The avalanche of unemployment across the world is unprecedented since the 1930s Depression.

In the USA, unemployment has officially gone up to 8.1%, the highest level since 1983. In the UK it's gone up to 6.3%. In France and Spain recently there have been some of the highest monthly increases since records began: Spain now has the highest rate of unemployment in the EU - 13.9% or 3.2 million. In former economic powerhouses the picture is no different. In Germany the jobless rate is 7.8%; in Japan (which has already been in recession for some years) the unemployment rate jumped to 4.4% last November, the biggest increase for almost 42 years. In ‘booming' China, the official rate is very similar, 4.2%.

These bland figures don't tell us that much in themselves:

- in terms of the real number of unemployed. In Britain, the official number of unemployed is around 1.9 million, but it is well known that these are ‘massaged' figures which deliberately fail to tell us about all the workers who have simply given up looking for work; those who are taking sick benefits rather than the dole; those who are forced to take precarious and low paid jobs, sometimes more than one at a time...

- or in terms of the real, day-to-day sufferings of the unemployed and their families, and the brutal increases in exploitation that all this implies for those ‘privileged' enough to keep their jobs.

We are facing a global unemployment pandemic, and the prognosis, as more and more of the bourgeoisie's economic experts admit, is not one of a short ‘downturn' followed by a booming job market, but of a long, painful slide into an economic slump comparable in scale to that of the 1930s.

Is resistance futile?

Faced with the factory, shop or office simply shutting its doors, fighting back seems, at first sight, to be hopeless. And when you're thrown onto the dole, you can get demoralised by the sense of isolation and the daily grind of finding enough to live on.

Is there any solution, or are we facing the prospect of becoming a desperate mass like the ancient ‘proletariat' of Rome, which was kept alive by state handouts of bread and kept diverted by state-sponsored circuses?

Is the class struggle going to be undermined by the economic crisis itself?

Some argue that it is pointless to expect a reaction from a working class that is anyway losing its sense of identity and its traditions of struggle. They say that the best we can hope for is a more effective policy from the ruling class: a Keynesian ‘New Deal' based on state intervention, or, if you listen to extreme left groups like the Trotskyists, a more radical programme of nationalisations spiced up with a bit of ‘workers' control'.

Crisis brings clarity

But the crisis and the surge in unemployment don't only bring despair and hopelessness. They also bring clarity: they undermine all the bourgeoisie's propaganda about how well capitalism functions and how, if we just work hard enough or save carefully enough, we can have everything we need. We've worked, we've saved, we've made sacrifices, sometimes even accepting wage cuts to keep the firm going, like the £50 a week cut accepted at construction equipment firm JCB last October when they went on a four-day week. Yet the plants still close, and the companies go under.

The crisis also makes a mockery of all the claims that this or that country is doing well and even offers a way out of the crisis. For years we have been told that the ‘leaner, meaner' British economy is stronger than it has ever been, and now we are finding out that its policy of deindustrialisation and reliance on the financial sector is making it one of the world's most vulnerable economies faced with the current financial storms. We were also told that the Chinese and Indian economies, with their ferocious rates of exploitation, could operate as the locomotives pulling the world economy out of the mire. And now we learn that they too are sinking, which is hardly surprising that their economies are geared to cheap exports to the west, which is the epicentre of the world recession. 

And above all, the crisis demonstrates that the capitalist system, which has for so long arrogantly claimed to be the only one that could possibly work, does not work at all, that producing for the market brings with it the saturation of the market, that producing for profit brings about a fall in the rate of profit, that the whole anarchic mess can no longer serve the needs of humanity. Because there is no reason for people to be thrown out of work, for factories to close, for welfare services to be cut, except that these measures are dictated by production for profit rather than production for need. The crisis therefore can provide the most powerful evidence that a new society is both possible and vitally necessary if human beings are to feed, clothe and house themselves and live a really human life.

From self-defence to revolution

But this new society will not simply drop out of the clouds. We are not talking about a new religion of change from on high, whether that change comes from God or Barack Obama. We are talking about a change that needs to be fought for, organised for, a change that requires an open challenge to the present world system and those who run it - in short, a social revolution.

A social revolution can only be made by those ‘below', those who have least to gain from the preservation of the existing order. But those below will never advance towards making a revolution unless they forge themselves into a force that is capable of defending itself today, of fighting against every encroachment made by the capitalist system - every factory closure, every benefit cut, every wage reduction, every attempt of the bosses and the state to repress this resistance and victimise those who take part in it. 

How can we fight back?

Only by starting from the fundamental proletarian principle that an attack on one is an attack on all. To fight against all these attacks, it is necessary to build up a balance of forces in our favour; and this can only be done if we try to spread our struggles as widely as possible. If one workplace closes, or hundreds of workers are cut from its workforce, those faced with losing their jobs need to appeal to those still at work or working in nearby or linked workplaces and draw them into the struggle, arguing that ‘if it's us today, it will be you tomorrow'. If the workers remain isolated outside the gates of the workplace in question, or even if they occupy it and just sit tight, their isolation will eventually wear them down. But if they spread the response to other workers, if they organise mass meetings and demonstrations, they can force the bosses and the state to take notice, and sometimes to shelve their redundancy plans or moderate their attacks. We caught a clear glimpse of the ability of the working class to do this in the recent oil refinery strikes. Ignoring all the rigmarole of the trade union/legal rule book, hundreds of workers walked out on the spot in solidarity with other strikers, held mass pickets and discussed in general meetings where decisions about the conduct of the strikes were taken.

Neither are the unemployed condemned to remain locked up at home. In the 1930s and again in the 1980s, unemployed workers formed their own committees to oppose evictions, to demand increased benefits, and to join in with the struggles of the employed workers. In the oil refinery strikes, many unemployed construction workers joined the pickets and mass meetings. In Greece at the end of last year, employed and unemployed workers fought side by side in the street demonstrations, and occupied public buildings (including the headquarters of the official trade union federation) to call for general assemblies open to all proletarians.

Of course there is no cast-iron guarantee that such struggles will win their demands; and in any case, sooner rather than later the pressure of the crisis will force the ruling class to renew and increase their attacks. But it is through such struggles that the working class can reassert its dignity, rediscover its identity, become more and more conscious of its power - a power that can both paralyse the machinery of capitalism and create the foundations for a new society where everyone can work together for the satisfaction of humanity's needs.  

WR 7/3/9

As the wave of unofficial solidarity strikes spread from the Lindsey oil refinery to other refineries, power stations, gas and electricity plants, a gas terminal, steel and chemical works, the media ensured that the ‘British jobs for British workers' slogan was mentioned at every opportunity, regardless of the fact that it wasn't actually one of the workers' demands.

This wasn't a nationalist movement but one of the most important working class struggles in recent years. However, the weight of nationalist illusions was undeniable, and it was essential for revolutionaries to oppose these illusions without any compromise. Indeed it's only internationalists that can mount an effective opposition to nationalism, in particular through the defence of international working class unity.

Leftists who denounced the strikes

Groups of the so-called ‘revolutionary' left, in particular the Trotskyists, are in no position to criticise nationalism with their defence of national ‘liberation', nationalisation and, fundamentally, plans for national capital. Yet, hypocritically, but unsurprisingly, some leftist groups insisted that the short-lived movement only had a nationalist dynamic. Workers Vanguard (13/2/9) headlined "Down with reactionary strikes against foreign workers!" Workers Power (February 2009) "unreservedly" opposed the strikes ("No to the nationalist strikes!") The World Socialist Web Site (2/2/9) agreed, "British unions back reactionary strikes against foreign workers."

The WSWS cited as evidence the British National Party hailing the action as "a great day for British nationalism." It is unambiguous on where it thinks workers should focus their attention: "The primary and over-riding concern of working people everywhere must be to oppose the spread of nationalism, chauvinism and racism."

These particular leftist groups also blamed the unions for their role in recent events. WV said "The responsibility for this social-chauvinist crusade lies with the Labourite leadership of the Unite and GMB trade unions." For the WSWS "legitimate grievances and fears" were "being manipulated by the union bureaucracy for the most reactionary ends". WP thought "The unions should have been giving a militant lead over the last year."

Yet despite these criticisms, and all the other evidence of how the unions act against workers' struggles, the leftists still proposed the unions as the guardian of workers' interests. "Unions must defend immigrant workers!" demanded WV. WP thought that the TUC and the big unions could launch "a militant campaign to defend every job" and call "a nationwide general strike and mass demonstration". At Lindsey the shop stewards said that workers should keep to the law on strikes. The workers ignored this advice and walked out. They have first hand experience of the unions' attitude to striking workers.

In this respect it's useful to turn to the approach of the Socialist Workers Party. It issued many warnings about the strikes without formally stating its opposition. Saying "these strikes are based around the wrong slogans and target the wrong people" (30/1/9 online only) it declared that "Those who urge on these strikes are playing with fire." Having warned of the threat posed by right-wing ideas it said that "everyone should be organising in a united way to pressure the union leaders to fight. And if the union leaders won't fight then workers will have to organise the resistance themselves."

The logic of this is hard to follow. If workers are organising themselves, why would they need to put pressure on union leaders? To do what? The illegal, unofficial strikes showed what workers are prepared to do without getting union approval. A subsequent Socialist Worker article (7/2/9) acknowledged that the strikes "have shown that unofficial strike action is an effective way to fight" but asked the reader to consider "how effective it would have been if trade unions had led such walkouts." In general the answer to such a consideration is ‘much less effective' and ‘doomed to failure'.

The SWP, like the other groups already mentioned, poses as the partisan of struggle out of the control of the ‘bureaucratic' unions, only to defend the union struggle as the only viable prospect. It's like Workers Power describing the strikes as the "first sign of a militant fightback against the effects of the recession" and "workers' first serious rebellion in this new period of conflict" ... while admitting it's against them.

Beware of leftist ‘supporters'

While the strikes' opponents portrayed them as motivated by nationalism, their ‘supporters' put everything in the framework of the trade unions. The Socialist Party is particularly interesting in this respect because one of its members, Keith Gibson, was on the Lindsey strike committee.

In an editorial in The Socialist (4/2/9) it said "No workers' movement is ‘chemically pure'. Elements of confusion, and even some reactionary ideas, can exist, and have done in these strikes. However, fundamentally this struggle is aimed against the ‘race to the bottom', at maintaining trade union-organised conditions and wages on these huge building sites." An SP leaflet said that the slogan of the struggle should be "Trade union jobs, pay and conditions for all workers".

Millions of workers who are in jobs where the pay and conditions have been agreed by the unions will know what this means in practice. The ‘negotiations' between unions and employers establish the conditions of workers' exploitation and the level of their wages. It is because of such conditions that workers struggle in the first place. Yet the SP trumpets the unions as the only force that can safeguard workers' interests.

Some of the specific demands of the Lindsey strike committee had initially been put forward by the SP. The SP wanted all workers to be covered by a national agreement, which obviously would boost the role of the union. It wanted "all immigrant labour to be unionised", that is, to extend the level of union control. It was for "union-controlled registering of unemployed and local skilled union members". Apart from smuggling in the idea of ‘local' workers, the SP claimed that "What the Lindsey strikers were demanding quite correctly is a form of pre-entry closed shop. That means that if the contractors on site need more labour then they have to go to the union for this labour from its unemployed register. In other words you have to be in the union to be on the register." This obviously strengthens the role of the union, but does nothing for workers and their struggles.

The SP made great claims about what the shop stewards will now be able to do. "In a major breakthrough, part of the deal allows for the shop stewards to check that the jobs filled by the Italian and Portuguese workers are on the same conditions as the local workers." In addition "Built into the deal is that the shop stewards on the site will be able to keep the Italian company in check by regular liaison meetings." Far from being kept ‘in check', companies that have ‘regular liaison meetings' with union officials (at any level) are more aware of what's going on in the workforce and therefore more able (in conjunction with the unions) to cope with expressions of discontent and undermine the potential of any struggle.

The SP claims to have been an indispensable part of the recent movement. It knows that others "dismissed the strike as reactionary, racist or xenophobic", but says that "If the Socialist Party had not participated actively in the dispute, there were dangers that such attitudes could have gained strength." In a meeting where Keith Gibson spoke, according to a report by the commune (14/2/9), he apparently said that "there were nationalist elements in the movement - arising spontaneously from the vacuum of union direction." This is a familiar refrain, the implication that ‘spontaneously' workers are ‘nationalist' and that they need leftists and unions to prevent them from going astray. In reality the initial strike and the strikes in solidarity showed what workers can do when they don't put their faith in the unions or their leftist supporters.   

Car 28/2/9

The media is currently dominated by the campaign about incompetent bankers and their undeserved bonuses, on the one hand, and the beginning of ‘quantitative easing' on the other.

The fact that the bourgeoisie seems incapable of hiring people who actually know how to run banks is not an irrelevance and, indeed, has intrinsic interest as an expression of the crisis. However, the main reason for the concentration on the remuneration of undeserving bankers is to distract from the seriously bad news that is accumulating about the world economy, and to give the impression that the state has a workable strategy for dealing with the credit crisis and the recession.

Here we will reverse the order of approach. We will look first at the seriously bad news on the economic front, and that will give us a correct framework within which to discuss the phenomenon of errant bankers and to address the question of ‘quantitative easing'.

International dimension of the crisis

The world economy continues to deteriorate at great speed. For example, in the last month, the recognition by the bourgeoisie that the Asian economies, in particular China and India, are completely caught up in the downward spiral. At one time the bourgeoisie were putting forward the idea that the Asian economies would ‘decouple' from the western economies, in the hope that the dynamic built up there in the previous decade would carry on and offset, to some extent, the decline in the western economies. The bourgeoisie abandoned that rather hopeful vision some time ago, but they still thought that there would be some independent economic life in Asia in the sense that trade between the Asian nations would hold up. Since that appears not to be happening the bourgeoisie have been forced to the realisation that much of this trade was the logistics of manufacturing (Korea, say, supplying parts to China or Japan) where the ultimate destination of the goods was the western market. Overall the speed of contraction of world trade has taken the bourgeoisie by surprise. They are right to think that this is of exceptional importance, since it provides the most direct measure of the speed and scale of contraction of the global economy.

Response of the British bourgeoisie

The British bourgeoisie have a particularly acute sense of the fact that the performance of their own economy is tied to the performance of the world economy because of the economic history of Britain, with its overdeveloped financial sector (we explored this in the last issue of the paper [15]). This is reflected in Mr. Brown's search for a united response from the ‘world community' and his focus on his recent visit to the US and on the upcoming G20 summit. The G20 meeting will include many more countries in the discussions than the usual meetings of the G8 countries.

The world bourgeoisie have, up to now, experienced considerable success in managing the economic crisis that started in the late 60s and was clearly apparent by the mid 70s. However, they have only been managing the crisis, not overcoming it - despite, for instance, Mr. Brown's affirmations over the last decade of the ‘end to boom and bust'. The bourgeoisie now have to face the reality of the situation rather more squarely. It is predicted now that the British economy will contract by perhaps 5% this year and 2% more during 2010, and firms of all types and descriptions are battening down the hatches, reducing their expectations, trying to clean up their balance sheets and laying off workers. There are a very few counter-examples, such as fast food firms, but these examples are understood to be an expression of the recession rather than going in the opposite direction.

Furthermore the Bank of England seems to accept the very negative evaluations being given of the prospects for the recession and has finally initiated a policy of ‘quantitative easing' (printing money). Some of the bourgeoisie's experts have been saying for some time that the Bank should take this route and would have been happier to see it happen earlier. On the other hand many experts are not at all confident that the process will do anything to rectify the situation since the Bank of Japan has pursued the same policy for a sustained period without it having much appreciable effect. And the open printing of money always brings with it the real threat of devaluing the currency and unleashing powerful inflationary tendencies.

Mass unemployment - a fundamental sign of the crisis

The recession will accentuate phenomena that are already clearly established as the result of the long term decline that has taken place since the end of the post-war period of relative prosperity and sustained growth. Most important is the phenomenon of mass unemployment that was hardly dented even by the superficial success of the 10 year period prior to the credit crunch. The bourgeoisie like to blame this either on the unemployed themselves or the ineffectiveness of their own bureaucratic schemes for dealing with the situation. The one thing that they will not do is accept (at least in public statements) that unemployment is an expression of economic reality.

For example, the London Evening Standard on February 20th summarised an article originally written for The Times:

"A devastating critique of Labour's flagship New Deal for the unemployed has branded it an ‘expensive failure'.

Frank Field, the Labour MP and former minister for welfare reform, said the jobs scheme and related tax credits had cost £75 billion since 1997 yet failed, even at the height of the boom, to produce results.

‘The results are derisory', he said, adding that in a decade the number of people doing no work had fallen just 400,000 from 5.7 million. Yet at the same time the number or young people not in work or education had actually gone up. Labour's New Deal incorporates a series of schemes that compel the unemployed to take training, work places or community work...

The Labour veteran said that only a third of young people held a job for more than 13 weeks after being on the New Deal - even during the boom. The rest returned to living on benefits....

Many youngsters would stay on benefits for life unless the system was reformed, said Mr Field. ‘The recession calls for a totally new programme of welfare reform', he said."

Since the recession will add hundreds of thousands and probably millions to the total of the unemployed it is difficult to see how a ‘programme' can be set up that will deal with the situation, given the balance sheet drawn up by Mr Field of the operation of the New Deal scheme during the so-called ‘boom' period. What he really shows is that we are in a period in which the bourgeoisie can only speak of ‘boom' periods at the expense of ‘overlooking' uncomfortable realities like the real scale of unemployment. And, having shown the futility of such schemes, he can only put forward as a ‘solution' ‘a totally new programme of welfare reform' - in other words another austerity ‘initiative'.

Whether or not prominent members of the bourgeoisie can convince themselves that such schemes can somehow miraculously ‘deal with' the phenomenon of unemployment, the reality is that unemployment is a fundamental expression of the crisis.

Marx noted this in the mid-19th century. In Capital (Volume 1, Chapter 25), he wrote:

"The life of modern industry becomes a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, overproduction, crisis and stagnation. The uncertainty and instability to which machinery subjects the employment, and consequently the conditions of existence, of the operatives, become normal, owing to these periodic changes of the industrial cycle."

So it is nothing new in itself that the lives of the workers - or ‘operatives' - are afflicted by unemployment. But Marx was writing in a period when the industrial cycle - Brown's ‘boom and bust' - was a reality: crises of overproduction were alleviated by what Marx called "expanding the outlying fields of production", penetrating into new economic regions of the globe, and during the resulting phase of growth the army of the unemployed could be considerably reduced. This has not been the case for most of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Great Depression of the 1930s and the subsequent world war, the long drawn-out crisis since the late 60s, the menace of a new depression today, all reveal a tendency for the crisis to become permanent and to push capitalism towards disaster and self-destruction. This is why so many young people, as Mr. Field's exposition so eloquently says, have extremely little expectation of ever becoming ‘operatives'.

Errant bankers are an expression of capitalist decomposition

As we said in our last article, the financial manoeuvrings of the bourgeoisie that have characterised the last decade are not the cause of the crisis but part of the bourgeoisie's response to the growing bankruptcy of capitalism. Since the crisis is so deep and has gone on so long, the fabric of capitalist society is collapsing. This is expressed at the highest levels of the bourgeois class, and the behaviour of the financial engineers of various hues (including bankers, certainly) is an expression of this. It has now become very tangible, given that the crisis in finance and banking have in the end assuredly deepened the crisis of the ‘real economy', that the expedients taken up by the bourgeoisie to ameliorate the crisis rebound with ever greater certainty on the heads of the bourgeoisie themselves. But there is also an irrational element here which is characteristic of a society in decomposition. It lies in the fact that that the bankers (in particular) have ceased to have any sense of responsibility to the institutions that they serve. That may not seem perverse, since these institutions are not laudable. But their own futures were bound up with the future of the institutions they served. Very many of them are being laid off in the current cut backs in the banks and other institutions. Such a fundamental failure to have regard to the future consequences of their actions speaks of a class that has a basic difficulty seeing any future for itself or society at all. That does, of course, correspond to the actual situation.

However, the bourgeoisie as a whole will never simply give up the fight to preserve its class rule or just take the money and run like some of the banking fraternity. The ‘greedy bankers' can provide a last service to their class by acting the part of a recognisable scapegoat that people can blame for the crisis, obstructing any deeper investigation of the real contradictions that lie behind the crisis and encouraging the belief in false solutions like a more moral, more responsible, better regulated, more state-controlled form of capitalism.  

Hardin 5/3/9

The British government has been embarrassed by revelations that it has used ‘torture by proxy'. It was alleged that part of the UK's secret service, MI5, was involved in questioning suspects while they were being tortured by the secret services of Pakistan and the United States.

Binyam Mohamed was held without trial for six years, four of them in Guantanamo Bay. He says that the only evidence against him was obtained through torture. He alleges that he was tortured and interrogated in Pakistan, in Morocco (by the CIA) and Afghanistan between 2002 and 2004, including being beaten and scalded and having his penis slashed with a scalpel. He says that MI5 supplied the CIA with questions and details of his life in the UK that was used in his interrogation process. He eventually ended up in Guantanamo Bay from where he has just been released, after a five-week hunger strike. Medical examinations show that he has endured long periods of physical and mental torture. Central to Binyam Mohammed's case are secret documents that show Britain was involved in his interrogation. The high court ruled that the documents could not be released because they would compromise national security. The basis of this possible breach of national security is that the USA would cease to co-operate with the UK government if it releases this information. This is embarrassing for Britain, which claims not to do this sort of thing.

The UK government was further embarrassed by a report from the US group Human Rights Watch. This report reveals that MI5 were helping the Pakistani secret service with their interrogations too. MI5 agents would ask questions of detainees and the Pakistani secret services would do the torturing. Not at the same time, for legal reasons, of course. The report gives details of ten Britons who they say were tortured in Pakistan and questioned by MI5. The report says that the events weren't just the result of ‘rogue agents' but occurred over a seven-year period with many different interrogators.

British democracy is no stranger to using torture. In "A short history of British torture [25]" (WR 290) we described how Britain used torture on a large scale in Northern Ireland, Malaya and Kenya. But torture isn't just for the history books. The British government claims to be against the use of torture now, but their concern for the victims of torture is only for public consumption. If the law doesn't allow it to carry out torture in its own name then it can bypass that by asking a friend to do it instead.

The press and human rights groups' answer to torture is the observance of national and international law. Human Rights Watch is calling for an end to legal loopholes and has asked the UK government to put pressure on the Pakistani government to end torture. This seems unlikely if you read their World report 2008: "The United States and United Kingdom, the key external actors in Pakistan, remain focused on counterterrorism in their dealings with Pakistan, subordinating all other issues. The US, working closely with Pakistan's notoriously abusive Inter-Services Intelligence agency, has had a direct role in ‘disappearances' of counterterrorism suspects." The truth is that when it comes to defending their national interests all capitalist states, ‘democratic' or openly dictatorial, will use any means they deem necessary.  

Embla 28/2/9

"President Obama has inherited a tougher foreign policy inbox than any president has faced since Harry Truman; establishing priorities among dozens of conflicts and crises requires new understanding of the most critical regions, the most salient issues within them, and the issues ripest for new direction", so says the Carnegie Endowment website introducing a series of articles on ‘Foreign Policy for the Next President'.

The mess faced by US imperialism is well known: its military bogged down and stretched in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, instability spreading into Pakistan, the difficulty it faces with Iran and Syria, and last but not least the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

The mess Obama faces

Israel's invasion of Gaza just before Obama took over the reins of power have left the population faced with an even more devastated strip of land and a tighter blockade. The invasion was no doubt timed to take place while Bush, whose support could be counted on, was still president,  but under Obama the US continues to be closely allied to Israel and he kept very quiet while the slaughter was going on. Israel's inconclusive election added another complication to the divisions between Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the Palestinian Authority. Palestinian prime minister Fayyad promised to step down in favour of a government of national unity, but this will remain an empty gesture unless one can be formed, and this is by no means a certainty with two factions that came to blows only two years ago. Despite the widespread anti-Americanism in Arab populations, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have no love for Hamas since it is backed by Iran, which is not only Shiite but also pursuing a determined policy to become the major regional power, and to arm itself with nuclear weapons in line with its ambitions.

Iraq, which was overcome so quickly in 2003, remains unstable whatever the small effects of the troop surge. With 10% of world oil production coming from the Kurdish north, and with Iran having a great influence in the Shiite South, the country is still threatening to fall apart. Obama has announced the "draw down" of troops with the aim of leaving by 2010 (although up to 30,000 will remain), showing the USA's inability to impose its control over the situation.

Afghanistan is occupied by an international force, with the US at its head and providing the vast majority of the troops, but they control little more than Kabul and its environs - or as Major Morley,  formerly of the British SAS, said of Helmand Province: "we are kidding ourselves if we think our influence goes beyond 500 metres of our security bases... We are not holding the ground." And instability threatens to overtake Pakistan, with the well-known links between the ISI security force and the Taliban, who have taken over the Swat Valley in agreement with the government. And in reaction to US bombing of the Pakistani Taliban and their allies - an action denounced by Islamic militants with a banner proclaiming "Bombing on tribes, Obama's first gift to Pakistan" -  Pakistan's Prime Minister has emphasised his determination to defend the country's territorial integrity.

The USA's difficulty maintaining its status as sole superpower

After the collapse of the USSR the USA was left riding high as the world's sole remaining superpower. It has suffered a significant decline in the 20 years since. We have only to compare its ability to cajole all the world's major powers into supporting, or at least bankrolling, it in the first Gulf war in 1991, with the open opposition of France and Germany when it invaded Iraq in 2003; or contrast America's strategy in the early 1990s, openly defined as one aimed at preventing the emergence of any global or regional power that would challenge its imperialist hegemony, and the reality today when we have seen a whole series of powers challenge the US.

Already by the early 1990s Germany had made a bid for influence in the Balkans, provoking the war that raged there for most of the decade by  supporting Croatia's independence from Yugoslavia. Around the same time, France was challenging the US in Africa, leading to the barbaric wars in Rwanda and Zaire/Congo. Today the US is facing further challenges.

Iranian imperialism's growing strength is a clear illustration of the difficulties faced by the US. Pushed by the threat of losing its global authority into massive displays of force like the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, these acts of global bullying have actually strengthened hostility to America all over the world, but especially in the "Muslim" countries, with Tehran bidding against al Qaida and others for the ideological leadership of Islamic anti-Americanism. On top of which, the military overthrow of Iran's local rivals, Saddam in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan, has given Iran the space to expand.

Today the USA is also faced with the defiant attitude of a revived Russia, which it almost directly confronted over the war in Georgia,  and the rise of China as an imperialist power. The latter's growing economic strength has given it the appetite and means to challenge for influence in Asia where Pakistan is a long term ally, and it is also establishing client states around it in Africa (Sudan, Congo, Angola, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Zambia). Even worse, it supports the pariah, "terrorist" states Syria, Iran and North Korea.

It is true that the USA remains the greatest military power by some considerable margin - China, despite its growth and ambition, has a military budget of a little more than a tenth of the USA's ($58.3bn compared with $547bn for the US) and slightly behind Britain's. Nevertheless even America's military resources are finite, and it cannot fight every conflict at once, particularly with a working class that has not been defeated and is not willing to sacrifice itself for the nation's imperialist adventures.

Obama's policy: adjusting to a changed situation

Faced with this weakening of American leadership, where it has to negotiate with North Korea and recognise China as a player in Asia, where its policies are contested by all and sundry, including its previously loyal allies, there is a need for an adjustment in policy to better defend its interests.

First of all, Obama has made Afghanistan and Pakistan the centre of his policy objectives. This is a very important strategic area with Iran to the West, the Caucasus and Russia to the North, China and India to the East. This will not be easy as the USA will have to withdraw from Iraq, taking the risk of letting it fall apart, in order to concentrate on Afghanistan. 17,000 more US troops will be sent to Afghanistan. And Obama has been a hawk in relation to Pakistan since he announced during the election campaign his intention to bomb and invade this ‘ally' in the war on terror whenever necessary. Iran is the second priority, and here again Obama has been among the most aggressive in his rhetoric - nothing, certainly not the military option - will be taken off the table.

The other policy change is a diplomatic offensive. The USA has found itself increasingly isolated in Iraq and Afghanistan, and is no longer going to try and go it alone in the ‘war on terror'. Secretary of state Hilary Clinton has been sent on a tour of Asia, including Japan, Indonesia, China, and the Middle East for a ‘peace' conference in Egypt. Vice president Joe Biden announced in Munich that the US would have a new policy of listening. The Bush administration allowed the US to become dangerously isolated on a whole number of issues and the Obama team has a great deal of diplomatic damage to undo. Unfortunately, the basic need of US imperialism - to remain the world's only superpower - prevent it from ever really giving up the loneliness of power.

No let up in the growth of military barbarism

In the current situation the USA, while it remains the only military superpower, is facing greater and greater challenges from more and more directions. None of the actual or potential challengers, France, Germany, China, Iran.... has anywhere near the financial or military strength to take over the role of leader of an alliance, of an imperialist bloc to rival Washington. Nor does the USA have the strength or resources to prevent and destroy these challenges. In other words we can expect no peace, no hope, in American or any other foreign policy. On the contrary, each and every power needs to destabilise its rivals and will use any means at its disposal: short term alliances, wars, terrorism. In brief, we can see more death, more chaos, in all the areas of conflict throughout the globe. This is the expression of the decomposition of capitalist society on the level of imperialism.

The working class remains a barrier to world war because it is undefeated, but is unable to prevent the increasing barbaric conflicts around the globe until it takes its struggle to a higher level and is able to put an end to the whole capitalist system.

Alex 7/3/09

Two items appeared on the news on 17 February: one from Reuters on the worldwide increase in antisemitism as a result of Israel's offensive in Gaza and the onset of the global economic recession; and a Guardian article about a leaked document from the Home Office which envisages reclassifying extremists in a way that would officially define thousands of Muslims as potential terrorist recruits.

"Several countries have reported an increase in anti-Semitism during Israel's 22-day offensive in Gaza which ended with a January 18 truce with Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.

France's main Jewish association CRIF recorded more than 100 attacks in January, up from 20 to 25 a month in the previous two years.

Some 250 anti-Semitic incidents were recorded in Britain in the four weeks after fighting began in Gaza, compared with 541 incidents over the whole of last year, a charity that protects the Jewish community was reported last week as saying.

In Venezuela, armed men vandalised the Tiferet synagogue in January while Turkey's centuries-old Jewish community said it was alarmed by anti-Semitism that emerged during protests at Israel's Gaza assault."

And in addition:

"A survey by the Anti-Defamation League published last week found that stereotypes about Jewish power in business still held strong in Europe.

The poll of 3,500 people in Austria, France, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Spain and Britain found 31 percent blamed Jews in the financial industry for the global economic crisis".

The economic crisis is the product of the inbuilt contradictions of capitalism. But capital is an impersonal force and the laws of the capitalist economy, at first sight, seem so hard to understand. Isn't it much easier to look around for some actual persons to blame, someone identifiable? And the mainstream media certainly encourage such a way of looking at things, with their endless scandals about the role of sinister speculators and greedy bankers in the credit crunch. But it's not such a step to go from greedy bankers to the Jews. ‘We all know' that most Jews are rich and are masters of financial skulduggery ever since they started lending money at interest....

Thus one of the mainstays of reactionary thought from the Middle Ages to the Nazi concentration camps comes creeping back to a Europe that is seeing the downfall of all its propaganda about prosperity and progress. What Trotsky said about fascism in general applies in equal measure to one of its habitual components - anti-Jewish racism:

"Fascism has opened up the depth of society for politics....Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing up from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the psychology of National Socialism" ("What is National socialism", 1933).

There is of course a new gloss on this old rubbish: the enemy is not the Jews, it's the Zionists. Look what Israel is doing in Gaza, look what it did in Lebanon in 2006, look at how it terrorised hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into fleeing from Palestine during the war of 1948...All of which is true. But it is also true that ‘anti-Zionism' is often a thin cover for the old antisemitism. The ‘powerful Zionist lobby' in the US that unduly influences US foreign policy can easily become the secret Jewish cabal that controls the world or the ‘Zionist Occupation Government' dreamed up by America's extreme right-wing militiamen. But the left wing (of capitalism) is no bulwark against antisemitism either. On marches against Israel's atrocities in Gaza the Trotskyists tell us to support Hamas because it is leading the ‘resistance' against the Israeli state. But Hamas has the Protocols of the Elders of Zion - a Czarist forgery purporting to reveal Jewish plans for world domination - enshrined in its constitution. A local branch of the Socialist Workers Party, eager to win Muslim youth to its popular fronts, recently brought out a leaflet which tells us that the Nazis exterminated gays, disabled people and trade unionists, but somehow forgets to mention the Jews...even an Italian anarchist group came under fire for talking about the "the powerful US Jewish economic lobby" in the US (see https://libcom.org/forums/theory/does-libcom-support-aryanization-22122008 [40]). Whether the extreme left is openly antisemitic or not, its inbred nationalism and its flirtation with Islamic radicalism certainly make it incapable of fighting against the renewal of anti-Jewish hatred.

Democratic Islamophobia

The link between the revival of antisemitism and the development of Islamic extremism is also evident in Europe: many of the attacks on Jews in Europe are not the work of the traditional fascists but of young Muslims fired up by Bin Laden's tirades against Crusaders and Jews and enraged by what they see happening under the auspices of  a ‘Jewish state' in the Middle East.

For people like Ed Husain, who chronicled his involvement with and eventual break from Islamic extremism in his book The Islamist, the violent, fascist element in jihadist Islam is enough to justify defending the democratic state and calling on it to step up vigilance against Islamic extremism. "Violent extremism is produced by Islamist extremism and it's only right to get into the root causes." (Guardian 17 February)

He's referring to his support for the approach contained in a new strategy for dealing with Islamic radicalism, Contest 2 as it is known in Whitehall. The strategy is still only in draft form and has reportedly stirred up a good deal of controversy among politicians, civil servants and the ‘intelligence community', since some have recognised that it will only serve to further alienate Muslims. According to Contest 2,

"people would be considered as extremists if:

• They advocate a caliphate, a pan-Islamic state encompassing many countries.

• They promote Sharia law.

• They believe in jihad, or armed resistance, anywhere in the world. This would include armed resistance by Palestinians against the Israeli military.

• They argue that Islam bans homosexuality and that it is a sin against Allah.

• They fail to condemn the killing of British soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Contest 2 would widen the definition of extremists to those who hold views that clash with what the government defines as shared British values. Those who advocate the wider definition say hardline Islamist interpretation of the Qur'an leads to views that are the root cause of the terrorism threat Britain faces" (ibid).

So while radical Muslims find ready scapegoats in the Jews, the democratic state finds an excellent scapegoat in the radical Muslims, stretching the definition of extremism so wide that it could encompass not only thousands of Muslims but all those who find themselves politically at odds with ‘British values' by opposing its wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, or by daring to suggest that parliamentary democracy is a hollow fraud.

The rise of Judaeophobia and Islamophobia are both expressions of the extreme putrefaction of capitalist society and its real ‘values'. But they cannot be opposed by the liberal wing of capitalism, which aligns itself with the democratic state and its cynical use of anti-Islamic prejudices, nor by the pseudo-revolutionary left which has chosen sides in the imperialist conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere and is acting as a cheerleader for Islamic gangs which are open advocates of anti-Jewish myths. The only standpoint which can really oppose both sets of prejudice is the standpoint of proletarian internationalism, which rejects support for any national state or would-be state and insists on the common interest of all the exploited, whether they are Christian, Jewish or Muslim, Israeli or Arab, European or Asian...  

Amos 4/3/7

Introduction 2009

It is 30 years since the so-called ‘Iranian Revolution'. Below we have reprinted a statement that was put out across the ICC press in response to the powerful propaganda that filled the pages of the left and right wing media at the time. It ridicules the notion that some kind of bourgeois or bourgeois democratic revolution had taken place.

It refers to the fact that the autocratic regime of the Shah, who had been installed by the US as a reliable puppet of the western bloc, had sewn the seeds of his own downfall with his brutal repression of all opposition and dissent towards his regime. When the proletariat came to the head of the popular rebellion against him and the state was effectively paralysed, it fell to the Islamic opposition, itself a victim of the Shah's terror, to take a secure grip on the reins of government and gradually restore bourgeois order.

As the text affirms, the struggle of the Iranian working class was a significant demonstration at the time that the working class in the peripheral countries was awakening to the struggle. Indeed it was part of a wave of struggles that was soon to be followed in the heartlands with strikes by public sector workers (‘winter of discontent' in Britain) and by steelworkers' strikes in France and Britain, and not much later by the mass strike in Poland.

In Iran though it wasn't long before the Islamic regime began expelling or eliminating all opposition to itself in the same manner as the Shah. The religious fanaticism of the Mullahs became a tool for imposing state terror via its re-organised secret police and ‘revolutionary guards'.

The hatred for the Shah was transferred onto his main backer the USA after his departure, and the US embassy was occupied by young students inspired by the popular uprising that preceded the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini from exile. It took some time and a botched US ‘rescue mission' before satisfactory terms could be finalised for the release of the Ambassador and his staff. But Iran had definitely quit the American orbit, and this was a major setback for the US bloc. This led to the policy of arming to the teeth another major client in the region, Iraq, and goading it into waging war with Iran. This war would last for 10 years and saw a million killed in circumstances reminiscent of the 1914-18 world war. Owing of its comparative military weakness compared to Iraq, and suffering a much heavier death-toll than its opponent, Iran resorted to conscripting a generation of children to serve in its army. Farcically, Iran claimed a great victory when the war was finally over.

More recently, the massive instability inflicted on the region by the US invasion and 5 year-long occupation of Iraq, has actually worked in Iran's favour. With Iraq in turmoil, Iran has been able to recover its position as a leading imperialist power in the region and is developing the capacity to stand up to Israel. It is with this objective that  it has been developing the technology for nuclear weapons. In the circumstances, the US has been unable to do little about it other than stamp its feet. With Russian imperialism newly revived today and assisting Iran with this project, President Obama is said to have sent a letter to the Russian leadership, offering to withdraw the military shield being installed in Poland in return for Russia exercising restraint over Iran.  The content of this letter was subsequently denied but it does show the extent of the threat that the US recognises from a resurgent Iranian imperialism.

Alongside this, it is worth mentioning that the Iranian proletariat, having suffered so heavily under this bourgeois religious regime, is still nonetheless beginning to re-emerge into the light of day and participate in the developing resurgence of international struggles. With the deepening economic crisis, the Iranian proletariat will be forced into further struggles to defend its living standards, and to rediscover the revolutionary proletarian traditions that stretch back to the authentic revolutionary period of 1917-23.

WR 7/3/9

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ICC Statement

After several months of rioting, of strikes, of powerless attempts by the Shah's government to suppress popular discontent through a bloody campaign of massive repression, a new governmental team, previously excluded from the official political arena when it wasn't rotting in prison or exile, has assumed responsibility for conducting the affairs of Iranian capitalism. The breadth of the convulsions suffered by Iranian society, provoking the spectacular and brutal change in the ruling apparatus; the important position occupied by this country in the strategic needs of the world's most powerful imperialist bloc - a factor of gravest concern for the bloc; the wide-ranging international scope of the events in Iran, more for what they are a sign of, than for their consequences; and finally, but most importantly, the part taken by the proletariat in these events, necessitate drawing a certain number of lessons for the struggle of the world proletariat.

1. Contrary to what is claimed in some quarters, whether in the liberal or Bordigist press, there has been no ‘revolution' in Iran, neither a ‘democratic', ‘Islamic', nor ‘Cossack' revolution. The Shah was no more a representative of some sort of ‘feudalism', vanquished by the ‘progressive' forces of the Ayatollah Khomeini, than is the Queen of England or the Emperor Bokassa the First. The main cause of the breach between the monarchy and the Shi'ite hierarchy, by an irony of history, was the agrarian reform undertaken by the monarchy, which harmed the landed property interests of the Mosque. In fact, the new leaders of Iran don't represent any type of ‘progressive' or ‘radical bourgeois' force, either at a political or an economic level. What bourgeois revolution in the past was made in the name of ‘religious tradition', or represented nothing more than a change of clothing for the regime? What revolutionary character is there in the ‘nationalisation' of the oil industry - an industry already nationalised in any case?

What the so-called Iranian revolution does illustrate is the fact that, in decadent capitalism, throughout the world, the time of the bourgeois or democratic revolution of whatever form has long since passed. There no longer exists any country (or ‘area') in the world, no matter how backward in its development, where the tasks posed to society are the same tasks as those accomplished in 1789.

2. If the Iranian events confirm that the conditions for the bourgeois democratic revolution exist nowhere in the world today, and certainly not in the underdeveloped countries, they also illustrate equally well that in such countries the army constitutes the only force in society capable of guaranteeing a minimum of unity - to the benefit of the national capital. Immediately upon taking power, the Bazargan-Khomeini regime was obliged to appeal to the very force that only a few weeks earlier had been the main support of the Shah. And the execution of certain generals, done in an attempt to calm the anger of the masses, will change nothing about the reality of how the army has been left intact; both the army as an institution and the military hierarchy. As in all countries where the capitalist state cannot root its power in a strong, historically developed, economic base; where the ruling class doesn't have at its disposal juridical institutions and a political apparatus flexible enough to contain within the confines of ‘legality' and ‘democracy' the conflicts which tear it apart and throw all strata of society into turmoil, developments in Iran underline a fundamental lesson in regard to the army. Since it represents the hierarchical, centralised violence of social relations based on exploitation and oppression, and expresses the entire tendency in decadent capitalism toward the militarisation of society, the army constitutes, in a practically constant fashion, the only guarantee of the survival and stability of the bourgeois regime, whether it calls itself ‘popular', ‘Islamic', or ‘revolutionary'.

3. Once again, the events in Iran serve to demonstrate that the only revolution on the agenda today, in the backward countries as much as in the rest of the world, is the proletarian revolution. In opposition to the legend so often upheld by those who have a stake in maintaining it, the events in Iran have decisively proven not only that the proletariat exists in the backward countries, but that it is equally capable of mobilising itself in a combative way and on its own class terrain as the proletariat in the advanced countries. Coming in the wake of workers' struggles in different countries in Latin America, Tunisia, Egypt, etc... the strikes of the Iranian workers were the major, political element leading to the overthrow of the Shah's regime. Despite the mass mobilisations, when the ‘popular' movement - regrouping almost all the oppressed strata in Iran - began to exhaust itself, the entry into the struggle of the Iranian proletariat at the beginning of October 1978, most notably in the oil sector, not only refuelled the agitation, but posed a virtually insolvable problem for the national capital, in the absence of a replacement being found for the old governmental team. Repression was enough to cause the retreat of the small merchants, the students and those without work, but it proved a powerless weapon of the bourgeoisie when confronted with the economic paralysis provoked by the strikes of the workers. Thus, even in a country where it is numerically weak, the proletariat in Iran showed what an essential strength it has in society, owing to its position at the heart of capitalist production.

4. The events in Iran, while reaffirming the fundamental strength of the proletariat, also demonstrated that the proletariat is the only force in society able to oppose itself to the one solution capitalism has for its crisis, the solution of imperialist war. Indeed, because Iran occupies an essential position in the military deployment of the western bloc, it has become the recipient of great attention on the part of the bloc. And the difficulties created by the movement of the class, not only for the national capital, but also for the essential war preparations of the imperialist bloc, makes it obvious why the action of the proletariat today constitutes, as it did in the past, the only obstacle, but a decisive obstacle, standing in the way of the bourgeoisie pursing its own course toward imperialist war.

5.The decisive position occupied by the proletariat in the events in Iran poses an essential problem which must be resolved by the class if it is to carry out the communist revolution successfully. This problem centres on the relationship of the proletariat to all the other non-exploiting strata in society, particularly those without work. What these events demonstrate is the following:

- despite their large numbers, these strata by themselves do not possess any real strength in society;

- much more than the proletariat, such strata are open to different forms of mystification and capitalist control, including the most out-dated, such as religion;

- but in as much as the crisis also hits the working class at the same time as it assaults these strata with the increasing violence, they can be a force in the struggle against capitalism, provided the proletariat can, and does, place itself at the head of the struggle.

Faced with all the attempts of the bourgeoisie to channel their discontent into a hopeless impasse, the objective of the proletariat in dealing with these strata is to make clear to them that none of the ‘solutions' proposed by capitalism to end their misery will bring them any relief. That it is only by following in the wake of the revolutionary class that they can satisfy their aspirations, not as particular - historically condemned - strata, but as members of society. Such a political perspective presupposes the organisational and political autonomy of the proletariat, which means, in other words, the rejection by the proletariat of all political ‘alliances' with these strata. It is not by placing its weight behind their specific demands that the proletariat will draw these strata behind it. On the contrary, history has shown that they tend to follow the most dynamic force in society. Therefore, only the decisive affirmation of its own revolutionary goals will allow the proletariat to attain its objective of drawing them behind its struggle, initially by splitting apart those sectors of the other strata closest to the ruling class from those closest to itself.

6. If there has been no bourgeois revolution in Iran, neither has there been a proletarian revolution. Despite its indisputable combativity, the working class has not asserted its real autonomy. It has not vied for power with the bourgeoisie, nor has it set up its own unitary organisations of struggle - the workers' councils. And it is here that another lesson of the events in Iran can be found. Despite the weaknesses of the proletariat, numerical as well as organisational and political, which allow the bourgeoisie today to retain overall control, nonetheless the struggle of the workers has had a decisive influence on the evolution of the world political situation. The events in Iran are in this sense a prefiguration of the future. After a period of eclipse following the wave of class struggle which took place between 1968 and 1973, today the workers' struggle is tending more and more to assert itself, and to generalise. The working class progressively occupies the front of the political stage in society, to the detriment of all the internal contradictions wracking the capitalist class (its economic and political crises, the military reinforcement of the blocs). But for the proletariat in Iran, as for the proletariat in all the underdeveloped countries, the problem could only be posed, not resolved. Only the action of the entire world proletariat in the strongest countries will resolve the problem, by generalising the assault on capitalism and destroying the whole system.

ICC 17/2/79

This is an extract from our "Left Wing of the Turkish Communist Party" pamphlet. It is not available online. Copies can be purchased for £4.

The Comintern's theses on the national question put forward the idea that ‘national liberation' movements should be supported and nations' right to self determination should be recognised. On the other hand, even if it had some influence, there was no need for the Comintern to pressure the Turkish Communist Party to accept the decision. The majority at the Congress, just like the majority who participated in the Peoples' Congress of the East, had not managed to break from nationalist ideology and some of them had feelings towards Westerners that were arguably quite racist. Following the Congress, the militants in Constantinople started crossing to Anatolia while Mustafa Suphi, Ethem Nejat and the founding cadres of the TKP called "the 15" had quite enthusiastically started to exchange letters with Mustafa Kemal in order to go to Ankara.

Unfortunately, the naïve calculations made at the TKP Congress were not going to fit the ruthless reality. Indeed the central bourgeois government did not intend to give any movement other than itself the opportunity to live. First of all, on 5th January 1921, the Islamic-Bolshevik nationalist gangs who aided communists in Anatolia were disbanded and the gang leaders had to escape and get out of the country. On 19th January 1921, lots of self-proclaimed communists, leftists in the parliament, as well as militants of the Communist Party in Anatolia ... were arrested, and were condemned by the "Independence Tribunals", a sort of revolutionary court of the nationalist movement, to 15 years imprisonment with forced labour for their efforts to "weaken the feelings for the defence of the fatherland". Sherif Manatov, a revolutionary who had played an important part in the organisation of communists in Anatolia was deported. Manatov returned to the Soviet Union where he was to be murdered sometime afterwards.

Finally on the night of 28-29 January, the 15 founding leaders of the TKP who had naively come to Turkey despite everything that had happened, were brutally murdered on the orders of Mustafa Kemal, who had shown a true example of bourgeois hypocrisy in order to pull "the 15" to where he could reach them, on the boat they had boarded in Trabzon in order to escape from the reactionaries who had attacked them. The Kemalist bourgeoisie had aimed to get rid of all those who called themselves communists with this attack. [...]

Even before the foundation of the united TKP, one of the important militants of the Anatolian TKP, Sherif Manatov, had warned Mustafa Suphi of what Kemal planned to do personally and had said he couldn't trust bourgeois politicians. Another important figure from the Anatolian TKP, Salih Hacioğlu, had said that "Mustafa Kemal is a dictator; he doesn't allow anyone to do anything. A Bolshevik who was sent from Odessa to do organisational work among workers was caught by the police in İnebolu, was tortured despite saying ‘I'm a Bolshevik' and was eventually tortured to death".The interesting part was that these observations of Salih Hacioğlu were reported a few days before the Founding Congress of the TKP and in this report it was explained that it would be suicide to cross to Anatolia openly and all together. And after the attacks took place, the Comintern did nothing but ignore them.

WR 9/3/09 

This article is adapted from the article in International Review 136 available here [64]