless for 17 years, from 5.2 to 5.7% and 1.79 million, when we hear predictions of 2 million unemployed by the end of the year and another million by the end of next year, we know that the figure is much higher - we are talking 1980s or 1930s levels.

Over the last year inflation has brought about an across-the-board pay cut with many basic foods, fuel, housing costs up much more than official inflation, which is in turn more than average pay increases. The perspective is for this to get worse. And it will inevitably result in more home repossessions.

Over the last 40 years we can see what else the working class has lost: most final salary pension schemes; benefits much harder to get; not only are student grants gone, but they also pay tuition fees; many hospitals and beds... This year we also saw the abolition of the 10p tax band.

Even before the economy is in official recession we can see poverty among children and pensioners has started to rise again.

The government has promised efforts to reduce the effects of the recession by increased spending, but this will delay and not prevent the attacks which must have a profound effect on not just working class living standards but also on the development of class struggle and the consciousness of what perspective capitalism has in store for humanity.

B. Class struggle

"The situation of capitalism can only be understood at the global level, since it is only by grasping its totality that its real nature and dynamic can be seen. Thus it is a mistake to expect to see every aspect of capitalism expressed equally in the situation of any particular nation state. Britain does not show the devastation of the economic crisis seen elsewhere any more than it bears the direct scars of war and nor has it seen class struggle on the scale witnessed elsewhere. Nonetheless it is part of the international dynamic and the particular developments in this country contribute to the overall dynamic." (‘Resolution on the British situation' WR 301 and 302). When examining the class struggle it is particularly important to look at the global level in order to understand the context and significance of each development.

In looking at the developments in the struggle of an undefeated working class in response to constant attacks on its living standards we see the development towards decisive class confrontations, the slow and tortuous development towards the mass strike. The most important developments in this are qualitative. We know that there were many very large strikes in the 1930s, in a period in which the working class was defeated, which the unions used to deepen the ideological defeat and help prepare the conditions for war. Since 1968 there have been some massive strikes on a very militant basis - from 1968 in France, the Hot Autumn in Italy in 1969, Poland in 1970, 76 and most importantly 1980, the miners' strike in Britain in 1984... These huge strikes on a very militant class basis are an extremely important reference point for workers today. However we also know that the working class in this period was not able to develop the level of consciousness demanded. Obviously decisive class confrontations, the mass strike, require a quantitative development: they are massive, but the developments in consciousness that prepare this can also go on underground, hidden from view in periods of apparent quiet. The growing interest in the politics of the communist left in a very tiny minority of the working class is one aspect of this.

The ICC has drawn out the characteristics of these qualitative developments today: "they are more and more incorporating the question of solidarity. This is vitally important because it constitutes par excellence the antidote to the ‘every man for himself' attitude typical of social decomposition, and above all because it is at the heart of the world proletariat's capacity not only to develop its present struggles but also to overthrow capitalism". The effects of the long crisis have had an impact: "nearly four decade of open crisis and attacks on working class living conditions, notably the rise of unemployment and precarious work, have swept aside illusions that ‘tomorrow things will be better': the older generations of workers as well as the new ones are much more conscious of the fact that ‘tomorrow things will be worse'." And so "Today it is not the possibility of revolution which is the main food for the process of reflection but, in view of the catastrophic perspectives which capitalism has in store for us, its necessity" (All three quotations from the ‘Resolution on the international situation' in IR 130).

Two years ago we noted a development in the class struggle in Britain. We remarked that the strengths of the bourgeoisie in Britain which had impeded the development of the class struggle, particularly the strength of the unions, the slow introduction of attacks and the ideological weight of the Labour government, were having much less impact and there was a growing combativity. In particular there had been some small but highly significant struggles expressing solidarity, such as the BA workers who struck in solidarity with Gate Gourmet workers in August 2005, right in the middle of all the propaganda about terrorism. This and several other small struggles had gone outside the control of the unions. There had been a large scale strike by local government workers which, while carefully controlled by the unions, seemed to have a more militant spirit.

The working class, however, was still facing the very experienced unions, who had started to distance themselves from the Labour government to better control the workers.

The last two years

Discontent in the working class has been much wider than class struggle, inevitably. And there has been a lot to be unhappy about. For instance in spring 2007 there was widespread discontent in the NHS, like many other sectors, not just about the below inflation pay rises, 2.5% for nurses, or its staging, but also because of the government's tightening of financial controls, leading to the loss of 20,000 jobs in hospital trusts and to newly qualified nurses, physiotherapists and others finding it harder to get jobs. Pension funds had lost £5 billion a year thanks to a ‘simplification' of tax, to add to the difficulty pensions funds were in throughout the world. This was when we heard the first announcement of the loss of the 10p tax band, which came into force this April at such great cost to most workers that the government had to take measures to limit its effects. It is also the period that saw the sub-prime crisis break in August last year, followed by the run on Northern Rock, the credit crunch and now the financial meltdown we are in the middle of. This must give rise to both attacks and to reflection in the working class that will continue for some time.

Expressions of solidarity

All class struggle, all strike action, is an expression of solidarity among the workers involved. Given the situation of decadent capitalism, the increasing attacks affecting the whole class, the unity the ruling class shows against any workers' struggle, the need for solidarity and struggle to spread beyond the immediate dispute is posed in every struggle.

The question of solidarity was posed in the postal workers' dispute in the wildcat solidarity actions that continued throughout the struggle from summer to autumn last year. Huge discontent was expressed in the vote for strike action in May - 77% in favour in a turnout of two thirds in the CWU ballot. The issues were the below inflation pay offer, and even more importantly the ‘modernisation' plan to cut jobs and worsen conditions. But the union was able to keep a degree of control over the situation to the extent that they continued negotiation, expressed the need to try and prevent strike action, and then called 2 one-day strikes in July; they were very successful in selling the idea that token strike action would force the Royal Mail to negotiate.

However CWU control was not so complete, as was shown by the unofficial strikes that accompanied the official CWU limited strikes. In August 13 drivers refused to cross the picket line and were suspended, prompting a mass walk-out in Glasgow, quickly spreading to Motherwell and the rest of Scotland. Wildcats spread to Liverpool, where it was supported by Polish agency workers, Newcastle, Hartlepool, Chester, Bristol. At its height there were wildcats involving more than 1400 workers in 30 offices. It seemed that the CWU suspended the strike in the summer in order to break the unofficial strike movement - but they must have been bitterly disappointed to see the wildcats start up again in the autumn. At any rate they ended the strike very precipitately without any announcement of the deal until after the strike was ended. This showed great militancy and solidarity, but with the exception of Scotland it was confined to local areas. Union control prevented the struggle generalising to all categories of Royal Mail workers and to workers in other sectors.

In June this year 641 Shell oil tanker drivers struck for 4 days over pay, with workers from other haulage firms showing solidarity by refusing to cross picket lines: 15 BP drivers at Stanlow in Cheshire, drivers from every company supplying fuel in Devon and Cornwall, drivers from Wincanton, a large haulage firm, joined Shell drivers on protests in Cardiff, Plymouth and Avonmouth. "This solidarity took on a new dimension on the third day of the strike (16th June), when workers from other haulage firms joined the Shell workers picketing the Grangemouth oil refinery in Scotland in protest at the suspension of 11 Scottish Fuel drivers for refusing to cross picket lines. This was potentially a very explosive situation, given that the struggle was taking on a demand beyond those of the Shell tanker drivers - the defence of workers from Scottish Fuels. A demand that if not resolved could have drawn in more and more drives and potentially other workers into the struggle... Not surprisingly the bosses and unions moved rapidly to stop this by reinstating the suspended workers" (WR 316).

These examples of class solidarity are particularly important in revealing the potential that exists in the class struggle today. They are totally illegal, and therefore show the force of the movement. They are taking place on a larger scale than the examples of solidarity we were discussing 2 years ago (Heathrow strike, Cottam, Polish agency workers in Leicester); they are taking place in a context of very similar attacks on workers in all sectors of the economy, and in the context of developing international struggle in which solidarity has been a very important factor - from the solidarity shown in the struggle against the CPE in France, Vigo in Spain, Opel and others in Germany, Egypt, Bangladesh, New York transit etc. There is also the work that the unions needed to put in to keep control of the situation.

Union perversion of solidarity

In the postal workers' and Shell oil tanker drivers' strikes we saw the unions having a degree of control to delay and limit the struggle, but not to prevent unofficial solidarity action during the struggle. CWU and Unite used similar tactics: ending the struggles very suddenly, declaring victory when little or nothing had been added to the original offer, delaying the announcement of what the deal entailed. The CWU deferred negotiation on the so-called modernisation attacks to local offices after the return to work.

Their other major tactic is always to try and keep workers tied up within the limits of not just legality but of corporation, sector, job and union membership. Inevitably this leads to calling on workers to support their employer - the CWU added to their call for negotiation a demand for "An urgent government review of the damaging impact of competition on Royal Mail..."

A similar union perversion of the idea of solidarity was also shown when in March 2007 workers at the Airbus Broughton and Bristol plants took unofficial strike action in response to the threat of 1600 job losses, out of 10,000 announced by the firm in Europe as a whole. Workers faced union opposition to their action, but the unions also called for their version of solidarity - a Europe wide day of action and solidarity - calling for a better plan for Airbus, to make it more profitable, to make it more competitive with Boeing (which was cutting 7,000 jobs at the same time). In other words, unions perverted the notion of solidarity between workers into workers' solidarity for the boss within the company.

On 24 April this year we had what leftists described as ‘fightback Thursday' to unite workers in education and civil service. The unions put strict limits on their call for unity: schoolteachers but not other workers in schools, not teachers in sixth form colleges, teachers in the NUT but not the NAS-UWT... with demonstrations that tended to isolate teachers from other workers. The same tactic was used in the council workers' strike, involving 300,000, in July with a lot of small demonstrations.

While the unions have been keeping workers divided, the tendency to large scale union mergers has continued with Unite joining with the United Steelworkers of America to form Workers Uniting. This will not overcome each union's fundamental loyalty to the economy of the country in which it operates, nor prevent their support of protectionism, but it will give them a fig leaf of ‘internationalism' all the better to keep workers divided on national lines.

The unions have also continued their policy of distancing themselves from the Labour government, essential to maintain the trust of the workers they claim to represent while forcing through attacks and keeping the workers' response limited.

Development of consciousness

During the postal workers' strike we saw not only the development of the online rank and filist Royal Mail Chat, an opening where workers could discuss their struggle online, but the much more significant Dispatch which was not limited to any one sector, and on a much clearer basis "a group of workers who are interested in discussing and co-ordinating a response to the ongoing public sector pay disputes. We believe they key to winning is to unite the disputes, fight together and for workers themselves to control the struggle. We work in several different sectors, including the postal service, NHS, education and local government and all use the website libcom.org". It re-emerged in response to the public sector strikes this year with a new name, Tea Break (see WR 317) trying to draw the lessons of the defeats of 2007 and the role of the unions in dispersing the struggles.

This initiative plays a similar role to the development of groups of militant workers who came together in the 1970s and 1980s to try and influence the course of struggles, an expression of the development in consciousness. Some saw themselves as being a rival trade union, but others avoided this error, "they understood that they were only a minority, and that their essential role was to act in the more general class movement. Depending on whether or not that movement was latent or open, rising or retreating, they could play a positive role by:

• - acting as a focus for discussion about the lessons of past struggle and the prospect for future ones,
• - creating links between militant workers in different sectors,
• - intervening as a group in the workplace, in mass meetings, strikes and demonstrations,
• - producing leaflets and bulletins advocating the most effective methods for the struggle" (WR 307).

The emergence of this group is a very encouraging sign of the development of consciousness going on at the present time. Its presence online allows it to reach many workers and more to participate. But it will be a weakness if it is limited to an online network.

Revolutionary intervention

"It is the responsibility of revolutionary organisations, and the ICC in particular, to be an active part in the process of reflection that is already going on within the class, not only by intervening actively in the struggles when they start to develop but also in stimulating the groups and elements who are seeking to join the struggle" (‘Resolution on the international situation' in IR 130).

WR has participated in this work by articles on Dispatch/Tea Break, participation in online discussion, articles in WR (which have formed the basis for this section of the report). For particular events in the class struggle we have intervened with leaflets (to the postal workers, council workers, teachers). We have often found the latter form of intervention has been particularly difficult, at least in part due to the strength of the union hold. On one level this is a purely practical difficulty - in strikes where the workers are kept separated on small pickets, small demonstrations. But it is also due to difficulties in developing the discussion with workers - for example at the start of the postal workers' strike the certainty many workers had that they only to show their militancy in token strikes to force the Royal Mail to negotiate a better deal. It will be important to address this difficulty.

Perspective

What is the effect of the current economic crisis on the development of the class struggle today? It is quite clear that the financial crisis is already feeding into the economy as a whole, with increased unemployment, reduced living standards caused by inflation, and wages pegged well below price rises. This is already happening; we have to be prepared for attacks to accelerate, and this is bound to have an impact on the developing class struggle. However it would be a mistake to expect the development of the class struggle to follow the development of the crisis and attacks in any mechanical fashion. First of all the government is already turning its attention to attempting to control the economic fallout, measures which will not prevent a slump but may mean it develops more slowly, not just big bank rescues but also measures to ensure some small businesses either survive or take longer to go bust, slowing the development of unemployment a little; as well as to limit the immediate effects on workers, such as schemes to allow those who can no longer afford their mortgages to stay on as tenants, at least for the time being. We have no doubt about the severity of the attacks that are coming, but we should not forget the strength and intelligence of the British bourgeoisie at this level. In the UK they are ably assisted by the unions who are very experienced in ‘negotiating' to bring in attacks as well as in dividing up the workers' response and limiting it to safe token actions even when there is a real groundswell of militancy.

But the most important factor to take into account is the dynamic of the development of the class struggle itself. In The Mass Strike Rosa Luxemburg analyses the development of the dynamic of the movement in this way: "The January mass strike was without doubt carried through under the immediate influence of the gigantic general strike which in December 1904 broke out in the Caucasus, in Baku, and for a long time kept the whole of Russia in suspense. The events of December in Baku were on their part only the last and powerful ramification of those tremendous mass strikes which, like a periodical earthquake, shook the whole of south Russia, and whose prologue was the mass strike in Batum in the Caucasus in March 1902...". At the same time she went on to look at the immediate economic or other causes of each strike movement. This is the method the ICC has emulated in analysing the international waves of class struggle from 1968 to the collapse of the Russian bloc, looking at the international significance of each movement and of its developments and defeats. We have used the same method in analysing the developments of the revival of struggle since 2003, particularly looking at the development of the sense of class identity and of expressions of solidarity in struggles. It is this development of the international class struggle from one strike movement to the next that makes the use of revolutionary publications to overcome the bourgeoisie's blackout of important movements so vitally important.

We must also remember that the worsening economic crisis, while it makes struggle more essential, also makes it more difficult, and the growth of unemployment which is only just beginning today will only emphasise that difficulty: "the use of the strike weapon is much more difficult today mainly because of the weight of unemployment which acts as a basis for blackmailing the workers, and also because the latter are more and more aware that the bourgeoisie has a rapidly reducing margin of manoeuvre for satisfying their demands.

However, this last aspect of the situation is not just a factor in making the workers hesitate about entering into massive struggles. It also bears with it the possibility of a profound development of consciousness about the definitive bankruptcy of capitalism, which is a precondition for understanding the need to overthrow it. To a certain extent, even if it's in a very confused way, the scale of what's at stake in the class struggle, which is nothing less than the communist revolution, is what is making the working class hesitate to launch itself into such struggles." (‘Resolution on the international situation' in IR 130).

C. British imperialism

The main feature of the development of imperialist conflicts today is a growing chaos, unstable alliances and with the USA, the world cop, only able to impose its discipline through its huge military superiority. In doing so it has itself been one of the major factors in instability. "Today in Iraq the US bourgeoisie is facing a real impasse. On the one hand, both from the strictly military standpoint and from the economic and political point of view, it doesn't have the means to recruit a force that would eventually allow it to ‘re-establish order'. On the other hand, it can't simply withdraw from Iraq without openly admitting the total failure of its policies and opening the door to the desolation of Iraq and an even greater destabilisation of the entire region" (‘Resolution on the international situation', IR 130). Alongside and as a consequence of the difficulties faced by the US as it finds itself mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, various second rank and regional powers are starting to flex their muscles and stir things up.

The resolution on the British situation from WR's 17th congress two years ago noted the great difficulties facing British imperialism. Faced with the offensive launched following the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001 Britain aligned itself more closely with the US. This was not an abandonment of the more independent strategy it took up following the collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989, in which it tried to steer a course between the US and Europe, playing one off against the other, as it did for instance in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s, but an attempt to apply this independent strategy in the new situation under the impact of the storm whipped up by the US. Britain joined the US in Afghanistan and Iraq and found itself sharing in the impasse in these two theatres of conflict, causing disquiet in the military. The July 7th London bombings in 2005 had only emphasised Britain's failure - it had laid itself open to attack, and while it could use the events to strengthen its repressive apparatus, it gained nothing on the imperialist level. This was followed up by Blair's humiliation over the invasion of Lebanon in 2006, when he tried to present himself as a player, only to suffer the humiliation of waiting for a call that never came - Britain was just a complete irrelevance in the situation.

Two years ago the resolution on the British situation told us: "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. We have seen this contradiction sharpening... it has provoked a deep division within the ruling class...there is a recognition that the imperialist strategy has to change but there is an absence of any well-defined plan." And it asked; "Will it be possible to forge a new imperialist strategy in the wake of the failure not just of London's independent policy but also of Washington's post-9/11 offensive?"

A change at the top, but still stuck in the same quagmire

Blair handed over to Brown 18 months ago in May 07. While this handover was expected from before the 2005 election, it is common knowledge that he was forced from office sooner than he intended. Pressure had been put on him to go, chiefly through the loans for peerages scandal in which ministers were arrested and the prime minister questioned by police; but pressure was also applied with open criticism of government strategy by the head of the armed forces in 2006, by criticism of informal cabinet decision-making and cronyism in the Butler report. Despite all his good service to the bourgeoisie for 10 years Blair's foreign policy failures and excessively close relationship to the US led to his removal. "...Mr Blair's room for pragmatic manoeuvre in foreign affairs was limited by his partnership with George Bush... his insistence on seeing problems of the Middle East in purely Manichean terms - as a global struggle between Good and Evil, between Western Civilisation and apocalyptic terrorism does not lend itself to good policy-making. Stabilisation in Iraq, Iran's nuclear ambitions, Israel's occupation of Palestine - these are problems that require separate treatment" was a typical comment in the Observer 29.4.07. As an aside, we can see that it is not only the British bourgeoisie that noticed Blair's closeness to Bush - since he left office he has been rewarded with the role of Middle East Envoy and a lucrative post teaching at a US university.

The change in foreign policy was illustrated by the appointment of David Milliband, a critic of Blair's policy on Lebanon, as foreign secretary; Shirley Williams, who had opposed the Iraq war as an advisor; and another critic, Mallach Brown, as minister for Africa. Mallach Brown's appointment was described as "inauspicious" by John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN.

Labour was brought in to defend British interests more independently than the Tory government: "Labour's huge victory, and the humiliation of many of the Eurosceptics, confirms that the most influential fractions of British capitalism have no intention of going back to the old alliance wit the USA" (WR 204, May 1997). After 2001, Britain's closeness to the USA was a result not so much of Blair's relationship with Bush as of its weakness as a declining power in the face of the pressures from America's ‘war on terror'. Indeed, steering a path between the US and Europe will only get harder whoever is in no 10. "Even though Blair has gone it is not possible to put the clock back. Britain's weakened power has been exposed and there is no basis yet for overcoming the divisions this produced in the bourgeoisie. Certainly the ruling class will try to respond to this situation and there may be some shifts in policy ahead of us but there is no way back to Britain's former standing" (WR 306).

Defeat in Basra

When Blair announced a partial military withdrawal from Basra in February 07 there was no disguising that this was a defeat: "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..." (‘Where is Iraq going? Lessons from Basra', June 07, International Crisis Group). And "Anthony Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, asserts that British forces lost control of the situation in and around Basra by the second half of 2005" (The Independent 23.2.07). Britain now has what Brown describes as an ‘overwatch role', completely powerless but unable to leave altogether. In March this year, when the Iraqi Army got into difficulties in its push against the Madhi Army in Basra, it called on the US to send troops, ignoring the British troops holed up nearby.

Britain's humiliating weakness was only emphasised when 15 UK naval personnel were detained by Iran in March 07. Blair could only bluster about the crisis moving to a ‘different phase', but it was clear that Iran was in control of this situation.

A further humiliation came in October with a Times interview with the Iraqi PM Nouri Al-Maliki in which he said it was time for British troops to leave and criticised the deal they made last year with the Mahdi Army.

Rise of Iran

Iran has gained from the US ‘war on terror' in Iraq and Afghanistan. In particular the invasion of Iraq "removed Tehran's traditional enemy from the region, while the US reliance on Shia clerics empowered Iran's allies inside Iraq. The US now confronts a greatly strengthened Iran because of its own actions" (Le Monde Diplomatique Feb 07). "Furthermore, the increasing boldness of Iran over its preparations for obtaining nuclear weapons is a direct consequence of the US falling into a quagmire in Iraq, which for the moment prevents a similar massive use of troops elsewhere" (‘Resolution on the international situation', IR 130).

This has been particularly uncomfortable for British imperialism with its troops holed up in Southern Iraq where Iran has greatest influence. The SAS has joined the USA's conflict with and incursions into Iran to protect its troops.

Afghanistan

NATO troops in Afghanistan are also bogged down in a quagmire. Even the UK commander in Helmand has warned we should not expect a decisive victory and there have been calls in the US for a troop surge. It is a country disintegrating into chaos, which is spreading into Pakistan. The Taliban operate out of Pakistan, which is seeing increased incursions by the USA.

Essentially the British bourgeoisie has been unable to extricate itself from the disaster of its close relationship to the USA and still finds itself bogged down in unsuccessful military adventures. Its weaknesses have been exposed, severely damaging its ability to ‘punch above its weight' in an effort to defend its interests world wide. In other conflict zones Britain is also shown to be impotent. For instance whatever support Britain may give to the opposition in Zimbabwe, its old colony, it is hardly an important player in this situation with South Africa negotiating the (failed) compromise. Similarly, Brown could bluster over the war between Russia and Georgia that Russia's actions have ‘real consequences', but this only showed Britain's powerlessness. The perspective is for things to get worse for British imperialism, both because it is embroiled in situations of growing chaos that it cannot control, and because its forces are overstretched. While the economic crisis sharpens imperialist tensions and conflicts, the ruling class is faced with an undefeated working class that it has not prepared for the level of sacrifice needed to significantly increase its military capacity. At the same time the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are another example of the perspective capitalism has in store - more military chaos, more barbarity.

D. Life of the bourgeoisie

Two years ago the Resolution on the British Situation asked "Will it be possible to contain the divisions within the ruling class?" Blair was still in office, but the bourgeoisie had made it clear he had to go, piling on unprecedented pressure: the loans for peerages scandal had led to police questioning of ministers under caution and even the PM had answered questions. Their real problems with Blair had little to do with a bit of sleaze, which is normal anyway, but the fact the government had got too close to the USA and the informalism and cronyism criticised in the Butler report, both of which robbed foreign policy of sufficient flexibility. Nevertheless at the level of attacks on the working class, the bourgeoisie could be well pleased with the efforts of their outgoing prime minister - pressure on the unemployed to limit costs of benefits, longer hours for some, more insecure and part time work for others, etc. Brown became PM without even a leadership election to great media acclaim and for the first 5 or 6 months could do no wrong. When the media started the campaign about Brown the incompetent ditherer after the party conference season last year, this had none of the bite of the campaign to persuade Blair to resign and played more a role of smokescreen to divert attention from the worsening economic situation in the credit crunch. Brown had the role of scapegoat for the crisis, as well as being responsible for bringing in attacks on the working class - it didn't matter how unpopular this was making him, several commentators told him, as he had no hope of winning an election. It also allowed the media to start playing up the opposition leader, David Cameron, as a credible choice for a future government.

That this was largely a temporary campaign seems to be confirmed by the way the bourgeoisie have started to rally round the Brown government over the last 6 weeks or so as the true seriousness of the present financial crisis and of the recession can no longer be hidden. We have had cross party support for the bailout plan, and the media have played up the prime minister's role in pushing forward the international response to the crisis. We will have to watch the development of the scandals that break out, such as that going on now around Oleg Deripaska. The chronically scandal prone Peter Mandelson has been brought back into the government because his close ties and experience with business will be useful in responding to the crisis, but the scandal about this Russian oligarch affects the Tory shadow chancellor as least as much. For the moment then, the bourgeoisie have an administration that has done what it can to pull back from its previously too close association with the US, and even if this policy has limited success they are cohering, for the moment, in the face of the financial crisis.

E. Decomposition

Decomposition affects every aspect of life in capitalist society, from the increasingly chaotic shifting imperialist alliances and military barbarism, to cronyism in government. Its use by the bourgeoisie is obvious in so many campaigns asking us to look for scapegoats for every ill capitalism foists on the working class, with blame falling to immigrants particularly, but also bad teachers, bad doctors, chavs, and the obese. The pervading sense of ‘every man for himself' through society is a constant weight on the working class, something that has to be fought to develop solidarity and a sense of class identify in every struggle.

However, the most noted and most tragic expression of decomposition is the increase in knife and gun crime among teenagers. A UNICEF report has condemned Britain as a bleak place for children, where many live in fear of crime and violence, the worst among developed countries. If it is particularly bad in Britain it is a response to the future without hope that capitalism offers: "the world that young people are growing up in, with the violence of nation against nation, gang against gang, individuals against each other. Seemingly random pointless violence is a pure product of decomposing capitalism" (WR 311). This cannot be solved by either repression or education, but will no doubt continue to be used in a campaign of fear to try and encourage a feeling of dependence on the state and acceptance of repressive measures.

Conclusion

We find ourselves analysing the British situation today after a year of the developing credit crunch and at the very beginning of a recession that even the chancellor predicts will be long and deep. This poses difficult questions for the bourgeoisie as it tries to keep the banking system afloat with unprecedented rescue packages and stabilise the economy. At the same time it is totally bogged down in failing military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan alongside the USA which continue to drain resources. In spite of a policy of trying to spend its way out of the crisis, with money it has to borrow, the working class will be made to pay for the crisis.

This gives the working class with much to reflect on about the future capitalism has in store for humanity. The working class remains undefeated and able to respond to the crisis. Nevertheless the fear of unemployment, the understanding that the crisis leaves the ruling class a reducing margin of manoeuvre to satisfy its demands makes it harder to enter into struggle. At the same time the crisis is posing the question of what is at stake in the class struggle today, the necessity to overthrow capitalism and make the communist revolution.

WR 26.10.08

We are publishing here a leaflet from Brazil, produced jointly by the ICC and the Workers Opposition group (OPOP) and distributed on 20 October in the general assemblies of bank employees.

The Brazilian bourgeoisie, faced with movements escaping its control (in fact, escaping the control of the unions) is using its repressive apparatus, the police, in a grotesque manner in order to intimidate the workers. In Porto Alegre, in the south of Brazil, it violently repressed a demonstration by bank employees on 16 October, using tear gas and rubber bullets, injuring around ten people. As if the repression carried out that morning wasn't enough, on the same day and in the same town, the 13th march of the 'Sem'[1], about 10,000 strong, was also the target of police repression, with a number of resulting injuries.

Before that, the bank bosses and the government itself had already attempted to take measures against the current strike of bank employees by persecuting and dismissing leaders in order to contain the development of the movement.

The necessity for class solidarity

It has to be stressed that the struggle of the bank employees goes beyond classic economic demands because the essential demand is for all employees to be treated equally. The banks, and above all the Federal banks, have created a huge gulf between the situation of long-standing employees and those who were taken on since 1998, when certain 'advantages' won in the struggle were clawed back. Much more than a simple demand for economic recompense, this is an important gesture of solidarity between workers, since it is not possible to accept being treated differently, as though some of us were inferior. We all do the same work, in the same centres and we are all subject to the same pressures.

It also needs to be very clear that all our 'advantages' are the fruit of the struggle: if some of us benefit from them, then we all need to benefit, regardless of when we were taken on. In the same way, this struggle is trying to win back what has been taken away, this time from all of us, such as the monthly bonuses, etc. All these economic gains were the product of our resistance struggles, but they were then annulled by the bosses with the complicity of their 'partners', the trade unions.

We all want better working conditions, an end to moral harassment, the end of targets for sales and services imposed by the banks: all this has led to so much illness among bank workers. We will say it again: we don't want to be treated differently from one another. We cannot accept the amputation of our 'advantages' which are the product of our struggles and not presents from the bosses, whether public or private.

The demand for the same conditions of work and remuneration for all those who are currently employed is an act of solidarity between different generations of workers in this sector. It is this same solidarity which we have to prove in acts with all those who are victims of state repression. We can only join together with all those fighting against being crushed by the needs of capitalism in crisis, with all those that the bourgeoisie has repressed or aims to repress because they are involved in struggles.

These struggles, and the whole problem of state repression, are not questions that concern only the bank employees, but all workers, with or without jobs. 

ICC/OPOP 10/08 

[1]Sem= Portuguese for 'without'. In other words movements which involve different categories excluded from society, The Landless Movement, the Roofless Movement, the Workless Movement. As the name indicates, the latter is made up essentially of unemployed proletarians. The Roofless Movement regroups elements from different non-exploiting strata, who come together to organise squats. The Landless Movement is also made up of different non-exploiting strata, mainly town dwellers organised within this structure to occupy land in the countryside with the idea of putting it under cultivation. This structure is solidly controlled by the state, especially since Lula first became head of state. 

The crisis - what's happening and why? What does it mean for us today and how can we be prepared for future struggles?

These and related questions were the topical programme for a day school held in Brighton on Saturday 29th November, organised by some of the people involved with Aufheben and local anarchist and community activists. These are the impressions of one of the ICC sympathisers who took part.

The event was well attended with around 50 people, including members of the Solidarity Federation and ICC members and sympathisers, indicating a real interest in discussion and learning in the broad proletarian milieu generally. As one participant put it: "I haven't seen that spectrum of people in one place since the anti-war movement in 2003".

The sessions for the day included an explanation of the credit crunch and the crisis of the banking system; an attempt to relate the current financial crisis to the crisis of capitalist accumulation and its relationship to the class struggle using key Marxist terms; an historical overview of the capitalist crisis of the 1970s and its implications for the current crisis, and a look at recent workers' struggles around the world, including Germany, China and Argentina, and the potential for future struggles.

This was an ambitious programme, and in the event it proved too much to pack into the time available with only short question and answer slots at the end of each session and frustratingly little opportunity at the end for opening up the discussion to all those present to debate they key issues.

This wasn't simply a practical problem, however. Although some presentations used Marxist terms to offer an analysis of the crisis, there was no collective framework for the discussion, with presenters free to offer their eclectic viewpoints (including one that appeared to suggest there was a revolutionary struggle taking place in Iceland against the IMF). Nor was there any attempt to sum up the main points of the day's discussions or put forward any perspective for future work or discussion.

Inevitably some presentations were more interesting than others. The one on the crisis of the 1970s was particularly thoughtful, offering a broader historical perspective. Without mentioning capitalist decadence it proposed that we are now seeing the‘decomposition'of the capitalist‘solutions'to the crisis of the 1970s. To quote from the speakers' handout:

"...with what appears to be the unraveling of a shape of capitalism that has dominated the last 30 years, we are reminded again of the crisis of the 70s and the waves of struggles that ensued from the late 60s through to the early 80s ... the supposed liberalisation that emerged from the crisis of the 70s, and which was often predictably presented as the finally achieved solution to running a stable and growing economy, itself appears to be unraveling."

Despite such insights, however, one of the unanswered questions of the day was whether ultimately we are seeing today a cyclical crisis of the capitalist system, in other words essentially a crisis of growth, or whether in fact we are seeing a crisis of a system in its death throes. Without answering this basic question, we cannot be clear about the questions of strategy and tactics for todays and future struggles.

The fact that elements at the day school were moving close to an analysis of capitalist decadence is significant, and there were, but this milieu is loath to accept the basic Marxist position on the decadence of capitalism - don't mention the 'd-word' - and as a result we can say that despite some interventions from the floor arguing that capitalism is a bankrupt system, the general flavour of the presentations underestimated the seriousness of the current situation and its historical significance.

The ICC members and symapthisers present made several interventions to highlight what for us are the most important basic points about the current economic crisis and the lessons of past struggles for today. The meeting was very open to these interventions, and also to the ICC's leaflet on the crisis, although it was frustrating that there was little opportunity offered to engage in further debate and discussion. While there are opportunities for such discussion online in the libcom discussion forums, there is no substitute for face-to-face discussion in order to clarify and develop ideas.

There was no real 'conclusion' or summary of the day, no attempt to try and draw together points of agreement, points raised for future discussion etc. It tends to feel like"ok, we've come together, had a discussion, listened to several different points of view - away you go now till next time".

A practical challenge today is to promote and strengthen a culture of debate

Practically, we would suggest that there should definitely be future meetings to pursue the main themes of this one, that future meetings should ensure adequate time and opportunity for discussion, and that the organisers should delegate responsibility for the summarising of the key points of the discussion,

Some participants wanted to highlight the local dimension of the global crisis, how the crisis will hit employment in Brighton. We would emphasise the importance of such meetings and discussions for the working class as a whole: they are part of a process of reflection and express an urge to clarify on an international scale.

libcom.org/forums/announcements/day-school-crisis-brighton-sat-29th-nov-17112008 [137]

On Wednesday the 12th of November 120.000 school kids took to the streets in Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, Munich, Trier and many other German cities. They protested against increasing examination stress, the shortage of teachers, the resulting cancelling of lessons etc. In other words, they protested against the intolerable conditions in the schools. Their protest threw the light of truth on the grand speeches of politicians about how much they value education; on the different "educational offensives" they announce in response to the miserable "marks" their system has been given in the "Pisa" quality assessments, where they pose unceasingly with the kids in front of the camera. The school school students have brought to the fore the best qualities which characterise this young generation: The radicalism of their criticism, their lack of respect for the hallowed institutions of the ruling class, the audacity of their actions.

You can find enough shortcomings of these protests if you want. The party atmosphere of the demonstrations has been pointed to, or the fact that the sparks of insubordination only rarely spread to the teachers and students. You can complain that this movement did not organise itself, that the protests were called by official and semi official pupil representation structures or private initiatives such as "Break Through the Education Blockage". But all such grumbling misses the essential point of these protests, which are far from being a mere footnote of the class struggle.

These actions are part and parcel of the struggles of the working class as a whole, not least of the international protest movement of contemporary school students and students, which began with the protest movements of these sectors against the "CPE" legislation in France in the spring of 2006. France and Chile 2006, Italy and Spain in the autumn of 2008, and now Germany as well. Everywhere the young generation is returning to the scene of struggle against the worsening of the living, working and learning conditions. It is even placing itself in the forefront of the workers' struggle.

It is striking that, in all of these movements the school students have played a particularly active role. In Germany the school students have even assumed a vanguard role. They were the driving force behind the protests, and not the students, among whom to a great extent passivity had crept in. The latter had worn themselves out in recent years in the aftermath of protests against the introduction of university fees, which, under the direction of leftist groups, dispersed themselves in activism and boycott actions.

What is also striking is the grim determination with which the protesting school students expressed their indignation. Two episodes express this powerfully. In Berlin, thousands of school students briefly occupied the venerable Humboldt University, hanging flags and slogans out the windows such as: "Capitalism is the crisis".

What happened in Hannover was even more spectacular. There, the protests broke through the police ban mile around the provincial parliament of Lower Saxony, besieged the "holy house of democracy" and even tried to storm it. This resulted in scuffles with the uniformed representatives of the state, in the course of which some of the school students made the unpleasant acquaintance of state repression.

It is enough to imagine that the workers of the nearby Volkswagen plants might follow this example in order to begin to sense the explosive potential of such proceedings. As far as we are aware, this is the first time in the post war German Federal Republic that the working class undertook such an action. It was left to the school students of Hannover - as wage labourers of the future, part of the working class - to be the first to directly attack the parliament as the symbol of domination in western capitalism, without bothering in the least about the unspeakable character of this breaking of taboo's in the eyes of the ruling class. Congratulations!

Indeed, the present world wide movements of school students and students distinguish themselves from their predecessors in the 1960's and 1970's through the progressive loss of illusions in relation to bourgeois mystifications, through their soberness regarding the system and its perspectives. What is at issue today is no longer having your own pupil representation, but basics of life, concrete material demands which capitalism is less and less able to fulfil. The advanced stage of the crisis is lending the present pupil and student actions a much more radical character than that of the 1960s and 70s.

The present youth movements also distinguish themselves from the "no future" generation of the 1980s. Already the simple fact that the present generation increasingly defends itself collectively, that it raises concrete demands, is a sign of anything but resignation. Those who struggle have not yet lost hope for the future.

Weltrevolution 26.11.2008