Inflation increasingly puts basic necessities out of reach of the world's poor. Used on the front page of World Revolution 314, May 2008. UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon has said that “the dramatic escalation in food prices worldwide has evolved into an unprecedented challenge of global proportions”. While the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates that globally average food prices have risen 57% over the last year, this average is exceeded by certain staples. With rice up 74% over a year (217% over the last two years), wheat up 130% (136%), corn 31% (125%) and soybeans 87% ( 107%) we’re looking at absolute essentials for the majority of the world’s population. As we pointed out in WR 311 (‘Inflation meets recession’) in the 82 poorest countries, where 60 to 90% of the family budget is spent on food, anticipated rises in food prices mean that much of the population will suffer famine, and ultimately death. Already throughout the world 100,000 people every day die from starvation.

As the statistics accumulate, so does the other evidence of the growing hunger across the world. To take the examples that have been most publicised in the European media: the food riots, demonstrations and strikes that have occurred in Africa (Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ethiopia, Guinea, Madagascar, Mauritania, Morocco and Senegal), Asia (Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Yemen) and the Americas (Bolivia, Brazil, Haiti, Mexico and Peru.)

In WR 313 (‘It’s a crisis of the whole system’) we referred to the record 28 million in the US who were anticipated to be claiming food stamps by November. This figure has had to be revised as the total had already reached 27.7m in January, and remember that only about 65% of those eligible make a claim. It’s true that the situation in the US is not the same as in the most devastated countries, but, if you bear in mind that, beyond the food stamps, there is a network of 200 regional food banks to about 30,000 churches and soup kitchens across the country, you can what the real extent of American ‘prosperity’ is.

Many explanations, but no capitalist solutions

The head of the UN’s World Food Programme, describing the crisis as a “silent tsunami” that threatened to plunge more than 100 million people into hunger, said “This is the new face of hunger -- the millions of people who were not in the urgent hunger category six months ago but now are.”

Alongside the admission of a crisis the bourgeoisie does have explanations, and even attempts at amelioration. The FAO points to low levels of world stocks following below-average harvests; crop failures; growing demand for subsidised grain-based biofuels; lower production levels in OECD countries; increased demand from countries like China and India; and climate change.

37 countries are listed by the FAO as being “in crisis requiring external assistance”. It distinguishes between three categories:

“Countries facing an exceptional shortfall in aggregate food production/supplies as a result of crop failure, natural disasters, interruption of imports, disruption of distribution, excessive post-harvest losses, or other supply bottlenecks.

Countries with widespread lack of access, where a majority of the population is considered to be unable to procure food from local markets, due to very low incomes, exceptionally high food prices, or the inability to circulate within the country.

Countries with severe localized food insecurity due to the influx of refugees, a concentration of internally displaced persons, or areas with combinations of crop failure and deep poverty.”

If you look through the factors that undermine the possibility of viable agriculture, it’s clear that war lies behind a number of them. The disruption of imports, distribution and circulation within a country, movements of refugees and internally displaced people can most often be put down to past or current conflicts. This is a circular question. When the head of the IMF warned of mass starvation and other terrible consequences if food prices carried on going up so quickly he said “As we know, learning from the past, those kinds of questions sometimes end in war.” In the short term capitalism can only briefly stop wars; in the long term it makes them more likely.

Of the other factors (crop failures, post-harvest losses, deep poverty etc), some can be put down to ‘natural’ disasters like drought and flood, which, whether attributed to climate change or not, capitalism has shown no sign of wanting or being able to deal with, or to social situations which are worsening with the deepening of the economic crisis across the globe, an inevitable result of capitalist production for profit.

It is no surprise that the FAO talks of ‘crisis’ and ‘external assistance’. It can only think it terms of responses to emergencies, short term action for something that has no long term solution within capitalism. It can only conceive of ‘external’ help, because, in the anarchy of capitalist production, the poorest countries stand no chance of getting out of their current position, relying on aid from the richest countries to ‘survive’.

When organisations like the FAO, IMF, World Bank, the WTO and all the rest meet together for crisis talks, they can only propose various forms of aid, subsidies and loans. There are sometimes campaigns for changes in production patterns, but they can only have the most minimal effect on the overall situation. 2008, for example, is the International Year of the Potato. The FAO enthuses over the nutritional qualities of the potato and how it has been neglected as a potential source of income. But no amount of diversification can solve the basic problem, any more than so-called ‘fair trade’ schemes, that still, after all, leave exploitation in place.

The fundamental reality with the rise in food prices, like the rise in fuel prices, is that they are a direct product of the economic crisis. It is not within capitalism’s powers to deal with the factors that cause the food crisis, as it is capitalism itself that generates all the problems. Don’t believe any ‘solution’ that leaves capitalist rule untouched. It has to be dismantled worldwide, and replaced by a different system of production where food and all life’s other necessities are produced and distributed on the basis of need, not sale and profit.

At the latest food summit in Berne, Ban Ki-moon warned of the “spectre of widespread hunger, malnutrition and social unrest on an unprecedented scale.” It is the spectre of increasing working class struggle that most disturbs the ruling class. Car 29/4/8

The 1st May local election results were a very bad setback for the Labour government, with only 24% of the vote, the lowest share since 1968, the loss of a number of councils in their core areas of support, and most spectacularly Boris Johnson's victory over Ken Livingstone in the London Mayoral election.

This fiasco is widely, and correctly, put down to the feel-bad effect of the economy since the credit crunch. Gordon Brown has tried to insist that the economy is basically sound and Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, has argued that investors overdo the "doom and gloom" of the markets. But there has been a whole media campaign blaming the economic problems on Gordon Brown's incompetence, while various Labour MPs have, rather belatedly, discovered that the loss of the 10p tax band announced a year ago when he was still chancellor will hurt many Labour voters on low incomes.

Fears about the effects of the credit crunch on the economy, and particularly jobs and living standards, are entirely justified. The housing bubble, an integral part of Britain's ‘growth' during Brown's chancellorship, burst loudly with the dramatic run on Northern Rock, the first on a British bank for well over a century. House prices have been estimated as 25-30% overpriced, or to put it another way, the price of a home for a first time buyer is now well over 5 times annual income whereas it was just under 4 times income at the end of the 1980s, immediately before the last fall in the housing market. Naturally house prices are now falling, down 0.6% in March, 1.8% in April, and 4% down from peak levels last summer according to building societies; but not all buyers have a mortgage and estate agents have noticed that overall sales are about 10% down on the peak of last summer (The Economist 12.4.08). The IMF has estimated that the credit crunch will cost nearly $1 trillion in write-downs and credit losses for financial institutions internationally.

The long and the short of it is that while more and more money is being made available to the banks - such as the £50 billion the Bank of England announced it will make available in bonds in exchange for mortgage security at the end of last month, and the bank base rate is falling - mortgages are rising on top of already unprecedented repayments: "Mortgage payments are making ever-larger dents in household income, rising from 12.5 per cent in 1997 to 17.6 per cent in May this year" (Independent 24.8.07). Of course, the actual payments for any household with a mortgage is much higher. And that is for those who can afford a mortgage. It is estimated that the effect of the crunch will be the loss of 40,000 city jobs; a third of estate agents may close, and a further 100,000 retail jobs may go.

Is it all down to poor government, or is there a more serious underlying problem in the economy?

But what about the soundness of the British economy?

Britain was not just the workshop of the world and imperialist top dog in the 19th Century, with a third of the land mass coloured pink (for the empire) on maps, it was also the world's banker. Financial services played an increasingly important part in Britain's economy, and their relative importance increased from the late 1800s as her competitors, especially USA and Germany, caught up and overtook her industrial production. Much of the world had conducted its trade in £s, the ‘Sterling area' including Portugal, Argentina and Scandinavia. Britain's huge financial sector was analysed by revolutionaries in the Italian communist left in the 1930s: "It is a fact that British finance has for a long time ceased to be interested in the industrial and agricultural sphere in the Metropolis, contenting itself with gleaning profits from merchants and colonies and from the capital exports derived from accumulation in industry. ... 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 from their perturbations; a strength because, cut off from production, it retains a greater elasticity of action in periods of crisis" (‘The evolution of British imperialism', WR 312). The depth of Britain's continued decline was shown up very clearly with the sterling devaluation forced on the Labour government in 1967 by a run on the pound, which marked the final end of the last remnants of the Sterling area. The devaluation was also an important marker of the onset of the economic crisis internationally.

With British industry in even further decline since then, the underlying weakness of the economy is more pronounced and the strength and elasticity less effective, particularly in a crisis which is centred on banks and financial services. "Jim O'Neill, chief economist at Goldman Sachs, who correctly forecast the collapse of the US property market, said that Britain was likely to be the worst hit of the world's economies in the fallout of the global credit crisis. Mr O'Neill said that Britain, with its heavy reliance on financial services, was ‘in the eye of the storm of a de-leveraging world economy' and that British homeowners would bear the brunt of the City's ensuing slowdown" (The Times 1.5.08). He also predicted that Britain's service sector would lose ground to the rest of Europe.

To understand the extent of the effect that this will have we need to see that the housing bubble was one of the main factors behind a huge increase in personal debt, rising to £1.35 trillion up from 1.25 in 2006, ie more than the GDP of 1.33 trillion (Grant Thornton predictions quoted in The Independent, 24 August last year). We need to add to this mountain of personal debt a public debt of 43.3% GDP (CIA World Factbook). Back in August the Bank of England was saying that this debt was a ‘social' rather than an ‘economic' problem - by which they meant it was a problem for the individuals who got into debt. But in fact it is a social problem for the ruling class as well because of the effect the bursting of the housing bubble will have on the working class as it is faced with rising mortgages, along with rising food and fuel prices, at a time of relative pay cuts and job losses. The working class will be forced to defend its living conditions.

Britain is due to break the Maastricht rules over its public debt, with new borrowing rising to more than 3% of GDP as the Treasury loses £16 billion in revenue over the next 2 years. Brussels estimates UK growth will be down to 1.7% this financial year and 1.6% next (far less than the Treasury forecast given for public consumption at the time of the budget).

Leaner and meaner

The ruling class has not remained inactive in the face of the decline in British industry, attempting to make production leaner and fitter, more competitive, particularly in the 1980s, the Reagan and Thatcher years. This was accompanied by the ideology of neo-liberalism, but we should not let that label fool us into thinking that it was just about ‘Tory policies' nor that it was about less state intervention. The rundown of the steel industry in 1979-80 was the result of the economic crisis of the time, in particular the overproduction of steel relative to the market and the fact that British Steel could not compete. Jim Callaghan's outgoing Labour government was just as aware of the need to cut steel jobs as Thatcher. And the rundown of the steel industry was not the result of privatisation. Privatisation was simply the best way for the state to run down the industry as it gave a false target for workers' anger - not the crisis of capitalism and the state, but a particular government and the new private boss. Such diversion tactics were particularly important given the militancy of the struggles in the 70s and 80s, which included the 1980 steel strike.

The next industry to fall was coal mining, which also had to be run down in the face of the militant struggle of workers in 1984. And this time there was a clearer feeling of solidarity from the rest of the working class, although it was usually channelled into set piece battles with the police. The final nail in the coffin of the coal industry came in 1992.

Of Britain's great industrial prowess in the 19th Century - coal, iron and steel, shipbuilding, textiles - almost nothing is left. The remnants of the steel industry, Corus, was sold off to an Indian capitalist. This part of the economy is not leaner and fitter, but emaciated and moribund.

But we are talking about a crisis-ridden capitalist system, not a complete collapse. There have been new industries in the 20th Century: cars, computers, services. The massive loss of jobs in the docks was due to containerisation, which gave a boost to global trade by cutting costs, allowing some production to be transferred to areas of the world where labour is significantly cheaper, such as China and India. But none of this has re-launched the economy since the 1980s. There have been waves of redundancies in the car industry and there will be more to come as it is acknowledged that it is about 20% overcapacity world wide. Each new hope for the economy has proved to be largely speculative and given rise to its own crash - the Asian tigers in 1997, then the internet bubble, and now the housing bubble. Each new industry only participates in a crisis-wracked world capitalist system and cannot escape the limits of its solvent market, based on who can pay for things and not what is needed by human beings.

This is confirmed by the levels of unemployment. Although unemployment of 1 million became normal in Britain in the 1920s, reflecting the decline in the economy and the weakness of the recovery after the First World War, even before the depression of the 1930s, the post war boom in the 1950s and 1960s created a great need for labour and the ideology that capitalism could create full employment. But unemployment gradually rose in the late 1960s and 1970s (before the massive redundancies in steel and coal), so that the length of the dole queues was a major plank of Tory electioneering in 1979. Thatcher was duly elected and continued to lengthen the dole queues to around 3 million, only getting the unemployment figures down by statistical manipulation and forcing many unemployed to claim incapacity benefit instead of unemployment for the most minor health problems - which allows them to be portrayed as malingerers today.

No government competent to run the economy

The latest outbreak of the economic crisis is exposing the shallowness of both the Thatcherite fix of the 80s and the Brownian ‘boom' of the last ten years. Gordon Brown has lost his shining image as the prudent chancellor who presided over a healthy economy. He is now being widely portrayed as the profligate who failed to save in the good years, and an incompetent not fit to be prime minister. Taking this flack is an essential part of his job - far better for the ruling class and their state that we blame Gordon Brown or Alistair Darling, and wonder whether Cameron and Osborne could do better, than that we start to question the future capitalism has to offer us. Alex 3.5.08

In WR 312 [4] and 313 [5] we published articles (for the first time in English) on the evolution of British imperialism, from Bilan, the theoretical organ of the Italian Communist Left. They first appeared in 1934-1935 and gave a marxist framework for understanding subsequent developments.

In this issue we are republishing the first part of a text on the evolution of Britain since the Second World War, written in 1978. It is in continuity with the earlier articles, in particular with the continuing conflict of interests between British and American imperialisms. It does talk of the "complete US hegemony" in the ‘special relationship' between the UK and the US, but also acknowledges the efforts of America to deal with "any independent actions that did not correspond to its own requirements".The most obvious example of this was British and French policy over Suez.

There are some expressions in the article which have not stood the test of time, or, rather, time has helped us understand reality more clearly. For example, the text says that Labour had become the ‘natural party of government'. In fact the years of the Thatcher/Major governments, during which the Labour party played an essential role in undermining the struggles of the working class, showed that the Labour party has become the central party of the British bourgeoisie, whether in government or opposition.

There are other formulations which there is no need to take up at present as future articles on British imperialism will look more deeply at the questions raised both by the Bilan articles and developments over the last 30 years.

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An analysis of the current situation at any time - whether at the international level or in any one country - can never be a simple snapshot; connected events are only moments in a dynamic interplay of forces which develops over a period of time. Our previous analyses of the situation in Britain have been located within a view of its development through the period since 1967 when the sterling devaluation heralded the opening-up of the present open crisis of the world capitalist system. This text attempts to gain a broader perspective on the situation in Britain by examining its evolution since the outbreak of the Second World War.

The general significance of the period for Britain

1. The general significance of this period can be summarised by the following:

- Britain’s capacity to remain a global imperialist power was broken by the systematic efforts of the US during the Second World War and its aftermath. This was done in such a way as to bring Britain to a position of total economic and military subservience to the US in the constitution of the western bloc after the war.

- The mantle of the ‘natural party of government’ has been irreversibly transferred from the Conservative to the Labour Party. This correspondence of the Labour Party to the overall needs of British capital has not been a product merely of conjunctural circumstances in the past few years, but has been the true state of affairs during and since the last world war. Indeed, it is the periods in which government power has rested with the Conservatives that have been the product of conjunctural circumstances.

- The balance of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat has undergone a change of historic proportion. If the Second World War marked the bourgeoisie’s zenith and the proletariat’s nadir, the proletariat has now strengthened to the point where it not only stands as a barrier to a third global war, but is developing to go further and pose its own revolutionary solution to the historical crisis of capitalism. Although this shift of forces is an international one, its manifestations in Britain have had a profound effect on the situation.

These are the main themes of this text.

Britain and the formation of the US bloc

2. The Second World War changed the physiognomy of the world imperialist system of capital. It transformed the pre -1939 pattern of several competing ‘mini-blocs’ into two great global blocs each under the unassailable hegemony of its major national bourgeoisie, the US and Russia. The war was pursued not only militarily between the Allied and Axis powers, but economically among the Allies themselves, or rather between the US and each of the others. For Britain, its ‘war’ with the US was the crucial determinant of its post-war position.

3. The lynchpin of the British economy in the thirties was still the Empire which included outright colonies (such as India) as well as semi-colonies (such as China or Argentina). Its increasing importance as a primary source of wealth to the economy was irreplaceable and can be easily illustrated. With a base of 100 in 1924, the index of total national income had risen to nearly 110 in 1934 while the index of national income earned abroad had risen to nearly 140. In 1930 its level of investment abroad was higher than any other country in the world and 18% of the national wealth was derived from it. And throughout the thirties Britain retained the greatest share of world trade - in 1936 it was 15.4%.

In absolute and relative terms Britain’s foreign investments greatly exceeded those of the US... In 1929 Britain’s income from long-term investment abroad amounted to 1219 million gold dollars while for the US it was 876 million gold dollars. However, the giant US economy (whose national wealth in 1930 was 1760 billion marks compared to Britain’s 450 billion marks) had been expanding far faster than the British economy and its need for foreign markets was becoming more and more pressing, as can be seen for example in the relative growths of capital invested abroad. British capital invested abroad in 1902 was 62 billion francs (at pre-war parity) and this rose to 94 billion francs in 1930; the equivalent figures for the US were 2.6 billion francs in 1900 and 81 billion francs in 1930. With such an appetite for foreign markets the US could only lust for the Empire clutched so desperately by the British bourgeoisie for its markets and raw materials.

With increasing competition (especially from the US and Germany) the loss of the Empire would have been catastrophic. Yet, at the same time, the cost of maintaining it was enormous. Threats came from all sides: German and Japanese military expansion; colonial bourgeoisies fighting to enlarge their own position at Britain’s expense; pressure, particularly from the US, for ending Imperial Preferences and opening the markets up for their own economic expansion. Some sections of the British bourgeoisie had been arguing for years for a less onerous way of maintaining British advantages but they were fighting against very entrenched interests. Consequently, right up to the beginning of the war, and even well into its first year, the British bourgeoisie was markedly divided about what was the best course to follow.

The basic ‘choice’ was: to go to war or to avoid war. Of those who wished to go to war there was a small pro-German faction in the Conservative Party, but far larger factions of the bourgeoisie saw greater gains to be made by defeating Germany. These included the left wing of the Labour Party and the faction of the Conservative Party led by Churchill. However, other factions of the bourgeoisie saw that whichever side Britain chose, the war would certainly lead to the dismemberment of the Empire to the advantage either of Germany or the US. This latter view was the one held by the Chamberlain government and led to the policy of appeasement, epitomised by the action at Munich in 1938. Only by avoiding war could Britain escape becoming a dependency either of the US or Germany.

However, for global, historic reasons, war was inevitable and the only question was: who was Britain to be allied with and against whom? In trying to avoid the question Chamberlain took up the ridiculous role of a Canute, and the rest of the bourgeoisie has despised him for it ever since.

4. In the event, a combination of German interventions into Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, combined with the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin, meant that further German expansion would be towards the west. The threat to Britain’s own shores was clear, and Chamberlain declared war on Germany. However, a period of indecision followed during which the British bourgeoisie was led by those who had wanted to avoid war while, on the other hand, the German bourgeoisie hoped that the situation could quieten in the west so that they could expand to the east - at the expense of Russia. This period was the ‘phoney war’ which ended with the advance of the German army through the Ardennes in May 1940 and the subsequent fall of France. These events precipitated the fall of Chamberlain and the rise to power of a coalition of forces under Churchill which was totally committed to finding the solution to British capital’s problems through the defeat of German expansionism. As it was clear that Britain’s productive capacity was not sufficient to meet the requirements of the war the British bourgeoisie was forced to ask the US for help.

5. The objectives of the US bourgeoisie’s policy in regard to the war were:

- to defeat Germany and Japan

- to prevent the rise of Russia in Europe

- to turn Britain and its Empire into dependencies of the US.

In pursuit of these goals the US bourgeoisie’s policies were engineered to secure victory at the least possible cost. ‘Least possible cost’ meant: bleeding its allies as much as possible for repayments for war matériel without destroying their commitment to the war effort; using the massive market created by the war to stimulate the US economy and absorb the unemployed back into the process of production; minimising domestic discontent with the war by ensuring that the brunt of the slaughter on the battlefields would be sustained by the armies of its allies.

During the early stages of the war the application of these policies hit the British economy harder than the German bombers could. Through the cash-and-carry system, British financial reserves were steadily depleted to pay for war matériel, fuel and food, a substantial proportion of which never even reached Britain because of the shipping losses sustained by the North Atlantic convoys. The US bourgeoisie was thus able to systematically weaken the British bourgeoisie’s resistance to the conditions put on the economic and military arrangements which followed; and so, when in 1941 the Lend-Lease arrangements came to replace the cash-and-carry system (which had cost British capital nearly 3.6 billion dollars) Britain had only 12 million dollars in uncommitted reserves left. In the Lend-Lease Master Agreements the US began a whole programme of schemes to force Britain to abolish Imperial Preference after the war, and to dismantle the Empire. And to ensure that Britain could not postpone all repayment until the end of the war, Reverse Lend-Lease was provided for in the summer of 1943. These were demands in kind placed by the US for raw materials, foodstuffs, military equipment and support for the US army in the European theatre of operations. On top of this, regular assessments of Britain’s reserves were made so that when the US government considered they were ‘too large’, immediate cash payments were demanded under the Lend-Lease arrangements.

The advantages gained by the US over Britain throughout the war were pressed home immediately the war ended. On VJ Day Truman terminated all Lend-Lease, with the account standing at 6 billion dollars due to the US from Britain. Although the US wrote off a substantial proportion, the sum outstanding was left sufficiently high to ensure a continued US domination of Britain’s economic options. This residual sum was 650 million dollars which was greater than British foreign currency reserves. In addition, the US refused to share the cost of amortising the sterling balances (worth nearly 14 billion dollars) built up as part of the allied war debt.

By the end of the war the US was well on its way to achieving its wartime goals regarding Britain and the Empire, though they were not fully accomplished for some years more. These goals became interwoven with the need to construct and consolidate its bloc against that being built up by Russia, particularly since, in the second half of the 1940s, the possibility of a third world war was very real.

6. The US did not intend to repeat its post-World War One mistakes where it had bankrupted Europe by forcing repayment of war debts and raising its tariff barriers. Its main objectives were to apply co-ordinated financial measures to the reconstruction of the countries in its bloc in such a way as to stimulate the US economy. The reconstruction of Europe and Japan would thus provide markets for US industry and agriculture, while making it possible for these countries to contribute to the military capacity of the bloc. These plans were set into motion even before the war finished - mainly through the Bretton Woods system (the IMF and World Bank).

However, in the context of this overall strategy, the US singled Britain out for special treatment. Since Churchill’s rearguard actions had resisted the US efforts to prise the Empire free from the grip of the British bourgeoisie, the US maintained the squeeze on the British economy. In return for the 3.75 billion dollar loan to offset the rigours of the end of Lend-Lease, the British government had to agree to help to impose the Bretton Woods plans on the rest of the bloc. It also had to make sterling convertible by mid-1947, which the US wanted in order to make Britain more vulnerable to calls on its reserves. (Indeed, this was too successful: when Britain lost 150 million dollars in gold and dollar reserves in one month, the US had to permit a suspension of convertibility.)

As the rivalry between the US and Russia became more intense, the US saw the need to accelerate the reconstruction process and to increase European military spending. The Marshall Plan provided the funds to do this between 1948-51 and in conjunction with this NATO was formed in 1949. Pressure was maintained on the British bourgeoisie throughout the 1940s to make a high contribution to this military force. So, while the US demobilised at a very high speed, Britain had to support substantial forces in Europe - indeed, Britain still had one million men at arms as late as 1948. In 1950 the US committed first its own and then other allied (including British) troops to the Korean War; it also demanded an enormous increase in the British military budget - to £4.7 billion that year. With German rearmament in 1950 the bill for the British army of occupation was taken from the German bourgeoisie and presented to the British bourgeoisie.

Several other measures were taken to keep up the economic pressures on British capital: for example, when the US gave the go-ahead to Japanese rearmament in 1951 it waived Japanese reparations to Britain; when Britain tried to waive its own debts to its colonies (created through non-payments for materials and services received during the war) the US blocked the move.

7. With greater or lesser degrees of success, successive British governments tried to defend the economy from the US bourgeoisie’s onslaughts on the home and colonial markets. They also tried to sustain Britain’s position as a global imperialist power.

But with the US cynically putting itself forward as the champion of anti-colonialism and national independence, war-drained Britain was completely unable to maintain its anachronistic colonial system. The war had given a huge impetus to national movements in the colonies - movements supported by Russia and America, both of whom had a vested interest in the dismemberment of the British Empire. The British withdrawals from India and Palestine were the most spectacular moments in the breaking-up of the Empire, and the Suez fiasco in 1956 marked the end of any illusions that Britain was still a ‘first class power’. The US made it quite clear that it would not sanction any independent actions that did not correspond to its own requirements. The British government was helpless against this position and had to withdraw, and in doing so acknowledged that it was unable to defend its trade routes and colonies.

The dismantling of the British Empire gathered speed and the sixties saw a steady trail of colonies lining up for their ‘independence’. The final withdrawal by British forces from ‘East of Suez’ overseen by the 1964 Wilson government was only the last formality in a process which had begun decades previously.

8. The major conclusions we can draw from the process of the formation of the bloc regarding Britain can be summarised as follows:

- The US bourgeoisie set out to reduce the British nation state to a secondary economic and military power. The main objective was to demolish the British Empire which was regarded as the main obstacle to American expansionism. By developing the appropriate policies and using its enormous economic and political power, it achieved this goal in the course of the war and the reconstruction which followed.

- Cash-and-carry and Lend-Lease were used to generate claims on British concessions and access to raw materials. By these means control of deposits of strategic materials such as oil, minerals and rubber was transferred from the British to the US bourgeoisie. A state of permanent financial indebtedness was also created and maintained.

- Post-war ‘aid’ was channelled into Europe in a manner which both stimulated the US economy and increased the military capacities of the western bloc. Thus Britain’s economic policies were dictated primarily by the needs of a permanent western war economy controlled by the US bourgeoisie.

- Although the reconstruction brought an apparent boom to the western economy, the benefits to the British economy were substantially tempered and carefully tailored by the US for its own interests. The loss of the Empire and the onset of the world economic crisis in the sixties thus found British capital in a very weak position, far less able than most other major economies (such as Germany, Japan or France) to face up to it.

- The ‘special relationship’ which the British bourgeoisie has so often claimed it has with the US bourgeoisie is simply one of complete US hegemony. In the reinforcement of the bloc which has taken place in recent years as a result of the heightening inter-imperialist antagonisms, Britain has consequently been the most compliant of the US’ major allies. Marlowe (Summer 1979)

 

400,000 workers were involved in strikes, demonstrations and rallies on 24 April. 250,000 teachers took part in their first national strike in 21 years. 100,000 civil servants were on strike. Of the 25,000 on strike in Birmingham it was the second day for council workers. It's true that the actions were well prepared in advance and run by the unions, and that different sectors of workers were mostly kept apart. Also, many teachers seemed content to follow the NUT slogan of ‘Fair pay for teachers', presumably under the illusion that employers would listen to reason rather than the language of economic constraints. But despite the degree of union control it was still possible to see that workers' real feelings were engaged. At root the workers who participated have felt the sting of the inflation that affects fuel, food and most other prices, seen the pay offers which amount to attacks on their living standards and wanted to do something to express their anger and desperation.

At the start of a 10,000 strong march of mainly teachers in London a man handing out union pennants was shouting that 100,000 civil service workers were striking in solidarity with the teachers. That wasn't the case, as unions like the NUT and PCS had both made a point of emphasising what was specific to teachers and civil servants. However, it did tap into the need all groups of workers have - to not feel as though you're on your own, to be part of a common struggle. Teachers who had seen BBC breakfast TV on the morning of the strikes would have witnessed a typical example of media balance: a non-striking teacher from the NAS/UWT saying how appalling it all was and a pupil saying how he wanted to be taught so he could pass his exams. Newspapers attacked teachers for being ‘unprofessional', telling them they should be grateful to have a job in the current climate. At times like that it's easy to feel isolated and worried if you're doing the right thing.

The workers at the Grangemouth refinery in Scotland were also attacked by the media and the government for their two day strike. We were told that the 1200 striking workers would cost the country £50 million a day, that it would bring chaos to the North Sea oil fields, put petrol prices up even more and deliver another blow to the whole economy. Ineos, the employer, said that the two days would mean the plant could be out of commission for a month. Papers in Scotland said it was outrageous for workers earning more than twice the average Scottish wage to expect to continue with their current pension arrangements. Ineos said that 650 workers would have to go if its pension plan was not allowed through.

In reality this was the first refinery strike in 73 years. The concern of Grangemouth workers was not just their own pensions but that in future the plan would mean that no new employees would be able to enter the scheme. These skilled workers are indeed better paid than many but, as a comment piece in the Herald, entitled ‘Militants' mantle may be forced on middle classes', put it: "we are going to see very much more of this kind of dispute in future. Workers in IT, media, financial services, energy, pharmaceuticals, who probably don't even think of themselves as ‘workers', are finding their living standards squeezed by inflation, mortgage rates, energy and petrol costs. Moreover, they are increasingly facing anonymous and intransigent bosses..."

There has been a fashion for pundits and academics to say that the working class has changed so much that it's no longer a useful way of characterising all the different people who work for wages. Against this just look at the position of Grangemouth, more or less midway between Glasgow and Edinburgh, still very much a population/industrial belt, despite the decline of traditional manufacturing industries in the area. You can tell people that they're not part of the working class, but that's not going to stop them struggling when their living conditions are attacked.

The refinery workers did not only have to contend with Ineos and the media. Grangemouth has been gradually run down over a period of time. In the 1980s there were 5000 workers there, but, under BP, the previous owner, and with great help from the union, the number of workers has been reduced to its current level. This is not the first time that unions have helped Ineos. When the firm took over a Runcorn chlorine plant, they imposed a similar pension scheme to that at Grangemouth, got rid of 600 workers and received £50 million from the government, all with the assistance of the unions, which later accepted the Ineos takeover of Grangemouth from BP, fully aware of the way the company operated. With the strike itself the union has worked hand in glove with the employer, more concerned with PR and respectability than the interests of the workers. And almost immediately after the strike the Unite union and Ineos met, discussed and quickly issued a joint statement that they had a plan which would be considered in a few days. To date there have been no details of what the plan involves.

With the worsening of capitalism's economic crisis it is no surprise that workers are more and more beginning to struggle, not only for themselves, but, as at Grangemouth, for workers still to be employed; not only in Britain but internationally. Along with these struggles there will continue to be attacks from the media and sabotage from the unions of any move towards the expression of workers' solidarity. The unions are particularly strong in Britain and at the moment workers still find themselves marching behind their banners. Increasingly, however, workers will begin to realise that it's only when they take over their own struggles that they become a force to be reckoned with. Car 1/5/8

Just a couple of years ago, China's President Hu Jintao promised a "peaceful rise" of his country onto the international arena. Many international observers and commentators were taken in by the Stalinist doublespeak from the military dictatorship of the People's Liberation Army and argued that China's economic ascension would make it a more reliable, responsible power for good in the world. Indeed, since the 1990s, with one or two notable exceptions, China has trod softly, softly. But the reality behind China's imperialist ‘peace' was underlined on 11 January 2007, when it shot down one of its own weather satellites 850 kilometres above the planet, directly positing a threat to American dependence on space-based capabilities around the world and triggering a new arms race. The aptly named Pentagon Strategy for Global Military Aggression had already singled out China as "having the greatest military potential to compete with the US and field disruptive military technologies that could over time offset traditional US advantage". The US military has since responded with its own anti-satellite tests and the Pentagon is assiduously following the recommendations of a 2001 Congressional Report advocating the development of "new military capabilities for operations to, from, in and through space" (co-author, Donald H. Rumsfeld).

There will be no peaceful development of China overall, no ‘force for peace and stability', but rather a development of good, old-fashioned militarism and imperialism. In the first place, the economic ‘miracle' of Chinese national capital is based on the ferocious exploitation of its working class and peasantry and on an export drive to a debt-sodden world economy. The economic colonisation that it is presently undertaking contains a strong geo-strategic element that projects Chinese power well beyond its borders. And while elements of this colonisation will provide some work for Chinese labour, unlike the colonisations of the 19th century, it will provide little economic stabilisation for its economy and even less reform or attenuation in the condition of its working class. Mao Zedong and his ideology are now a rather restricted taste but his dictum that "power grows out of the barrel of a gun" still holds good for Chinese, as well as imperialism in general.

This is even more the case within the post-89 world after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the free-for-all in military relations resulting from this descent into imperialist decomposition. No nation state can stand above it. After China resumed its threats against Taiwan and increasingly threatened Japan, both French and German diplomacy have been trying to overturn the arms embargo on the People's Liberation Army. Such developments show the contribution China is making to the deepening chaos in international relations. China has taken advantage of the new world disorder and the historic crisis of US imperialism in order to make its own imperialist thrust across the globe. It is profiting from the considerable weakening of the US at the imperialist level in order to develop its geo-strategic presence. Its appetites go well beyond the Taiwan Strait and a supposed ‘pacifist' Japan, which itself has rearmed and been ranked among the top five military powers in recent years, provoking a regional arms race with nuclear connotations.

China's policy to make Asia's seas its mare nostrum, keeping Japan at bay and excluding US military presence, is just one part of its project, which through Burma, Africa and Pakistan aims to extend its military power up to the Arabian Sea, on to the Persian Gulf and into the Middle East and Africa[1]. There have been press reports of China providing arms to the Taliban and its political reach extends to the USA's backyard of Latin America. It has also, along with Russia, taken advantage of certain US setbacks in the Russian ex-republics, strengthening relations with Uzbekistan for example. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute recently stated that, in terms of purchasing power, China's defence budget is second only to the USA. The same Report expressed concern about China's increased strike capabilities and its intrusions into computer networks, including those of the US government.

To its south, China is largely underwriting the construction and development of an 1850 kilometre network of roads, rivers (blasting shallow sections of the Mekong) and ports, circumventing the natural defensive barriers of the foothills of the Himalayas. ‘Route 3', which directly connects Chinese Kunming to Thai Bangkok, also takes in the thinly inhabited upper reaches of Vietnam and Laos. As well as the markets and natural resources that it covets, the road is also an expression of the geo-strategic expansion of Chinese imperialism.

To its west, around India and Pakistan, important developments are also taking place within the framework of Chinese imperialism. As the United States and India enjoy an increasingly warmer relationship, Pakistan will look closer to China for military and technical assistance. China already supplies Pakistan with nuclear technology, including what many experts suspect was the blueprint for Pakistan's nuclear bomb. According to the Asian Studies department at the Brooking Institute: "The Pakistani nuclear programme is largely the result of Sino-Pakistani relations". Some news agency reports suggest that Chinese security agencies knew of the transfer of nuclear technology from Pakistan to Iran, North Korea and Libya, with the former having long-standing ties with Abdul Quadeer Khan, the so-called ‘father' of Pakistan's nuclear bomb. One of the most significant recent projects of the two imperialisms is the construction of a major port complex at the naval base of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea, giving China strategic access to the Persian Gulf and a naval outpost on the Indian Ocean.

China and the Nepali Maoists

Relations between China and India deteriorated after India gave refuge to the Dalai Lama in 1959 and after India's humiliating defeat in the 1962 war over a disputed border and Chinese aid to Pakistan. India still claims that China occupies 38,000 sq km of its territories and, for its part, Beijing still lays claim to the northeastern Indian province of Aranchal. It's in this context of inter-imperialist rivalries that the election of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), a group that the US administration has designated ‘terrorist', must be situated. The previous Nepali regime gave India pre-eminence in imperialist relations and this must now be called into question. "Chief Comrade" Prachanda of the CPN (Maoist), has already called for the scrapping of all major agreements with India, underlined the need for good relations with China and supports China over Tibet. Tibetan refugees in Nepal must be in danger, as in neighbouring Bhutan, where Chinese affiliated Maoists are also active. The Institute of Conflict Management in Delhi says that a surge in Maoist violence in India itself can be expected as it expects the new Nepali regime to provide them with training facilities and safe havens.

Every capitalist nation talks peace. Throughout the 20th century every capitalist nation extolled the virtues of ‘peace', ‘stability' and ‘good relations', but all, caught up in the ineluctable irrationality of imperialism, actively prepared for and fomented war. Particularly today, in the conditions of growing imperialist chaos, there's no ‘peaceful rise' to Chinese imperialism and its pawns, but preparations for and developments towards war. Baboon, 22.4.8

 

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[1] For Chinese imperialism in Africa see WR 299 [9]

 

Poverty, uncertainty, the rising price of food and fuel - we are all feeling the pinch. Even the ruling class is getting worried about the global scale these problems have reached.

Every day, around the world, 100,000 people die of hunger. Taken as a whole, food prices have risen by 83% over the last three years. Grain prices have gone up by 181%. The USA itself has brought in ration cards for rice. Over the last 20 years, it was already clear that the famines in the Sahel, Ethiopia, or Dahfur, so often presented as natural disasters, were caused by the capitalist system itself; but they were relatively isolated. Now the price of basic foodstuffs has become intolerable for a growing part of the world population. The World Bank estimates that the populations of 33 countries are being hit by the disaster. "We are heading towards a very long period of riots, conflicts, uncontrollable waves of regional instability" declared Jean Ziegler, UN special reporter on the ‘right to nourishment' in an interview with Liberation (14.4.08). He also said that "even before the surge in prices...854 million people were gravely undernourished. We are facing a hecatomb". The World Bank also warned that "food price inflation is not a temporary phenomenon and levels will be higher than those of 2004 up until 2015". A large section of the world's population is facing the threat of dying of hunger in the next few months. And why is this? Because the capitalist system is inexorably sinking into economic crisis, which is what lies behind the rise in prices. And now that it's no longer viable to speculate on housing, it's raw materials and food in particular that are the target of the speculators, pushing prices up even higher.

Hunger riots spread across the planet

The first manifestation of this deepening crisis is the spread of hunger riots across the planet. Revolts have erupted in a number of countries. By saying no to misery that is either there already or fast approaching, large parts of humanity are seeking to defend themselves against this society. There have been hunger riots in many parts of Africa - Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Mauritius, Ethiopia, Senegal, but also in many other places: Haiti, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Bangaldesh....

In Haiti the demonstrators expressed their rage at the fact that, among other things, a 120lb bag of rice has gone from 35 to 70 dollars in a year. The head of state René Préval cynically declared: "Demonstrations and destructions won't pay for the increase in prices or resolve the country's problems. On the contrary, they can only increase poverty and prevent investment in the country". And all this not because there's not enough food, but because in a matter of weeks it has become too expensive for most people's miserable income. 80% of the population of Haiti live on less than two dollars a day. This is well below the official poverty line, which has now become a line between life and death

In Haiti as in other countries where there have been riots, the bourgeoisie only has one response for those protesting about their hunger: feed them with bullets. 200 killed in the repression of the riots in Burkina Faso in February, 100 in Cameroon, 5 in Haiti and two youngsters of 9 and 20 shot by the anti-riot forces in Egypt. Capitalism has nothing else to distribute to them. This is one of the proofs that this system is leading humanity into an impasse.

The revolt by a growing mass of the dispossessed throughout the world shows that they are not simply resigning themselves to their fate; and they are not alone. The same anger and militancy is mounting in the ranks of the workers all over the world in the face of spiralling prices for basic necessities and of poverty wages. Strikes and demonstrations have multiplied in numerous countries, both the developed ones and in the huge industrial basins of the poorest countries. Very often, the propaganda of the bourgeoisie tries to set the inhabitants of the North against those of the South, as though the former are ‘privileged' and the latter are not able to do anything. It's their way of making us feel guilty about the ravages of their own economic system. This tactic is beginning to wear out. The bourgeoisie has been shifting many of its enterprises to areas of the world where they can pay the workers next to nothing, but more and more of them are refusing to accept this frenzied exploitation. They are beginning to develop their own experience of the struggle. In a world based on competition between states, companies, exploiters of all kinds, we are told that the working class has also succumbed to the spirit of ‘every man for himself'. But it's not true. In most of these countries we have seen the development of a powerful feeling of solidarity among the workers.

The development of class solidarity is the only response to the failure of world capitalism

Over the last few years there has been a significant development of workers' struggles all over the world, both in the poorest countries at the peripheries of the system and the countries at its heart, especially in western Europe.

For more than two years, there have been a number of conflicts in Egypt, especially around the textile factory Gahzl al-Mahalla to the north of Cairo. The weakness of union control there has allowed the struggle to develop massively and give rise to radical demands. The official unions are recognised for what they are - an integral part of the state. The spirit of solidarity shown by these struggles in Egypt has been demonstrated by the fact that other sectors, such as the railway workers, tax employees, postal workers or university teachers in Cairo, Alexandria, and Mansoura have joined the struggle. All these strikes have given rise to similar demands: against the high cost of living, against humiliating wages, overpriced and insalubrious housing, etc.

In Iran, a powerful wave of strikes has shaken the country: in January bus drivers in Tehran were on strike. A hundred workers were arrested and two of the leaders of the movement are still in prison. On 18 February in Chouch in the south of the country, the workers of a sugar cane factory demonstrated in protest against the non-payment of wages in January and February. They had already been out on strike in September 2007 for the same reason. They had not been in a position to celebrate the end of the year festival with their families and children (new year in Iran is at the end of March). Non-payment of wages were the cause of numerous walk-outs or demonstrations throughout the country, notably by the workers of the Pachmineh Baft factory in Ghazvine in the west, the Mehrpouya textile factory in Isfahan in the centre, at Navard in Karadj in the west, telecommunication workers and employees of Sandoigh Nasouz in Tehran. In the north , in the Rasht region, the workers, especially in the textile sector, whose wages had not been paid for months, blocked the town's roads and went to demonstrate in front of the official buildings, waving placards saying ‘We are hungry'. In the nearby province of Gilan, workers have not been paid for 13 months. Similar strikes and demonstrations took place in Elam in the west and in a pharmaceutical factory in Tehran. Each time the government has responded with harsh repression. On 21 February, at Masjed Soleiman in the south, 800 striking workers were violently attacked by the state security forces and the secret police (VEVAK). On 14 April, after a strike had lasted three days, the police used a bulldozer to assault an occupied tyre factory in the region of Alborz in the north, in order to dislodge strikers who had built a shield of burning tyres around the factory to show their anger, again over the non-payment of wages. A thousand workers were arrested after violent clashes with the security forces.

Since the beginning of the year, in Vietnam, there have been 150 strikes in various enterprises. Recently 17,000 workers of a Nike shoe factory in the south of Vietnam came out for wage rise, demanding an increase of 200,000 dongs (8 euros), in response to the spiralling cost of consumer goods. They only obtained half of what they asked for, but, as they went back to work, clashes with the police took place and the factory had to close for three days. Ten thousand workers making toys in Danang also went on strike for a raise in bonuses and an increase in holiday during the Tet festival.

In Rumania, the workers of the Dacia Renault factory won wage rises of 100 euros (a 40% increase in their wages) after a strike lasting several weeks. And 4000 steel workers at Arcelor Mittal in Galati, in the east of the country, came out on indefinite strike. They wanted their wages doubled, a rise in weekend bonuses and an increase in benefits to the families of workers injured or killed at work. The management immediately conceded a wage rise of 12%. But the strike was suspended by the courts "for reasons of security and because of the risk of explosions at the site because certain furnaces had been reduced to minimal operations". These struggles at Dacia-Renault and Arcelor Mittal give the lie to all the propaganda about outsourcing and all the efforts of the bourgeoisie to divide the workers by national frontiers. They remind us of this simple truth: the working class suffers the same exploitation in all countries and therefore has the same struggle. There is only one working class across the planet.

In Poland, in January and February the workers of the Budryk coalmine in Ornontowice in Silesia struck for 6 days to demand parity with other mines in the country (all the mines have gone back to state control). It's the biggest strike in this sector since 1989 and it saw the occupation of the pits. This strike was supported by 2/3 of the population. The great strike of 1980 was held back and then openly opposed by the creation of Solidarnosc, applauded by the bourgeoisie in all the western countries. And now you had the same Solidarnosc union, and the ZZG union federation, working hand in hand with the bosses, and calling the strikers a "rabble". The wives of the miners went to demonstrate their support for the strike in Warsaw. A week after the return to work and because the management was clearly in no hurry to grant the wage increase, 900 workers threatened to come out again.

But the resistance of the workers can also be seen in countries in the heart of capitalism.

In this issue we have written separately about the recent strikes in Britain. In Germany, after the mobilisation of the workers in the Bochum region (especially at Opel) in support of the workers at Nokia threatened with redundancies[1], there was a series of walk-outs in the steel sector in February, resulting in a 5.4% increase in wages for the 93,000 workers. Since then the country has been through a wave of ‘hard' strikes, especially in the public sector in the week 3-7 March. The unions were obliged to launch a ‘warning strike' in public transport (regional trains and buses were halted, especially in Berlin where a 12% increase in wages was demanded), in the hospitals, childcare, the airports (Frankfurt, Munich, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Hanover) and in a number of public offices. Under the pressure of the workers, the Verdi union threatened a massive and indefinite strike at the end of March or the beginning of April for a further 8% wage rise, whereas the management were only offering half that; it was also proposed to hold an indefinite strike on 2 May in the post, with a demand for a 7% wage rise, guaranteed jobs until 2011 and the dropping of plans to increase the working week by half an hour. In exchange for this extra half hour, the bosses were proposing a 5.5% wage increase and a vague promise about no redundancies. In Berlin, Verdi also called for a strike on 20 April in factories making buses, metro trains and trams as well as in the services that do the cleaning and supply fuel to public transport. The fact that the German working class has entered onto the scene, a working class which was hit with the full force of the counter-revolution in the 1920s following its insurrectionary movements between 1918 and 1923, and which has such a wealth of historical experience behind it, is a factor of considerable encouragement for the development of the class struggle worldwide.

Towards the unification of struggles

The most obvious thing about all these examples of class struggle from around the world is that workers are getting angry about similar issues. First and foremost, the general increase in prices and the low level of wages are making daily survival increasingly difficult. To this must be added unbearable working conditions, pensions disappearing into the distance and pretty miserable ones at that, growing problems of accessing healthcare, and so on. Some workers are already being reduced to famine, while everyone is seeing their living standards and security of employment diminishing.

In the last few years, the working class has come a long way. Not only has it returned to the path of struggle, but its struggles are becoming more and more simultaneous and extensive[2]. There is a profound link between the struggles at the edges of the system and those at its centre. The struggles in countries like France, Britain and Germany, where workers have a whole historic experience of the traps that the ruling class can lay, are key to the future internationalisation of the movement. But at the same time, the courageous battles fought by workers in the peripheries are an encouragement to the workers in the heart of the system. They show that even when workers live in conditions of extreme poverty and face the harshest repression, they are refusing to lie down and accept their lot. The feeling of dignity is one of the deepest moral values of the working class and gives us the confidence and strength to fight back. Map 25.4.08

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[1] See ‘Workers' struggles in Germany: an accumulation of discontent [11] ', ICC Online.

 

[2] See the far from exhaustive list of recent struggles around the world in ‘One class, one struggle [12] ', ICC Online.

 

In the first part of this article [13] on the movement of May 68, we retraced its first stage: the mobilisation of the students. We showed that the agitation of the students in France, from 22 March 1968 up to the middle of May, was only an expression in this country of an international movement affecting almost all of the western countries, beginning in the United States where it opened up in 1964 at Berkeley University, California. We ended this article thus: "What characterises all of these movements is clear: above all, the rejection of the war in Vietnam. But whereas the Stalinist parties, allies of the Hanoi and Moscow regimes, would have logically been found at their head, as was the case with the anti-war movements around the Korean War in the early 1950s, it was nowhere the case here. On the contrary, these parties had practically no influence and, quite often, they were in complete opposition to these movements.

This is one of the characteristics of the student movements of the end of the 1960s, and it reveals their profound significance."

It is this significance that we are going to try to draw out now. And to do this, it is evidently necessary to recall the principal themes of the student mobilisation of this period.

Reasons to protest

As we've already noted, the opposition to the war undertaken by the United States in Vietnam was the most widespread and activating theme in all the western countries. It's certainly not by chance, evidently, that it's first of all in the United States that student revolt developed. American youth was confronted in a direct and immediate fashion by the question of war since it was it that was sent abroad to defend the ‘free world'. Tens of thousands of young Americans paid with their lives for the policies of their government, hundreds of thousands amongst them returned from Vietnam with wounds and handicaps, millions were marked for life because of the horror that they lived through. Outside of the horror that they found themselves in, and which is characteristic of all warfare, many among them were confronted with the question: what are we doing in Vietnam? Official speeches said that they were there to defend ‘democracy', the ‘free world' and ‘civilisation'. But the reality that they lived through contradicted these speeches in a flagrant fashion: the regime that they were charged with protecting, the one in Saigon, had nothing either ‘democratic' nor civilised about it: it was a dictatorial and particularly corrupt military regime. On the ground, American soldiers had difficulty understanding that they were defending ‘civilisation' when they were asked to act as barbarians, terrorising and massacring poor, unarmed peasants, women, children and the old included. But it wasn't just the soldiers there who felt revolted by the horrors of the war; it was also the case for a growing part of American youth. Not only were young men in fear of having to go to war and young women afraid of losing their companions; everyone became more and more informed by the returning ‘veterans' or simply through the television channels of the barbarity that the war represented[1]. The crying contradiction between government speeches on the ‘defence of democracy' and its actions in Vietnam fed a revolt against the authorities and the traditional values of the American bourgeoisie[2]. This revolt fed, in the first instance, the hippy movement, a pacifist and non-violent movement which raised the slogans ‘Flower Power' and ‘Make Love Not War'. It's probably not by chance if the first student movement of any scale took place at Berkeley University, in the suburbs of San Francisco which was the hippy Mecca. The themes, and above all the means, of this mobilisation still had some points in common with this movement: use of the non-violent ‘sit-in' in order to claim ‘Free Speech' for political propaganda within the University, notably for ‘civil rights' for blacks and to denounce the presence of the army on the campus and its efforts to enlist students. However, as in many other countries subsequently, and notably in France, 1968, the repression that was unleashed at Berkeley (800 arrests) constituted an important factor in the ‘radicalisation' of the movement. From 1967, with the foundation of the Youth International Party by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who moved away from non-violence, the movement of revolt was given a ‘revolutionary' perspective against capitalism. The new ‘heroes' of the movement were no longer Bob Dylan or Joan Baez, but figures such as Che Guevara (who Rubin had met in 1964 in Havana). The ideology of this movement was more confused. It bore anarchist ingredients (the cult of liberty, notably sexual liberty, as well as the copious consumption of drugs) but also stalinist ingredients (Cuba and Albania were considered as exemplary). The means of action borrowed greatly from the anarchists, such as derision and provocation. Thus one of the first actions of the Hoffman-Rubin axis was to throw phoney banknotes around in the New York stock exchange, provoking a rush to grab them. Similarly, at the Democratic Convention of summer 68, it presented a pig, Pigasus, as candidate for President of the United States[3] at the same time as preparing for a violent confrontation with the police.

To sum up the principal characteristics of the movement of revolt that agitated the United States during the 1960s, you could say that it presented itself as a protest against the war in Vietnam, against racial discrimination, against inequality between the sexes and against the traditional values of America.

The majority of its protagonists showed themselves to be the rebellious children of the bourgeoisie; this movement had no proletarian class character. It wasn't by chance that one of its ‘theoreticians', the professor of philosophy Herbert Marcuse, considered that the working class had been ‘integrated' and that the forces of revolution against capitalism were to be found among other sectors such as the black victims of discrimination, the peasants of the Third World or rebellious intellectuals.

In the majority of other western countries, the movements that agitated the student world during the 60s showed a strong resemblance to those of the United States: rejection of American intervention in Vietnam, revolt against authority in general and in the universities in particular, against traditional morals, notably sexual morals. That is one of the reasons why the stalinist parties, symbols of authoritarianism, had no echo within these revolts whereas they were party to the denunciation of American intervention in Vietnam against the forces armed by the Soviet bloc and called themselves ‘anti-capitalist'. It is true that the image of the USSR had been greatly tarnished by the repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the portrait of Brezhnev wasn't a ‘pin-up'. The rebels of the 1960s preferred to display in their rooms posters of Ho Chi Minh (another old apparatchik, but more presentable and ‘heroic') and more still the romantic visage of Che Guevara (another Stalinist party member, but more ‘exotic') or Angela Davis (also a member of the US stalinist party, but who had the double advantage of being both black and a woman, a ‘good looker' like Che Guevara).

This form, both anti-Vietnam War and ‘libertarian', was especially prevalent in Germany. The main spokesman of the movement, Rudi Dutschke, came from the GDR, under Soviet tutelage where, as a very young person, he was opposed to the repression of the Hungarian Uprising. His ideological references were the ‘Young Marx' of the Frankfurt School (of which Marcuse was a part), and also The Situationist International (which included the group Subversive Aktion, which the SI's Berlin section was based on in 1962). The German ‘extra-parliamentary opposition' was, on the eve of May 1968 in France, the main point of reference for student rebellion in Europe.

Slogans on the walls

The themes and demands of the student movement that developed in France in 1968 were fundamentally the same. That said, during the course of the movement, references to the war in Vietnam were largely eclipsed by a whole series of slogans inspired by situationism and anarchism (even surrealism) that covered the walls ("The walls are the word").

The anarchist themes were evident in:

• The passion for destruction is a creative joy (Bakunin)
• It is forbidden to forbid
• Freedom is the crime that constrains all crime
• Elections - traps for idiots
• Insolence is the new arm of the revolution

They were completed by those that called for the ‘sexual revolution':

• Love one and all
• Unbutton your brain as often as your fly
• The more I make love, the more I want to make revolution. The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love.

The Situationist perspective was found in:

• Down with the consumer society
• Down with commodity society
• Abolish alienation
• Never work
• I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires
• We don't want a world where the certainty of not dying of hunger is exchanged for the risk of dying of boredom
• Boredom is counter-revolutionary
• Live without dead time and play without hindrance
• Be realistic, demand the impossible.

There was also the theme of the generation gap. It was widespread in the United States and Germany and included some quite odious forms:

• Run comrade, the old world is behind you
• The young make love, the old make obscene gestures.

Similarly in France May 68, where barricades were regularly thrown up:

• Barricades close the street but open the way
• The outcome of all thought is a brick in the mouth of the CRS
• Under the pavement, the beach.

Finally, the great confusion that accompanied this period is well summed up by two slogans:

• There is no revolutionary thought, only revolutionary actions
• I have something to say, but I don't know what.

Class nature of the 60s student movements

These slogans, like the majority of others put forward in other countries, clearly indicate that the student movement of the 60s had no proletarian class nature, even if in several places (as in Italy and evidently in France) there was a will to establish a bridge with the struggles of the working class. This approach also manifested a certain condescension towards the workers, mixed with a fascination with these mythic beings, the blue collar proletarians, heroes of readers who had half digested some of the classics of marxism.

Fundamentally, the student movement of the 1960s was of a petty-bourgeois nature, one of its clearest aspects being the will to ‘change life immediately'.

The ‘revolutionary' radicalism of the avant-garde of this movement, including the cult of violence promoted by certain of its sectors, was also another illustration of its petty-bourgeois nature. In fact, the ‘revolutionary' preoccupations of the students of 1968 were incontestably sincere but were strongly marked by Third Worldism (Guevarism and Maoism), or else anti-fascism. It had a romantic vision of the revolution without the least idea of the real development of the movement of the working class that would lead it. In France, for the students who believed themselves ‘revolutionaries', the movement of May 68 was already The Revolution, and the barricades that went up day after day were presented as the inheritors of those of 1848 and of the Commune of 1871.

One of the components of the student movement of the 60s was the ‘conflict between generations', the very important cleavage between the new generation and those of its parents, which was the subject of all kinds of criticisms. In particular, given that this generation had worked hard to get out of its situation of poverty, even famine, resulting from the Second World War, it was reproached for only concerning itself with its material well being. From this came the success of fantasies about the ‘consumer society' and slogans such as "Never work!" Descended from a generation that had submitted to the full force of the counter-revolution, the youth of the 1960s reproached its parents for its conformism and its submission to the demands of capitalism. Reciprocally, many parents didn't understand and were loath to accept that their children despised the sacrifices that they had made in order to give them a better life than their own.

However, there existed a real economic element in the student revolt of the 60s. At this time, there was no real threat of unemployment or of problems of finding a job as is the case today. The principal concern that then affected student youth was that it would not be able to acquire the same social status as that of previous university graduates. In fact, the generation of 1968 was the first to be confronted, in a somewhat brutal manner, with the phenomenon of proletarianisation of the middle strata abundantly studied by sociologists at the time. This phenomenon had begun some years earlier, even before the open crisis had manifested itself, following a palpable increase in the number of university students. This increase came from the needs of the economy but also from the will of parents to provide their children with an economic situation superior to their own, and the possibility of doing so. It was, among other things, this ‘massification' of the student population which provoked a growing malaise with the authoritarian structures and practices inherited from a time when the universities were mainly frequented by the elite.

However, if the student movement that began in 1964 developed in a period of ‘prosperity' for capitalism, it was no longer the same from 1967 where the economic situation began to seriously degrade, strengthening the malaise of student youth. This is one of the reasons that allows us to understand why the movement of 1968 reached its heights. It is what allows us to explain why, in May 1968, the movement of the working class took the reins.

That is what we will look at in the next article. Fabienne 29 March 2008

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[1] At the time of the Vietnam War, the American media was not so tightly controlled by the military authorities. This is an ‘error' that the American government corrected at the time of the wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003.

 

[2] Such a phenomenon wasn't seen following the Second World War: US soldiers had equally lived through hell, notably in the invasion of Europe in 1944. But their sacrifices were accepted by almost all of them and by the population, thanks to the authorities' exposure of the barbarity of the Nazi regime.

 

[3] At the beginning of the twentieth century, some French anarchists had presented an ass to the legislative elections.

 

Faced with all the conflicting arguments about the Russian revolution, it is difficult to steer an even course between the predominant view - that the revolution was a total disaster for humanity and inexorably led to the horrors of Stalinism - and the less fashionable but equally uncritical portrayals of Lenin and the Bolsheviks as superheroes who never made any errors. For our part, we follow the method of Rosa Luxemburg in her pamphlet The Russian Revolution: total solidarity with the October insurrection as the first step in the world revolution, but without the slightest hesitation to criticise the mistakes that were made by the Bolsheviks almost immediately after they came to power. What follows is the first section of an article originally published in International Review 99 [15] in 1999, 4th quarter. This section focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of Luxemburg's pamphlet.

Rosa Luxemburg and the Russian revolution

Marxism is first and foremost a critical method, since it is the product of a class which can only emancipate itself through the ruthless criticism of all existing conditions. A revolutionary organisation that fails to criticise its errors, to learn from its mistakes, inevitably exposes itself to the conservative and reactionary influences of the dominant ideology. And this is all the more true at a time of revolution, which by its very nature has to break new ground, enter an unknown landscape with little more than a compass of general principles to find its way. The revolutionary party is all the more necessary after the victorious insurrection, because it has the strongest grasp of this compass, which is based on the historical experience of the class and the scientific approach of marxism. But if it renounces the critical nature of this approach, it will both lose sight of these historical lessons and be unable to draw the new ones that derive from the groundbreaking events of the revolutionary process. As we shall see, one of the consequences of the Bolshevik party identifying itself with the Soviet state was that it increasingly lost this capacity to criticise itself and the general course of the revolution. But as long as it remained a proletarian party it continuously generated minorities who did continue to carry out this task. The heroic combat of these Bolshevik minorities will be the main focus of the next few articles. But we will begin by examining the contribution of a revolutionary who was not in the Bolshevik party: Rosa Luxemburg, who, in 1918, in the most trying of conditions, wrote her essay The Russian Revolution, which provides us with the best possible method for approaching the errors of the revolution: the sharpest criticism based on unflinching solidarity in the face of the assaults of the ruling class.

The Russian Revolution was written in prison, just prior to the outbreak of the revolution in Germany. At this stage, with the imperialist war still raging, it was extraordinarily difficult to obtain any accurate information about what was happening in Russia - not only because of the material obstacles to communication resulting from the war (not to mention Luxemburg's imprisonment), but above all because from the very start the bourgeoisie did everything it could to hide the truth of the Russian revolution behind a smokescreen of slander and bloodthirsty fabulation. The essay was not published in Luxemburg's lifetime; Paul Levi, on behalf of the Spartacus League, had already visited Rosa in prison to persuade her that, given all the vicious campaigns against the Russian revolution, publishing articles criticising the Bolsheviks would add grist to these campaigns. Luxemburg agreed with him, and so sent the essay to Levi with a note saying "I am writing this only for you and if I can convince you, then the effort isn't wasted" (Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Pathfinder Press, p 366). The text was not published until 1922 - and by then Levi's motives for doing so were far from revolutionary (for Levi's growing break with communism, see the article on the March Action in Germany in International Review no.93).

Nevertheless, the method of criticism contained in The Russian Revolution is entirely in the right spirit. From the very start, Luxemburg staunchly defends the October revolution against the Kautskyite/ Menshevik theory that because Russia was such a backward country, it should have stopped short at the "democratic" stage, showing that only the Bolsheviks were able to uncover the real alternative: bourgeois counter-revolution or proletarian dictatorship. And she simultaneously refutes the social democratic argument that formal majorities have to be obtained before revolutionary policies can be applied. Against this deadening parliamentary logic she praises the revolutionary audacity of the Bolshevik vanguard: "As bred-in-the bone disciples of parliamentary cretinism, these German Social-Democrats have sought to apply to revolutions the homemade wisdom of the parliamentary nursery: in order to carry out anything you must first have a majority. The same, they say, applies to revolution: first let's become a ‘majority'. The true dialectic of revolution, however, stands this wisdom of parliamentary moles on its head: not through a majority to revolutionary tactics, but through revolutionary tactics to a majority - that is the way the road runs.

Only a party which knows how to lead, that is, to advance things, wins support in stormy times. The determination with which, at the decisive moment, Lenin and his comrades offered the only solution which could advance things (‘all power in the hands of the proletariat and peasantry') transformed them overnight from a persecuted, slandered, outlawed minority whose leaders had to hide like Marat in cellars, into the absolute master of the situation" (ibid, p 374-5).

And, like the Bolsheviks, Luxemburg was perfectly well aware that this bold policy of insurrection in Russia could only have any meaning as a first step towards the world proletarian revolution. This is the whole significance of the famous concluding words of her text: "theirs is the immortal historical service of having marched at the head of the international proletariat with the conquest of political power and the practical placing of the problems of the realisation of socialism, and of having advanced mightily the settlement of the score between capital and labour in the entire world. In Russia the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to ‘Bolshevism'" (ibid, p395).

And this solution was, in Luxemburg's mind, entirely concrete: it demanded that the German proletariat above all must fulfil its responsibility and come to the aid of the proletarian bastion in Russia by making the revolution itself. This process was under way even as she wrote, although her assessment, in this very essay, of the relative political immaturity of the German working class was also an insight into the tragic fate of this attempt.

Luxemburg was therefore well placed to develop the necessary criticisms of what she saw as the principal errors of the Bolsheviks: she judged them not from the detached heights of an "observer", but as a revolutionary comrade who recognised that these errors were first and foremost the product of the immense difficulties that isolation imposed on the Soviet power in Russia. Indeed, it is precisely these difficulties that required the real friends of the Russian revolution to approach it not with "uncritical apologetics" or a "revolutionary hurrah spirit", but with "penetrating and thoughtful criticism": "Dealing as we are with the very first experiment in proletarian dictatorship in world history (and one taking place at that under the harshest conceivable conditions, in the midst of the worldwide conflagration and chaos of the imperialist mass slaughter, caught in the coils of the most reactionary military power in Europe, and accompanied by the most complete failure on the part of the international working class), it would be a crazy idea to think that every last thing done or left undone in an experiment with the dictatorship of the proletariat under such abnormal conditions represented the very pinnacle of perfection" (ibid p 368-9).

Luxemburg's criticisms of the Bolsheviks were focussed on three main areas:

1. the land question

2. the national question

3. democracy and dictatorship.

 

1. The Bolsheviks had won peasant support for the October revolution by inviting them to seize the land from the big landowners. Luxemburg recognised that this was "an excellent tactical move" But she went on: "Unfortunately it had two sides to it; and the reverse side consisted in the fact that the direct seizure of the land by the peasants has in general nothing at all in common with socialist economy...Not only is it not a socialist measure, it even cuts off the way to such measures; it piles up insurmountable obstacles to the socialist transformation of agrarian relations" (ibid, pp375-376). Luxemburg points out that a socialist economic policy can only start from the collectivisation of large landed property. Fully cognisant of the difficulties facing the Bolsheviks, she does not criticise them for failing to implement this straight away. But she does say that by actively encouraging the peasants to divide the land up into innumerable small plots, the Bolsheviks were piling up problems for later on, creating a new stratum of small property owners who would be naturally hostile to any attempt to socialise the economy. This was certainly confirmed by experience: though prepared to support the Bolsheviks against the old Czarist regime, the "independent" peasants later became an increasingly conservative weight on the proletarian power. Luxemburg was also very accurate in her warning that the division of the land would favour the richer peasants at the expense of the poorer. But it has also to be said that in itself the collectivisation of the land would be no guarantee of the march towards socialism, any more than the collectivisation of industry; only the success of the revolution on a world scale could have secured that - just as it could have overcome the difficulties posed by the parcellisation of the land in Russia.

2. Luxemburg's most trenchant criticisms concern the question of "national self-determination". While recognising that the Bolsheviks' defence of the slogan of "the right of peoples to self-determination" was based on a legitimate concern to oppose all forms of national oppression and to win to the revolutionary cause the masses of those parts of the Czarist empire which had been under the yoke of Great Russian chauvinism, Luxemburg showed what this "right" meant in practise: the "new" national units which had opted for separation from the Russian Soviet republic systematically allied themselves with imperialism against the proletarian power: "While Lenin and his comrades clearly expected that, as champions of national freedom, even to the extent of ‘separation', they would turn Finland, the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic countries, the Caucasus etc into so many faithful allies of the Russian revolution, we have witnessed the opposite spectacle. One after another, these ‘nations' used the newly granted freedom to ally themselves with German imperialism against the Russian revolution as its mortal enemy, and, under German protection, to carry the banner of counter-revolution into Russia itself" (p 380). And she goes on to explain why it could not be otherwise, since in a capitalist class society, there is no such thing as the "nation" separate from the interests of the bourgeoisie, which would far rather subject itself to the domination of imperialism than make common cause with the revolutionary working class: "To be sure, in all these cases, it was really not the ‘people' who engaged in these reactionary policies, but only the bourgeois and petty bourgeois classes, who - in sharpest opposition to their own proletarian masses - perverted the ‘national right of self-determination' into an instrument of their counter-revolutionary class policies. But - and here we come to the very heart of the question - it is in this that the utopian, petty bourgeois character of this nationalistic slogan resides: that in the midst of the crude realities of class society and when class antagonisms are sharpened to the uttermost, it is simply converted into a means of bourgeois class rule. The Bolsheviks were to be taught to their own great hurt, and that of the revolution, that under the rule of capitalism there is no self-determination of peoples, that in a class society each class of the nation strives to ‘determine itself' in a different fashion, and that, for the bourgeois classes, the standpoint of national freedom is fully subordinated to that of class rule. The Finnish bourgeoisie like the Ukrainian bourgeoisie, were unanimous in preferring the violent rule of Germany to national freedom, if the latter should be bound up with Bolshevism" (ibid).

Furthermore, the Bolsheviks' confusion on this point (although it must be remembered that there was a minority in the Bolshevik party - in particular Piatakov - who fully agreed with Luxemburg's point of view on this question) was having a negative effect internationally since ‘national self-determination' was also the rallying cry of Woodrow Wilson and of all the big imperialist sharks who were seeking to use it to dislodge their imperialist rivals from the regions that they themselves coveted. And the whole history of the twentieth century has confirmed how easily the "rights of nations" has become no more than a cloak for the imperialist desires of the great powers and of their lesser emulators.

Luxemburg did not dismiss the problem of national sensitivities; she insisted that there could be no question of a proletarian regime ‘integrating' outlying countries through military force alone. But it was equally true that any concession made to the nationalist illusions of the masses in those regions could only tie them more closely to their exploiters. The proletariat, once it has assumed power in any region, can only win those masses to its cause through "the most compact union of revolutionary forces", through a "genuine international class policy" aimed at splitting the workers from their own bourgeoisie.

3. On "democracy and dictatorship" there are profoundly contradictory elements in Luxemburg's position. On the one hand there is no doubt that she falls into a real confusion between democracy in general and workers' democracy in particular - the democratic forms used in the framework and in the interest of the proletarian dictatorship. This is shown by her resolute defence of the Constituent Assembly, which the Soviet power dissolved in 1918, in perfect consistency with the fact that the very appearance of the latter had made the old bourgeois democratic forms entirely obsolete. And yet somehow Luxemburg sees this act as a threat to the life of the revolution. In a similar vein she is reluctant to accept that, in order to exclude the ruling class from political life, "suffrage" in a Soviet regime should be based primarily on the workplace collective rather than on the individual citizen's domicile (albeit her concern was also to ensure that the unemployed would not be excluded by this criterion, which was certainly not its intention). These inter-classist, democratic prejudices are in striking contrast to her argument that "national self-determination" can never express anything else than the "self-determination" of the bourgeoisie. The argument is identical as regards parliamentary institutions, which do not, whatever the appearance, express the interests of the "people" but of the capitalist ruling class. Luxemburg's views in this text are also totally at odds with the programme of the Spartacus League formulated soon after, since this document demands the dissolution of all municipal and national parliamentary type bodies and their replacement by councils of workers' and soldiers' delegates: we can only presume that Luxemburg's position on the Constituent Assembly - which also became the rallying cry of the counter-revolution in Germany - had evolved very rapidly in the heat of the revolutionary process.

But this does not mean that there is no validity to any of Luxemburg's criticisms of the Bolsheviks' approach to the question of workers' democracy. She was fully aware that in the extremely difficult situation facing the beleaguered Soviet power, there was a real danger that the political life of the working class would be subordinated to the necessity to bar the road to the counter-revolution. Given this situation, Luxemburg was right to be sensitive to any signs that the norms of workers' democracy were being violated. Her defence of the necessity for the widest possible debate within the proletarian camp, and against the forcible suppression of any proletarian political tendencies, was justified in light of the fact that the Bolsheviks, having assumed state power, were drifting towards a party monopoly that was to damage themselves as much as the life of the proletariat in general, particularly with the introduction of the Red Terror. Luxemburg did not at all oppose the notion of the proletarian dictatorship. But as she insisted "this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination, in energetic, resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society, without which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished. But this dictatorship must be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class - that is, must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses; it must be under their direct influence, subjected to the control of complete public activity; it must arise out of the growing political training of the mass of the people ( ibid, p 394).

Luxemburg was particularly prescient in warning of the danger of the political life of the Soviets being emptied out more and more as power became concentrated in the hands of the party: over the next three years, under the pressures of the civil war, this was to become one of the central dramas of the revolution. But whether Luxemburg was right or wrong in her specific criticisms, what inspires us above all is her approach to the problem, an approach that should have served as a guide to all subsequent analyses of the revolution and its demise: intransigent defence of its proletarian character, and thus criticism of its weaknesses and its eventual failure as a problem of the proletariat and for the proletariat. Unfortunately, all too often the name of Luxemburg has been used to pour scorn on the very memory of October - not only by those councilist currents who have claimed descent from the German left but who have lost sight of the real traditions of the working class; but also, and perhaps more importantly, by those bourgeois forces who in the name of "democratic socialism" use Luxemburg as a hammer against Lenin and Bolshevism. This has been the speciality of those who descend politically from the very forces who murdered Luxemburg in 1919 to save the skin of the bourgeoisie - the social democrats, particularly their left wing factions. For our part, we have every intention, in analysing the mistakes of the Bolsheviks and the degeneration of the Russian revolution, of remaining faithful to the real content of her method. CDW.

The second part of this article can be found here [16].