The current financial crisis is ultimately the result of a crisis of overproduction, like the one of 1929. The growth over the last few decades has only been possible thanks to the accumulation of vast debts, which have destabilised the entire banking system.
On 24 September 2008, US President Bush gave what journalists and commentators around the world agreed was an "unusual" speech. His televised address focused on the harsh trials facing the "American people":
"This is an extraordinary period for America's economy. Over the past few weeks, many Americans have felt anxiety about their finances and their future. I understand their worry and their frustration. We've seen triple-digit swings in the stock market. Major financial institutions have teetered on the edge of collapse, and some have failed. As uncertainty has grown, many banks have restricted lending. Credit markets have frozen. And families and businesses have found it harder to borrow money.
We're in the midst of a serious financial crisis
The government's top economic experts warn that without immediate action by Congress, America could slip into a financial panic, and a distressing scenario would unfold: more banks could fail, including some in your community. The stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet. Foreclosures would rise dramatically. And if you own a business or a farm, you would find it harder and more expensive to get credit. More businesses would close their doors, and millions of Americans could lose their jobs. Even if you have good credit history, it would be more difficult for you to get the loans you need to buy a car or send your children to college. And ultimately, our country could experience a long and painful recession".
In reality, it's not just the American economy which is facing "a long and painful recession", but the entire world economy. The USA, locomotive of growth for 60 years, is now dragging the world economy towards the abyss.
The list of financial institutions in difficulty is getting longer every day:
- in February, the 8th largest bank in Britain, Northern Rock, had to be nationalised under threat of going under
- In March, Bear Stearns, Wall Street's fifth largest bank, had to be ‘saved' by being annexed by JP Morgan, the third biggest US bank, with the help of funds from the Federal Bank
- In July, Indymac, one of the USA's biggest loan companies, had to be taken in hand by the Federal authorities
- Beginning of September, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, two key finance organisations with a joint weight of 850 billion dollars, were again only kept afloat thanks to a new influx of funds from the Fed
- A few days later, Lehman Brothers. America's fourth largest bank, declared itself bust and this time the Fed couldn't save it. Its total debts on 31 May stood at 613 billion dollars. This was the biggest collapse of an American bank ever
- Then came Merrill Lynch (taken over by the Bank of America); American International Group, propped up by emergency funds from the US central bank; Washington Mutual, America's biggest building society, closed down. In Britain, first HBOS had to be taken over by Lloyds, then Bradford and Bingley had to be nationalised.
Naturally, world stock markets have also been in turmoil. Regularly there have been falls of 3,4,5% in the wake of new bankruptcies. In Moscow the stock exchange had to close its doors in mid-September after successive falls of over 10%. And all records were broken when Congress first turned down Bush's 700 billion dollar bail out package: Wall Street dropped 800 points, the biggest ever in a single day.
Faced with this cascade of bad news, the world's biggest economic experts have been thrown into a bit of a panic. Alan Greenspan, the former and much revered president of the Fed, declared on ABC television on 14 September: "this is a once in a half century, probably once in a century type of event....There's no question that this is in the process of outstripping anything I've seen and it still is not resolved and still has a way to go". Even more significant was the statement by the Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz who, with the aim of "calming minds" rather maladroitly asserted that the present financial crisis had to be less serious than the one in 1929, even if we need to avoid "overconfidence": "we could be mistaken but the general point of view is that today we have the tools to avoid another Great Depression". Far from reassuring anyone, this eminent specialist in economics, but not a very good psychologist, seems to have provoked considerable disquiet. After all, he had brought up the question that everything is thinking about but few dare speak about: are we heading towards a new 1929, a new "Depression"?
Since then, the economists have queued up on TV to reassure us that, while things today are indeed serious, they have nothing in common with 1929 and the economy is going to pick up again soon. This is all half-truths. At the time of the Great Depression, in the USA, thousands of banks went bust, millions of people lost their jobs and businesses, the rate of unemployment reached 25% and industrial production fell by nearly 60%. In short, the economy more or less ground to a halt. At that time, the world's leaders only responded after a long delay. For months, they left the markets to themselves. Even worse, the only measure they took at first was to close the borders to foreign exports through protectionist barriers, which further paralysed world trade. Today, the context is very different. The bourgeoisie has learned a lot from this economic disaster, has equipped itself with international organisms and keeps a very close eye on the unfolding of the crisis. Since 2007, the various central banks (mainly the Fed and the Central European Bank) have injected nearly 2000 billion dollars to save companies in trouble. They have thus managed to stave off the complete and brutal collapse of the financial system. The economy is slowing down at a considerable rate but it is not completely blocked. For example in Germany, growth for 2009 will only be around 0.5% (according to the German weekly Der Spiegel on 20 September).
But contrary to what all the economic experts are saying, the present crisis is really far more serious than in 1929. The world market is totally saturated. The growth over the last few decades has only been possible thanks to vast debts. Capitalism is now sinking under this mountain of debt
Certain politicians or economists are now telling us that the world of finance needs to be made more ‘moral' in order to avoid the excesses which have led to the present crisis, that we need to go back to a more ‘healthy' capitalism. But what they avoid saying is that the ‘growth' of these past decades has been the precise result of these ‘excesses', ie of capitalism's headlong flight into generalised debt. It's not the excesses of the financial fat cats who have brought about the present crisis: these excesses and the financial crisis are only symptoms of the irresolvable crisis, the historic dead-end that the capitalist system as a whole has reached. This is why there can be no real ‘light at the end of the tunnel'. Capitalism is going to carry on sinking down. The 700 billion dollar Bush bail-out may stabilise the stock-market for a while, if it is accepted, but it can bring no lasting solution to the problem. The underlying problems will still be there: the market will still be glutted with commodities that can't be sold and the financial establishments, the companies, and the states themselves will still be staggering under the weight of debt.
The billions of dollars thrown into the financial markets by the various central banks of the planet won't change anything. Worse, these massive injections of liquidity will mean a new spiral of public and banking debts. The bourgeoisie is at an impasse and it only has bad solutions to offer. This is why the American bourgeoisie is hesitating about launching the ‘Bush plan': it knows that while it might avoid panic in the immediate, it will only pave the way for new and even more violent convulsions tomorrow. For George Soros, one of the world's most celebrated financiers, "there is a real possibility that the financial system will break down".
The living conditions of the working class and the majority of the world's population are going to decline brutally. A wave of lay-offs will hit all corners of the planet at the same time. Thousands of factories and offices will close. Between now and the end of 2008, in the finance sector alone, 260,000 jobs are going to go in the USA and Britain (according to the French paper les Échos of 26 September). And a job in finance on average generates four directly linked jobs! The collapse of the financial organisations will thus mean unemployment for hundreds of thousands of working class families. House repossessions are going to rise sharply: 2.2 million Americans have already been evicted from their homes since the summer of 2007 and a million more are expected to follow suite between now and Christmas. This phenomenon is now hitting Europe, in particular Spain and Britain.
In Britain, the number of house repossessions rose by 48% in the first quarter of 2008. In the past year or so, inflation has also made a big comeback. The prices of raw materials and foodstuffs have exploded, resulting in famines and hunger riots in many countries. The hundreds of billions of dollars the Fed and the Central European Bank have injected into the economy will make this situation worse. This adds up to the impoverishment of the whole working class: housing yourself, feeding yourself and travel will become increasingly difficult for millions of workers.
The bourgeoisie will not shrink from presenting the bill for the crisis to the working class, through wage reductions, cuts in benefits (unemployment, health, etc), postponing retirement age, tax increases and increases in the number of taxes. George Bush has already announced this: his 700 billion dollar bail-out plan will be financed by "contributions". Working class families will each have to give several thousand dollars to propping up the banks at a time when many of them can't even afford a roof over their heads!
The crisis today may not have the same sudden aspect as the crash of 1929, but it will subject the exploited of the world to the same torment. The real difference between now and 1929 is not to be found at the level of the capitalist economy but at the level of the consciousness of the working class and its willingness to fight back. At that time, having just been through the defeat of the Russian revolution of 1917, the crushing of the German revolution between 1918 and 1923, and the rise of the Stalinist and fascist counter-revolution, the world proletariat was beaten, resigned to its fate. The ravages of the crisis did provoke class movements such as the struggles of the unemployed and the auto-workers in the USA or the massive strikes in France in 1936, but these movements were unable to prevent capitalism dragging humanity into the Second World War. Today it's totally different. Since 1968 the working class has thrown off the dead weight of the counter-revolution and although the campaigns about the ‘death of communism' after 1989 were a real blow, since 2003 the working class has been developing its struggles and its consciousness. The economic crisis today can be a fertile soil for the further growth of workers' solidarity and class consciousness.
Francoise 27/9/8
The current financial crisis means a fall in living standards for the working class. This is already visible and obvious, something the ruling class is no longer trying to hide. From Gordon Brown, whose ‘first concern' is for people "struggling to make ends meet", promising to do "whatever it takes", to David Cameron putting aside party political differences in a crisis, or the meeting between Alistair Darling and George Osborne, all are speaking the language of truth, telling us that we will suffer in this global crisis. Credit is close to unobtainable; we can only trust the banks with our money if they are backed by the state, but we will end up paying for every bank rescue through taxes; prices of everyday necessities are rising far higher than official inflation; unemployment is up and growth at a standstill.
This was how The Economist (27/9/08) depicted Henry Paulson's plan for a $700bn bail-out of the US banks and his brutally honest admission that it would cost the taxpayer. The Northern Rock nationalisation alone represents a greater proportion of British GDP than the Paulson bail-out plan does of the US GDP (‘Finance crisis: in graphics', BBC news online). The Sunday Times has estimated that it will cost 5p in the pound in extra taxation (21/9/08).
However, while the banks need more and more money put in to shore them up, borrowing from them is harder and harder. Mortgage lending is down more than 90% on a year ago as the housing market seizes up and average house prices have fallen by 12.% on a year ago according to a Nationwide Building Society report, while house prices at auction fell 25%. Homeowners are no longer taking equity out of their houses. Repossessions rose 17% to 38,000 in the second quarter of the year, and this is expected to worsen - more working people falling into arrears will be evicted, despite the government's plan to encourage housing associations to buy up these homes and rent them back.
Credit is also being squeezed for business, fuelling recessionary tendencies. British factory output is falling at the fastest rate in 17 years, having already shed 1 million jobs in the last 10 years. Fords in Southampton, for example, has announced a 4-day week. The building industry is in full recession with new orders down 15% in the 3 months to August and new housing orders down 33% with the Construction Products Association predicting a 3 year slump. The CBI has optimistically estimated only 10,000 jobs in finance will go in the next 3 months. Even the service sector is at a standstill. Overall the economy fell 0.2% between June and August.
Unemployment is up 81,000 to 1.72 million in May to July, with the claimant count up to 904,900 in August, up 56,000 in the last year. Along with workers in construction, industry and banks, council workers can also expect job losses, with the Local Government Association predicting a £1bn shortfall caused by inflation. And cuts in services will inevitably accompany the cuts in jobs.
No-one in Britain is unaware of inflation, officially 4.7%, but in reality, for any worker, anyone on a modest income, it is far higher as all the basic necessities have increased in price - in the year to June food up 10.6% with many basic foods rising even more steeply, petrol up 24%. House prices may be falling, but mortgages are more expensive and so is rent. Even a pay rise equal to the nominal inflation rate would represent a significant cut in living standards - but in reality pay is being pegged well below that, usually between 2 and 3% in the public sector after Gordon Brown called for rises to be kept to 2% this year.
These are only the most immediate effects of the credit crunch and bank failures. We know that over the last few years many thousands of workers have lost some or all of their pensions, and that is bound to continue and worsen with the financial crisis. Things are tough for the working class at all levels, and the perspective is that they will get worse. Various media commentators are at pains to tell us that this is not as bad as the depression in the 1930s, but what is the reality of the situation? It is true that all the money pumped into financial institutions to keep them afloat is aimed at ensuring that there is enough liquidity in capitalism to prevent a sudden and severe slump, and to that extent they have learned the lessons of 1929. Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, has apologised for it, "We did it. We're very sorry... we won't do it again" (The Times 1/10/08). So it was all a big mistake by the economists, and if only we put our trust in the state bail-outs going on all over the world, and accept a bit of austerity, tighten our belts, put up with a common or garden recession, there will be no slump, no Depression.
Experience tells us otherwise. The older generation can remember the Labour government in the 1960s telling us that if only we accept unemployment of 1-2% we can avoid unemployment of one or two million. Well we got unemployment of a million in the following decade with the next Labour government, and it has never gone below that. We can remember the last time that the bourgeoisie talked the language of ‘truth', warning us that there was ‘no alternative', in the Thatcher years, when unemployment rose to over 3 million officially, only coming down with a policy of forcing people to claim incapacity benefit instead of the dole, as well as with a whole pile of statistical manipulations. In any case the financial bail-outs will be paid for in inflationary pressures and taxes - only wages will be held in check as the working class is asked to pay for the crisis, just like the ‘social contract' in the 1970s, just like Gordon Brown's demand last January to keep public sector pay rises to 2%.
The Times article on Mr Bernanke's speech helpfully reminds us that "The stock market decline was more a reaction to, rather than a cause of, the deteriorating economic conditions". Exactly. So how will skilful management of today's stock market decline and bank failures reverse the deteriorating economic conditions? They may continue to deteriorate more slowly than immediately after 1929, but they have surely continued to deteriorate over the last 40 years for all the Asian tiger, dot.com and housing bubbles on the way, and with them the conditions of the working class have declined. The only way to stop them doing it again is to develop the struggle of the working class in response (see back page) with the perspective of overthrowing capitalism.
Alex 4/10/08
But the slide into barbarism went furthest in Georgia.
Once again, the Caucasus was aflame. At the moment that Bush and Putin were taking part in the opening of the Olympics, so-called symbol of peace and reconciliation between nations, the Georgian president Saakashvili, the protégé of the White House, and the Russian bourgeoisie, were engaged in a grim massacre.
This war between Russia and Georgia resulted in a veritable ethnic cleansing on each side, with several thousand deaths, mainly among the civilian population.
As ever, it was the local populations (whether Russian, Ossetian, Abkhazian or Georgian) who were taken hostage by all the national factions of the ruling class.
On both sides, the same scenes of killing and horror. Throughout Georgia, the number of refugees, stripped of everything they owned, went up to 115,000 in one week.
And, as in all wars, each camp accused the other of being responsible for the outbreak of hostilities.
But the responsibility for this new war and these new massacres does not only lie with the most direct protagonists. The other states who are now shedding hypocritical tears about the fate of Georgia have their hands soaked with blood from the worst kinds of atrocities, whether we're talking about the US in Iraq, France in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, or Germany, which, by backing the secession of Slovenia and Croatia, helped unleash the terrible war in ex-Yugoslavia in 1992.
And if today the US is sending warships to the Caucasus region, in the name of ‘humanitarian aid', it's certainly not out of any concern for human life, but simply to defend its interests as an imperialist vulture.
The most striking thing about the conflict in the Caucasus is the increasing military tensions between the great powers. The two former bloc leaders, Russia and the US, once again find themselves in a dangerous head-to-head: the US Navy destroyers that have come with ‘food aid' for Georgia are only a short distance away from the Russian naval base of Gudauta in Abkhazia and the port of Poti which is occupied by Russian tanks.
This is all very nerve-wracking and we can legitimately pose a number of questions. What is the aim of this war? Will it unleash a third world war?
Since the collapse of the eastern bloc, the Caucasus region has been an important geostrategic prize between the great powers. The present conflict has been building up for some time. The Georgian president, an unconditional Washington partisan, inherited a state which from its inception in 1991 had been supported by the US as a bridgehead for Bush Senior's ‘New World Order'.
If Putin, by laying a trap for Saakashvili, into which he duly fell, used the occasion to re-establish his authority in the Caucasus, this was in response to the encirclement of Russian by NATO forces which had already been in operation since 1991.
Since the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989, Russia has been more and more isolated, especially since a number of former eastern bloc countries (like Poland) joined NATO.
But the encirclement became intolerable for Moscow when Ukraine and Georgia also asked to join NATO.
Above all, Russia could not accept the plan to set up an anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. Moscow knew perfectly well that behind this NATO programme, supposedly directed against Iran, Russia itself was the real target.
The Russian offensive against Georgia is in fact Moscow's first attempt at breaking the encirclement.
Russia has taken advantage of the fact that the US (whose military forces are bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan) had its hands tied in order to launch a military counter-offensive in the Caucasus, not so long after re-establishing its authority, at considerable cost, in the murderous wars in Chechnya.
However, despite the worsening of military tensions between Russia and the USA, the perspective of a third world war is not on the agenda.
There are today no constituted imperialist blocs, no stable military alliances, as was the case with the two world wars of the 20th century or the Cold War.
By the same token, the face-off between the US and Russia does not mean that we are entering a new Cold War. There's no going back and history is not repeating itself.
In contrast to the dynamic of imperialist tensions between the great powers during the Cold War, this new head-to-head between Russia and the US is marked by the tendency towards ‘every man for himself', towards the dislocation of alliances, characteristic of the phase of the decomposition of the capitalist system.
Thus the ‘ceasefire' in Georgia can only legitimate the victory of the masters of the Kremlin and Russia's superiority on the military level, involving a humiliating capitulation by Georgia to the conditions dictated by Moscow.
And Georgia's ‘patron', the US, has also suffered a major reverse here. While Georgia has already paid a heavy price for its allegiance to the US (a contingent of 2000 troops sent to Iraq and Afghanistan), in return Uncle Sam has been able to offer no more than moral support to its ally, issuing vain and purely verbal condemnations of Russia without being to raise a finger of practical help.
But the most significant aspect of this weakening of US leadership resides in the fact that the White House had to swallow the ‘European' plan for a ceasefire - worse still, this was a plan dictated by Moscow.
While the USA's impotence was evident, Europe's role shows the level that ‘every man for himself' has reached. Faced with the paralysis of the US, European diplomacy swung into action, led by French president Sarkozy who once again represented no one but himself in all his comings and goings, following a policy that was entirely short-term and devoid of any coherence.
Europe once again looked like a basket of crabs with everyone in it pursuing diametrically opposed interests. There was not an ounce of unity in its ranks: on the one side you had Poland and the Baltic states, fervent defenders of Georgia (because they suffered over half a century of Russian domination and have much to fear in a revival of the latter's imperialist ambitions) and on the other side you had Germany, which was one of the most fervent opponents of Georgia and Ukraine joining NATO, above all because it wants to block the development of American influence in this region.
But the most fundamental reason that the great powers can't unleash a third world war lies in the balance of forces between the two main social classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Unlike the periods which preceded the two world wars, the working class of the most decisive capitalist countries, notably in Europe and America, is not ready to serve as cannon fodder and sacrifice itself on the altar of capital.
With the return of the permanent crisis of capitalism at the end of the 1960s and the historic resurgence of the proletariat, a new course towards class confrontations was opened up: in the most important capitalist countries the ruling class can no longer mobilise millions of workers behind the defence of the national flag.
However, although the conditions for a third world war have not come together, we should not at all underestimate the gravity of the present historical situation.
The war in Georgia has increased the risk of destabilisation, of things running out of control, not only on the regional level, but also on the world level, where it will have inevitable implications for the balance of imperialist forces in the future. The ‘peace plan' is just a mirage. It contains all the ingredients of a new and dangerous military escalation, threatening to create a series of explosive points from the Caucasus to the Middle East.
With the oil and gas of the Caspian Sea or the central Asian countries, some of which are Turkish-speaking, the interests of Iran and Turkey are also involved in this region, but the whole world is also part of the conflict. Thus, one of the objectives of the USA and the western European countries in supporting a Georgia independent from Moscow is to deprive Russia of the monopoly of Caspian Sea oil supplies towards the west via the BTC pipeline (from the name Baku in Azerbaijan, Tbilissi in Georgia and Ceyhan in Turkey). These are thus the major strategic stakes in this region. And the big imperialist brigands can all the more easily use people as cannon fodder in the Caucasus given that the region is a mosaic of different ethnicities. This makes it easy to fan the nationalist flames of war.
At the same time, Russia's past as a dominant power still exerts a very heavy weight and contains the threat of even more serious imperialist tensions. This is what lies behind the disquiet of the Baltic states, and above all of Ukraine which is a military power of quite another stature compared to Georgia and has its hands on a nuclear arsenal.
Thus, although the perspective is not of a third world war, the dynamic of ‘everyman for himself' is just as much the expression of the murderous folly of capitalism: this moribund system could, in its decomposition, lead to the destruction of humanity by plunging it into bloody chaos.
In the face of all this chaos and military barbarism, the historical alternative is more than ever ‘socialism or barbarism', world communist revolution or the destruction of humanity. Peace is impossible in capitalism; capitalism carries war within itself. And the only future for humanity lies in the proletarian struggle for the overthrow of capitalism.
But this perspective can only become concrete if the workers refuse to serve as cannon-fodder for the interests of their exploiters, and firmly reject nationalism.
Everywhere the working class must put into practice the old slogan of the workers' movement: ‘The workers have no country. Workers of all countries unite!'
In the face of the massacre of populations and the unleashing of military barbarism, it's obvious that the proletariat cannot remain indifferent. It has to show its solidarity with its class brothers in the countries at war, first of all by refusing to support one camp against the other, and secondly by developing its own struggles against its own exploiters in all countries. This is the only way it can really fight against capitalism and prepare the ground for its overthrow and for the construction of a new society without national frontiers and wars.
RI 27/9/8
After the murderous confrontations in Georgia in August, bourgeois propaganda, notably in Europe, has been reassuring us that our governments are doing all they can to find a peaceful solution in the Caucasus. To prove their good intentions, we have the current humanitarian operations, with American and NATO warships transporting food and medicine to the Georgian population. In response to the questions asked about why this humanitarian aid is being taken by warships instead of merchant ships, our good democrats invoke the malevolent presence of the Russian navy which is occupying the Georgian coast. No doubt the Russians are ready to defend the territory they have conquered, but we can have reason to doubt the ‘humanist' sincerity of the US and NATO forces who have sent a veritable armada to the Black Sea.
This force is made up of no less than seven NATO warships (three American, one Spanish, one German, one Polish and one flying the NATO flag) which have been deployed to all the key points of the Black Sea. The American hydrographic warship USNS Pathfinder is capable of detecting submarines at a distance of over 100km; the missile carrier McFaul is equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles which can carry both conventional and nuclear warheads (we saw their terrifying firepower during the first Gulf War in 1991); and the flagship Mount Whitney of the American 6th Fleet is a craft equipped with the most sophisticated communication and surveillance systems in the world. It's the orchestral conductor of this so-called peaceful and humanitarian operation.
Such a deployment of military forces obviously has nothing altruistic or philanthropic about it. Its real objective is to "evaluate the state of the Georgian armed forces" and, as the US Senate's mission in Georgia underlined, "The US will provide assistance to the Georgian armed forces by providing them with the most modern anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons, and by continuing to train their troops" .
Clearly, ‘humanitarian aid' is a smokescreen for the transportation of deadly weapons and the strengthening of the Georgian army. All this prefigures America's response to the reverse it has just suffered through the invasion of its Georgian ally by the Russian army last August and the latter's recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. This so-called humanitarian operation contains all the ingredients for a new and dangerous escalation of war over ex-Soviet Central Asia, a zone of immense importance, whether because of the energy reserves of the Caspian Sea or its geo-strategic position in relation to Russia, China and India.
The populations who are the victims of these military rivalries have nothing to gain from this militarised humanitarian aid. Like previous ‘peacekeeping interventions' (Somalia 1992, Bosnia 1993, Rwanda 1994 and a whole list of others - Kosovo, Darfur, Congo, Palestine....) humanitarian aid is a cynical alibi for war, the indispensable complement to all the speechifying about peace served up by imperialist states, large or small, in order to defend their interests.
Daniel 26/9/8
On 21 September the Marriott hotel in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, was all but gutted by a suicide bomb attack. More than 50 people were killed including US state department officials. Within 48 hours the BBC was reporting that US officials had ‘..vowed to redouble their efforts in fighting extremism..' whilst at the same time noting that this vow had come during heightened tensions between the two, formerly staunch, allies on the so-called war on terror. Just a few days later there was news of two other attacks on the same day "Police said they averted a major attack today on Pakistan's largest city, Karachi, by raiding the hideout of a group suspected of planning an attack on a high-profile target in the area. Three men blew themselves up. The explosions killed a hostage they had been holding for several months, police said. The man is thought to have been a supplier of fuel and goods to US and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Explosives, suicide jackets, guns and grenades were found, police said. ‘Police definitely averted a big attack from happening in this city,' said Babar Khattak, the head of Sindh police. In a separate incident, a bomb blast derailed a train in Punjab province, killing three people and wounding 15 others." (Guardian 26/9/8)
Pakistan was first described as ‘the most dangerous place in the world' by Bill Clinton, a designation that has stuck - quite something when you look at the map and see that its neighbours include Afghanistan and Iran! Given that the Islamabad government has no control over huge border areas, and the increasing dangerousness of everyday life, we can see the real descent into barbarism. That it has been degenerating into daily violence - bomb attacks, shootings and their subsequent reprisals - should come as no surprise. The ‘war on terror' has, in reality, meant ‘more war and more terror'. Far from combating terrorism the US-led war has greatly exacerbated the situation in this part of the world.
This is now spilling over to Pakistan with an increasing number of cross-border assaults by the US military, much to the anger of the Pakistani bourgeoisie. Just days after jointly vowing to fight terrorism, Pakistani and US troops came into conflict along the Afghan border "Pakistan has warned US troops not to intrude on its territory after US and Pakistani ground forces exchanged fire along the border with Afghanistan. The incident began after Pakistani troops fired on US helicopters they believed had encroached their airspace.... ‘Just as we will not let Pakistan's territory to be used by terrorists for attacks against our people and our neighbours, we cannot allow our territory and our sovereignty to be violated by our friends,' (Pakistani Prime Minister) Zardari said."
Partly in response to this escalating situation Zardari has appointed a new head of the ISI (Pakistani secret service) "The appointment of Lieutenant General Ahmed Shujaa Pasha as head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency was part of a leadership shake-up. In his position as director general of military operations, Pasha oversaw offensives in the Taliban and al-Qaida north-western stronghold. Some observers say ISI elements may still be aiding the Taliban to retain them as assets against India" (Guardian 1/10/9).
The problem remains, both for the US and Pakistani bourgeoisie, with different factions having different interests. Within the ISI, as hinted above, there are strong pro-Taliban factions who will do their best to subvert US military operations. Within the US there are factions which distrust Pakistan and want the freedom to chase the Taliban across the Afghan border. For example, Democratic nominee Barack Obama "...has said he would use military force if necessary against al-Qaida in Pakistan even without Pakistan's consent" (BBC news online). Given the tensions between nuclear armed Pakistan and India, over ongoing murderous bombing campaigns and the unresolved disaster of Kashmiri ‘independence', capitalism's perspective for the region is for greater unrest and the spread of chaos.
Graham 03/10/08
This review of a new book that contains damning evidence against the idea of World War Two as a ‘Good War' is by a close sympathiser of the ICC.
The title of the book Human Smoke - The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilisation refers to a Nazi officer's description of the debris of humanity falling from the sky from where it was sent through the chimneys of the ovens in the concentration camps. The book, written by Nicholson Baker and published by Simon and Schuster, has an interesting narrative that mostly includes sections of newspaper and magazine articles, radio pieces, memoirs, diaries, state directives and documents. It begins in the 1920s, with Winston Churchill's new enemy the "sinister confederacy" of international Jewry and, a few years later, his welcoming of Signor Mussolini to anti-Bolshevism, where "Italian fascism had demonstrated that there was a way to combat subversive forces...". It covers the period up to the end of 1941 with Churchill in Ottawa telling its parliament that the "Hun" would be "cast into the pit of death and shame... and only when the earth has been cleansed and purged of their crimes and of their villainies will we turn from the task which they have forced upon us".
Nicholson is apparently a pacifist and he uses many quotes from Gandhi and the Quakers. The whole period outlined shows not only the complete inability of pacifism to stop imperialist war, but how, in the end, it eventually supports one side against another. Even so, for the hard evidence involved against the victor's version of the Second World War, the book is an eye-opener on the complicity of democracy in genocide and some of the greatest mass murders in history. First though it's necessary to outline a marxist framework for the whole period.
In June1931, two years before the council communist Marinus van der Lubbe was arrested in front of the burning Reichstag, Hitler said in an interview, that the building looked like a synagogue and the sooner it was burnt down "the sooner the German people will be free from foreign influences". The democratic accession to power of Hitler in 1933 marked a decisive victory for the forces of counter-revolution; the rise of fascism to power was the product of the proletariat's defeat and not its cause. Fascism and democracy are two sides of the same coin. The barbarity of the Nazi regime and its Holocaust wasn't a monstrous accident, the product of "evil" or of a few deranged minds, but an outcome of decadent capitalism and this barbarity was equalled by democracy in all its horror, cynicism, lies and crimes against humanity. The crushing of the German revolution around 1918-23 was the first major act of the capitalist counter-revolution. Hitler's original power base, the SA had its roots in the counter-revolutionary Freikorps which, a decade earlier, assassinated thousands of communist militants in Germany in the name of Social Democracy.
What German capital expressed through its embrace of fascism wasn't an aberration based on this or that so-called national characteristic, but the fundamental need of nationalism, all nationalisms, to carve out a bigger slice of the world for themselves at the expense of their rivals: "War becomes the only means for each national capital to try to extricate itself from its difficulties, at the expense of rival imperialist states" (Gauche Communiste de France 14.7.45, quoted in International Review no. 78, ‘50 Years of Imperialist Lies'). Given the particularities of German capital at that time, the defeat of German imperialist power in WWI and the defeat of the revolutionary wave in that country, fascism was a particular form of state capitalism that was born of German imperialism and western democracy. It took a brutal form but in essence its state capitalism was part of a worldwide phenomenon affecting all the major capitalist countries. Like the USA, Britain and France, Germany embarked on programmes of public works and welfare but with its proletariat crushed, the centralised German state apparatus oriented the economy directly towards war. After the decisive defeat of the working class in Germany, Jews and other minorities became the scapegoats of the Nazi regime and the latter's characterisation of them, "cosmopolitan blood-suckers", was essentially shared by the democratic regimes of Britain, France, Russia and America, particularly in relation to the connection they all made between Jewry, internationalism and marxism.
The ‘democracies' didn't have very much to say about the Nazi concentration camps at the time that they were being built and put to use; they certainly did nothing to put them out of action or assist their condemned and miserable inmates during the worst of times; but directly after WWII the Allies, for whom the proletariat was still a major concern, developed a whole propaganda campaign regarding the concentration camps. This massive campaign, which persists today from infant school to the grave, allowed the Allies to hide their own murderous crimes, complicities and genocides and to vaunt the moral superiority of victorious democracy.
Churchill and Roosevelt were both anti-Jewish, as were the regimes that they represented; and both slammed their doors to Jewish immigration from Germany throughout. Apart from vaguely looking at real estate for Jewish settlements in inhospitable parts of Latin American and Africa (where they would share the terrain with Tsetse Flies and various forms of plague), both governments did nothing to increase quotas of Jewish refugees. The tales of the concentration camps of Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachenhausen, though not yet fully operational, were known to both governments by 1938, as was the murder of workers and the treatment of Jews and other minorities prior to that. In Britain in 1940, thousands of Jewish refugees between 16 and 60 were rounded up by soldiers with fixed bayonets and taken to detention camps. The age was later increased to 70 where they were met with "deplorable and disgraceful" conditions, according to Lord Lytton (22.8.40). In May of that year, a thousand CID officers rounded up "enemy aliens", ie, several thousand women workers of German and Austrian origins and their children, and sent them to the Isle of Man. Eleven thousand, mostly Jews, were held in detention facilities. At the Mooragh camp on the island some Jews published a newspaper that said that the war of liberation of Western civilisation had begun "by imprisoning the most embittered enemies of its own enemies". The British authorities shut the paper down.
In the lead-up to war, in building up Adolf Hitler as their policeman of Europe, the west provided his gangsters not just with the small arms needed to begin its reign of terror, but heavier, more deadly equipment. In 1934, the French arms supplier Schneider supplied tanks to Germany. The British company Vickers provided bombers and other arms, as did Boeing. US manufacturers were selling Germany crankshafts, cylinder heads and control systems for anti-aircraft guns. The Sperry Corporation shared patents with Germany on bombsights and gyroscopic stabilisers and BMW brought Pratt and Whitney engines. The USA, like Britain, also sold ‘non-military' guns and ammunition to Germany.
In the dance of death leading up to the outbreak of war, and to some extent during its first year or so, all the combatants tried to paint themselves as victims of the other. Hitler said early on: "We will not make the mistake of 1914. We now have to lay the blame on our enemy".
"No matter how much it has successfully prepared the population for war on the ideological level, the bourgeoisie in decadence cloaks its imperialist wars in the myth of victimisation and self-defence against aggression and tyranny. The reality of modern warfare, with its massive destruction and death, with all the facets of barbarism that it unleashes on humanity, is so dire, so horrific, that even an ideologically defeated proletariat does not march off to slaughter lightly. The bourgeoisie relies heavily on manipulating reality to create the illusion that it is a victim of aggression, with no choice but to fight back in self-defence" (IR. 108, ‘The Machiavellianism of the Bourgeoisie'). The defence of the national capital, common to the imperialist thrusts of both fascism and democracy, has to cloak itself in the mantle of victim; and for democracy that meant acting the "peace lovers" against tyranny and expansionism. We can see the same game of imperialism being played out today by the west over the events in Georgia. The book amply confirms the provocations of the democracies, Britain and America in particular, in the words and policies of their own regimes, towards both Germany and Japan, in order to appear the wronged party and brainwash their own populations to support and fight for their own imperialist aims.
From the forgery of the Zinoviev letter days before the British election of 1924 (very likely written by himself), to his opinion of being "... strongly in favour of using poisoned gas on uncivilised tribes", step forward the man of the British bourgeoisie, Winston Churchill. Added to what we already know of this expression of barbarism, Baker's book is damning. In order to pursue what was being called ‘the people's war' the whole policy of Churchill on behalf of his putrid class was to murder as many workers and civilians as possible. With its naval superiority, British imperialism enforced a food blockade on mainland Europe. It affected all the German occupied parts, including Belgium (‘plucky little Belgium' of World War I), Holland, Poland, Greece, Norway and others. Ex-US President Herbert Hoover proposed lifting the blockade, but the starvation of men, women and children was the policy of Churchill and his Ministry of Economic Affairs. Hoover wrote: "When Churchill succeeded Chamberlain... he soon stopped all permits of food to Poland" with the result of bodies lying on the streets of Warsaw and the death rate of children ten times higher than the birth rate. In a speech to the House of Commons, August 1940, on why he was refusing requests to lift the blockade, Churchill said: "Fats make bombs and potatoes make synthetic fuel". He added: "The plastics used now so largely in the construction of aircraft are made of milk"! Refusing to let the Red Cross food ships deliver even the smallest amount of milk to France led the French to call Churchill "the famisher". The blockade went on. In the German-occupied territories lived forty million children. How many hundreds and thousands, possibly millions of these vulnerable children died of disease, malnutrition or starvation? The British bourgeoisie certainly wasn't keeping count and the general information that Baker gives comes from the Quakers. Add to this the old, the sick, pregnant women and it must have been millions. Hoover called this a "holocaust" years before the word was give a capital letter and applied exclusively to the abomination of the Nazi death camps.
The starvation of civilians wasn't the only policy of the British bourgeoisie; there was also the deliberate bombing of civilians overseen by the arch-terrorist Churchill. There were two aims to the saturation bombing of civilians by the Royal Air Force: one was to provoke a response to the increasingly devastating carnage, ie, to get Luftwaffe to bomb British working class areas in retaliation thus pulling the population behind the bourgeoisie - a ploy that largely succeeded. And secondly, the aim was to kill, maim and terrorise as many German civilians as possible - the primary aim wasn't industry or the war machine. Very early on in the war, the RAF were dropping bombs on working class areas and then coming back to strafe with machine guns the firemen trying to put out the blazes. The British Air Ministry produced a new policy report on bombing, 24.4.41: "It is only possible to obtain satisfactory results by the ‘Blitz' attack on large working class and industrial areas of the towns". An appendix concluded, "delayed action bombs should make up 10% of the tonnage dropped". Previous head of the RAF, Lord ‘Boom' Trenchard, said the way forward was to drop more tonnage where most people live, so that fewer bombs would be wasted. Charles Portal, Head of the RAF, agreed. Head of Bomber Command, Richard Peirse gave these orders on 5.7.41: "(destroy) the morale of the civilian population as a whole, and of the industrial workers in particular". Churchill called for the "largest quantity of bombs per night" and the RAF started night bombing.
Baker's book looks at other interesting areas notably the disgust of many Germans of the treatment of the Jews. The were demonstrations in Bremen and Baker reports that the population were so disgusted in Berlin that "the Nazis found it necessary to distribute handbills saying that the Jews were to blame for everything". The handbills added that anyone being friendly to Jews committed treason. There are reports of Germans showing politeness and civility to elderly Jews wearing their yellow badges on public transport. The Gestapo was sufficiently concerned to inform all its branches that "persons of German blood continue to maintain friendly relations with Jews and appear with them in public in a blatant fashion". The answer was terror: make and publicise examples by sending both Germans and Jews involved to concentration camps.
Baker's well-researched book, covering the build-up and the first two years of WWII, amply confirms the marxist position that both fascism and anti-fascism are two sides of the same imperialist coin.
Baboon, 20/9/8
From the Right, a Republican senator from Kentucky was able to say of Bush's proposed $700bn rescue package "It's a financial socialism and it's un-American" and, from the Left, Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Guardian 17/9/8): "To think that the biggest neo-liberal nation in the world would start nationalising banks ... we're rubbing our eyes in disbelief."
There's no disbelief for marxists. Since the First World War revolutionaries have seen that the state has an essential role to play not just in times of war and open economic crisis, but as a permanent feature of decadent capitalism. And that socialism can only come through the revolutionary struggle of the working class, which has to destroy the capitalist state.
Yet left-wingers feed the myth that the state can be an organ of protection and planning. George Monbiot (Guardian ibid) cast his mind back to the 1930s: "A Keynesian solution along the lines of Roosevelt's New Deal could deliver many of the things that the left is calling for - more public spending, more training and education." In reality, the New Deal in the US was, like fascism in Germany and Italy, and Stalinism in the USSR, just a particular expression of a universal tendency for state intervention in the economy and of the preparations for war.
Trotskyists give their ‘critical' support to this process. The SWP (to take a typical example) said that although "The solutions Keynesian economists propose now are only partial. Many are ideas socialists would support, such as nationalising industries" (Socialist Worker 13/8/8). At the time of the Bear Stearns bailout the SWP thought that "To reshape society in a socialist direction it is necessary to take control of ... corporations and coordinate their investment decisions (5/4/8)" Certainly they say that "Recession is built into capitalism and state intervention cannot eliminate it" (13/9/8) and that "All too often the supporters of socialism, as well as its enemies, identify socialism with state ownership" (20/9/8). But they still go on to say "Socialists support nationalisation if it's used to protect jobs. We oppose privatisation of public services because it means less public accountability" (ibid). Here you see the idea of ‘protection', as if the capitalist state was neutral and could be used for the benefit of workers as much as the bourgeoisie. The ‘accountability' comes through something they call ‘workers' control'.
In Socialist Worker (ibid) they say that "workers' control has reappeared again and again", giving examples of Spain 1936, France 1968, Poland 1980, Hungary 1956, Portugal 1974, and recently in Argentina. There is the qualification that "under capitalism workers' control can only go so far. There cannot be socialism in a single country and certainly no socialism in a single workplace. Even if workers take over their factory, they will eventually end up competing on the market and thus organising their own exploitation." In fact, as the examples cited all show, ‘workers' control' can't even go "so far". As soon as workers in struggle occupy their place of work they have the choice of whether to ‘organise their own exploitation' or use it as a moment in the development of the struggle, as a place for discussion, as a base toward the extension of the fight to other workers.
Nationalisation, whether ‘under workers' control' or not, is not a goal or a means of workers' struggles - it is one expression of state capitalism. Self-managed exploitation is a trap, no alternative to spreading the fight. Car 24/9/8
Contribution from a sympathiser which examines the background to the convulsions shaking the world economy and the way they may develop in the period ahead.
The recent economic crisis began with the explosion of the ‘sub-prime' mortgage market in the US and has been jolting the world economy with aftershocks ever since. The bourgeoisie has mobilised the full resources of the state, intervening on a global scale, in an effort to contain the crisis of the financial system which, if left to itself, would most likely have imploded.
Unfortunately, although the strategy has managed to prevent a complete rout of the financial apparatus, the crisis has not been resolved. In terms of surface phenomena, the shockwaves have now rippled through every sector of the world economy. It now seems certain, even in a best case scenario, that the world economy will experience a sharp slowdown with individual countries being more or worse hit depending on their specific economic weaknesses. And, for Marxists, it goes without saying that the strategies of the bourgeoisie have done nothing to counter the underlying systemic contradictions of a decadent capitalist economy.
Nonetheless, as with all previous crises, history cannot stand still. The crises of the 70s gave birth to ‘Thatcherism' and ‘Reaganomics'. The crises of the 80s led to the downfall of the Soviet Union and the development of ‘globalisation'. We are now standing on the cusp of a new period in the unfolding drama of decadent capitalism. It is impossible to see the exact form which capitalism will evolve in the coming period but it seems possible to trace two major tendencies that will undoubtedly impact on that evolution.
The process of US decline has been an incipient worry for that bourgeoisie ever since the 70s, when the economic crisis reasserted itself exacerbated by the US's entanglement in Vietnam. Increasing commercial competition from Japan and the impact of the crisis at home, led to talk of ‘imperial overstretch' - the worry that the US would be unable to meet its strategic military commitments with the decline in its economic performance.
The policy of containing the Soviet Union, most closely associated with the Reagan administration, and the increased military spending of this period appeared to demonstrate that these worries were for nothing. In fact, the Western bloc suffered enormous drains on its resources which were overcome only by new mechanisms of deficit spending which allowed the great powers to square the circle to some extent, even if it only put off the day of reckoning.
The US was able, through mechanisms such as the IMF and the World Bank, to co-ordinate the response to the crisis to some extent. Even after the break-up of the US military bloc, the US was able to maintain its economic dominance through these mechanisms and also through its position as the ‘world locomotive'.
Today, the US's capacity to continue in this role is becoming visibly weaker. The ‘Washington Consensus' - a global strategy based on neo-liberalism and massive debt - is now lying in tatters. Not only has the US been severely wounded by the current crisis, its financial apparatus has been forced to go to its former subordinates in the Middle and Far East for hand-outs in order to maintain the stability of its banking system. Although this has been successful up to a point, it represents a long-term weakening of the US's global economic position and a transfer of power to these smaller financial players. The continuing current account deficit is also a sign of this long-term weakening, because it depends on other players in the world economy to essentially fund American consumption. This was possible while the US provided the world reserve currency, but the US's current fiscal policy, which has flooded the world with cheap dollars, is now causing the economies of China and India to dangerously overheat. US decline will more and more put the dollar into question.
The use of the dollar as the world's reserve currency has been a lynchpin of global economic strategy since the Second World War. The collapse of Bretton Woods in the 70s was simply the first step in the unravelling of this policy even though it did, initially, allow the US and the world economy to prevent an immediate collapse. Moreover, the bourgeoisie worldwide made conscious efforts to resist any effort to return to the ‘beggar-thy-neighbour' policies of the 30s which not only failed to resolve the crisis but also provided fertile ground for the drive to war.
Today, as American authority continues to unravel, this consensus is beginning to break down. The first signs of a new phase of American weakness were signposted several years ago when the ‘developing nations' became much more assertive in the world trade talks. The new crisis has put protectionism firmly back on the agenda both in the US and internationally. The Doha Round of trade talks has still failed to reach agreement, despite being in progress since 2001! In addition, the apparent stability of the Euro as compared to the dollar will undoubtedly shift the balance of financial power back toward Europe.
However, even the Euro area will have problems due to the pressures created by the differing economic performance of the member states. Supporters point out that the US has the same problem with the dollar and the varying regions of the United States, but the various US states have a history of unity far longer than Europe and don't have developed regional bourgeoisies in the way that the European Union does. There are thus very powerful centrifugal forces threatening the integrity of the Euro that can only be exacerbated by the current crisis, particularly if it proves to be long-term.
The exact pace that these tendencies will work out their logic in the world economy is impossible to foresee. For the moment, despite enormous pressures, the bourgeoisie is aware of the stakes in the current situation and its more lucid segments will do everything in their power to prevent such a disintegration taking place. Nonetheless, it seems possible that we could have reached a point that will have as crucial repercussions in the world economy as the collapse of the Eastern bloc had nearly 20 years ago. They also demonstrate clearly the growing impasse of the entire capitalist system. So far, the world economy has not suffered the spectacular effects of decomposition that have been visible in the social and political spheres. If the economic sphere begins to disintegrate, then all the other self-destructive tendencies of decomposing capitalism will be unleashed on a new and unprecedented scale.
The only solution to this growing threat to human civilisation is the conscious dismantling of capitalist society and its replacement with one based on truly human values. The bourgeoisie cannot entertain this as an option while the other classes in society have no alternative vision. Only the working class, the revolutionary proletariat, can destroy this rotting system before it destroys humanity.
Silver (1/10/8)
Readers will have seen that with this issue of World Revolution both the cover price and subscription charges to our press have increased. Such an increase is dictated by the ever-rising costs of producing our press and distributing it all over the world. The decision to raise the price was not taken lightly; indeed this is the first increase in over a decade (see WR 197). But we know that buying a communist publication is itself a political act, and buying it regularly already expresses a certain commitment to the cause that it defends. We are therefore confident that our readers will not only understand the financial necessities involved, but actively support the development of our press. We urge comrades to continue, or begin, to subscribe to the revolutionary press and where able take extra copies to sell. Although the price of the subscription barely covers our costs it allows our organisation to husband its resources in order to intervene more effectively in the class struggle. Payment of the subscription is a direct expression of support for, and defence of, communist positions. Please help us with this work.
We end this appeal with a statement from the pages of Bilan, which has never been more appropriate:
"Once again, we are calling for the support of all our readers. Our press can only live if it gets the support of all those communists who understand the necessity for an intense effort of political clarification. Let every militant help us distribute Bilan and make the necessary financial effort of subscriptions and donations. Our fraction has always known perfectly well that the regular publication of the review would require substantial funds relative to its resources but we have based ourselves on the spirit of sacrifice of all those militants who feel the gravity of the present situation, and who are ready for the enormous effort of understanding that is demanded if we are to prepare for the struggles of tomorrow.
Let our readers help us then, by sending donations and by helping us distribute the press".
WR 4/10/8
We are publishing here a statement by one of our contacts in the Dominican Republic after the hurricanes which devastated neighbouring Haiti, leaving several thousand victims. It very rightly denounces the primary responsibility of capitalism in the sombre balance-sheet of catastrophes which have little that is ‘natural' about them.
At the end of August, beginning of September, Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, was hit by the hurricanes Gustav and Hannah, leaving over a thousand recorded dead and thousands more disappeared, hurt or homeless. This tragedy is, as usual, being used by the ruling class to call for reconciliation between the classes and ‘humanitarian aid'.
You can make all the fine speeches you want, but the only force guilty for all these deaths is capitalism, first and foremost as the material author because it is responsible for the environmental crisis (see ‘The ecological crisis: real menace or myth' in WR 317); and, in the concrete case of Haiti, because it has been the victim of the pillage carried out by the great capitalist powers. They have brought about the deforestation of this part of the ‘Island of Hispaniola'[1], drying out the rivers and transforming their former riverbeds into settlements for a deprived population of workers, unemployed and poor peasants, who built their huts and barracks there, all of which were swept away when the channels once again became rivers swollen by torrential rain.
Decadent capitalism in Haiti has taken such a clear form that other nations refer to it as a ‘failed state', a country where a whole mass of people have no choice but to take to the sea in flimsy boats and head towards the Dominican side of the island or the US to sell their labour power. And there these workers often become victims of nationalist xenophobia; if the bourgeoisie isn't satisfied with robbing their labour, it robs them of everything else by using its immigration laws to chuck them out of the country.
How is it possible that so much is invested in military coups, guerrilla wars, armed invasions like the one carried out by MINUSTAB[2], which included troops from a whole range of countries (Peru, Chile, Nicaragua, Brazil, some of these claiming to be ‘socialist') and that all this money is never used to avoid tragedies like the ones provoked by Gustav and Hannah? Only the collective action of the proletariat of all countries, and, in the present case and as a beginning, the proletariat of the whole island of Hispaniola, can face up to capitalism which for years has had nothing to offer but crises and wars, to which we can now add climatic catastrophes.
Vi.
Workers of all countries, unite!
Internationalist Discussion Nucleus, Dominican Republic
[1] Hispaniola is the old name for the entire island, today divided between Haiti, a former French colony, and the Dominican Republic, a former Spanish colony
[2] Name of the ‘stabilising' mission of UN troops in Haiti
This is a report on the recent congress of our section in France, looking back at the developments in the class struggle and the activity of revolutionaries since the events of May 1968.
This Congress took place at a very symbolic moment in the history of the world wide class struggle. It coincided with the 40th anniversary of the ‘events' (to use the media term) of May 1968 - actually the biggest strike in the history of the international workers' movement, a movement which marked the historic revival of the proletarian struggle on a world scale after four decades of counter-revolution. What's more, our section in France also celebrated the 40th anniversary of its foundation, because it was in the wake of the events, indeed even before the return to work had been completed, that the small group Revolution Internationale was set up: along with 5 other groups, RI was to be involved in the constitution of the ICC in 1975. The formation of our international organisation was by no means a chance event. It was the crystallisation of a whole process of reflection that was going on in the working class as it returned to the path of massive struggles[1].
What has become of the great hopes raised by May 68? How has capitalist society, the struggles of the working class, and the revolutionary movement evolved since then? The 18th Congress of RI had to respond to these questions and in doing so open up its reflections to the whole of the working class and the proletarian political milieu.
As we wrote in World Revolution no 316, in the article ‘May 68, the international significance of the general strike in France': "If the whole of the working class of this country launched itself into a general strike, it's because all its sectors had begun to be hit by the economic crisis which, in 1968, was only at its inception, a crisis that wasn't ‘French' but of the whole capitalist world". The attacks on wages, jobs or benefits that the workers in France were beginning to experience were expressions of what was going on in all the main capitalist countries. The world economic crisis had returned to centre stage after several decades of respite. The period described by the ruling class as the ‘economic miracle' or the ‘Thirty Glorious Years', which had begun soon after the end of the Second World War, was coming to an end. However, at that time, the bourgeoisie was still a long way from having used up all the mechanisms at its disposal for dealing with, or rather slowing down the aggravation of its mortal economic crisis. We have now had more than 40 years of the capitalist system sinking inexorably into this crisis.
At the end of the 1920s and during the 1930s, capitalist society also went through a major outbreak of its economic crisis. Since then the bourgeoisie has learned a good deal and in particular it has found ways of attenuating and postponing the most devastating effects of the crisis. But this does not mean at all that it possesses the means to overcome the contradictions inherent in its system and which are at work deep in the very fibres of this society. This is why the discussions at this Congress highlighted the fact that while in May 68 the bourgeoisie had the means to face up to the first manifestations of the crisis, it is very different today. All these means, all the palliatives have to a large extent been used up today. It emerged clearly from our discussions that the world economic crisis was entering into a new phase, into new and profound convulsions on a far greater scale than anything seen since 1968. In 1968 many sectors of the working class were suffering from the first serious attacks on their living standards, resulting in a first great wave of discontent in numerous countries. The far more serious economic situation today is bringing with it a series of much wider and deeper attacks than in the late 60s. Above all, since 1968, these attacks have become general across the entire planet. Thus we are seeing the development of the conditions for a more powerful and generalised social discontent.
After 1968 and throughout the 1970s and 80s, through successive waves of struggle, the hopes and perspectives raised by the massive movement in France in 1968 were confirmed and reinforced. But the evolution of the class struggle has been permanently confronted with all the traps and manoeuvres deployed by the world bourgeoisie, which is united against the class struggle in spite of all its commercial and imperialist rivalries, and which had been caught by surprise in 1968. The hardest blow received by the working class consisted of the massive, worldwide ideological campaigns launched by the bourgeoisie around the theme of the ‘death of communism' following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and of the ‘Soviet' bloc in 1989. According to the ruling class, this showed that communism had failed lamentably and that capitalism, for all its faults, had proved its crushing superiority. Any idea that communist revolution was possible, or even that the working class could play any role in society, was thus buried under an avalanche of lies. The result of this was to be over ten years of retreat in the militancy and consciousness of the working class, making the life of the working class and of its revolutionary organisations all the more difficult. At this point the hopes raised by 1968 seemed to have utterly disappeared. But the 18th Congress of RI, as well as the international and territorial congresses which have been held since at least 2003, insisted in their discussions and resolutions that the evolution of the international situation and of the class struggle demonstrates that this is not at all the case. At the beginning of the 2000s, the weight of the defeat suffered by the working class during the 1990s was gradually lifting and the class struggle was beginning to renew its links with the past.
Since then, even if's been in a much less spectacular way than in 1968, the struggle has developed more and more on all continents. In Asia, in China, for example, where there are more industrial workers than anywhere else in the world, there has been one struggle after another for a number of years. We have described and analysed in our press many of these struggles around the world. The Congress drew particular attention to the recent struggles in Germany, following those against the CPE in France two years ago. Germany has one of the most experienced proletariats in the world - the one which carried out the 1918-19 revolution in continuity with the 1917 revolution in Russia. It was also this fraction of the working class which went through a crushing defeat orchestrated by the entire national bourgeoisie (with the social democratic party in the forefront), and which could draw the most lessons from this experience for the new generations of the working class. The fact that struggles are now developing at the heart of world capitalism, at a moment when all continents are going through strikes and class movements, demonstrates concretely that the historic perspective opened up in 1968 is being conformed.
The discussion at the Congress also examined the difficulties facing these struggles, and they are not to be underestimated. Unlike in 1968, the working class no longer has many illusions in the future that capitalism can offer to it and to its children, seeing that the system has been bogged down in a generalised economic crisis for forty years and is showing more and more obvious signs of being a system in decomposition. But the question of the perspective, the question of the communist revolution, still largely remains outside the consciousness of the great majority of the working class. This difficulty is without doubt one of the major characteristics of the new worldwide wave of struggles. However, in the Congress we pointed to the fact that the increasingly simultaneous attacks, the increasingly uniform degradation of living standards, will more and more oblige workers to develop active forms of solidarity in their struggle - indispensable to the extension and unification of their movements. Another aspect of the struggle discussed at the Congress, and one which was virtually absent in May 68, was that there are now more and more frequent reactions within the working class to the problem of hunger. Feeding oneself has become an increasingly pressing issue for a growing part of the working class. In the recent period, hunger riots have also broken out in a number of countries, as for example in Egypt recently. The working class as a whole will have to integrate this question into its general struggle against capitalism. In contrast to 1968, the state of world capitalism is much more serious, far more rotten, and the class struggle even more vital. But this situation poses much harder questions than in May 1968, and these are the questions that future struggles will have to take up and resolve.
The Congress went in some depth into the situation in France and showed how it is illustrative of the evolution of the struggle on a world scale. Thus, in 2003, it was the working class in France, along with the Austrian workers, who gave proof of a revival of struggles more than 10 years after the blow received with the fall of the Berlin Wall. This dynamic was confirmed by the struggle against the CPE in spring 2006 and the movement in November 2007, which involved the students' struggle against the LRU law and the strikes by railway workers, gas and electricity workers against the attacks on their pensions[2]. All these struggles illustrated the depth of the resurgence of class combats, because of the role played within them by the younger generation and the forms of the struggle, which renewed the link with the ones that had been seen in May 68. At the same time, the sophistication of the manoeuvres by all the political and union forces of the bourgeoisie which we saw at work in November 2007 shows what the ruling class is capable of at an international level in its efforts to get its attacks through and to block any massive response by the working class.
After the 17th ICC Congress held in 2007, and the Congress of our section in France in 2006, this was the third time groups from the proletarian political milieu were present and actively participating at a Congress of our organisation. A delegation from the OPOP group in Brazil was already present at the Congress of RI in 2006 (and was able to witness the demonstrations and struggle against the CPE). At the 2007 International Congress there were delegations from the OPOP, the EKS in Turkey and the SPA from South Korea (the group Internasyonalismo in the Philippines, which had accepted our invitation, couldn't come but sent greetings to the congress and statements of position on all the points on the agenda). At the recent RI Congress, there were again delegations from the OPOP and the EKS (Internasyonalismo again sent statements, being again unable to come as were a number of groups from Latin America who had also accepted our invitation). This active participation by internationalist groups has now become a gain of the left communist camp. It shows, like the regroupments that took place in the wake of 1968, that there has been a maturation of consciousness within the class as a whole, expressed in the emergence of small minorities, whether organised or not. In a difficult, but increasingly visible manner, the working class is necessarily being led to pose the questions raised in 1968, but now on a much deeper level. It is undeniable that, much more than in the late 60s and early 70s, this revival of interest is now posed on a much wider international scale. Our Congress showed how vital it is for our organisation and the older generations of militants who lived through May 68 to transmit all the experience accumulated over the past 40 years to the young elements now being politicised. Without this capacity, it's obvious that the construction of the future world communist party will not be possible. The revival of interest in the positions of the communist left is without doubt the first step on this road.
All the workers or militants who lived through May 1968 had a foretaste of what it means to debate in a proletarian manner. The bourgeoisie always tried to present the struggles of 1968 as no more than a series of violent clashes between the students and the police. Nothing could be more false! In the massive struggles of the working class at this time, and despite all the difficulties connected to the sabotaging role of the left and the unions, the workers in struggle, in the general assemblies and street demonstrations, began to develop a process of collective discussion on the meaning and aims of their movement. In the same way, without the desire for debate there could have been no unification of revolutionary forces at this time and no ICC. The renewal of the international class struggle pushed all those who really responded to the needs of the movement to develop a discussion on the widest possible scale. Since then, this basic condition of the workers' struggle and the regroupment of revolutionaries has been posed to our organisation in a much clearer and more conscious way.
For several years now the ICC has put the question of the culture of debate in the workers' movement at the heart of its concerns, both theoretical and practical. The 18th Congress of RI continued this work. But it was above all in the way the debates were conducted - in an open, fraternal spirit, a spirit of attentive, reciprocal listening - that our maturation at this level was expressed most clearly. This necessity, this precondition for the unification of internationalist forces was also expressed in the way the groups present themselves took part in the Congress discussions, fully taking up a conception of debate and reflection that is shared by the ICC.
Despite all the difficulties, all the partial defeats suffered by the working class over the past 40 years, what this Congress highlighted above all is that the hope and promise opened up by May 68 are not dead and buried. May 68 in France and all the struggles which followed in its wake were an integral part of the historical experience of the working class. The enormous interest in May 68 at the time of its 40th anniversary, not only in France but in many other countries, above all among the younger generation, is the sign that the most advanced elements of the world proletariat are in the process of re-appropriating this experience in order to prepare the battles of tomorrow.
ICC (1/10/8)
[1] On the significance of the events of May 68, see 5-part series in WRs 313-317 (or IR 133 and 134).
[2] See ‘Struggles in France: Government and unions hand-in-hand against the working class'
ICConline, January 15, 2008
As banks get nationalised, as the Federal Reserve and other central banks leap in to prop up the money markets, and the US Congress argues over the $700bn banking rescue plan, workers know that no one's going to bail them out. On the contrary. It's clear that on top of the existing wages that are falling behind inflation, the attempts to crank up productivity that are already in place, and jobs that have already gone, the current financial crisis will rapidly have an impact on the working and living conditions of millions who haven't already been directly hit by the collapse of banks and other financial institutions.
The material conditions experienced by workers are the basis for the development of their struggles. The crisis of capitalism leads to attacks on the working class that in turn can lead to a militant response. How far workers' struggles go, how combative they become, what sense they have of their own potential cannot be tied down in a scientific formula. The deepening of the crisis, x, doesn't necessarily become y amount of struggle or z amount of consciousness.
However, it is right to ask whether the working class is today showing signs that it could be up to the challenges of the current crisis, or whether it has been disarmed by the whole brutal experience of exploitation, and succumbed to ideologies which have left it passive in the face of the worsening situation it finds itself in.
In the aftermath of the 1929 Wall Street Crash, the Depression is recognised as a time of great economic suffering. A characteristic image from Britain in the 1930s is of the weary hunger march from Jarrow, or, from the US, the queues at soup kitchens in the richest country in the world. This was only part of the reality, as there were many expressions in this period of militant class struggle. In France there were waves of strikes and occupations from 1934-38 that were ultimately derailed by the illusions workers had in the Popular Front. In the US there were major struggles from 1935-37, finally undermined by workers' misplaced confidence in the new industrial unions. In Spain in 1936, the workers' first response to Franco's coup took on a semi-insurrectionary nature. But here again the Popular Front dragged workers away from their own ground into the battle between democracy and fascism, prefiguring the mobilisation of the world working class for the second imperialist carnage. In short, this was a period of profound defeat for the working class.
It was a different situation at the end of the 1960s, where a less serious expression of the economic crisis set off first the struggles in France in 68, the ‘hot autumn' in Italy 69, and the demonstrations and strikes in Poland in 1970. These were followed by waves of struggles over two decades, in which the working class in countries across the world returned to the struggle, often on a massive level.
While it's now easy to see the limitations of the struggles of the 70s and 80s, it shouldn't be forgotten that the ruling class was not a passive onlooker. The ruling bourgeoisie adopted particular political strategies against the threat of the class struggle. Typically, in the 1970s left parties came to power, using the language of reform or even socialism, able to get the working class to accept wage levels and unemployment that would have been unacceptable from the conservative parties of the right. In the 1980s, with governments privatising and cutting jobs and services, there was a massive response from the working class; in this context left parties (along with unions and the leftists) posed as the opposition to the status quo, advocates of a so-called ‘alternative'.
In the 1990s, in the wake of the collapse of the eastern bloc and the huge campaigns about the ‘death of communism' and the ‘end of the class struggle', there was a definite disorientation within the working class and a low level of militancy, but since 2003 there has been a slow but definite renewal of workers' struggles, with a number of positive characteristics.
Changes in material reality can have a significant effect on workers' understanding of the world and their place in it. Even the blind can recognise objects when they bump into them. In the current state of the economic crisis it is clear that our masters have very little control of their own affairs and have to resort to the further intervention of the state to cope with a crisis of state capitalism. The idea that capitalism doesn't suffer from crises that are intrinsic and insoluble can surely now only convince those who have an interest in its continuation. In addition, the worldwide nature of the crisis, revealing yet again the interlinked nature of all economies, is another reminder that there can be no national solutions to the problems presented by global capitalism.
In recent struggles the illusions that workers have in the possibilities of sustainable reforms, or in the real role of the unions, or in left-wing governments, have been challenged. Indeed because of the lack of credibility of the left parties (and their leftist satellites) there have been attempts recently to create new, or re-launch old, left parties in Germany, Italy and France, among other countries.
As for the content of the class struggle, we have seen a number of struggles where solidarity has been shown in practice. Not on a massive scale, but significant enough to demonstrate one of the most important aspects of the working class in struggle, and as the basis for a future society. Some academics (and other ideologists) maintain that the working class has changed so much with the development of technology and the transformation of heavy industry that the marxist view of the working class is a relic of the 19th century. Expressions of solidarity among the ‘new' working class show that such ideas are just wishful thinking from the ruling class.
Furthermore, the expansion of migration patterns across the world means that in nearly every country there is greater diversity in the working class, and correspondingly, a greater capacity for internationalism and unity across potential divisions. The fact that the bourgeoisie is everywhere trying to sustain racist and anti-migrant campaigns in order to sow divisions in the ranks of the working class shows what a threat working class unity is to capitalism.
During the last five years there have been examples of workers' struggles that have shown significant differences to the past. For instance, we have seen various struggles in a country as important as Germany, which was much less affected by workers' militancy in the 1970s.
In a country like Iraq, where we can see the profound effects of war, both past and present, we can still see the struggle of the working class. Recently, in response to an attempt by the Iraqi government to cut public sector wages by 30% (that is, to reverse a wage rise from earlier in the year) there was a wave of strikes, demonstrations, protests and sit-ins. The wage rise has been reinstated, the government will no doubt rapidly return to the attack, but workers have gained a sense of what it is like to fight for class interests, not national or religious interests.
In Iran, supposedly under the rigid domination of fundamentalist clerics, there have been demonstrations over labour laws as well as strikes involving thousands of workers angry at the non-payment of wages for many months.
Across Egypt there have been successive waves of strikes during the last two years, involving thousands of workers. In Vietnam, a country that is in no way isolated from the impact of the economic crisis, there is high and still growing inflation that has led to dozens of wildcat strikes. There have also been massive strikes in Bangladesh and Argentina, and a nationwide general strike in South Africa in August.
As for the latest ‘economic miracles', India and China, neither has been immune from the crisis or the class struggle. In China, with tens of thousands of enterprises going bust and 20 million people laid off, it is not surprising that there have been massive workers' demonstrations that wouldn't have happened ten years ago, and wildcat strikes involving many thousands of workers happening just about every day. In India, in September, there was a strike affecting a number of states, which the unions claimed involved 80 million workers. Industry, banks, insurance, coal, power, steel, tea, telecoms and IT were all affected. Subsequently, there was a two day strike of 900,000 workers in 26 government-run banks that closed about 60,000 branches; and at the time of writing tens of thousands of workers employed by the ‘Bollywood' film industry are on strike against low wages or not being paid at all.
A working class that can't defend itself can't make a revolution. But the question still stands: can the working class go beyond the defensive struggles of today?
In practice, as the working class struggles it begins to change. It becomes more aware of the possibilities of the struggle, the nature of the obstacles that will be encountered and the lies that it has been told. Consciousness develops through the gradual escape from the weight of bourgeois ideology at the same time as the development of workers' self-organisation and the sense of unity and solidarity. The response of the working class is not just to immediate attacks but to a whole history of them. The difference between ‘economic' and ‘political' struggles diminishes; ‘defensive' struggles announce the start of struggles where workers take the initiative.
But in this whole process of the development of the working class through the experience of its struggles there is still one enormous hurdle to get over. The more workers reflect on the implications of their situation, the more they will be drawn to the conclusion that capitalism has to be overthrown. That means a revolution. It is understandable that workers should be hesitant when the immensity of what lies before them becomes clear.
The current phase of the economic crisis will lead to the further development of the class struggle. When the working class begins to realise where that struggle is leading, it will be vital that it understands that it is not only the sole force that can free itself from capitalist exploitation, but also the only force that offers a future to humanity. Revolutionaries will play an important role in the development of this consciousness. Hesitation is understandable, but the working class is transformed by its struggle, so that future movements will be undertaken by a class that has gained from its struggles and in reflecting on them.
Car 1/10/8
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/great-depression
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/attacks-workers
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/credit-crunch
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/economic-crisis
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/unemployment
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/inflation
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-georgia
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/imperialist-rivalries
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/georgia
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/humanitarianism
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/144/pakistan
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/terrorism
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-terror
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/world-war-ii
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/pacifism
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/socialist-workers-party
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/state-capitalism
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/nationalisation
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/u
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/intervention
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/international-communist-current
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/dominican-republic
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/532/haiti
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/climate-change
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/ecological-crisis
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/may-68
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-reports
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/france
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle