This article is available as a leaflet here [1] to download and distribute

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After two years of strangling the economy of Gaza - blockading fuel and medicines, preventing exports and stopping workers from leaving Gaza to find work on the Israeli side of the border - after turning the whole of Gaza into a vast prison camp, from which desperate Palestinians have already tried to escape by breaking through the border into Egypt, Israel's military machine is subjecting this densely populated, impoverished area to all the savagery of a virtually continuous aerial bombardment. Hundreds have already been killed and the already exhausted hospitals cannot cope with the endless stream of wounded. Israel's claims that it is trying to limit civilian casualties are a sinister joke when every ‘military' target is situated next to a  cluster of houses; and since mosques and the Islamic university have been openly selected as targets, the distinction between civil and military has been made entirely meaningless. The results are evident: scores of civilians, many of them children, killed and maimed, even greater numbers terrified and traumatised by the non-stop raids. At the time of writing, the Israeli PM Ehud Olmert is describing this offensive as only the first stage. Tanks are waiting at the border and a full-scale land invasion has not been ruled out. 

Israel's justification for this atrocity - supported by the Bush administration in the US - is that Hamas has not stopped firing rockets at Israeli civilians despite the so-called ceasefire.  The same argument was used to support the invasion of southern Lebanon two years ago.  And it is true that both Hizbollah and Hamas hide behind the Palestinian and Lebanese population and cynically expose them to Israeli revenge, falsely presenting the killing of a handful of Israeli civilians as an example of ‘resistance' to Israel's military occupation.  But Israel's response is absolutely typical of any occupying power: punish the entire population for the activity of a minority of armed fighters. They did this with the economic blockade, imposed after Hamas ousted Fatah from control of the Gaza administration; they did it in Lebanon and they are doing it today with the bombing of Gaza. It is the barbaric logic of all imperialist wars, in which civilians are used by both sides as shields and targets, and almost invariably end up dying in far greater numbers than the uniformed soldiers.   

And as with all imperialist wars, the suffering inflicted on the population, the wanton destruction of houses, hospitals and schools, has no result except to prepare the ground for further rounds of destruction. Israel's proclaimed aim is to smash Hamas and open the door to a more ‘moderate' Palestinian leadership in Gaza, but even former Israeli intelligence officers (at least one of the more...intelligent) can see the futility of this approach. Speaking about the economic blockade, ex-Mossad officer Yossi Alpher said "The economic siege of Gaza has not brought any of the desired political results. It has not manipulated Palestinians into hating Hams, but has probably been counter-productive. It is just useless collective punishment". This is even more true of the air raids. As Israeli historian Tom Segev put it, "Israel has always believed that causing suffering to Palestinian civilians would make them rebel against their national leaders. This assumption has proved wrong over and over" (both quotes from The Guardian 30.12.08). Hizbollah in Lebanon was strengthened by the Israeli attack in 2006; the Gaza offensive may well have the same result for Hamas. But whether strengthened or weakened it will no doubt respond with further attacks on Israeli civilians, if not through rocket attacks, then through a revival of suicide bombings.

The ‘spiral of violence' expresses the decay of capitalism

‘Concerned' world leaders like the Pope or UN general secretary Ban Ki-moon often talk about how such actions as Israel's only serve to inflame national hatred and ratchet up the ‘spiral of violence' in the Middle East. All this is true: the whole cycle of terrorism and state violence in Israel/Palestine brutalises the populations and the combatants on both sides and creates new generations of fanatics and ‘martyrs'. But what the Vatican and the UN don't tell us is that this descent into the hell of national hatred is the product of a social system which everywhere is in profound decay. The story is not very different in Iraq where Sunni and Shia are set at each other's throats, in the Balkans where Serbs are pitched against Albanians or Croats, in India/Pakistan where it's Hindu against Muslim or in Africa's myriad wars where violent ethnic divisions are too numerous to mention. The explosion of these conflicts across the globe is the expression of a society which has no future for mankind.   

And what we are also not told very much about is the involvement of the concerned, humanitarian, democratic world powers in stirring up these conflicts, unless we hear it from the other side of an imperialist divide. The press in Britain was not silent about the support France gave to the Hutu murder gangs in Rwanda in 1994. It is less forthcoming about the role British and American secret forces have played in manipulating the Shia/Sunni divide in Iraq. In the Middle East, America's backing for Israel and Iran and Syria's backing for Hizbollah and Hamas is out in the open, but the more ‘even-handed' role played by France, Germany, Russia and other powers is no less self-serving.    

The conflict in the Middle East has its own specific aspects and causes, but it can only be understood in the context of a global capitalist machine that is dangerously out of control. The proliferation of wars around the planet, the uncontrollable economic crisis, and the accelerating environmental catastrophe are all evidence of this reality. But while capitalism offers us no hope of peace and prosperity, there is a source of hope in the world: the revolt of the exploited class against the brutality of the system, a revolt expressed most graphically in Europe in the last few weeks in the movements of young proletarians in Italy, France, Germany and above all Greece. These are movements which by their very nature have put forward the need for class solidarity and the overcoming of all national and ethnic divisions. Although only in their infancy, they provide an example that can eventually be followed in those areas of the planet which are most ravaged by divisions inside the exploited class. This is no utopia: already in the past few years public sector workers in Gaza have come out on strike against the non-payment of wages almost simultaneously with public sector workers in Israel striking against the effects of austerity, itself a direct product of Israel's top-heavy war economy. These movements were hardly conscious of each other, but they still show the objective community of interests among workers of both sides of an imperialist divide. 

Solidarity with the suffering populations of capitalism's war zones does not mean choosing the ‘lesser evil' or supporting the ‘weaker' capitalist gangs like Hizbollah or Hamas against the more obviously aggressive powers like the US or Israel.  Hamas has already shown itself to be a bourgeois force oppressing the Palestinian workers - especially when it condemned the public sector strikes as being against "national interests" and when, along with Fatah, it subjected the population of Gaza to a murderous faction fight for control of the region. Solidarity with those caught up in imperialist war means rejecting both warring camps and developing the class struggle against all the world's rulers and exploiters.

WR, 1/1/09.

What is happening to the workers of Giardini del Sole is also happening in many factories, not only in Cebu, not only in the Philippines, but also around the world. In fact our brothers/sisters in America are the first to suffer the attacks of the capitalists - retrenchments, rotation of work, reduction of working days and reduction of wages and benefits.

Why are these happening? Because the capitalist system that rules the country and the world is currently in acute crisis of over-production. It means, there are so many unsold products in the world market. There is over-production because in capitalism we produced beyond our capacity to consume; beyond the capacity of our wages as slaves.

Also, capitalism reduced our wages to gain more profits. Result: we are sunk in debts that make it more difficult for us to buy the basic necessities of our production. Thus, over-production becomes more acute.

To prevent the slow death that capitalism forces on us through retrenchments, rotation of work and reduction of wages and benefits, we need to struggle. To prevent the attacks of the capitalists we need to unite and help each other in different factories/companies. No one helps us other than our own class brothers/sisters. We cannot expect anything from the government, Department of Labour and politicians. All of them are instruments and collude with the capitalist class. We cannot expect anything from TIPC1 or any tripartite meetings between us, capitalists and government. We cannot expect a bailout from a corrupt, debt-ridden and rabidly pro-capitalist government.

Our only hope is our unity and to spread our struggle in several factories!

The government and capitalists want us to sacrifice, to accept retrenchments, rotation of work, reduction of working days and reduction of wages and benefits and to suffer more to save the exploitative system! This is a defeat because what we need as slaves of capitalism are PERMANENT work, ADEQUATE wages and HUMAN conditions of work!

If workers struggle in several factories, there is a strong possibility that we can defend our jobs and salaries. WE SHOULD NOT SACRIFICE TO SAVE CAPITALISM FROM ITS CRISIS!

But if we are fragmented and act separately in our different factories, if we let our brothers/sisters in one or two companies struggle on their own, the capitalists can win and we are forced to shoulder the crisis they themselves created!

We should unite in assemblies where all workers could participate. Regular and contractual, unionists and not, we are all members of the WORKERS' ASSEMBLIES. These are the only form of organization for our struggle. We ourselves should discuss and decide for our future and not the few!

Even if we accept the sacrifices, these cannot solve the crisis of the rotten system. Instead, it becomes worse. The problem resides in the nature itself of capitalism and there is no solution to the crisis of over-production. The ultimate solution is to OVERTHROW capitalism and replace it with a system for us as workers. A system which we are not slaves anymore of the capitalists.

INTERNASYONALISMO

1 TIPC - Tripartite Industrial Peace Council

In a press release of the leftist Partido ng Manggagawa (Labor Party) published in Manila Indymedia last January 9, it claimed, which is its title also,"Furniture workers win major concessions as dispute settled".

According to the press release, "The workers of Giardini del Sole, (...) one of the biggest furniture exporting company in the country, won major concessions in negotiations at the National Conciliation and Mediation Board (NCMB) Region 7..."

What are these "victories" that the union claimed?

"Management and the union agreed on the following points:

1. Establishment of a joint evaluation team that includes the union, management and the DOLE/NCMB to rotate work among as many of the workers as possible. The joint evaluation team will also monitor the company's performance and recall the workers when demand picks up.
2. Granting of financial assistance of PhP 5,000 and one sack of rice per month for the duration of the temporary shutdown. It will be deductible from separation pay in case of permanent closure.
3. No worker will be terminated and only voluntary resignations will be accepted.
4. Release of backwages for the holiday pay last December equivalent to three days salary."

 

Because of this settlement, PM joyfully said "The settlement averted the Giardini union's plan to file a notice of strike on the basis that the temporary shutdown was illegal and a ruse for union busting."

Since the union is now part of the evaluation team with the management and the state agency in discussing on how many workers will be "retain in rotation work" and recall the workers (those who will be retrenched or out of the job) when "demand picks up", the union's vice president proudly proclaimed, "workers [ie the union and not the workers] now have a voice in how the company will cope with the crisis." It means that the union is now officially recognized as partner of the management and government in implementing the retrenchment for the employees to accept voluntarily!

What the unions are doing here in the Philippines is the same as what the unions doing in Europe and in other parts of the world: police in the company to prevent the workers in extending and generalizing their struggles.

In addition, unions help to sow reformist calls and actions helping to save the dying capitalist system as what the PM-Cebu spokesperson said on the "victory" of the Giardini workers: "the Cebu, Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu unions that have been preparing for solidarity actions to the Giardini workers will now shift to campaigning for a bailout scheme for workers". According to PM-Cebu spokesperson, "The plight and fight of the Giardini workers highlight the imperative of a bailout package for workers affected by the crisis."

Internasyonalismo, 10/01/2009 

This article was originally published on Israel's Indymedia site and on Libcom.org [10] . It was written by a comrade in Israel who, despite being in an extreme minority, felt the need to respond to the patriotic war fever sweeping Israel/Palestine in the wake of the Israeli assault on Gaza. His decision to issue a statement was in part the result of the encouragement and solidarity offered by a number of posters on Libcom (including members of the Libcom collective, the ICC and the Turkish left communist group EKS). This is a modest but signficant contribution to the emergence of a real opposition to the pernicious nationalism that currently dominates the Middle East.  WR, 10/1/09.

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What's in a flag? An attempt to present an internationalist perspective on the current situation in the West Bank, following Israel's attack on the Gaza Strip. 

Most people in Israel will remember one thing about the protest later today (Sat 3/1/2009): that the organizers went to the Supreme Court in order to make sure they are allowed to present a Palestinian flag.

Now, I am in favor of anyone being able to present any kind of flag or no flag at any time. But one should ask what purpose a Palestinian (former PLO) flag would serve.

This protest is allegedly aimed at stopping the attack on Gaza. What does the Palestinian flag have to do with that? One would reply: "well, it represents support for the Palestinian resistance." To that I would have to further ask: what Palestinian resistance? Most sensible Palestinians in Gaza would like to get the hell out of the bombing area, not resist being bombed. What does it even mean to resist being bombed? Wave your hand against the incoming fighters?

This flag represents Palestinian nationalism, in the same way that the Israeli flag represents Israeli nationalism. Now, most readers of this website would probably associate Israeli nationalism with violence, oppression, and a thin veil covering up the rule of capitalists over our country. Why doesn't the same apply to Palestinian nationalism?

As we speak, Palestinians in the West Bank are being brutally oppressed and restrained, Palestinians who wish to protest against this same war. Why? Because the Palestinian Authority will not hear criticism, and will not step away from its only raison d'etre, being a subcontractor of Israeli control over the Occupied Territories.

Just months ago, these same Hamas leaders who are now hiding in bunkers and safehouses and recording messages of resistance to "their" people were refusing pay to teachers, wrecking Palestinian trade unions, killing innocent Palestinians in the streets as they fought their Fatah competitors, and shooting rockets at random civilian targets, in lieu of actual attempts at bettering the lives of hard-working and unemployed Palestinians.

While we are protesting the brutal bombing of Gaza by Israeli nationalism, we have to remember that Palestinian nationalism is merely less powerful, not less brutal. Unfortunately, this flag incident just plays into the hand of nationalism as an ideal, making it easier to dismiss dissent against the government as automatic support for "the enemy".

Of course, to be cynical, there is a very good reason why this fiasco came about. This protest, organized by the Israeli Communist Party's front Hadash, comes a day before the official launching of this party's election campaign. And Hadash needs to pander to its Palestinian nationalist base inside the Green Line in order to maintain its electoral power in the next elections against the Secular Nationalists (Al-Tajmua3) and the Muslim Movement. And this, again, plays into nationalism's hand, and ultimately, into the capitalists` hand.

This will only result in repeating cycles of violence, that will not end until it is realized that these nationalisms are there to cloud our judgment and to prevent us from focusing on the real issue, namely, that we are being sent to kill and die, and compete in the service of people who do not serve our interests, but their own. And that goes for both Israelis and Palestinians. Untie the Gordian knot of nationalism, and we will be on our way to have better lives for all.

(The Indymedia version of this article ended with a link to the ICC's article on Gaza [11] )

 

The idea that capitalism, like Roman slavery or mediaeval feudalism, is a transient system, condemned to disappear through the working out of its own contradictions, is fundamental to what Marx called the materialist conception of history. In the Communist Manifesto of 1848, Marx and Engels discerned in the crises of overproduction that regularly shook the edifice of capitalism the fatal disease that would lead to the decline of a system then still marching triumphantly across the globe; and this in turn would confront the revolutionary class in capitalism, the proletariat, with the necessity to overthrow it and build a new form of society. In that famous text, in fact, they made a premature diagnosis that already "the conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them". This plainly contradicted other elements of the Manifesto where they still saw the bourgeoisie playing a revolutionary role and thus defended the need for the proletariat to support its more progressive elements in the struggle against the remnants of feudal rule.  Capitalism's formidable growth following the crises of 1848 led them to revise the diagnosis, but they never abandoned the view that the communist revolution was only placed on the agenda of history at the point where "the productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property".

In the last decades of the 19th century, as capitalism continued to conquer the globe, bringing with it substantial increases in working class living standards, the ‘revisionist' current within the workers' movement began to argue that capitalism would be able to grow indefinitely and that as a result the movement should be more realistic, renouncing its revolutionary goals in favour of a gradual struggle for reforms or, at best, a struggle for a gradual evolution towards socialism. In the German social democratic party, Rosa Luxemburg led the fight against this current, especially in her pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution, written in 1900, where she reaffirmed the Marxist thesis that the socialist revolution could only be a "historic necessity" imposed by the opening of a period in which capitalism had become an out and out obstacle to the needs of humanity. And indeed the conditions of the 1890s - in particular, the development of imperialism - allowed her to put forward a very clear assessment of the period on the horizon:  

"on the one hand we now have behind us the sudden and large opening up of new areas of the capitalist economy, as occurred periodically until the 1870s; and we have behind us, so to speak, the previous youthful crises which followed these periodic developments. On the other hand, we still have not progressed to that degree of development and exhaustion of the world market which would produce the fatal, periodic collision of the forces of production with the limits of the market, which is the actual capitalist crisis of old age. We are in a phase in which the crises are no longer the accompaniment of the growth of capitalism, and not yet that of its decline".

As it turned out, the first decisive evidence that the system had entered into its epoch of decline was not an overt economic crisis, but an imperialist war of unprecedented savagery and destructiveness. But the vast majority of the revolutionaries, who - unlike the revisionist trend and the right wing of social democracy - remained loyal to internationalist principles when the war broke out in 1914, were also emphatic that the war demonstrated precisely that capitalism had now entered a new epoch: as the Communist International put it at its founding congress in 1919." The epoch of capitalism's decay, its internal disintegration, the epoch of the proletarian communist revolution". Their conclusions were confirmed by the revolutionary events that followed the war, by the economic stagnation which, with the exception of the US, affected the advanced capitalist countries in the 1920s, the cataclysmic stock market crash of 1929 and the world-wide depression that followed, and by the outbreak of a second world war which proved to be even more barbaric and destructive than the first. Virtually all the political currents which laid claim to Marx's historical method concluded from these events that capitalism was indeed a mode of production in decay.

It was only with the economic boom that followed the second world war that groups which more or less located themselves within the Marxist tradition - most notably the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie - began to question the ‘dogma' of the inevitable economic crisis and to look for other possible driving forces of the proletarian revolution: in the case of SouB, the rebellion of ‘order takers' against the small caste of ‘order givers', or with the Situationists, a movement of revolt against the sheer boredom of the ‘spectacular commodity society'.

It should be recalled that these new ‘revisions' of Marx's theory were formulated in a general ideological atmosphere in which the bourgeoisie itself was also proclaiming the end of economic crises, the advent of a more or less classless consumer society, the ‘embourgoisement' of the working class, and so on. This ideology was severely shaken by the return of the open economic crisis, which had been noted by a few in the late 60s but which had become embarrassingly obvious after 1973, and by the wave of workers' struggles which swept the globe in the wake of the events of May-June 1968 in France. This resurgence of class consciousness also expressed itself in the appearance of new revolutionary groups, a number of which, in rediscovering the traditions of the workers' movement, also came upon the lost history of the communist left, the current which, in the 1920s-40s, had most clearly drawn out all the political consequences of the decadence of capitalism.

But the crisis which came to the surface in the late 60s showed that the bourgeoisie had learned a great deal from the experience of the great depression. Unlike the discredited Hoovers and Coolidges of the late 20s, it would never again trust to the unfettered operation of the market to restore the economic balance disrupted by the crisis. Implicitly or explicitly, it had recognised that it was now living in the epoch of state capitalism and that there was no going back to the ‘laisser faire' approach of the 19th century. With the state intervening to support the economy with massive injections of credit, openly nationalising the weakest sectors and coordinating these manipulations on an international scale, the crisis has unfolded above all as a ‘slow motion' descent, with periods of recession punctuated with bursts of credit-led boom.   

This is the context in which a new generation of individuals searching for revolutionary ideas have been born, and it has profoundly affected their view of the real depth of capitalism's crisis - along with other factors, such as the weight of anarchist ideas engendered in reaction to the nightmare of Stalinism: anarchism has always had a strong tendency to insist that the revolution is possible at any moment, regardless of the historical, material conditions of the day. It has been a hard struggle convincing many of these elements that capitalism is indeed locked in a historic crisis; in the online debates on www.libcom.org [12], for example, we find ourselves again and again coming up against the view that capitalism passes from one crisis to the next in a purely cyclical manner - in essence that the crises of the 20th and 21st centuries are no different from the youthful crises of capitalism, and remain a necessary precondition for the further expansion of the system.

Goldner's view of crisis and decadence

In our view, the latest phase of the crisis, summed up under the short-hand ‘credit crunch', will certainly be a factor in challenging such views and convincing people that we are seeing the real putrefaction of capitalism as a mode of production. In this context, we welcome a recent contribution by Loren Goldner, who would describe himself as part of a "left communist mood" which has been growing in the recent period.  The essential approach of The Biggest ‘October Surprise' Of All: A World Capitalist Crash (home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/october.html) is to show:

• - that behind the financial crisis, the whole mad spiral of toxic debt which Goldner aptly describes as the world's biggest ever ‘Ponzi scheme' (or pyramid-selling scam) lies something far more fundamental: "a crisis of social reproduction" as Goldner puts it;
• - that this crisis is not a passing affair but has been more or less permanent since the end of the 1960s: "I would argue that from these late 1960's signals of the end of the previous era of expansion onward, world capitalism has been basically ‘running on empty', with ever increasing credit pyramiding of unbelievable and unprecedented proportions being the main ‘motor' of ‘growth', paid for by ever-increasingly social retrogression of every kind, that we can call CONTRACTED social reproduction, or non-reproduction on a world scale."
   
• - that this in turn is the expression of capitalism's decadence as a mode of production: "Around the time of World War I in 1914, capitalism reached a certain point in history at which it ceased to be a progressive mode of production on a world scale. Historically we see that in the first century of capitalism's existence from the early 19th century to 1914, there was a steady development of productive forces, and a growth of the productive working class on a world scale, in those areas that were fully capitalist. In that period, capitalism got to a stage where that kind of development could no longer happen in a peaceful evolutionary manner. (To periodize capitalism in this way is in no way to overlook its historical crimes, including the centuries of the African slave trade and the pillage and depopulation of the New World.)"
  The article does not deny that within this epoch, there have been periods or areas of considerable growth (Japan and the USSR in the 30s, western capitalism during the post-war boom, China today), but these phenomena have to be seen in the wider context of the barbaric history of the 20th and 21st centuries as a whole: "Starting in the 1970's and particularly 1980s, South Korea and Taiwan did in fact evolve into effectively first world countries, but these were special cases permitted by the U.S. as showcases to compete with the appeal of China and North Korea (the latter being more developed than South Korea until the 1970's). Since then, Hong Kong, Singapore and later China and Vietnam have followed the South Korean and Taiwan models, but this has to be offset against decline and stagnation in the US and Europe, as well as against outright retrogression in Eastern Europe, Russia, Central Asia, the non-oil countries of the Middle East, black Africa and Latin America. So,unlike the period prior to 1914, the rise of the Asian Tigers has not been expansion on a world scale but it was growth here and decline there.
  
  Historically, we can consider the period from 1914 to 1945 to be mainly lost decades for capitalism as a system, just more or less permanent crisis, war, reaction, destruction, and so on. There was to be sure exceptional growth in Japan, tied to its expansion into China, and some technological innovation, as in the US and Germany during the ‘rationalization movements' of the 1920's (always tied to historically high unemployment of 8-10%, that being the point), and even (e.g. the US auto industry) during the 1930's depression. Latin America from 1929 to 1945 built its ‘import substitution' populism behind high tariff walls. And we should not forget the Stalinist forced-march industrialization of the Soviet Union which killed upwards of 10 million peasants in the collectivizations, crippling Russian agriculture for the remainder of the Soviet period, and which placed factory speedup under the management of the GPU (the Soviet secret police). Quiet aside from World War I (20 million dead) and World War II (80 million dead), the ‘purely economic' character of the period was these local spurts of growth offset by the larger preponderance of crisis, stagnation and retrogression in the world as a whole".

• - that the roots of this decadence has to be sought in the underlying contradictions of capital - in the very relationship between wage labour and capital, and can only be overcome by abolishing that relationship. Basically Goldner shows that capital, which operates through the generalisation of the law of value, has become a fundamental barrier to the development of the potential locked up in the very productive forces it has set in motion, providing several concrete examples: the fantastic waste involved in unproductive economic activity (finance, arms, etc), the inability of capitalism to introduce non-polluting technology and to reduce the working day to what is already technically feasible if production was geared to need and not profit. Here Goldner's view corresponds to a very lucid passage in Marx's Grundrisse, which clearly anticipates the obsolescence of capitalism by viewing it from the angle of labour productivity: "Beyond a certain point, the development of the powers of production becomes a barrier for capital; hence the capital relation a barrier for the development of the productive powers of labour. When it has reached this point, capital, i.e. wage labour, enters into the same relation towards the development of social wealth and of the forces of production as the guild system, serfdom, slavery, and is necessarily stripped off as a fetter."

• - that abolishing capitalist social relations requires a restatement of the communist programme, which Goldner tries to concretise in a series of revolutionary measures which have as their basic aim the overcoming of the criminal waste and destructiveness inscribed in the present system, and using humanity's productive powers for human ends.

These elements are fundamental: they help to show that the crisis today is not the same as it was in the 19th century; and although Goldner somewhat ambiguously keeps open the possibility of a new boom based on the reorganisation of the world market, he sees no way that this can happen peacefully. In fact (and Goldner does not really draw this out), a new violent re-division of the world market would unleash such destructive powers that it is extremely unlikely that there could be any ‘recovery' in its wake - far from being a re-run of the second world war and the ensuing boom, it would more likely end in the destruction of civilisation.

The roots of the crisis

Naturally there are other points in the text which we don't share or find inadequate. Goldner bases his analysis of the origins of decadence on the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, which results from the necessity for capital, driven by competition, to reduce the amount of living labour, sole source of profit, in favour of the dead labour of machines. Marx certainly saw this as one of the contradictions which would transform capital into a barrier to itself (the passage from Grundrisse cited above comes precisely after a section explaining the consequences of the falling rate of profit). But Marx also looked deeply into the crisis of overproduction, no less rooted in the wage relation since the working class in the very act of producing surplus value produces a surplus of commodities for which it can never constitute a sufficient market. This ‘market problem' was further analysed by Rosa Luxemburg in her Accumulation of Capital; and although Goldner has recently written fairly extensively about the "continuing relevance of Rosa Luxemburg" there is no hint of her analyses in this text. It is important to relate these two sources of capitalist crisis because Marx saw ‘foreign trade' (the opening up of new markets by an outwardly expanding capitalism) as one of the factors that would offset the falling rate of profit. The question posed by the historical development of the world economy is this: what happens when capital considered as a totality no longer has any ‘foreign trade' - no relations outside itself. This is actually hinted at in Goldner's text when he writes "In the world then dominated by the capitalist system, the total productivity of labour was too high to be contained within the capitalist form", but he doesn't develop the point any further in relation to the problem of realising surplus value on the market. 

Marx in Vol 34 of the Collected Works (page 221) touches on this question with regard to the relationship between a single country and the world market; but the same problem is posed again and indeed magnified if we treat the whole of capitalism as a single country:  " The domination of production by exchange value appears for the individual in such a way that his production 1) is not directed towards his own needs, 2) does not directly satisfy his needs; in a word, he produces commodities, which can only be converted into use value for him after their conversion into money. But this now appears in such a way that the production of a whole country is not measured by its direct needs, or by such a distribution of the different parts of production as would be required for the valorisation of the production. With this, the reproduction process is dependent not on the production of mutually complementary equivalents in the same country, but on the production of these equivalents in foreign markets, on the power of absorption and degree of extension of the world market. This provides an increased possibility of non-correspondence, hence a possibility of crises". If the world market's "power of absorption and degree of extension" comes up against definite limits, as it began to do at the beginning of the 20th century, then crises become more than a possibility, they become a fatal disease, and no longer constitute the growing pains needed for an automatic phase of further expansion as they did in the 19th century. Hence the chronic and semi-permanent nature of crises in the 20th and 21st centuries.

On the conditions of the class struggle

When it comes to the perspectives for the class struggle that the deepening of the crisis is opening up, we are in substantial agreement with Goldner when he writes:  "This crisis, expressing the profound disarray of the capitalist class, offers the anti-capitalist radical left its biggest opening since the defeat of the world working-class upsurge following World War I.  Then, it was a century of British world domination and a phase of capitalist accumulation that was tottering, with rising American dominance in the wings; today, it is the decades of American world domination and of the 30+ years of decay represented by the ‘Washington consensus' that are up for grabs, and-most crucially, and for reasons indicated by the preceding analysis-NO SUCCESSOR POWER waiting in the wings.  That ‘fact' throws open a struggle for both a reorganization of world capital and a possible new working-class ‘storming of heaven'. The biggest capitalist crisis since 1929 may just be preparing the biggest working-class revolt since 1919".

In contrast to the crash of 1929, the present convulsions of the capitalist system are being experienced by a working class that is historically undefeated and far less likely to make the sacrifices that capitalism will demand of it, whether economic or military.

However, when it comes to grasping the dynamic of the movement towards a revolutionary outcome, it seems to us that Goldner draws some questionable conclusions from the consequences of the ‘deindustrialisation' which has dissipated many of the core industrial sectors of the working class in the advanced countries.  It is certainly true this process has posed serious problems for the working class in terms of retaining and developing its sense of class identity; and it is also true, as Goldner points out, that that the bloating of unproductive and useless forms of economic activity over the past few decades means that it makes little sense for workers to simply take over a good proportion of the enterprises that function for capital today - many of them will have to be simply dismantled. But in the following passage, Goldner seems to be in danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater:

"The old ‘imagination' of working-class revolution was a general strike or mass strike, occupation of the factories, establishment of workers' councils and soviets, the political overthrow of the capitalist class, and henceforth a direct democratic management of socialized production. This ‘imagination' was based on the experiences of the Russian, German, Spanish and Hungarian revolutions and revitalized by the American, British and French wildcat movement from the 1950's onward, the French May-June general strike of 1968, the Italian worker rebellion from 1969 to 1973, the worker rebellions in Portugal and Spain in the mid-1970's ‘transitions'...I think this model has lost touch with contemporary reality, at least in the West (in contrast to China and Vietnam) because capital-intensive technological development, downsizing and outsourcing have reduced the ‘immediate process of production' (the ‘volume I' reality of capitalism) to a relatively small part of the total work force (not to mention total population), and even the production workers who remain are often involved in making things (e.g. armaments) that would have no place in a society beyond capitalism. More contemporary workplaces would be abolished by a successful revolution than would be placed under ‘workers' control'."

The problem with this is that too many different things are thrown together. In the first place, occupying the factories - regardless of whether they produce useful or noxious products - was never more than a tactic that could be used by the workers to take the revolution forward provided that the immediate ‘self-management' of production did not become a goal in itself, turning isolated occupations into a trap. By contrast, the dynamic of the mass strike, the formation of the workers' councils, and the political overthrow of the capitalist class remain crucial to any future revolutionary process. It is true that the forms taken by the mass strike and by the councils may well differ from those we have seen in previous revolutionary upsurges. Indeed recent massive upsurges - such as the anti-CPE movement in France in 2006 and the steelworkers' strikes in Vigo in Spain the same year - have given us some indication of how mass assemblies and council-type bodies may appear in the future. But despite the changes that have taken place (the Spanish steel workers, for example, used the form of the street assembly to bring together workers from smaller enterprises; in the anti-CPE movement the universities functioned as a nodal point for discussions that were open to other sectors of the class, and so on) the essential content underlying these forms remains the same as in 1905 or 1917.  Goldner himself still refers to ‘soviets' when he talks about the bodies that will undertake the revolutionary transformation. The problem is that by sweepingly dismissing the ‘old model' rather than asking which elements of the class struggle remain constant and which more ephemeral, he leaves little point of connection between today's defensive struggles and the post-revolutionary stage when the social and economic transformation of the world can be posed in earnest.  The list of measures in the final section thus appear somewhat abstract and separated from the ‘real movement'; and at the same time, there is actually little attempt in the text to draw out what can be learned from some of the recent experience self-organisation. No doubt the development of movements like the revolt of the young proletarians in Greece will provide much material for reflection about the forms and methods that the class struggle is going to adopt in the period ahead of us.

We could say more about the specific social and economic measures which Goldner advocates, but that could be discussed another time. The most important issue of the day is the nature of the present crisis, and it is here that Goldner has made his most useful contribution.

Amos 12/08