The word ‘pogrom' was most often used to describe mob attacks on Jews in mediaeval times, often fomented by the state authorities as a means of deflecting popular anger away from them and onto an easily recognisable scapegoat. The persistence of anti-Semitic pogroms in Czarist Russia in the late 19th and early 20th century was often pointed to as an example of the extremely backward nature of that regime.
Today, however, the spirit of the pogrom is probably more widespread than it has ever been. Only a few months ago, in Kenya, following a disputed general election result, supporters of government and opposition, who are divided along tribal lines, carried out gruesome massacres of ‘rival' ethnic groups in which hundreds of people lost their lives and many more were made homeless.
In May the most advanced country in Africa, South Africa, was convulsed by a whole series of attacks on immigrants in shanty towns in Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town and other cities. Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Congolese and other immigrants were ‘necklaced' and hacked to death, their homes burned. Over 40 died in the violence and at least 15, 000 driven from their homes, often forced to seek refuge in churches and police stations.
"Yesterday we heard that this thing started in Warwick and in the (Durban) City centre. We heard that traders had their goods stolen and that people were being checked for their complexion; a man from Ntuzuma was stopped for being ‘too black'. Tensions are high in the city centre. Last night people were running in the streets in Umbilo looking for ‘amakwerkwere'. People in the tall flats were shouting down to them saying ‘There are Congolese here, come up!'". Statement by Abahlali baseMojondolo, an organisation based in the Durban shanty towns, on the xenophobic attacks (www.zabalaza.net [1]).
The justifications for these attacks were familiar: there are too many immigrants, they are coming here and taking our jobs. They are all criminals, drug dealers, muggers and thieves.
It is not hard to see that these horrible events are rooted in the extreme poverty faced by the majority of the population in South Africa, for whom ‘liberation' from apartheid has not brought much improvement in job prospects, wage levels, housing and social security. With more and more people, including both ‘native' South Africans and those fleeing war and terror in Congo or Zimbabwe, being pushed into insufferably cramped and unhealthy shanty towns, with the prices of basic necessities going through the roof, it is not difficult to stir up tensions between different ethnic groups.
But the pogroms have not been restricted to Africa, where poverty is perhaps at its most extreme. In Naples, in April, following reports that a young Roma girl had been accused of trying to kidnap a baby, local residents of the suburb of Ponticelli attacked two Roma squatter camps with Molotov cocktails, forcing their inhabitants to seek protection from local police. This was just the tip of the iceberg: racist parties have been gaining ground in Italy, where blaming immigrants from Romania, Albania and elsewhere for rising crime levels has become an easy route to election success. The anti-immigration Northern League and the ‘post-Fascist' Alleanza Nazionale made considerable gains in recent national elections pledging to tackle illegal immigration, while in Rome, Gianni Alemanno, also of the Alleanza Nazionale, was elected mayor on a pledge to expel 20,000 people.
In Britain, violent racist attacks are still mainly the work of small groups or isolated individuals. But for years now a pogrom atmosphere has been slowly building up as the right wing press increasingly leads with articles that blame immigrants for ‘taking our jobs' and ‘sponging off the welfare state', while the official parties vie with each other to prove that they are the most committed to reducing immigration and the toughest on Islamic terrorism, which is invariably linked to the immigration issue. A particularly widespread element of this campaign is the lament for the so-called ‘white working class' which, we are told, is being made to feel a ‘stranger in its own country'. This is meat and drink to groups like the BNP, who claim that the Labour party has lost touch with its roots in the ‘white working class'.
For the working class, there is nothing more shameful than a pogrom. It is the absolute negation of everything that the workers' movement has stood for from the beginning: the unity of all workers against exploitation, regardless of colour, country, or religion. That yesterday's victims of apartheid in South Africa should single out people who are "too black", that proletarians in Italy whose forebears suffered under fascism should be drawn into attacks on a hate figure as old as the Jew - the ‘gypsy': these are terrible testimony to the power of the exploiter's ideology in the minds of the exploited. They point to a very real danger facing the working class and the oppressed masses all over the world: that faced with the evident collapse of the capitalist social system, the proletariat, rather than uniting its forces against the dominant order, will be divided into an infinite number of ethnic and national groups, tribal or local gangs, and driven into fratricidal violence which leaves the real sources of poverty and misery untouched. If this happens, there will be nothing to prevent capitalism from plunging into the ultimate depths of barbarism and self-destruction.
In South Africa, spokesmen for the church and the state, like Archbishop Tutu, President Mbeki and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela have condemned the pogroms, arguing that this is a terrible blot on South Africa's reputation in the world, even saying that those who commit such crimes are not ‘real South Africans'. But the answer to an openly racist version of nationalism is not a kinder, more human version of nationalism, because both varieties serve to obscure the only perspective that can really provide an answer to divisions among the poor and the oppressed: the development of class solidarity in the struggle for class demands. And if, in a moment of terrible danger, immigrants fleeing persecution have had little choice but to throw themselves on the mercy of the local police, they can have no illusion that the police force can offer them any real protection, since on another day it is precisely the police who are harassing immigrants and the inhabitants of the shanty towns and reinforcing the bosses' law and order. The only real defence for workers lies in uniting with other workers, whether in the workplace or in the working class neighbourhoods, whether ‘immigrant' or ‘native', whether black or white, whether in fighting against attacks on jobs and wages or against repression by police and racist gangs.
The old slogan of the workers' movement - ‘workers of the world unite' - is often ridiculed today, when every opportunity is seized upon to argue that working class solidarity is a forlorn and outdated hope. But the working class was being written off in the 1960s, when it had allegedly been bought off by the ‘consumer society'. The events in France in 1968 - the biggest mass strike in history - provided the most eloquent response to that argument. And today when workers' struggles are again slowly but surely taking on a massive character, from France to Egypt and from Vietnam to the USA, when time and time again so many of these struggles have reasserted the need for solidarity and put it into practice[1], the hope of a proletarian alternative, with its perspective of fighting for a society without nations or borders, is by no means forlorn. In fact it is the only real hope for the future of humanity, while the promises of the bourgeois politicians, whether openly racist or falsely humanistic, serve only to mask the utter bankruptcy of the system they defend. Amos 6.6.08
[1] For a more detailed account of some of these struggles, see our website: ‘Workers' struggles multiply all over the world' (WR 314), ‘One class, one struggle' (ICC online), ‘Against the world wide attacks of crisis-ridden capitalism: one working class, one class struggle!' (IR 132)
Things have been so difficult for Gordon Brown recently you could almost feel sorry for him. The agony began on May 1 with the victory of Boris Johnson over Ken Livingstone in the London Mayoral elections, at the same time as Labour's worst council election results across England and Wales for forty years. Further salt was rubbed in Labour's wounds on the 22 May when, despite the ‘by-election bonanza' (a raise in personal allowances for all basic rate tax payers costing an estimated £2.7 billion), they spectacularly lost the Crewe & Nantwich by-election to the Conservatives, the Tories' first by-election win over Labour in 30 years with a swing of 17.6%. This would mean a landslide for Cameron & Co if repeated at a general election. According to the latest polls the Tories are at least 14% ahead of Labour. While Labour fortunes have collapsed around Brown, he has also had to deal with the fallout surrounding Cherie Blair's sensationalist biography, and discontent within the parliamentary party over the abolition of the 10p starting rate of tax, fuel duty and the 42 day detention plan. Things do indeed look gloomy for Gordon.
The press has had a field day with Labour's decline. "Is this the beginning of the end for Brown?" (The Observer 25.5.08); "Brown facing meltdown as Labour crash in Crewe" (The Guardian 23.5.08); "Labour chiefs tell Brown: appoint a leader-in-waiting" (The Observer 25.5.08); "PM isolated as ministers decide: Brown can't win" (The Guardian 24.5.08). The first Tory by-election win in 30 years "is uncomfortable, because the last Tory win, in Ilford North, came in 1978, a warning that the Callaghan government's time was running out and the Thatcher era was coming" (Ibid). But "although many fear the party is heading for a general election defeat, there seems little appetite for an early attempt to force Gordon Brown to stand down" (The Independent 3.6.08).
Smiling faces have emerged, left and right, from the ‘gloom' of Labour's defeat. The Tories have already announced that, "New Labour is dead" (The Guardian 25.5.08). For Cameron the Crewe & Nantwich by-election signalled a turning point on the road to electoral success: "Labour ran the most negative, the most backward-looking, the most xenophobic, the most class war [sic] sort of campaign they could have done and it completely backfired" (Ibid). For the Socialist Workers Party "Gordon Brown has reaped what New Labour sowed".
This is the stuff politics is made of; it's the familiar rough and tumble of any democracy, one man's loss is another man's gain, and so on. It's the essentially harmless ‘banter' of government, which oils the wheels of commerce and the state, isn't it? No! Internationally the more sophisticated national bourgeoisies have developed ideological tools to try and mask the reality of the capitalist system. The myth of the ‘free and democratic press' and ‘open government' are just two examples of this phenomenon. The endless ‘political' chatter is just the latest attempt to create a smokescreen that hides the reality of decomposing capital from the working class. An attempt to hide the crisis in the business and economic pages far away from the ‘real' news of parliamentary gossip and sleaze. But, as the crisis begins to bite, there is a danger that workers can be drawn into the politics of the ‘lesser evil'.
As internationally capitalism's crisis continues to deepen no one in government or the city really believes that the Tories, the Liberal Democrats or indeed the BNP or Respect could manage the economy any better than Labour, but it is essential that the illusion that it can be managed is maintained. The ‘game' of politics must continue. At least Brown himself understands the situation, blaming Labour's results on "difficult economic circumstances". Circumstances so difficult that the British bourgeoisie has no perspective for resolving them other than attacking the working class and increasing state intervention in the financial markets.
Politicians would do well to remember the phrase used by the Clinton camp against George Bush Snr in the 1992 US election: it's the economy, stupid! They could easily be its next victim. The state of the economy is central and things are not looking good for the bourgeoisie at home or abroad. The IMF have predicted that "the government faces another six months of economic pain" believing that "interest rates cannot be cut from their current 5% unless a tight hold is kept on pay, taxes rise more than expected or the credit crunch curbs domestic demand. It urged the Bank of England to be ready to raise rates if wage rises put pressure on inflation" (The Guardian 24.5.08). With the collapse of the housing market, increasing food and fuel bills and uncertainty over jobs, workers will begin to look for an alternative to the crisis. They won't find an alternative vision in bourgeois politics, where the choice is always between tweedledum or tweedledee, but in working class struggle and its perspective for a real alternative, communism. Kino 6.6.08
After a six-year campaign the TUC and the CBI, with government prompting, have recently agreed that 1.4 million temporary and agency workers should, after 12 weeks, have equal rights with full-time and permanent workers. Dave Prentis, the TUC President, said that "This is good news for agency workers, particularly those in workplaces where low pay, long hours and exploitation are the norm" and that "The abuse of temporary agency workers is a shameful relic of another age".
In a report for the TUC on ‘vulnerable workers' there was shock that "employment practices attacked as exploitative in the 19th century are still common today". It highlighted "extreme abuse of the rights of migrant workers, including levels of exploitation and control that meet the international legal definition of forced labour." It gave the examples of "employers illegally retaining workers' passports, threats or actual physical violence to workers and debt bondage - where a worker is forced to pay off debts accrued by inflated accommodation and food costs and is not therefore paid for their work."
Speaking of an earlier study, TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said "Too many unscrupulous bosses are getting rich by exploiting migrant workers", but "Unions are working hard to recruit migrant workers to protect them from rogue employers who seek to deny their workers a fair day's work for a fair day's pay." After all, "exploitation is not necessary for the operation of the British economy".
The "good news" for agency and temporary workers is something that the TUC hope to bring to other ‘vulnerable workers' (migrant workers, home workers, informal workers, younger workers, unpaid family workers etc). By acquiring the rights of permanent workers it is implied that they will no longer be so shamefully exploited.
With the growth of part-time, temporary, illegal and other precarious forms of employment there are an increasing number of people who find themselves in insecure, hyper-pressurised or otherwise dodgy working situations. ‘Exploited' is a word commonly used to describe workers who work in the worst conditions. From a marxist understanding of the relationship of the working class to its capitalist employers, all wage labour - no matter what conditions it takes place in, whether it's done with extreme reluctance or is the fulfilment of a childhood dream, whether it's down a mine, in a factory, shop or comfortable air-conditioned office - it's all exploitation.
For workers to be able to use their labour power, in exchange for wages, they need to be able to function at various levels, depending on the job. However, every worker needs food, sleep, clothing and some sort of shelter. These are the basics. The wages that you receive are intended to ensure that you will be ready for work on every day you're needed. If employers provide food, accommodation, somewhere to sleep, healthcare, training etc, it's so that you can work for them.
Whether bought with your wages, or provided by an employer/state, everything that enables you to reproduce your labour power helps your availability for work. Fundamentally we all work to live. We work for the necessities that keep us alive. Things like holidays are something that employers know are essential if workers are not to get completely burnt out. You might have a car, where your grandparents might not have, but, with the decline in public transport and the necessity to carry children or shopping about, it is by no means a luxury any more. You might ‘own' your own home, but in reality you will have this absolutely massive debt (with the fancy name of mortgage) that you will spend decades paying off, and comes with the assumption that you will be in reasonably well-paid employment for most of your working life. At root the resources invested in the working class are to ensure we can continue to work. Anything beyond the basics, then you're lucky that your employer maybe wants to keep you on for the foreseeable future - but we are all dispensable.
Having said that, let's return to our valuable labour power. For a certain amount of the time you will be working just to reproduce your labour power. However, at a certain point, the work you are doing is beyond the value of what is required to keep you functioning. This surplus value comes from labour time workers put in for free, and it goes to the exploiting class. Whether we call them bosses, the bourgeoisie or the capitalist class, they are the ruling class in capitalist society and the surplus value from unpaid labour-time is theirs to do with what they will. Some might wear smart suits and hang out in Mayfair or Manhattan, while others wear less fashionable suits, combat jackets or tunics and call themselves ‘Communists' in Beijing, Havana or Pyongyang: what they have in common is their relationship to surplus value. They are the exploiting class that pays the wages and the working class is the exploited class that creates all value.
Of the surplus value, after a part that's invested in new machinery, raw materials etc, (as Bukharin wrote in 1919 in The ABC of Communism) "Part goes to the capitalist himself, in the form of entrepreneur's profit; part goes to the landowner; in the form of taxes, part enters the coffers of the capitalist state; other portions accrue to merchants, traders and shopkeepers, are spent upon churches and in brothels, support actors, artists, bourgeois scribblers, and so on. Upon surplus value live all the parasites who are bred by the capitalist system".
This is the secret of all wage labour. "The fact that capitalist production is precisely the extraction, realisation and accumulation of this stolen labour makes it by definition, by nature, a system of class exploitation in full continuity with slavery and feudalism. It's not a question of whether the worker works for 8, 10 or 18 hours a day, whether his working environment is pleasant or hellish, whether his wages are high or low. These factors influence the rate of exploitation, but not the fact of exploitation. Exploitation is not an accidental by-product of capitalist society, the product of individual greedy bosses. It is the fundamental mechanism of capitalist production and the latter could not be conceived without it" (chapter 7 of ICC publication Communism: not a nice idea but a material necessity).
So, when Brendan Barber makes remarks on ‘rogue employers' and commends the unions' campaigns, we follow the ideas of Marx in Wages, Price and Profit when he said that "Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!'" we should have "the revolutionary watchword ‘Abolition of the wages system'", as it is the only thing that corresponds to the interests of the working class. This is revolutionary because it requires the destruction of the state by the working class, the overturn of the capital/wage labour relationship, and the building of a communist society where everyone contributes according to their abilities, and receives according to their needs. Car 1/6/8
In response to rising fuel costs there have been many dramatic and well-publicised actions across Europe. Truckers came to London in convoys, blocked a main road and went to lobby Downing Street. Welsh hauliers threatened to blockade ports and refineries. In the Netherlands a huge truck was parked outside parliament and hauliers across the country wanted drivers to beep their car horns in solidarity.
In France truckers drove go-slow convoys to block major roads. Farmers and taxi-drivers have blockaded fuel depots with their tractors and cars, and fisherman blockaded a number of ports.
Fishing fleets from Belgium, Italy, Portugal and Spain have not gone to sea for varying lengths of time, in protest at fuel costs and static fish prices. In Madrid fishermen gave out 20 tons of free fish.
Across Europe there have also been protests by farmers at the low cost of milk, which have involved feeding milk to calves and using it as fertiliser.
The often spectacular stunts have been given much coverage in the media throughout Europe. Unlike the minimal reporting that workers' struggles get, these campaigns found a prominent place in news bulletins and plenty of pictures in the papers. In some respects the message was simple: everyone knows that the cost of petrol is rocketing up, and it's even worse for these people because their very livelihood depends on it. With fish and milk prices staying relatively low, you can see incomes declining in the face of growing inflation.
When workers demonstrate or go on strike, because their wages are falling further behind increasing inflation, or because of attacks on jobs, pensions or working conditions, there's not so much space available in the media, particularly if workers are giving an example that will inspire others. When hauliers, fisherman or taxi-drivers take action the only people who can emulate them are those who already have their own lorry, boat or cab. All the actions mentioned above are from groups of people who have a distinct position within capitalism.
In contrast to the capitalist class, that employs millions, and owns factories, plant, office blocks, technology, and transport etc, and the working class, that only has its labour power to sell, there are many intermediate social strata that are neither one nor the other.
These strata between the working class and the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, will maybe own property (farm, shop, studio, workshop etc) or vehicles (boats, lorries, taxis). Typically they will be self-employed, and possibly employ small numbers. They do work, but unlike the working class they own their own means of production. They do own property, but don't live mainly off the surplus value from wage labour.
The petty bourgeoisie is in a conflicted position "Through the small amount of capital it owns, it shares in the conditions of existence of the bourgeoisie; through the insecurity of its existence, in the conditions of the proletariat" (Engels, ‘The Prussian Military Question and the German Workers' Party'). Farming, for example, shows a wide range of different social positions, from the mega agribusiness that's run like any industrial corporation to the tenant farmer living in a tied cottage. In between are those with big ambitions to take on more workers and those who are worried about losing their farms. Some ‘farmers' also have to work for wages for part of the year; among the truckers, others are former proletarians pushed into becoming ‘owner-drivers' in order to deprive them of many of benefits that accrue to employees or to disperse class solidarity. At this level the line between the petty bourgeoisie and the working class gets quite blurred.
In general, however, the intermediate strata are "eternally tossed about between the hope of entering the ranks of the wealthier class, and the fear of being reduced to the state of proletarians or even paupers" (Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany). The petty bourgeoisie is a politically unstable class - not that you can really describe such a motley aggregate of individuals as a class - that follows the lead of either of the two main classes in capitalist society. It can follow but can't act as an independent force.
If you look at the 1917 Russian Revolution you can see how many from intermediate strata were inspired by the working class struggle, even to the point of creating forms of organisation based on the example of the workers' councils. In the 1930s, however, with the working class having been defeated, it was clear that the petty bourgeoisie was one of the mainstays of fascism.
The actions taken over the rise in oil prices show that the petty bourgeoisie are feeling the pinch. The campaign has caused some governments to juggle with taxes and subsidies, and others to do nothing. What's important is that under the pressure of a deteriorating economic situation some from the intermediate strata want to do something. It has tended to be dramatic, and very reliant on getting a positive response from government, but at least they have acted, rather than just passively accepting things getting worse.
Over the last five years the struggle of the working class internationally has been slowly developing, with questions of solidarity being posed on many occasions. At the moment this struggle is not widespread enough to have a major impact on those outside the working class. However, as it develops, the working class will be able to show that it has not only forms of struggle to offer, but a perspective for a different sort of society. The petty bourgeoisie tend very much to accept the ideology of the ruling capitalist class, but in their recent actions they have shown a response to the growing economic crisis that is hitting all sectors of the population without prejudice. In the future, when the working class shows signs of organising its struggles more massively, and in an increasingly more united manner, then significant numbers from the intermediate strata can begin to recognise the social force that can take on the system that impoverishes them. Car 2/6/8
More than a month after Cyclone Nargis hit Burma, as many as 2½ million people were still utterly destitute, with no homes, (often no villages), severely limited access to food, water or medicines, and no prospect of the situation changing soon. Officially nearly 80,000 were dead and 60,000 missing, but the shocking indifference of the Burmese state to what had happened to the millions caught in the mud and mire means that the real figures could be almost anything, certainly much more.
The military clique of Than Shwe, at the heart of the Burmese state, was an easy target for governments around the world. These hardline ‘Stalino-Buddhists' said they would accept foreign aid, but not foreign rescue workers. They showed little interest in the plight of the population, being far more concerned at getting constitutional amendments ratified by a referendum that clocked up 93% in favour. After less than four weeks they started evicting families from relief camps, because they didn't want them to become permanent, even though there was nowhere obvious for them to go after the tents were taken away. They continued to harass opposition figures. They used refugees to build labour camps. They kept for themselves some of what little aid was allowed through.
All such criticisms were true, except that in the mouths of leading figures from some of the major imperialist powers they were used as grounds to threaten a ‘humanitarian' invasion of the country. The French foreign minister suggested using the UN's "responsibility to protect" as a cover for the ‘international community' to go into the country without clearing it with the Burmese state. He cited the availability of nearby French, Indian and British warships. The fact that the US has substantial forces in Thailand, as well as the aircraft carriers Kitty Hawk and Nimitz, and other warships, was a more direct way of making the same threat. It was clear that the US wanted to act on its own and not bother with the UN route.
There are some leftists who think that the Burmese state is defensible - some even describe it as a ‘deformed workers' state'! In the rest of the political spectrum the Stalinist nature of the military leaders is cited as the reason for their callous behaviour. Others have said that they are paranoid or just mad. After all Than Shwe did order that the capital be moved from Rangoon and built in Naypyidaw partly on the advice of astrologers.
The reality is more prosaic. That Burmese capitalism is more overtly repressive, and the military more prominent in the state apparatus than many others, is a reflection of its great economic weakness. But neither this, nor some of the more bizarre habits of its leaders, stop it from being a society based on capitalist exploitation.
Another country with a Stalinist state, China, has also recently suffered a catastrophic disaster, the earthquake in the Sichuan province which affected more than 15 million people, and in which more then 70,000 died.
The contrast with the situation in Burma was dramatic. There was a massive mobilisation by the state, including 130,000 troops. For a period of time there was a lot of open reporting in the Chinese media on what was happening. President Hu Jintao expressed his thanks for all the international aid, and for help from rescue teams from South Korea, Singapore, Russia, Japan and even Taiwan. The government said it would crack down on any corruption linked to relief supplies. With at least 3 million homes destroyed and another 12 million damaged there are 5 million homeless - the state hopes to get a million temporary housing units up within 3 months.
Countries in the west have also praised, rather than criticised the actions of the Chinese capitalist state: "This represents a model for other countries to follow"(US Assistant Secretary of State David Kramer), "A nation confronts a tragedy and finds its better self"(a Time magazine front cover), "Quake reveals softer side to China" (BBC website headline).
This lack of criticism might seem surprising. After all, there have been many protests throughout Sichuan at the evidence of a lot of substandard construction work. This becomes even more obvious when you compare the hundreds of schools that collapsed, killing thousands of children, with the government buildings that are still standing. There are also a nuclear research reactor, two nuclear fuel production sites and two nuclear weapon facilities (of which we know little) in the earthquake zone, and a number of hastily constructed dams which are already at risk of collapse, an eventuality that could result in disastrous floods.
A key difference between Burma and China is that the latter is an enormous investment market for the most developed countries and the former is negligible. What would be the point of ruffling Chinese feathers when the Beijing Olympics, that great festival of commerce, is just round the corner? And alongside the purely economic considerations are the ‘diplomatic' issues - in other words the efforts of the different imperialist powers to increase their influence with the Chinese ruling class, and their own conflicts with China over their positions in Asia and the Pacific. Despite competition between the US, France, Germany, Russia, and others over the spoils of this region, they seem to be agreed for the moment that it's in everyone's interest not to use the earthquake to provoke further disorder in the world imperialist chessboard.
In any case, the real humanitarian credentials of those who criticise the Burmese junta for its appalling response to the cyclone are easily unmasked. It is not so easy to erase the memory of how the richest and most powerful state in the world, the USA, effectively abandoned millions of its most deprived citizens to hunger, thirst and disease in the wake of Hurricane Katrina[1].
Car 4/6/08
[1] See Internationalism ‘Hurricane Katrina: A Capitalist-made Crisis [8] '
Faced with all the lies about the events of May 68, it is necessary for revolutionaries to re-establish the truth, to draw the real lessons of these events and prevent them being buried under an avalanche of flowers and wreaths.
That's what we have begun to do in publishing the two previous articles that retraced the first component of the ‘events of 68', the student revolt. We are turning here to the essential component of the events: the movement of the working class.
In the first article of the series we concluded: "May 14, discussions continued in many firms. After the immense demonstrations of the previous evening (in solidarity with the student victims of repression), with the enthusiasm and feeling of strength that came out of them, it was difficult to go back to work as if nothing had happened. In Nantes, the workers of Sud-Aviation, led by the youngest among them, unleashed a spontaneous strike and decided to occupy the factory".
This is point at which we take up the story.
In Nantes, it was the young workers, the same age as the students, who launched the movement; their reasoning was simple: "if the students, who can't pressurise with strikes, have the strength to knock back the government, the workers can also make it retreat". For their part, the students of the town came to show solidarity with the workers, mingling with the pickets: fraternisation. Here, it was clear that the campaigns of the PCF and the CGT warning against "leftist provocateurs in the pay of the bosses and the Interior Ministry" had only a feeble impact.
In total, there were 3100 strikers on the evening of May 14.
May 15, the movement reached the Renault factory at Cléon, in Normandy as well as two other factories in the region: total strike, unlimited occupation, locking up the management and the red flag on the gates. At the end of the day, there are 11,000 strikers.
May 16, the other Renault factories join the movement: the red flag at Flins, Sandouville, le Mans and Billancourt. That evening there were only 75,000 strikers in total, but Renault joining the struggle is a signal: it's the biggest factory in France (35,000 workers) and for a long time the saying was: "When Renault sneezes, France catches a cold".
On 17 May 215,000 were on strike: the strike was beginning to spread across France, especially in the provinces. It was a totally spontaneous movement; the unions were just following it. Everywhere, the young workers were at the forefront. There were numerous cases of fraternisation between students and young workers: the latter went to the occupied faculties and invited the students to come and eat at their canteens.
There were no specific demands. It was just a general feeling of being fed up. On the walls of a factory in Normandy it said "Time to live and with dignity!" On that day, afraid of being outflanked from below and also by the CFDT which was much more involved in the early strikes, the CGT called for the extension of the strike. It had ‘jumped on the bandwagon' as was said at the time. Its communiqué wasn't known about till the next day.
On the 18 May, a million workers were on strike by midday, even before the CGT line was known about. By the evening it was 2 million. By Monday 20 May there were 4 million on strike and 6 and a half million the day after that.
On 22 May, there were 8 million workers on indefinite strike. It was the biggest strike in the history of the international workers' movement. It was much more massive than the two previous benchmarks: the May 1926 General Strike in Britain (which lasted a week) and the May-June strikes in France in 1936.
All sectors were involved: industry, transport, energy, post and telecommunications, education, administration (several ministries were completely paralysed), the media (national TV was on strike, with workers denouncing the censorship imposed on them), research labs, etc. Even the undertakers were out (it was a bad idea to die in May 68!). Even professional sports people joined the movement: the red flag flew over the building of the Fédération Française de Football. The artists didn't want to be left out and the Cannes Festival was interrupted on the initiative of the film directors.
During this period the occupied faculties (as well as other public buildings, like the Odéon Theatre in Paris) became places of permanent political discussion. Many workers, especially the younger ones but not only them, took part in these discussions. Some workers asked those who defended the idea of revolution to come and argue their point of view in the occupied factories. In Toulouse, the small nucleus which went on to form the ICC's section in France was invited to expound its ideas about workers' councils in the occupied JOB factory. And the most significant thing was that this invitation came from militants of the CGT and the PCF. The latter had to negotiate for an hour with the permanent officials of the CGT, who had come from the big Sud-Aviation factory to ‘reinforce' the JOB strike picket, to get authorisation to allow the ‘leftists' to enter the factory. For more than six hours, workers and revolutionaries, sitting on rolls of cardboard, discussed the revolution, the history of the workers movement, soviets, and even the betrayals...of the PCF and the CGT.
Many discussions also took place in the street, on the pavements (the weather was good all over France in May 68!). They arose spontaneously; everyone had something to say (‘We talk and we listen' as one slogan had it). Everywhere there was an atmosphere of festival, except in the rich neighbourhoods where fear and hatred were building up
All over France, in the neighbourhoods and in or around certain big enterprises, ‘Action Committees' were formed. Within them there were discussions about how to wage the struggle, about the revolutionary perspective. They were generally animated by leftist or anarchist groups but many more were brought together outside of these organisations. At ORTF, the state radio and television station, an Action Committee was created by Michel Drucker, and the hard-to-describe Thierry Rolland was also part of it.
Faced with such a situation, the ruling class underwent a period of disarray, expressed in muddled and ineffective initiatives.
Thus, on May 22, the National Assembly, dominated by the right, discussed (before rejecting it) a motion of censure tabled by the left two weeks earlier: the official institutions of the French Republic seemed to live in another world. It's the same for the government that took the decision to forbid the return of Cohn-Bendit who had been to Germany. This decision only increased discontent: May 24 saw multiple demonstrations, notably denouncing the prohibition of Cohn-Bendit: "Frontiers mean fuck all!" "We are all German Jews!" Despite the cordon sanitaire of the CGT against the "adventurers" and "provocateurs" (that's to say the ‘radical' students) many young workers join up with the demonstrations.
In the evening, the President of the Republic, General de Gaulle, gave a speech: he proposed a referendum so that the French could pronounce on "participation" (a sort of capital and labour association). He couldn't have been further from reality. This speech fully revealed the disarray of the government and the bourgeoisie in general [1].
In the street, demonstrators listened to the speech on portable radios, anger still mounting: "His speech is shafting us!" Confrontations and barricades were mounted throughout the night in Paris and several provincial towns. There were numerous windows broken, some cars burnt, which had the effect of turning part of public opinion against the students who were seen as "hooligans". It's probable, moreover, that among the demonstrators were mixed in Gaullist militias or plain clothes police in order to ‘stir things up' and frighten the population. It is clear that a number of students thought they were ‘making a revolution' by throwing up barricades and burning cars, symbols of the ‘consumer society'. But above all these acts expressed the anger of the demonstrators, students and young workers, in the face of the risible and provocative responses of the authorities to the biggest strike in history. An illustration of the anger against the system was the setting alight of that symbol of capitalism, the Paris Bourse.
It was only the following day that the bourgeoisie finally took effective initiatives: on Saturday May 25 the Ministry of Labour (Rue de Grenelle) opened negotiations between unions, bosses and government.
Straightaway, the bosses were ready to give much more than the unions imagined: it's clear that the bourgeoisie was afraid. The Prime Minister, Pompidou presided: on Sunday morning he had an hour-long one to one session with Seguy, boss of the CGT: the two main people responsible for the maintenance of social order in France needed to discuss without witnesses the means to re-establish this order [2].
The night of May 26/27 the "Grenelle Accords" were concluded:
- 7% wage increases for all from June 1st, then 3% from October 1st;
- increase of the minimum wage in the region of 25%;
- reduction of patients' contributions from 30% to 25% (health expenses not paid for by Social Security);
- union recognition within the firm;
- a series of vague promises of negotiations, notably on the length of the working day (which was 47 hours a week on average).
Given the importance and strength of the movement, it was a real provocation:
- the 10% would be wiped out by inflation (which was quite serious during this period);
- nothing on safeguards against inflation in the wage packet;
- nothing concrete on reduction of the working week; they talked about aiming at "the progressive return to 40 hours" (already officially obtained in 1936!); in the time scale proposed by the government it will take... 40 years!;
- the only workers who would gain significantly were the poorest workers (dividing the working class by pushing them back to work) and the unions, rewarded for their role as saboteurs.
On Monday May 27 the "Grenelle Accords" were unanimously rejected by the workers' assemblies.
At Renault Billancourt, the unions organised a grand ‘show' amply covered by television and radio: coming out of negotiations, Seguy said to journalists: "The return to work won't be long" and he hoped that the workers at Billancourt would give the example. However, 10,000 of them, meeting at dawn, decided to continue the movement even before the arrival of the union leaders.
Benoit Frachon, ‘historic' leader of the CGT (who had been present at the negotiations of 1936) declared: "The Grenelle accords will bring millions of workers a comfort that they couldn't have hoped for": this was greeted by a deadly silence!
Andre Jeanson, of the CDFT, expressed satisfaction with the initial vote in favour of continuing the strike and talked of solidarity of the workers with the students in struggle, bringing the house down.
Seguy, finally, presented "an objective account" of what "had been gained at Grenelle": whistles then general booing for several minutes. Seguy then made an about turn: "If I judge from what I hear, you will not let it happen": applause but in the crowd you could hear remarks like "He's fucking us about".
The best proof of the rejection of the "Grenelle Accords": the number of strikers increased still more on May 27 to reach 9 million.
This same day at the Charléty Stadium in Paris, a big meeting took place called by the student union UNEF, the CDFT (which went one better than the CGT) and the leftist groups. The tone of the speeches was very revolutionary: it was a question of giving an outlet to growing discontent against the CGT and the French Communist Party. Aside from the leftists there was the presence of social democratic politicians like Mendes-France (old boss of the 50s government). Cohn-Bendit made an appearance (he'd already been at the Sorbonne the night before).
May 28 was the day the parties of the left began their games:
In the morning, François Mitterand, President of the Left Democratic and Socialist Federation (which brought together the Socialist Party, the Radical Party and divers small groups of the left) held a press conference: considering that there was a vacancy for power, he announced his candidature for the Presidency of the Republic. In the afternoon, Waldeck-Rochet, boss of the PCF, proposed a government with "Communist participation": it was important for them not to allow the social democrats to exploit the situation solely for their own benefit. This was relayed the next day, May 29, through a large demonstration called by the CGT demanding a "popular government". The right immediately cried "a communist plot".
This same day, we had the ‘disappearance' of General de Gaulle. There were rumours that he had withdrawn but, in fact, he went to Germany to make sure of the support of the army through General Massu who commanded the occupation troops in Germany.
May 30 constituted a decisive day in the bourgeoisie taking the situation in hand. De Gaulle made a new speech: "In the present circumstances, I will not withdraw (...) I am today dissolving the National Assembly..."
At the same time in Paris, an enormous demonstration in support of De Gaulle took place on the Champs-Élysées. It mobilised those from the posh and wealthy districts and rural areas, thanks to army trucks. The ‘people' came, the wealthy, the well-heeled, and the bourgeois; representatives of religious institutions, high level bureaucrats imbued with their ‘superiority', small businessmen trembling for their shop windows, old combatants embittered by attacks on the French flag, veterans of French Algeria and the OAS, young members of the fascist group Occident, the old nostalgic for Vichy (who, however, detested de Gaulle); this whole, beautiful world came to proclaim its hatred for the working class and its ‘love of order'. In the crowd, alongside the old combatants of ‘Free France', you could hear chants like "Cohn-Bendit to Dachau!".`
But the ‘party of order' couldn't be reduced to those who demonstrated on the Champs- Élysées. The same day, the CGT called for negotiations branch by branch in order to "ameliorate the acquisitions of Grenelle": it was the tactic of dividing the movement so as to finish it off.
Elsewhere, from this date (it was a Thursday), the return to work began to take place, but slowly because on June 6 there were still six million on strike. The return to work was made in a dispersed fashion:
- May 31: steel in Lorraine, textiles in the north,
- June 4: weapons manufacture, insurance,
- June 5: electrical supply, coal mines,
- June 6: post, telecommunications, transport (in Paris, the CGT pushed the return to work: in each depot the union leaders announced that other depots had returned to work, which was not true);
- June 7: primary teachers;
- June 10: the police forces occupy the Renault factory at Flins: a student charged by the police falls into the Seine and drowns;
- June 11: intervention of the CRS at the Peugeot factory at Sochaux (second largest in France); 2 workers are killed.
We then see new demonstrations of violence throughout France: "They have killed our comrades!" At Sochaux, facing the determined resistance of the workers, the CRS evacuated the factory: work only resumed 10 days later.
Fearing that the indignation would only re-launch the strike (3 million still remained on strike), the unions (with the CGT at their head) and the parties of the left led by the PCF, insistently called for a return to work "so that the elections can take place and complete the victory of the working class". The Communist Party daily, l'Humanité, headlined: "Strong with their victory, millions of workers go back to work".
The systematic appeal for a strike by the unions from May 20 now has its explanation: they had to control the movement in order to provoke the return of the less combative sectors and demoralise the others.
Waldeck-Rochet, in his speeches on the electoral campaign declared that: "The Communist Party is the party of order". And, little by little, bourgeois order returned:
- June 12: secondary teachers return;
- June 14: Air France and merchant marine;
- June 16: the Sorbonne is occupied by the police;
- June 17: chaotic return at Renault Billancourt;
- June 18: de Gaulle frees the leaders of the OAS who were still in prison;
- June 23: first round of the legislative elections with gains for the right;
- June 24: return to work at the Citroën Javel factory (Krasucki, number two of the CGT, spoke at an assembly calling for an end to the strike);
- June 26: Usinor Dunkirk goes back;
- June 30: second round of the elections with a historic victory for the right.
One of the last firms to go back to work was the ORTF on July 12: numerous journalists didn't want to return to the restrictions and censorship that they submitted to before from the government. After the return, many of them would be sacked. Order returned throughout, including with the news items that the state judged useful to broadcast to the population.
Thus, the greatest strike in history ended in defeat, contrary to the affirmations of the CGT and of the PCF. A crushing defeat sanctioned by the return in force of the parties and of the ‘authorities' that had vilified the movement. But the workers' movement has known for a long time that: "The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding unions of the workers" (Communist Manifesto). Also, beyond their immediate defeat, the workers in France, in 1968, gained a great victory, not for themselves but for the whole of the world proletariat. That is what we are going to look at in the next part of this article where we are going to try to show the fundamental causes, as well as the world and historic stakes, of France's ‘merry month of May'. Fabienne (27.4.2008)
[1] The day after the speech, municipal employees of many districts announced that they would refuse to organise a referendum. Similarly, the authorities couldn't print the voting forms: the national print works was on strike and private printers (who weren't) refused to do it: their bosses didn't want supplementary problems with the workers.
[2] Later it was learnt that Chirac, Secretary of State for Social Affairs, had also met (in an attic!) Krasucki, number two of the CGT.
The ICC had a stall and hosted a meeting at the ‘May 68 and all that' event at Conway Hall in May. The event was a very mixed affair. There was a strong presence of those we refer to as leftists - political tendencies that talk about socialism and revolution but actually defend the interests of capitalism. This was evident in a couple of the meetings we attended. One called ‘Stopping the war in 1968 and 2008' wanted to glorify the North Vietnamese struggle, in reality part of the series of proxy wars that went on between the US and Russian imperialist blocs, and draw parallels with the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq today. In other words, these advocates of ‘Stop the War' actually want to continue the war on the side of the ‘resistance' just as they campaigned for the Russian bloc and the Vietnamese Stalinists in the 60s. A meeting on ‘Prague and May 68' concentrated on the conflicts within the CP and intelligentsia, without mention of either the working class or Czech state capitalism. In these meetings the working class and its struggle hardly even got the walk-on part that they are relegated to in the media coverage of the May 68 events.
Other meetings we attended were of a different character, such as the one on the influence of surrealism and situationism in 1968, or the meeting held by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, an organisation which is also highly critical of the leftists, even if they too are weighed down with a classical bourgeois position on parliament. In this case, their idea that class consciousness can be measured (at least in part) by how many people vote for ‘socialist candidates' prevents them from seeing the essential role that mass strike movements like the one in May 68 plays in the development of a revolutionary understanding within the working class.
The ICC meeting ‘May 68: the return of the working class after 40 years of counter-revolution' took this view as its point of departure. Rejecting the false lessons of those who say the working class was merely interested in wages while the students were the only ones who had any revolutionary ideas, we have to see how the events of May 68 are rooted in history.
The students were certainly in conflict with the state and the brutal repression handed out to them lit the fuse of a more general movement; but it was the massive entry of the working class into the arena that transformed the situation. With nearly 10 million involved it was the biggest working class strike in history, paralysing French capital. Workers were discussing everywhere - in the factories, in the universities, on the pavement. The French events also proved to be only the first in a series of movements: the Italian ‘Hot Autumn' of 1969 and the Argentine uprising in the same year; Poland in 1970; waves of radical strikes in Spain in 1972; dockers' and miners' strikes in Britain in 72 and 74, to name just some of the main struggles. This showed that something very profound was going on at the basis of society. As the title of our meeting proposes, it marked the historic revival of the world working class after the crushing defeat of its first revolutionary efforts in 1917-23. By 1968 the first signs of the economic crisis, supposedly banished from capitalism for ever, was met by the struggle of a new generation of workers who had not been crushed by fascism, Stalinism, and the fraud of ‘democracy' and had not lived through the worst moments of imperialist war.
This was just the beginning of a series of movements in the class struggle that is still going on today, despite all the difficulties the working class has faced in the last 40 years, and that is why it is still important to discuss the struggles of 1968 today, not just as an exercise in nostalgia for the older generation, but in order to pass on the lessons of those struggles to the new generation of workers going into struggle today. With this perspective it is fitting that, in spite of the fact that there was a large majority of the older generation at the event overall, all but one of the people who were attending an ICC meeting for the first time were young. However, the discussion was started by the only member of the older generation not there to support the ICC. He raised the key questions of the nature of the defeats suffered by the working class.
For this contributor, not all defeats are the same. During the Civil War in Spain they said ‘better Vienna than Berlin' (i.e. better the doomed uprising of Viennese workers in 1934 than the passive response to Hitler coming to power in 1933) because it is better to go down fighting than to capitulate, and this gives a positive aspect to some defeats. For the ICC the worst defeats are those in which the working class is fighting for interests that are not its own, such as the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, when the workers were enrolled for imperialist conflicts under the banner of bourgeois ‘democracy'. Similarly, the defeat of the revolutionary wave was not obvious, above all in Russia, as the Bolsheviks started with the aim of leading the workers to revolution but became part of the counter-revolution, and this has allowed the bourgeoisie to paint the most brutal state capitalism in ‘proletarian' colours. The consequences of this form of defeat are still haunting the working class today.
The discussion on the perspective for the class struggle took up the question of the movements going on in the world today. Could the massive and militant struggles in Egypt, for example, lead to a revolution there? The perspective for the development of the class struggle needs to be looked at internationally, and in terms of the balance of force between the working class and the ruling class. When workers go into struggle in countries such as Egypt or Bangladesh they are faced immediately with direct conflict with the state, since the ruling class lacks credible shock absorbers such as trade unions, and so they have to form assemblies, knowing that the unions are on the bosses' side. It is possible for an insurrection to break out in a country like Egypt, but it would still need to spread internationally, and particularly to those areas where the working class is strongest and most concentrated, for it to lead to working class revolution - this is why the Bolsheviks looked to the development of the revolutionary wave and particularly the German revolution. This does not lessen the significance of struggles in the third world, which are an important part of an international development and an inspiration to workers everywhere.
A young ICC supporter from France pointed to the dynamic of struggles there today - the students in 2006 struggling against the CPE, the students and railworkers and others last year - which are responding to generalised attacks on living standards. Sarkozy, like all political leaders, wants to bury the hopes raised by 1968 once and for all, but has been unable to do so. In fact, while 1968 led to the open and widespread discussion of revolution again, today, after 40 years of capitalist crisis, there is a deeper level of class consciousness shown in the discussions in the assemblies during the movement against the CPE and in the attempts of students (themselves much more part of the proletariat than those of 68) to link with workers, and of workers in struggle to link with other industries and with the students. This shows that the perspective of struggle opened 40 years ago is still open.
At the end of an ICC meeting we asked everyone, particularly those who had not spoken, to make any comments on the discussion. The general feeling was that they had come to learn about the events of the past, an illustration of the questioning attitude that is also a vital sign of the slow and painful development of class consciousness. Alex 4.6.08
Since August 2007, with the collapse of the ‘sub-prime' loans, we have seen further convulsions in the world capitalist economy. Bad news is followed by worse news: rates of inflation are spiralling (in the USA, 2007 was the worst year since 1990); unemployment is rising; the banks have announced billion dollar losses, the stock exchanges have gone down and down; the indicators for growth in 2008 have been revised downwards several times.... These ‘economic' phenomena have a very real and tragic impact on workers' lives: losing your job, losing your home, seeing your pension ebbing away. All this is very powerfully affecting millions of anonymous human beings whose feelings and concerns don't make the headlines.
Faced with a new eruption of the crisis, what do the experts tell us? There's an answer for every taste: there are the catastrophists who see the apocalypse round the corner; there are the optimists who say that it's all down to speculation, but the real economy is doing well. However, the most common explanation is that we are looking at a ‘cyclical' crisis like so many others that capitalism has been through in its history. Therefore, they advise, we should remain calm and go with the wind, because we will soon be sailing in the calmer seas of prosperity...
This ‘explanation' uses as its model, like a yellowing photograph, a picture of what happened in the 19th century, but which is no longer applicable to the real conditions of capitalism in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The 19th century was the epoch of capitalism's ascent and outward expansion across the whole world. Periodically, however, it was shaken by crises, as the Communist Manifesto highlighted:
"In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them".
This periodic entry of capitalist society into a phase of collapse had two main causes, which are still present today. First, the tendency towards overproduction, as described in the Manifesto, resulting in hunger, poverty and unemployment, not because there was a shortage of goods (as had been the case with previous societies) but on the contrary because of an excess of production, because there was too much industry, two much commerce, too many resources! Secondly, because capitalism functions in an anarchic way through ferocious competition which pits one enterprise against another. This results in a constant repetition of moments of uncontrolled disorder. However, because there were still new territories to be conquered for wage labour and commodity production, sooner or later it was possible to overcome these moments thanks to a new expansion of production that extended and deepened capitalist relations of production, especially in the central countries of Europe and in North America. In this epoch, the moments of crisis were like the beating of a healthy heart and periods of want were soon replaced by new periods of prosperity. But even at that point Marx saw these periodic crises as something more than an eternal cycle, which would always give rise to new phases of growth. He saw them as expressions of the profound contradictions which lay at the roots of the capitalist system and which would ultimately lead to its ruin.
At the beginning of the 20th century, capitalism had reached its peak. It had spread across the whole planet. The greater part of the globe was dominated by wage labour and commodity production relations. It thus entered into its period of decadence:
"At the origin of this decadence, as with the other economic systems, lies the growing conflict between the development of the productive forces and the relations of production. Concretely, in the case of capitalism, whose development had been conditioned by the conquest of extra-capitalist markets, the First World War constituted the first significant manifestation of its decadence. With the end of the colonial and economic conquest of the world by the capitalist metropoles, the latter were forced to confront each other in the dispute for each other's markets. From then on, capitalism entered into a new period of its history, defined by the Communist International in 1919 as the epoch of wars and revolutions" (Resolution on the international situation, 17th ICC congress, 2007).
The essential features of this period are, on the one hand, the outbreak of imperialist wars, expression of the deadly struggle between different capitalist states to extend their influence at the expense of others, of the battle to control a world market which has become increasingly narrow and could no longer provide a sufficient outlet for such an abundance of rivals; on the other hand, there is a growing tendency towards overproduction, so that economic convulsions pile on top of each other. In other words, what characterises the 20th and 21st centuries is that the tendency towards overproduction - which in the 19th century was temporary and could easily be overcome - has become chronic, subjecting the world economy to a semi-permanent risk of instability and destruction. Meanwhile competition - a congenital trait of capitalism - became extreme and, crashing up against the limits of a world market which constantly verged on saturation, lost its role as a stimulant for the expansion of the system, so that its negative side as a factor of chaos and conflict came to the fore. The world war of 1914-18 and the Depression that began in 1929 were the two most spectacular manifestations of the new epoch. The first resulted in 20 million deaths and untold suffering, inflicting the most terrible moral and psychological trauma on entire generations. The second was a brutal collapse leading to unemployment rates of 20-30% and atrocious poverty among the workers of the so-called ‘rich' countries, the USA in particular.
The new situation of capitalism on the economic and imperialist level led to important changes on the political level. In order to ensure the cohesion of a society facing chronic overproduction and violent imperialist conflicts, the state, ultimate bastion of the system, intervened massively in all aspects of social life and above all the most sensitive: the economy, war, and the class struggle. All countries headed towards a state capitalism that took on two basic forms: the one falsely labelled ‘socialist' (a more or less complete statification of the economy) and those defined as ‘liberal', based on a more or less open association between the classical private bourgeoisie and the state bureaucracy.
This brief summary of the general characteristics of the present historical epoch can help us situate the present crisis, analysing it in a considered way and avoiding both alarmist catastrophism and all the optimist demagogy about the ‘cyclical' crisis.
After the Second World War, capitalism, at least in the big metropoles, entered a more or less long period of prosperity. The aim of this article is not to analyse the causes of this, but what is certain is that this phase (contrary to all the sermons of the governments, trade unionists, economists and even some people who called themselves ‘marxists', telling us that capitalism had definitively overcome its economic crises) began to come to an end in 1967, first with the devaluation of the Pound, then the Dollar Crisis of 1971 and the so-called ‘oil crisis' of 1973. With the recession of 1974-75, a new stage was reached and the convulsions got worse. Summarising very rapidly, we can mention: the inflationary crisis of 1979 which hit the main industrialised countries, the debt crisis of 1982, the Wall Street crash in 1987 followed by the recession of 1989, the new recession of 1992-93 which caused disarray in all the European currencies, the crises of the Asian ‘tigers' and ‘dragons' in 1997 and the crisis of the ‘new economy' in 2001. Can this succession of shocks be explained by grafting on the formula of the ‘cyclical crisis'? No, a thousand times no! The incurable sickness of capitalism is the result of the dramatic lack of solvent markets, a problem that has not ceased to sharpen throughout the 20th century and which reappeared violently in 1967. But unlike in 1929, capitalism today has been able to face up to this situation armed with the weapon of massive state intervention, allowing it to ‘go with' the crisis in order to avoid an uncontrolled collapse.
What is the main tool used by the state to try to rein in the runaway horse of the crisis, enabling it to soften, delay, avoid - at least in the central countries - its most catastrophic effects? Experience has shown us that this tool is the systematic resort to credit. Thanks to debts that have reached colossal proportions in a relatively short span of time, the capitalist states have created an artificial market that has offered an outlet to mounting overproduction. For 40 years, the world economy has managed to avoid disaster through increasingly massive doses of debt. Debt to capitalism is what heroin is to an addict. The drug of debt has made sure that capitalism has managed to stay standing, albeit leaning on the arm of the state, whether ‘liberal' or ‘socialist'. The drug gives it moments of euphoria where it feels that it is living in the best of all possible worlds, but more and more frequently it is plunged into periods of convulsion and crisis, such as the one we entered in August 2007. As the dose increases, the drug has less and less effect on the addict. He needs a bigger and bigger dose to achieve a high that gets weaker and weaker. This is what has happened to capitalism today! After 40 years of injecting the credit drug into its raddled veins, the world capitalist economy is finding it harder and harder to get into new periods of euphoria.
This is what is happening now. Last August we were told that everything had gone back to normal thanks to the loans injected by the central banks into the financial organisations. Since then, they have injected no less than five hundred billion euros in three months, without this having significant effect. The ineffectiveness of these measures ended up sowing panic and January 2008 began with a general fall in the world's stock markets. In order to stop the bloodletting, in the USA government and opposition joined hands with the Federal Reserve to announce, on 17 January, the miracle remedy - an $800 dollar cheque to all households. However, such a measure, which had been very effective in 1991, led to a new fall in the stock market on 21 January - as grave a decline as the debacle of 1987. On the same day, the FED urgently reduced the rate of interest by three quarters of a point, the biggest reduction since 1984. But on 23rd January the world's stock exchanges, except for Wall Street, went through another plunge. What is the cause of this continuing slide, despite all the credits pumped in by the central states, using all the resources available to them: the loans to banks between August and November, reductions in interest rates, fiscal reductions? The banks, used on a massive scale by the state as a way of drawing companies and households into a spiral of debts, now find themselves in a pitiful state, beginning with the really big ones like Citigroup, and are announcing a series of enormous losses. There is much talk of a phenomenon which can further aggravate the situation: a number of insurance companies, which specialise in reimbursing banks for their ‘bad' credit linked to subprime mortgages, seem to be having a hard time keeping this up. But there is an even more worrying problem that is shaking the world economy like a tsunami: the resurgence of inflation. During the 1970s, inflation made life extremely difficult for anyone on a modest income, and it is now returning with a vengeance. This shows that the resort to credit and state capitalist measures did not eliminate it, but simply put it off to the future. There is a real fear that it will start to reach runaway levels and that the gigantic loans to the central banks, the fiscal reductions and cuts in interest rates, will drive it even faster without getting production going again. The general fear is that the world economy is entering into a phase of so-called ‘stagflation', in other words a dangerous combination of recession and inflation, which for the working class and the majority of the population would mean a new flood of redundancies and a growing difficulty in meeting the rising costs of basic necessities. To which we can add - and this is just one example - 2 million American households unable to pay their mortgages.
Like a drug, the desperate resort to credit little by little undermines the foundations of the economy. From this brief analysis of the situation in recent months, we can see that we are facing the most serious convulsions of world capitalism in these 40 years of crisis. And it is by looking at the last 40 years, rather than at the last few months as the economic ‘experts' do, that we will gain a much clearer picture of the real direction of the world economy. We will return to this in a second article, where we will show how the bourgeoisie has no choice but to push the most brutal effects of the crisis onto the backs of the workers; and we will try to provide an answer to the question: is there a way out of the crisis?
Translated from Accion Proletaria 199, January-March 2008, the ICC's publication in Spain.
It took the authorities 5 weeks before the results of the Zimbabwean presidential election were officially revealed. ZANU-PF had lost control of parliament for the first time in the 28 years since ‘independence' and Robert Mugabe had already been told he'd lost the presidency outright. A run-off between Mugabe and the MDC's Morgan Tsvangirai is due on 27 June.
In a report from the International Crisis Group, (they have lots of inside sources in Zimbabwe and South Africa), it is claimed that the Zimbabwean military have told Mugabe they can guarantee electoral victory. Certainly banning any MDC rallies for reasons of ‘security' shows the way the state is thinking. There has also been the suggestion that there might be either a pre-emptive military coup before the run-off, or after, if Tsvangirai wins.
Across Zimbabwe there has been a campaign of state intimidation and violence with arrests, beatings, torture and murder. The MDC claims more than 50 of its members have been killed and more than 25,000 driven out of their homes. The government has banned all aid agencies from helping the 4 million people who are dependent on them for food. Soldiers have been told that they must vote for Mugabe or leave the army.
All this is happening against a background of the Zimbabwean economy going through the floor. Whether inflation is running at 100,000% or 1,000,000%, it's a disaster, like the 80% unemployment rate. The once productive grain and tobacco farms have either been wrecked or neglected. Zimbabwe's involvement in the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1998 and 2002 was ruinous. It's true that Zimbabwe has many natural resources, such as platinum, copper, nickel, coal, tin, gold and diamonds, but mines have been closing as costs have risen and operations have become more difficult with an infrastructure that is falling apart and with the sheer scale of the economic crisis.
Mugabe always says that the MDC is a tool of US and British imperialism, who he blames for ruining the Zimbabwean economy and causing instability. Of course Mugabe is trying to divert attention from the extraordinarily irrational, corrupt and economically devastating policies of the ZANU regime. And Mugabe's recent suspension of the activities of aid agencies in Zimbabwe - accused of campaigning on behalf of the MDC - will no doubt result in further starvation and neglect for the mass of the population. But he's not inventing the fact that the US and Britain have been backing the opposition. Indeed Tsvangirai has been praised throughout the west so enthusiastically that he's had to start playing it down, and has been trying to build up support in the region with meetings with the leaders of nearby countries. As for British and American capitalism, it should go without saying that they want to protect and expand their interests throughout Africa, and that specifically includes Zimbabwe. But they're not the only forces interested in gaining an influence in the country.
For a start, South African President Thabo Mbeki apparently has a strong personal dislike for Tsvangirai and has only ever considered a reformed ZANU-PF government with just a token opposition representation. But the South African ruling class is not united, as ANC leader Jacob Zuma has not only been critical of Mugabe but ensured ANC support for the MDC. As another example, Tsvangirai accused the South African government of playing a role in facilitating the delivery of weapons to land-locked Zimbabwe from a Chinese ship, the COSATU unions (part of the SA government and with connections with MDC-linked unions in Zimbabwe) ensured that when it docked in Durban workers refused to unload it.
Apart from the interests of Britain, the US, China and South Africa in Zimbabwe, leaders of neighbouring countries seem at present to be opting for the status quo, although it's clear they all know that South African imperialism will have a major say in anything that happens. Mbeki has already, according to the Washington Post, told Bush to "butt out" of Zimbabwe.
Although there has been much praise for Tsvangirai, the forces of the opposition are very divided, as would be expected in the face of such a catastrophic economic situation where no ‘solution' is credible.
In 2005 the MDC went through a bitter split, and although the factions got back together in time for the elections they are not the force they were. Of those who voted for them a great number must have been for just ‘anything but Mugabe'. In terms of being able to mobilise strikes and demonstrations the MDC has a long history of calling for actions that turn out to be damp squibs. It is significant that the MDC was formed as a political party in 1999, the year after the last major wave of riots and strikes against the effects of the economic crisis.
An estimated 3 million Zimbabweans have not stuck around to see if the MDC can bring in a better future and have escaped to South Africa. The recent wave of anti-foreigner violence there has presented them with an impossible choice (see front page article in this issue). They ran away from poverty and violence, to be greeted with violence and poverty. Post-apartheid South Africa still means exploitation and oppression for the majority of the population.
In Zimbabwe ZANU-PF's original coming to power was no liberation either. The Justice Minister accused Tsvangirai of endangering the gains of the revolution. This is a country where, in 2005, 700,000 people lost their homes when Mugabe had tens of thousands of shanty dwellings and illegal street stalls destroyed because he thought they were an embarrassment.
Yet the myth of ‘liberation' still has a hold on people. The Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights, which has recorded hundreds of incidents of violence and torture following the elections, said"the vicious and cowardly attacks by so-called war veterans on women, children and the elderly shames the memory of all true heroes of the liberation struggle". These war veterans fought for ZANU-PF to take over the Rhodesian capitalist state. The name of the country changed, but its capitalist and imperialist nature did not. Whether Mugabe is replaced or not, the conflict between his supporters and his opponents will continue. As elsewhere in Africa, capitalism only offers war, poverty, hunger and disease. The only real form of liberation that can be fought for is in the international struggle of the working class, which will have to destroy every capitalist state in the world. Car 6/6/8
Links
[1] http://www.zabalaza.net
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/south-africa
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/pogroms-south-africa
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/30/economics
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/economic-crisis
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/fuel-price-protests
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalismusa/200509/1458/hurricane-katrina-capitalist-made-crisis
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/burmamyanmar
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/china
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/chinese-earthquake
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/cyclone-burma
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/may-68
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1968-may-france
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/public-meetings