The International Monetary Fund, in its 2009 World Economic Outlook, expects continuing decline in all the most advanced economies.

It does predict growth in countries such as India and China, but, overall, in the words of its chief economist, "We now expect the global economy to come to a virtual halt." Declaring that the outlook is worse than at any time since the Second World War can seem rather abstract. The International Labour Organisation (a UN agency) is very concrete in its latest forecasts. Last October it forecast that 22 million jobs would be lost worldwide in 2009. In January it revised that figure, saying that globally as many as 51 million workers could lose their jobs this year. It's a simple calculation to work out that means, on average, nearly a million people every week finding themselves out of work.

There are no exceptions. In the US nearly 600,000 lost their jobs in January. That's 2 million in the last 3 months, 4 million in the last year. In China, during the last year, 15.3% of their 130 million migrant workers left the coastal manufacturing areas to return to rural homes. To that figure of 20 million should be added all the workers who have stayed in the cities to search for work. The Chinese ruling class continues to warn of the possibility of social unrest, and recently has added the danger of ‘violence' as another potential outcome of the economic situation.

No workers' job is safe; and even when they have work, wages are being cut and working conditions worsened.

But workers around the world are showing their unwillingness to accept these attacks: there are daily strikes and demonstrations in China; at the end of January 2.5 million workers in France struck in protest about unemployment; students and young workers in Italy, France, Germany and above all Greece have been out on the streets demonstrating their rage against a society which offers them no future. The anger expressed by the wildcat strikes in Britain's refineries and power stations is not specific to the UK but part of an international response to the deepening economic disaster.

The ruling class knows perfectly well that the working class has not been passive in response to the attacks brought about by the economic crisis. As the Daily Telegraph (23/1/9) put it: "Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Greece and Iceland have all faced social unrest and rioting as unemployment soars and as many European countries have been forced to impose severe cuts to government spending. A senior EU source has told The Daily Telegraph that a March summit of European leaders will examine the increasing unrest as unemployment rises across Europe and cuts to social programmes bite."

The news that our exploiters are co-ordinating their response to our struggles is an important reminder that, whatever the immediate causes of our combats, we have to organise and extend our struggles, drawing in other workers, discussing the means and the goals of our struggle, if we are going to create a power capable of confronting capitalism and all its forces.

WR 7/2/9

The wave of unofficial strikes sparked by the struggle of construction and maintenance workers at the Lindsey refinery has been one of the most important workers' struggles in Britain in the last 20 years.

Thousands of construction workers on other refinery and power station sites walked out in solidarity. Mass meetings were organised and held on a regular basis. Unemployed construction, steel, dock and other workers joined the pickets and demonstrations outside various power stations and refineries. Workers were not in the least bothered about the illegal nature of their actions as they expressed their solidarity for striking comrades, their anger at the rising tide of unemployment and at the government's inability to do anything about it. When 200 Polish construction workers joined the struggle, it reached its highest moment by directly challenging the nationalism that had surrounded the movement at the beginning.

The laying off of 300 sub-contracted workers on the Lindsey oil refinery site, the proposal that another subcontractor be hired using 300 Italian and Portuguese workers (whose labour came cheaper because their conditions were inferior), and the announcement that no workers from Britain would be used on this contract ignited a powder keg of discontent amongst construction workers. For years there has been an increasing use of contract construction workers from abroad, usually on lower wages and worse conditions, with the direct result of accentuating competition between workers for jobs, driving down all workers' wages and conditions. This, combined with the wave of lay-offs in the construction industry and elsewhere due to the recession, generated the profound militancy that found expression in these struggles.

From the beginning this movement was faced with a fundamental question, not only for the strikers involved today but for the whole working class now and in the future: is it possible to fight against unemployment and other attacks by identifying ourselves as ‘British workers' and turning against ‘foreign workers', or do we need to see ourselves as workers with common interests with all other workers, no matter where they come from? This a profoundly political question and one which this movement had to address.

From the beginning the struggle appeared to be dominated by nationalism. There were pictures on the news of workers with home-made banners proclaiming "British Jobs for British Workers" and more professional union banners emblazoned with the same slogan. Union officials were more or less openly defending the slogan; the media talked about a struggle against foreign workers and found workers who shared this opinion. This movement of wildcat strikes could potentially have become swamped in nationalism and turned into a defeat for the working class, with worker pitted against worker, with workers en masse defending nationalist rallying cries and calling for the jobs to be given to ‘British' workers with the Italian and Portuguese workers losing their jobs. The ability of the entire working class to struggle would have been weakened and the ability of the ruling class to attack and divide the class strengthened.

The media coverage (and what some of the workers were saying) made it easy to believe that the demands of the Lindsey workers were "British Jobs for British Workers". They weren't. The demands discussed and voted on by a mass meeting did not have this slogan or hostility towards foreign workers in them. Funny how the media missed this! They expressed illusions in the unions' ability to stop the bosses playing worker off against worker, but not overt nationalism. The general impression created by the media however was one of the strikers being against foreign workers.

The persistent weight of nationalism

Nationalism is integral to capitalist ideology. Each national capitalist class can only survive by competing with their rivals economically and militarily. Their culture, media, education, their entertainment and sports industries, spread this poison all the time in order to try and tie the working class to the nation. The working class cannot escape being affected by this ideology. But what is crucially important about this movement is that it saw the weight of nationalism being challenged as workers grappled with the question in the struggle to defend their basic material interests.

The nationalist slogan "British Jobs for British Workers", stolen from the British National Party by Gordon Brown, generated a lot of unease amongst the strikers and the class. Many strikers made it clear that they were not racists nor did they support the BNP, whose attempts to intervene in the struggle led to them being largely chased away by the workers.

Besides rejecting the BNP many workers interviewed on the television were obviously trying to think about what their struggle meant. They were not against foreign workers, they had worked abroad themselves, but they were unemployed or they wanted their children to have work so they felt jobs should go to ‘British' workers first. Such views still end up seeing ‘British' and ‘foreign' workers as not having a common interest and is thus a prisoner to nationalism, but they were a clear sign that a process of reflection was taking place.

On the other hand, other workers definitely underlined the common interests between workers and said that all they wanted was the chance for all workers to find work. "I was laid off as a stevedore two weeks ago. I've worked in Cardiff and Barry Docks for 11 years and I've come here today hoping that we can shake the government up. I think the whole country should go on strike as we're losing all British industry. But I've got nothing against foreign workers. I can't blame them for going where the work is." (Guardian On-line 20/1/2009).There were also workers who argued that nationalism was a real danger. A worker employed abroad warned, on a construction workers' webforum, about the bosses using national divisions "The corporate media that have stirred up the nationalist elements will then turn on you, showing the demonstrators in the worst light possible. Game over. The last thing the bosses and the government want is for British workers to unite with workers from overseas. They think they can keep fooling us into fighting each other over jobs. It will send a shiver up their spineless backs when we don't"; and in another post he linked the struggle to those in France and Greece and the need for international links : "The massive protests in France and Greece are just a precursor for what is to come. Ever thought of contacting and building links with those workers and strengthening a Europe wide protest against workers getting the shaft? Sounds like a better option than having the real guilty parties, that cabal of bosses, union leadership sell-outs, and New Labour continuing to take advantage of the working class" (Thebearfacts.org). Workers from other sectors also intervened on this forum to oppose nationalist slogans.

The discussion amongst those involved in the strike, and within the class in general, over the question of the nationalist slogans reached a new phase on 3 February when 200 workers from Poland joined 400 other workers in a wildcat strike in support of the Lindsey workers, at Langage power station construction site in Plymouth. The media did their best to hide this act of international solidarity: the local BBC TV did not mention this and nationally it was hardly mentioned at all.

The solidarity of these Polish workers was particularly important because last year they had been involved in a similar struggle. 18 workers were laid off and other workers walked out in solidarity, including the Polish workers. The union tried to make it a struggle against the presence of foreign labour, but the presence of the striking Polish workers completely undermined this.

The Langage workers thus launched this new struggle with some awareness of how the unions had used nationalism to try and divide workers. The day after they walked out a handmade banner appeared at the Lindsey mass meeting proclaiming "Langage Power Station - Polish Workers Join Strike: Solidarity", which would imply either that one or more Polish workers had made the 7 hour journey to get there, or that a worker from Lindsey wanted to highlight their action.

At the same time a banner appeared at the Lindsey picket calling on the Italian workers to join the strike - it was written in English and Italian - and it was reported that some workers were carrying posters proclaiming "Workers of the world unite!" (Guardian 5/2/9). In short we were seeing the beginnings of a conscious effort by some workers to put forward a genuine proletarian internationalism, a step which can only lead to even more reflection and discussion within the class.

All this posed the question of the struggle going onto a new level, one which would directly challenge the campaign to present it as a nationalist backlash. The example of the Polish workers conjured up the prospect of thousands of other workers from abroad joining the struggle on the biggest construction sites in Britain, such as the Olympic sites in East London. There was also the danger that the media would not be able to hide the internationalist slogans. This would have broken through the nationalist barrier the bourgeoisie had tried to set up between the struggling workers and the rest of the class. It is no surprise that the struggle was so rapidly resolved. In the course of 24 hours the unions, bosses and government went from saying it would take days if not weeks to resolve the strike, to settling it with the promise of an extra 102 jobs that "British" workers could apply for. This was a settlement most of the strikers appeared to be happy with because it did not mean any job losses for the Italian and Portuguese workers, but as one striker said, "why should we have to struggle just to get work?"

In the course of a week we saw the most widespread wildcat strikes in decades, workers holding mass meetings and taking illegal solidarity action without a moment's hesitation. A struggle that could have been drowned in nationalism began to call this poison into question. That does not mean that the danger of nationalism has gone: it is a permanent danger, but this movement has provided future struggles with important lessons to draw on. The sight of the banners proclaiming "Workers of the world unite" on a supposedly nationalist picket line can only worry the ruling class about what is to come.  

Phil 7/2/9

This part of our series on the German Revolution of 1918-19 takes up the events of the mass strike which began to engulf the whole of Germany before, during and above all after the bloody and tragic events of the so-called ‘Spartakus Week' at the beginning of January 1919 in Berlin. The latter defeat in the capital squandered the potential for the unification of the revolutionary forces which these mass strikes revealed. Thus, the decapitation of the movement in Berlin, including the murdering of revolutionary leaders such as Luxemburg and Liebknecht, proved to be the fatal turning point towards defeat.

Revolutionary mass strike, January-March 1919.

In a famous article published in the Rote Fahne November 27 1918 entitled "The Acheron in Motion" Rosa Luxemburg announced the beginning of a new phase in the revolution: that of the mass strike. This was soon confirmed in a resounding manner. The material situation of the population did not improve with the end of the war. The contrary was the case. Inflation, redundancies and mass unemployment, short term work and falling real wages created new misery for millions of workers and state functionaries, but also for large layers of the middle classes. Increasingly, material misery, but also bitter disappointment with the results of the November Revolution, obliged the masses to defend themselves. Their empty stomachs were a powerful argument against the alleged benefits of the new bourgeois democracy. Successive strike waves rolled across the country above all in the first quarter of 1919. Far beyond the traditional centres of the organised socialist movement like Berlin, the coastal ports or the concentrations of the engineering and high technology sectors, politically less experienced parts of the proletariat were swept into the revolutionary process. These included what Rosa Luxemburg in her Mass Strike pamphlet of 1906 had called the "helot layers" These were particularly downtrodden sectors of the class, who had hardly benefited from socialist education, and who as such were often looked down on by pre-war Social Democratic and trade unions functionaries. Rosa Luxemburg had predicted that they would play a leading role in a future struggle for socialism.

And now, there they were. For instance the millions of miners, metal and textile workers in the industrial districts of the lower Rhine and Westphalia. There, the defensive workers' struggles were immediately confronted with a brutal alliance of the employers and their armed factory guards, the trade unions and the Freikorps. Out of these first confrontations crystallised two main demands of the strike movement, formulated at a conference of delegates from the whole region at the beginning of February in Essen: all power to the workers' and soldiers' councils! Socialisation of the factories and mines!

The situation escalated when the military tried to disarm and dismantle the solders' councils, sending 30.000 Freikorps to occupy the Ruhr. On February 14 the workers' and soldiers' councils called for a general strike and armed resistance. The determination of the mobilisation of the workers was in some areas so great that the white mercenary army did not even dare to attack. The indignation against the SPD, which openly supported the military and denounced the strike, was indescribable. To such an extent that on February 25 the councils - supported by the Communist delegates - decided to end the strike.  Unfortunately at just that very moment it was beginning in central Germany! The leadership was afraid that the workers would flood the mines or attack Social Democratic workers.[1] In fact, the workers demonstrated a high degree of discipline, with a large minority respecting the call to return to work -although not agreeing with it.

A second, gigantic mass strike broke out towards the end of March, lasting several weeks despite the repression of the Freikorps.

"It soon became clear that the Social Democratic Party and the Trade Union leaders had lost their influence over the masses. The power of the revolutionary movement of the months of February and March did not lie in the possession and use of military arms, but in the possibility of taking away the economic foundation of the bourgeois-socialist government through paralysing the most important areas of production (...) The enormous military mobilisation, the arming of the bourgeoisie, the brutality of the military, could not break this power, could not force the striking workers back to work."[2]

The second great centre of the mass strike was the region known as central Germany (Mitteldeutschland). There, the strike movement exploded in mid-February, not only in response to pauperisation and repression, but also in solidarity with the victims of repression in Berlin and with the strikes on the Rhine and Ruhr. As in the latter region, the movement drew its strength from being led by the workers' and soldiers' councils, where the Social Democrats were fast losing influence.

But whereas in the Ruhr area the employees in heavy industry dominated, here the movement engulfed not only miners, but almost every profession and branch of industry. For the first time since the beginning of the revolution, the railway workers joined in. This was of particular significance. One of the first measures of the Ebert government at the end of the war was to substantially increase wages on the railways. The bourgeoisie needed to ‘neutralise' this sector in order to be able to move its counter-revolutionary brigades from one end of Germany to the other. Now, for the first time, this possibility was put in question.

"Enraged to the point of madness"

No less significant was that the soldiers in the garrisons came out in support of the strikers. The National Assembly, which had fled from the Berlin workers, went to Weimar to hold its constitutive parliamentary session. It arrived in a midst of acute class struggle and a hostile soldiery, having to meet behind an artillery and machine gun barrier.

The selective occupation of cities by Freikorps provoked street fighting in Halle, Merseburg and Zeitz, explosions of the masses "enraged to the point of madness" as Richard Müller put it. As on the Ruhr, these military actions were unable to break the strike movement.

The call of the factory delegates for a general strike on February 24 was to reveal another enormously significant development. It was supported unanimously by all the delegates, including those from the SPD. In other words: Social Democracy was losing its control even over its own membership.

"From the very onset the strike spread to a maximum degree. A further intensification was not possible, unless through an armed insurrection, which the strikers rejected, and which appeared pointless. The only way to make the strike more effective would be through the workers in Berlin." (Müller, ibid. p146).

It was thus that the workers summoned the proletariat of Berlin to join, indeed to lead the movement which was flaming in central Germany and on Rhine and Ruhr.

And the workers of Berlin responded, as best they could, despite the defeat they had just suffered. There, the centre of gravity had been transformed from the streets to the mass assemblies. The debates which took place in the plants, offices and barracks produced a continuous shrinking of the influence of the SPD and the number of its delegates  in the workers councils. The attempts of Noske's Party to disarm the soldiers and liquidate their organisations only accelerated this process. A general assembly of the workers' councils in Berlin on February 28 called on the whole proletariat to defend its organisations and to prepare for struggle. The attempt of the SPD to prevent this resolution was foiled by its own delegates.

This assembly re-elected its action committee. The SPD lost its majority. At the next elections to this organ, April 19th, the KPD had almost as many delegates elected as the SPD. In the Berlin councils, the tide was turning in favour of the revolution.[3]

Realising that the proletariat could only triumph if led by a united, centralised organisation, mass agitation began in Berlin for the re-election of the workers' and soldiers' councils in the whole country, and for the calling of a new national congress of this organisation. Despite the hysterical opposition of the government and the SPD to this proposal, the soldiers' councils began to declare themselves in favour of this proposal. The Social Democrats played for time, fully aware of the practical difficulties of the hour in realising such plans.

But the movement in Berlin was confronted with another, very pressing question: The call for support from the workers in central Germany. The general assembly of the workers' councils of Berlin met on March 3 to decide on this question. The SPD, knowing that the nightmare of the January Week still haunted the proletariat of the capital, was determined to prevent a general strike. And indeed the workers hesitated at first. The revolutionaries, agitating for solidarity with central Germany, gradually turned the tide. Delegations from all the main plants of the city were sent to the assembly of the councils to inform it that the mass assemblies at the work places had already decided to down tools. It became clear that there, the Communists and Left Independents now had the majority of workers behind them.

The trauma of January

In Berlin too, the general strike was almost total. Work continued only in those plants which had been designated to do so by the workers' councils (fire brigade, water, electricity and gas supplies, health, food production). The SPD and its mouthpiece Vorwärts immediately denounced the strike, calling on those delegates who were party members to do likewise. The result: these delegates now declared themselves against the position of their own party. Moreover, the printers, who, under strong Social Democratic influence, had been among the few professions which had not joined the strike front, now did so - in protest against the attitude of the SPD. In this way, an important part of the hate campaigning of the counter-revolution was silenced.

Despite all these signs of ripening, the trauma of January proved fatal. The general strike in Berlin came too late, just when it was ending in central Germany. Even worse: The Communists, traumatised indeed by the January defeat, refused to participate in the strike leadership alongside Social Democrats. The unity of the strike front began to decompose. Division and demoralisation spread.

This was the moment for the Freikorps to invade Berlin. Drawing lessons from the January events, the workers' assembled in the factories instead of the streets. But instead of immediately attacking the workers, the Freikorps marched first against the garrisons and the soldiers' councils, to begin with against those regiments which had participated in suppressing the workers in January; those who enjoyed the least sympathy of the working population. Only afterwards did it turn on the proletariat. As in January, there were summary executions on the streets, revolutionaries were murdered (among them Leo Jogiches), corpses flung into the river Spree.  This time, the white terror was even more horrific than in January, claiming well over a thousand lives. The workers district of Lichtenberg, to the east of the city centre, was bombed by the air force.

Concerning the January-March struggles, Richard Müller wrote: "This was the most gigantic uprising of the German proletariat, of the workers, employees, civil servants and even parts of the petty bourgeois middle classes, on a scale never previously reached, and thereafter only once more attained, during the Kapp Putsch. The popular masses stood in general strike not only in the regions of Germany focused on here: in Saxony, in Baden and Bavaria, everywhere the waves of social revolution pounded against the walls of the capitalist production and property order. The working masses were striding along the path of the continuation of the political transformation of November 1918." (Müller ibid p161)

However:

"The curse of the January action still weighed on the revolutionary movement. Its pointless beginning and its tragic consequences were tearing the workers of Berlin asunder, so it took weeks of dogged work to render them capable of re-entering the struggle. If the January putsch had not taken place, the Berlin proletariat would have been able to come to the assistance of the combatants in Rhineland-Westphalia and in central Germany in good time. The revolution would have successfully been continued, and the new Germany would have been given a quite different political and economic face" (ibid p154).

This poses the question of whether the revolution could have triumphed, that we will return to in our next article.

Steinklopfer 7/2/09

A more complete version of this article appears in International Review 136 and is now online under the title ‘90 years ago: Revolution in Germany, Civil War, 1918-19' [7]

---

[1]1 On February 22 communist workers in Mülheim on the Ruhr attacked a public meeting of the SPD with machine guns.

[2] R.Müller History of the German Revolution: Civil War in Germany Vol. 3. P. 141, 142.

[3]3 In the first weeks of the revolution, the USP and the Spartakusbund, between them, only had a quarter of all delegates behind them. The SPD dominated massively. The party membership of the delegates voted in Berlin at the beginning of 1919 was as follows: February 28: USPD 305; SPD 271; KPD 99; Democrats:95.

April 19: USPD 312; SPD 164; KPD 103; Democrats 73. It should be noted that the KPD during this period could only operate in clandestinity, and that a considerable number of the USPD delegates in reality sympathised with the Communists and were soon to join their ranks.

Faced with the avalanche of attacks now raining down on the working class - unemployment, cuts in services, police repression - we are seeing the beginnings of a very widespread response from those under attack.

The December outbreak of open rebellion by students, workers and the unemployed all over Greece following a police murder was the most spectacular expression of this response, but it was preceded or accompanied by other revolts by young people in Italy, France, Germany, Lithuania and elsewhere.

One of the clearest signs that these were indeed movements of the working class and not a series of headless riots was the tendency towards self-organisation which they brought to the surface. In Greece, where the official trade union organisation, the GSEE, openly sided with the regime against the protestors, ‘insurgent workers' occupied the union HQ in Athens and turned it into a centre for holding general assemblies open to all students, workers, and unemployed. This is how the occupiers explained the reasons for their action:

We decided to occupy the building of GSEE

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

To propagate the idea of self-organization and solidarity in working places, struggle committees and collective grassroot procedures, abolishing the union bureaucracies"

 

The practise of using occupations as a basis for holding general assemblies was by no means restricted to this example. Following a vicious acid attack on a cleaning worker employed by the Athens metro, both the offices of the Athens metro and the local union HQ in Thessaloniki were taken over and used as a base for assemblies. The assembly held in the union building declared:

"Today we are occupying the HQ of the trade unions of Thessaloniki to oppose the oppression which takes the form of murder and terrorism against the workers...We appeal to all the workers to join this common struggle...the assembly, open to all occupying the union office, people coming from different political milieus, trade union members, students, immigrants and comrades from abroad adopted this join decision;

To continue the occupation;

To organise rallies in solidarity with Konstantina Kuneva

To organise actions to spread information and to raise awareness around the city

To organise a concert in the city centre to collect money for Konstantina".

This assembly made its opposition to the official trade unions very clear: "Nowhere in the platform of the trade unions is there any reference to the causes of inequality, poverty and hierarchical structures in society...The general confederations and the trade union centres in Greece are an intrinsic part of the regime in power; their rank and file members must turn their back on them and work towards the creation of an autonomous pole of struggle directed by themselves...if the workers take their struggles into their own hands and break with the logic of being represented by the bosses' accomplices, they will rediscover their confidence and thousands of them will fill the streets in the next round of strikes. The state and its thugs are murdering people.

Self-organisation! Struggles for social self-defence! Solidarity with immigrant workers and Konstanitina Kuneva".

The Athens Polytechnic, symbolic centre of pitched battles against the police state of the Colonels in 1973, was used in the same way: occupation and the holding of open assemblies, which insisted that decisions about the conduct of the struggle (including when to make a tactical retreat in the face of overwhelming state force) would be in their hands:

"The general assembly and the assembly alone will decide if and when we leave the university...the crucial point is that it's the people occupying the building and not the police who decide on the moment to quit.

By bringing the occupation of the Polytechnic School to an end after 18 days, we send our warmest solidarity to everyone who has been part of this revolt in different ways, not only in Greece but also in many countries of Europe, America, Asia and Oceania. For all those we have met and with whom we are going to stay together, fighting for the liberation of the prisoners of this revolt, and for its continuation until the world social liberation"

The closing words also show the internationalist spirit of the movement, which saw immigrant and Greek-born workers, students and unemployed fighting side by side, and which saw itself as part of a much wider international response to the open crisis of global capitalist society.

The idea of assemblies as an alternative to the dead hand of the trade unions also appeared on a smaller scale during a recent struggle by mental health workers in Alicante in Spain1. This mobilisation was provoked by the non-payment of wages by the local public authorities. The workers involved got together with patients and their families and organised in general assemblies which were not restricted to those most directly involved but were open to all workers. This was a direct consequence of the workers' rejection of any narrow, sectionalist attitude. As they put it in their leaflet: "We don't think that this struggle is ours alone. Our situation is the product of a situation of general crisis and bankruptcy on an international scale, as well as of the poor management of the public administration in particular. All of this is part of the general attack on the living conditions of the workers and the population in general".

We are publishing here a series of documents voted by the general assembly of AFEMA (Alicante Family Association for the Mentally Ill) workers:

For a general assembly on 27 November

We, the workers of AFEMA, have entered into struggle to defend our living conditions and for free, decent services

We know that this situation is a general problem for the whole working class which every day sees its living conditions under attack. We think that the only solution lies in the unity and extension of our struggles so that they become one combat. This is why we are calling for a general assembly of workers

We propose the following agenda, while remaining open to your proposals:

-            presentation and sharing of the particular situations of each enterprise or each comrade;

-            analysis of the general situation;

-            proposals for joint solidarity actions;

-            permanence of the assembly as a space for workers to come together;

-            etc

We hope to meet everyone on Thursday 27 November at 18.30 at the Loyola Centre

This assembly is open, we invite you to extend it to all workers and comrades

Platform of workers from the social and health services

NB: although this invitation has been sent to diverse political and trade union organisations, our approach is a unitary one, we see the working class as a whole which has to act together according to what's needed. This is why we think it is not the place for a confrontation of organisations or for the exposition of particular programmes.

 

 

Leaflet distributed by the workers

The administrations attack the rights of mental health users and workers

 

The users (people with mental health problems and their families) and the workers of AFEMA are also experiencing the crisis. Because of the disastrous management of mental health services by the public authorities for years, our situation today is frankly very difficult.

Like other associations, AFEMA is an NGO which runs publically subsidised services and centres. These are services for people with disabilities. The administrations have never paid much, they pay late and poorly, but today the situation has become scandalous.

The delays in payment and the absence of subsidies are threatening the existence of the already meagre resources allocated to these people, just as they threaten the workers with the loss of their jobs. We are already having a hard time getting our wages on a regular basis, with all the problems that leads to.

We have therefore decided to mobilise ourselves. We don't think that this struggle is ours alone. Our situation is the product of a situation of general crisis and bankruptcy on an international scale, as well as of the poor management of the public administration in particular. All of this is part of the general attack on the living conditions of the workers and the population in general.

This is why we think that our struggle is the struggle of everyone:

-            because of the danger of the disappearance of the social and health services needed by the population;

-            because of the repeated attacks on the living conditions of the workers

Poster drawn up by the workers

 

Users without resources, workers without wages!

Users and workers of AFEMA in struggle for decent and free services!

The administrations are no longer paying us and are neglecting the health services.

The users and their families are in danger of finding themselves without any resources.

We, the workers, aren't getting our wages and we are at risk of losing our jobs.

For a free, decent service for people with mental health problems.

For the rights of the workers and users of mental health services.

Support our mobilisations!

Wednesday the 19th at 19.00:

Information meeting open to members, families, friends, workers, professionals... Loyola Centre

meeting room

Friday 21 at 11.00:

Protest demonstration in front of the PROP building of the Rambla (Alicante)

Friday 28th

Demonstration in Valencia (to be confirmed)

Association of families and mental health patients in Alicante

Platform of workers from the social and health services

 

1. Since the 1970s there have been numerous examples of Spanish workers organising in general assemblies. In 1976 the workers of Vittoria, during a general strike, not only formed assemblies in the various workplaces but also elected a delegate assembly which more or less took over the running of the town. In Alicante itself, in 1977, a large movement of workers in the shoe industry also adopted this form of organisation, in open opposition to the trade unions: see https://libcom.org/history/reflections-shoe-industry-strike-assembly-movement-alicante-1977 [10]; and in Vigo in 2006 the steel workers held massive public assemblies to bring together the workers from a number of small steel factories and to open their struggle to other sectors of the working class: see https://en.internationalism.org/wr/295_vigo [11]

WR 7/2/09

"If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory) there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but as there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing."

John Maynard Keynes (General Theory (1936) bk. 3, ch. 1)

The IMF has declared that, of all the most developed economies, Britain's will be hit hardest by the recession.

This has provoked a backlash from some commentators, who are piqued at this evaluation of the adaptive capacities of the British economy. The IMF is probably correct, but at least one point that the commentators have made is true. Whereas the German bourgeoisie, for instance, are apt to admonish the undisciplined behaviour of countries, like Britain, that run a permanent deficit, the commentators point out that one's man's deficit is another man's surplus, so the German surplus is dependent on the lack of discipline of countries that buy goods without actually bothering to pay for them - or rather, that buy on credit.

The German economy is suffering from the contraction of global demand. Even more dramatic is the case of Japan. The main exporting companies in Japan are posting financial results that are unprecedented. Gordon Brown is right to insist that the crisis is global, that the fate of all countries is interconnected. But the IMF has noted the dependence of the British economy on the financial sector and judges that this will be enough to put Britain at or near the bottom of the league of performance of the major economies during the economic downturn.

We must put this in the context of the world economy because Britain no longer has the power to dictate to the rest of the world as it did for much of the nineteenth century. If London's capital markets were not used by the bourgeoisie of the whole world, if they did not perform any function for the bourgeoisie in other countries, then they could not still have the importance that they do at an international level. Therefore the question of the role of finance capital cannot be considered in isolation from the general features of the world economy. The most important point to understand is that the activities conducted by the bourgeoisie at the financial level, however exotic and fanciful some of the ‘products' of this ‘industry' may be, are part of the bourgeoisie's response to the ever-deepening crisis of decadent capitalism.

Finance manipulations: consequence not cause of the crisis of capital

Our article on the crisis in International Review 136 (now on ICConline) [16] points out that the explanations provided by the bourgeoisie for the present economic debacle lack historical depth and, by and large, get the explanation of the crisis back to front. In the typical media presentation we are told that the crisis began as a financial crisis (caused by the excesses of bankers over the last decade or so) and is spreading out into the general economy, causing a slump in demand and lay-offs in manufacturing and areas of the service sector that are not directly connected to the financial sector.

This is true in an empirical sense but it masks the fact that the crisis is fundamentally a crisis of overproduction - a form of crisis unknown to modes of production previous to capitalism. The excesses that have occurred in the sphere of finance are a response to this problem, not its fundamental cause. Although we can see how, in the end, the financial crisis can exacerbate the speed of the open crisis once it appears.

The constant extension of credit, overseen and approved of by the state, is based on the recycling of an excess of capital in money form generated above all by the states that are in surplus - China being the most famous example. It seems perverse for the Chinese to basically give back to the Americans a great part of the money they make from selling goods to America in the first place, thus financing a growth in the standard of living in the US (for the upper echelons of the population). But unless the surplus capital is recycled in some way, the debtor nations - like the US and Britain - would have no way to purchase yet more goods from the countries in surplus.

The addiction to finance capital

In the past both the US and Britain have been the dominant manufacturing countries in the world - in the case of Britain that is a long way back, but it is a key part of its history. It is precisely because of this history that the US and Britain have developed the most sophisticated financial sectors. Finance capital in both the US and Britain had, at a certain point of development, to assume a key role in the world economy and to develop mechanisms to allow the full development of international trade and investment.

As a result of this, both the US and Britain tend to act as beacons for the international economy - and this is typically reflected in the financial sphere. A very important example of this was the end of the years of economic expansion after the Second World War. This is the period that some continental commentators call the 30 Glorious Years, although the term has little currency in the Anglo-Saxon countries These years, though very successful in the terms of the bourgeoisie, were not really that ‘glorious', since they required a permanent intervention by the state apparatus to push along the economic expansion. Neither did they last for 30 years. Although relative prosperity did continue into the 70s, the end of the boom years was signalled quite precisely by the run on the British pound in the late sixties and by the US being forced off the gold standard in 1971. It is quite usual that the end of a period of economic history that appears stable on the surface is signalled by phenomena at the financial level. And it is also to be expected that the US and British economies would show the strain first since they have the leading role in international finance.

In the articles ‘Evolution of British imperialism' which we have recently reprinted from Bilan, the publication of the Italian communist left in the 1930s (see WR 312 [17], 313 [18]). it is shown that the weight of the financial sector in Britain was pivotal to the way the British bourgeoisie responded to the expression of the capitalist crisis after the First World War. In 1925 the British bourgeoisie took the decision to favour the financial sector over the needs of the relatively uncompetitive manufacturing sector of the economy:

"Benefiting from the ‘failure' of the first Labour government, which had been unable to solve the problems posed by the industrial bourgeoisie, the banks, following the coming to power of Baldwin, launched a vast ‘deflationary' offensive in 1925, with the aim of revaluing the Pound. The return to the gold standard was decreed in April of the same year. The antagonism between industrial capital and finance capital, which in Britain remained much more tenacious than in Germany, France or the USA, for the reasons we have indicated, was settled for a long time to the advantage of the banks."

The bourgeoisie in Britain has a great difficulty in envisioning economic solutions that do not give a preponderant weight to the financial sector.

In the period after the Second World War the British bourgeoisie tried to resuscitate the competitiveness of its manufacturing sector but failed, so it has had to resort for several decades now to relying on the financial sector and the services it offers to international capital as a source of profits to try and balance its books with the rest of the world (i.e. to finance its trade deficit).

What Bilan did not anticipate was that the US, having become the dominant power in the world, would eventually be forced into the same position. Bilan thought that this development of the priority of the finance sector in Britain was simply a manifestation of Britain's relative industrial decline. The British bourgeoisie are described as parasitic and accused of enjoying an inept and idle existence. There is nothing to disagree with here, fundamentally. But there is another, more serious insight in another passage:

"The structural particularities of finance capital constitute both a weakness and a strength: a weakness, because, due to its intimate links with the mechanisms of world trade, it suffers from their perturbations; a strength because, cut off from production, it retains a greater elasticity of action in periods of crisis."

The essence of the present period of the world crisis could hardly be better expressed. The Financial Times recently ran an article commenting on the latest conference at Davos. It observed that although the assembled leaders spent their time in denunciations of the US and its ‘inept' financiers for allowing the current situation to develop, they were also looking to the US to find the necessary ‘elasticity' to re-launch the world economy and revive the demand that would allow Germany, Japan and China to pour forth more products from their very efficient industrial systems. In reality that means a further plunge into the abyss of credit and fictitious capital which can only intensify the contradictions of the world economy. 

Hardin 5/2/9

This article is already available on-line here [21]

Within four days of his inauguration speech Barack Obama had authorised the bombing of targets in Pakistan. He had already advocated such attacks before US started the latest phase of its military campaign last July. Following an inaugural speech, in which he unambiguously declared to America's enemies "We will defeat you", he sanctioned the launching of missiles from Predator drones on two targets in Waziristan in which 22 people died. He has warned the US public that there will be an increase in American military casualties as he steps up actions in Afghanistan and Pakistan. US military strength in Afghanistan will be doubled to 60,000.

For Obama to confirm his commitment to the military core of American imperialism at the start of his reign is a warning to the rest of the world. For all that he spoke of ‘change' in his campaign, there is clear continuity with the Bush regime. America will continue to use its military power to defend its interests. In this the only thing that makes the US exceptional is the scale it can operate on. Every single capitalist state resorts to force to defend the interests of its ruling class. Whether it's Iran or North Korea developing missiles, China building an aircraft carrier, the Sri Lanka army sweeping across the north of the country, or any of the many factions fighting in the DR Congo, Sudan or Somalia - capitalism means war.  

Car 6/2/9

The ICC's section in Britain held its 18th Congress in November 2008.  Coincidentally the Congress was held on the same weekend as the G20 meeting in Washington, where the number one item on the agenda was also the world economic crisis: the credit crunch of 2007 was accelerating into the worst recession in decades, Iceland's banks had just collapsed and the governments of the most powerful countries, especially Britain and the USA, were organising huge rescue packages for theirs.

This open and profound crisis, unlike the Depression in the 1930s, is being experienced by an undefeated generation of proletarians, and in the last few years there have been clear signs of a working class response in the shape of strikes and demonstrations all over the world, while a tiny but growing politicised minority is advancing towards a communist understanding of the bleak perspective capitalism has to offer us today. Like the small furry animals scurrying about for food during the last days of the dinosaurs, these seemingly insignificant efforts have the potential for momentous developments in the future, in particular the development of class consciousness and its spread within the working class which is so vital for future revolutionary struggles. Today we can see a growth of discussion circles and small internationalist groups around the world from the Americas to the Philippines, as well as in countries where the ICC already has a presence. The ICC has responded to this new situation by taking up an old tradition of the workers' movement and inviting new internationalist groups to its last international congress and the congresses of our French section (see IR 130 and WR 318), and sympathisers to the congresses and national meetings of our other territorial sections. WR is no exception and our Congress last November benefited from the presence of 5 close sympathisers invited to the first day when we discussed general political questions, in addition to the delegations from other sections of the organisation, making it a real international meeting.

Our first discussion took up the activities of the organisation at an international level, in particular the discussions with internationalist groups emerging all over the world and the prospects for the expansion of the ICC into new regions. This discussion also covered the main discussions going on inside the ICC and the way we are approaching them. Readers can see expressions of the debate on the post war boom in IR 133 and 135, and our orientation texts on ethics and marxism in IR 127 and 128 and on the culture of debate in IR 131. There was agreement that more of these discussions need to be opened up outside the organisation.

In the discussion of the international situation we looked closely at the economic crisis, which has caused such panic in the bourgeoisie. Does the situation of Iceland mean there is a potential for the collapse of secondary countries? What is meant by the idea of the ‘collapse of capitalism' in general? The discussion affirmed that open crisis today cannot be seen in itself but has to be understood as the latest stage in a long dawn-out, historic crisis of capitalism. When we came to discuss the national situation, comrades drew on the contribution from Bilan in the 1930s (reprinted in WR 312 and 313) to show how British capitalism's reliance on finance capital increases its vulnerability to the crisis (this was at a time when the bourgeois media was still claiming that the country was in a relatively good position to face the recession).

 Obama's election, only a couple of weeks before the Congress, was recognised as a short-term victory for the ruling class, strengthening illusions in ‘change' and mobilising previously disaffected layers of the working class into the democratic circus. The new face that Obama gives to US imperialism is also an advantage at a time when the crisis is set to further intensify imperialist tensions.

Sympathisers' contributions were a real enrichment of all these discussions. Eddie's letter (see below), giving his comments on the Congress, show that it has also stimulated a lot of reflection in all the participants, both inside and outside the organisation.

 On the second day, the Congress looked at how to strengthen the organisation so that it can be up to the demands of the situation. In order to respond to the developments in the class struggle and the new groups and individuals wanting to find out about left communist positions, we have to deepen our own discussions and improve the centralisation both of our internal life and our external activities. Since centralisation is, as Bordiga says, a principle for the workers' movement it can only be strengthened in practise through a better understanding of its theoretical foundations.

WR 6/2/9

"I was very impressed with the depth of both discussions" (NM)

KT, a former member of the ICC, said we "can't overstress the importance of the ICC and within it of WR. It's been nearly two decades since I was at a congress. The situation has changed but also the organisation, the depth of references and the fraternal spirit, the desire to bring out differences in a spirit of inquiry. I wish the Congress success for the rest of its work".

 DG said: "First I would like to thank the ICC for inviting us to the Congress. This demonstrates that there is a real will to open itself up to the outside. The debates I have seen in the International Review are also examples of this. There has been a change in the organisation. This is having a definite effect on contacts, but also on those who are against the ICC... One of my old colleagues told me he has been reading the Decadence pamphlet online. He is making the effort... He thinks we need more accessible texts. This poses a challenge to the ICC."

Eddie wrote to us shortly after the congress:

"Dear Comrades,

I appreciated being invited to the Congress and welcome its very positive work. Through the discussions I got a sense of the challenges ahead for the class struggle in all its aspects and the necessity particularly for revolutionaries to remain patient and maintain a level course within deepening and wider activities. There were many elements raised in discussions, disagreements confronted openly, but mainly I thought nuances in understanding the development of the situation; how the crisis develops, how that relates to a proletarian response.

The importance of Britain as an experienced capitalist nation is and will be a factor in the development of the class struggle and this further underlines the role of the British section of the ICC.

The meeting and its preparation showed that there are many elements to the development of the economic crisis and a class response, a response that has to be seen first and foremost internationally, both within the two elements themselves and in relation to each other. There's no mechanical relationship between crisis and response and there are many possibilities. The sequence and speed of events are unpredictable and necessarily relative. But the expression of the crisis over this last year has been dramatic, fundamental and shaken the bourgeoisie to the core. I think, on a scale of things, that this is a more important development than 1989, in that its contradictions are being expressed in the citadels of capitalism around the same time...  What is clear is that the effects of the unfolding crisis on the working class are already profound. It appeared to me a couple of weeks ago that the bourgeoisie, at its highest levels, was afraid that the whole system, banks - including all accounts, trade, payments, bills, etc, was about to implode and collapse. That wouldn't have been useful for a deep working class response. But the expression and direction of the crisis and the bourgeoisie's overall lack of control over capitalism's contradictions (attenuated somewhat by state capitalism) indicates that events are unfolding at a more profound level: wage and social wage cuts, loss of housing, jobs, pensions being completely undermined, the very concept of a future under capitalism has to be posed more starkly for the working class..."

DG made some comments on the culture of debate in a discussion a few weeks later:

"Many comrades have read Lenin, who was often very withering, and this approach turns off the new generation. When I first wrote to the ICC it was about the polemic with the IBRP on the 1980s. The political content was spot on, but the tone was very negative. The reply to Aufheben is the same. There seems to be a change in tone [in the] Open Letter to the IBRP or the letter to Loren Goldner...There can be some organisations that look stable but internally are rotten (such as the German Social Democratic Party before 1914), whereas the Bolsheviks had many debates and divergences. It makes you wonder how they managed to lead a revolution! The discussions in the Bolsheviks showed the connection between discussions in the class and those in the party. It's similar to the ICC. When the class was quiescent the ICC was static. Now there is discussion within the class, this is reflected in the organisation. It shows the proletarian character of the ICC."

WR 7/2/09

Comrades of the ICC and World Revolution in particular want to express our sorrow that an old comrade of the left communist Workers' Voice group of the early 70s - Graeme Imray (whom contributors to Libcom may know by his pseudonym, Dave Graham) died, aged 58, at the end of 2008 after a short illness. We very much regret the passing of a comrade who was closely involved in the discussions between the international tendency that was the fore-runner of the ICC and the Liverpool-based Workers' Voice. We send our sincere condolences to his partner and his two sons. We remember Graeme with some affection, even though politically our paths diverged rather drastically, resulting in a 30-year separation between us. We nonetheless understand that Graeme was a militant of our class and indeed made a real contribution to the passing on of left communist positions, not least the reproduction of texts from the German Left and from the Workers' Dreadnought of Sylvia Pankhurst which were such a feature of the political evolution of Workers' Voice.

Graeme was indeed an expression of the wave of militants that appeared after 1968, passionate about participating in the struggles of our class, especially from 1972 onwards. Graeme attended the LSE in the late sixties and was radicalised by this experience. He also worked in the DHSS and helped to set up a London based Claimants' Union under the pseudonym "Sunshine Supermouth" in the early days of WV. Graeme moved on to work on the railways in the North West as a booking clerk and was a constant contributor to the Workers' Voice magazine, often under the pseudonym A Moss. WV' s development of communist positions, especially on the basis of their direct experience of the unions and the shop stewards' movement, was an important reference point for the whole international milieu and still bear reading today. They put "the flesh and bones" of reality on the discussions that were taking place, particularly during the international conferences (the phrase was used by a WV comrade writing a report of one of these conferences).

Most importantly it was Graeme's search for the clarity of the communist left that propelled him and WV to search out and discuss with the international milieu at that time. Graeme, along with another comrade of WV, travelled extensively on the continent to seek out and discuss with groups such as Daad en Gedacht, meeting and being very impressed by the Dutch council communist Cajo Brendel. WV as a group also relied heavily on Graeme's ability to translate from French and German to understand the development of the internationalist milieu.

Graeme made many contributions in the series of international conferences set up by the US group Internationalism. Although these conferences resulted in groups like Internationalism, Revolution Internationale and World Revolution moving closer together and forming the ICC, Workers' Voice followed a different trajectory. Despite a short-lived fusion with Revolutionary Perspectives to form the Communist Workers' Organisation in 1975, the Liverpool group soon split away and dissolved into local activity, influenced by councilist ideas which expressed a distrust of the project of forming a centralised revolutionary organisation. Graeme did not abandon political activity however, and was in contact with groups like the Anarchist Federation and the councilist group Subversion in the 80s and 90s. In particular, he played an active role in the long-running dockers' strike of the mid-90s. A detailed analysis of this dispute, written by Graeme, can be found at libcom.org/library/dockworkers-disputer-dave-graham-1 [28]. In our view, Graeme's immersion in the support campaign around this struggle represented a retreat from the clarity about ‘rank and file' trade unionism which he had reached in the 70s, but the article is nonetheless a serious contribution to the debate about the significance of this and similar long-drawn out strikes.

Graeme worked for many years as a teacher in Liverpool and the comments published on his school's website after his death show that he was an inspiring teacher who was extremely well-liked and respected by his colleagues and pupils.

The ICC certainly has profound differences with the direction that many comrades from the old Workers Voice took after our initial discussions, in particular on the question of working within a union framework (see also our obituary for comrade Chad, another old comrade of WV) but we remember our own and we salute the memory of an internationalist communist - comrade Graeme.

Melmoth 7/2/09 

Gaza is still being bombed and the Hamas rockets are still being fired, showing that nothing has been solved by this brutal, one-sided war: over 1300 dead, mostly civilians and foot-soldiers, thousands more wounded and traumatised; over 20,000 houses partly or totally destroyed.

The Israeli Blitzkrieg also destroyed the remaining weak infrastructure, power, water and sewage plants as well as 35-60% of the remaining agricultural industry. The latter was already extremely weak from over two years of economic siege by Israel and its buffer zone being extended into Gaza by up to a kilometre. Livestock, orchards, schools, offices, factories bombed and bulldozed; and in a fair summing up of the Israeli action, phosphorus bombs deliberately dropped on pallets of UN relief food in order that it would burn for days. "An eye for an eyelash", in the words of Avi Shlaim, ex-Israeli soldier and now professor of international relations at Oxford University. And after all this death, destruction and contamination Hamas still proclaims a "victory", while Palestinians remain in misery and squalor, denied any rebuilding materials by the Israeli blockade.

The rationale, if one can call it that, for Israel to unleash its dogs of war on Gaza, is that civilians allowed Hamas into government and they must pay the price for it. This is the same argument used by the 7/7 London suicide bombers, terrorists everywhere, states like Sri Lanka at the moment and by the British and American states to justify the bombing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the death toll in Gaza is nothing compared to the millions of Africans killed around the Great Lakes during the last 16 years through inter-imperialist war, the pictures of the suffering in Gaza bring home the horrors of the capitalist drive to war, the breakdown of the Geneva Convention, so-called ‘humanitarianism' and UN ‘protection', and the fact that, entirely contrary to the sickening hypocrisy and spin, civilians are the targets. What it also brings home is the complete lie about peace talks, these only being a prelude to ever more wars, barbarity and disintegration.

Imperialist manoeuvres behind the war

This war arose from a deliberate provocation by Israel, planned way back in the early part of last year when it set up its sinister National Information Directorate, and implemented by its breaking of the cease-fire that Hamas had observed since last June. The Israeli state could have cut a deal with Hamas (it did, but broke it) in order to stop the rockets, but it has not only maintained an impoverished ghetto, an open-air prison in Gaza - it even stepped up its three year blockade after the June 2008 Egyptian-backed cease-fire, further decreasing supplies of food, fuel, water treatment and sanitation, medical supplies and chances of work, thus increasing the influence of the Hamas clique with its ideology of ‘resistance'.

Before Obama took over the US presidency, Israel wanted to weaken Hamas (and therefore its backers Syria and Iran) before the new administration was in place and adopting a different, more multilateral approach. More than this, the war has to be put in the context of the development of imperialism in this region. The Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in August 2005 was presented as a step towards peace. But this retreat was nothing but a strategy for Israeli imperialism, giving up this tiny unstrategic territory and the expense of protecting its few settlers while it prepares for wider warfare. Israel destroyed everything before it left Gaza and left Hamas and Fatah to fight over the remains. The more important stake for Israeli imperialism, the front line with Syria and Iran, is much more the West Bank. Here the British, as imperialist allies of Israel, have been at the forefront in building up the repressive forces of Fatah through training, funding, arms and its "special services" developed from its experiences in Ireland and elsewhere. Britain's military and diplomatic activity helps secure the West Bank against any possible Hamas intrusion, and thus the growing influence of Iran and Syria. In practice this means backing the development of a ‘Greater Israel.

Peace is not a prospect

The prospects for even an uneasy peace in the region are grim to non-existent. Iran has underlined its nuclear ambitions with a successful satellite launch. Obama has already shown that he will intensify the Bush administration's war in Afghanistan and have mainly military ‘solutions' to instability in the Middle East. Diplomatic moves around Middle East are equally unpromising. The proposed Egyptian cease-fire for Gaza was ignored by Israel and the US. At the Arab League meeting on January 19 there were reports that Egypt and Saudi Arabia fell out with each other and the Saudi delegation even fell out with itself. Tehran has been strengthened by this war, as has the whole of the so-called ‘resistance'.

Israel's destruction of Gaza has been openly supported by the new US administration. US imperialism needs its Israeli ally more than ever now. Arabic-speaking George Mitchell, who sorted out US interests in Ireland, has been sent to the region. There is speculation on whether he will talk to Hamas. Beyond the speculation is the certainty that the misery of the Palestinian masses will continue and that war is always imminent. Long before the Israeli state existed the Middle East was a battleground for the major, rival imperialisms,like the Balkans, a running sore. This can only get worse.  

Baboon 4/2/9

Those attending the demonstrations against the recent massacres in Gaza, because they wanted to express their solidarity with the Palestinian people or with humanity in general, needed more than a warm coat, hat and scarf to participate. A strong constitution was also required to stomach what turned out to be an orgy of nationalism.

Alongside bloodied dolls and gory photos depicting the murdered children of Gaza, banners equating Nazism with Israel, and chants in defence of Hamas and the Palestinian ‘state' were flags, thousands of them, big and small, representing every bourgeois faction involved in the conflict and many that aren't. Even the Union Jack was present on banners proclaiming ‘Brits for Palestine'.

Despite the bourgeoisie's claims about the supposed diversity and humanitarianism of these demos, these displays of nationalism show that demonstrations like these are never the peace rallies they claim to be. They are a call to arms, a rallying point in defence of the nation state and against the working class organising for its own interests.

Nowhere is the pro-war stance clearer than with the leftist groups that never fail to choose one imperialist camp over another. Such groups offer their ‘unique' insights on the struggle, all of which, effectively, mean the defence of the ‘lesser evil'. Workers are required to choose a side and support, sometimes ‘critically', sometimes not, the ‘oppressed' against the ‘oppressor'.

For the Spartacist League this requires some Orwellian doublethink: "it is vital for the international proletariat to stand for the military defence of Hamas against Israel without giving that reactionary Islamic fundamentalist outfit any political support" (Workers Vanguard No 928). The SWP are less convoluted in their support for Hamas: "resistance to occupation and to collective punishment is not a crime - it is a right. Hamas was democratically elected and is the voice of an oppressed people" (Socialist Worker No 2135).

Even those on the left who say that there is no national solution to the conflict echo the same basic sentiments. The Socialist Equality Party may recognise that the solution to the conflict "is inseparably bound up with the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism all over the world" but still state that "it is necessary to defend Hamas against the assassination of its leaders and the vilification of its supporters as terrorists" (wsws.org).

Leftist groups distort the real meaning of internationalism. Solidarity with the dispossessed around the world doesn't mean supporting the weaker nation against the stronger. It means rejecting the myth of the lesser evil and developing the class struggle against all nations, all exploiters, big and small. This is why, although still a minority, internationalists must continue to be present at these demonstrations to defend a real perspective for the future, a communist perspective that goes beyond the stifling bonds of the nation.  

Kino 5/2/9

This article is available as a leaflet here [38] to download and distribute.

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The walk-outs and demonstrations by workers in oil refineries and power stations over the question of unemployment show the depth of anger in the working class faced with the tidal wave of redundancies brought about by the economic crisis.

This wave of lay-offs and short-time working is not confined to Britain but is engulfing the globe. From the USA to China, from western Europe to Russia, no workers' job is safe; and even when they have work, wages are being cut and working conditions worsened.

But workers around the world are showing their unwillingness to accept these attacks: there are daily strikes and demonstrations in China; at the end of January 2.5 million workers in France struck in protest about unemployment; students and young workers in Italy, France, Germany and above all Greece have been out on the streets demonstrating their rage against a society which offers them no future. The anger of the workers in the refineries is not specific to Britain but part of an international response to the deepening economic disaster.

Nationalism leads to a dead-end

However, the main slogan raised in the energy strikes  -  "British jobs for British workers" -  can only lead the workers into a complete dead end.

The threat to the jobs of workers in the power industry or anywhere else does not come from a ship-load of Italian and Portuguese workers who are being used by a network of British, US, and Italian firms to cheapen labour costs. Capitalism doesn't give a jot about the nationality of those it exploits. It only cares about how much profit it can extract from them. But it is more than happy when workers are set against each other, when they are divided up into competing national groups. The idea of "British jobs for British workers" is directly opposed to the ability of workers to defend themselves. This is because they can only stand up for their interests if their struggles extend as widely as possible and bring all workers, regardless of nationality, into a common resistance against their exploiters. Workers in the UK have no interests in common with British bosses and the British state and everything in common with so-called ‘foreign' workers, who face the same threat of unemployment and poverty because the crisis of capitalism is a world-wide crisis. 

Trade unions peddle the nationalist delusion

The main force pushing the nationalist delusion in this conflict has been the Unite and GMB trade unions who have taken up Gordon Brown's slogan - itself filched from the British National Party - and placed it at the centre of the movement. This is not the first time the unions have tried to peddle the "British jobs for British workers" line. Last year building workers on a construction site at a power plant in Plymouth were laid off by the contractor. Other workers walked out in solidarity with their comrades. The union tried to argue that workers from Poland on the site were taking "British" jobs. This rang very hollow when these Polish workers joined the strike. The union which had protested so loudly about British workers being laid off then made a deal with the bosses to get the striking workers back to work and to leave the laid-off workers unemployed.

The media have also played a big part in spreading the nationalist message. Normally they are very quiet when workers take unofficial action or engage in illegal solidarity strikes, but they have been giving maximum publicity to this conflict, constantly focussing on the "British" placards and slogans.

Although there's no denying that the workers in the oil refineries and power stations have swallowed the nationalist bait to some extent, reality is much more complex, as can be seen from this statement by an unemployed worker protesting outside a Welsh power station: "I was laid off as a stevedore two weeks ago. I've worked in Cardiff and Barry Docks for 11 years and I've come here today hoping that we can shake the government up. I think the whole country should go on strike as we're losing all British industry. But I've got nothing against foreign workers. I can't blame them for going where the work is." (The Guardian On-line 20.1.2009). Other workers in the industry have themselves made the point that thousands of oil and construction workers from Britain are currently working abroad. 

The future is the international class struggle

In the face of an economic crisis of devastating proportions, it is not surprising that workers will find it difficult to find the most effective way of defending themselves. The energy workers have shown a real desire to organise themselves, spread the struggle and demonstrate in support of comrades in other plants and other parts of the country, but the nationalist slogan they have adopted is going to be used against the whole working class and its ability to unite. 

The ruling class has no solution to this crisis, a crisis of overproduction which has been gathering pace for decades. It can no longer conjure it away with further injections of credit - the resulting mountain of debt is obviously part of the problem. And closing each country up behind protectionist barriers - which is the logic of "British jobs for British workers" - was already shown in the 1930s to be a way of sharpening competition between nation states and dragging workers off to war.

The working class has no immediate or local solutions to the economic catastrophe. But it can defend itself against the attempts of capitalism to make it pay for the crisis. And by uniting in self-defence, across all divisions and borders, it can start to discover that it has a historic answer to the collapse of capitalism: an international revolution and a new world society based on human solidarity and not capitalist profit.   

International Communist Current 31.1.09