Now the G20 London Summit is over, what is the message that the rulers of the earth want us to take from this ‘historic meeting'?
First and foremost: that the world's leaders and the states they represent can deal with the economic catastrophe facing the capitalist system. As Gordon Brown put it on April 2: "This is the day that the world came together to fight back against the global recession, not with words, but with a plan for global recovery".
But this G20 ‘world' is founded on competition for markets. One capitalist can only prosper at the expense of another, and the same goes for capitalist nations. Of course they have common interests: they all need to cooperate when it comes to keeping the wage slaves in line, and they are also reluctant to let whole nation states go to the wall, even when they are their competitors, because they are also markets for their goods or debtors. But they can't all realise their profits in an endless round of selling to each other, and this is why they are afflicted with the curse of overproduction - the clogging up of the market which leads to waves of bankruptcies, the collapse of industries and the pandemic of unemployment.
The present crisis of overproduction has its roots not, as the economic experts claim, in any kind of temporary ‘imbalance' in the world economy, but in the basic social relations of capitalism, where the great mass of the population are by definition the producers of a ‘surplus' value which can only be realised through a constant extension of the market. No longer able to expand into what Marx called "the outlying fields of production" and conquer new markets outside itself, capitalism for decades has dealt with this problem by replacing real markets with the artificial market of debt. Today's ‘credit crunch' has starkly demonstrated the limitations of that remedy, which has now become a poison eating at the very heart of the economy.
Brown's ‘plan for world recovery' is in reality a plan for the same kind of false recovery we have seen so often over the past 40 years - a recovery based on the bubble of credit.
Of course, we are told, we can't just let things go on as they have done over the last few decades. Left to itself, the ‘free market' will lead to a devastating slump like it did in the 1930s and as it is threatening to do now. So what we need is a lot more state intervention: to prevent the greed of bankers and speculators getting out of control, to find (or just plain print) the funds needed to stimulate the economy, and to step in and nationalise banks and other key economic sectors when all else fails. This is the new ‘Keynesianism' which is being presented as the solution to the failures of ‘neo-liberalism'.
What we are not told is that ‘neo-liberalism' - with its emphasis on introducing direct competition into every corner of the economy, on privatisation, on the ‘free' movement of capital into areas of the globe where labour power could be exploited at far lower costs - was conceived as an answer to the failure of ‘Keynesianism' at the end of the post-war boom in the 70s, when the world economy began sinking into the mire of ‘stagflation' - recession combined with spiralling inflation.
We are also not told that neo-liberalism - including its most recent brilliant invention, the ‘housing boom' - was from the very beginning a policy decided on and coordinated by the state. So all the failed economic policies of the past 40 years, Keynesian or neo-liberal, are failures of state-directed capitalism.
How could it be otherwise? The state, as Engels pointed out way back in the 1880s, is no more than the ideal, collective capitalist. Its function is not to do away with capitalist relations, but to preserve them at all costs. If the contradictions of the world economy lie in the fundamental social relations of capitalism, the capitalist state can do no more than try to stave off the effects of these contradictions.
The mainstream press is trying very hard to convince us that we need to put our faith in the good intentions of the world leaders. They have talked above all about the politics of ‘change' embodied by Barack Obama and his lovely wife, but in France and Germany Sarkozy and Merkel have been playing to the gallery as politicians ready to stand up to American power and the ‘irresponsible' fiscal fiddling of the Anglo-Saxons.
But this ideological paint job is not without its bare patches. It can hardly go unnoticed, for example, that the G20 is a club of the world's most powerful economies and that it may not, as a result, be overly concerned with the effects of its decisions on the world's poorest populations. One of the G20's decisions was to boost the role of the International Monetary Fund in world economic affairs - the very same IMF which has developed such a fearsome reputation for imposing draconian austerity in return for shoring up the world's weakest economies. Similarly, in the face of ever more pessimistic forecasts of looming ecological disaster, it was noticeable how climate change figured in the decisions of the world's leaders as no more than an afterthought.
So who has the job of painting over these bare patches? That is the role of the left - the people who organise big demonstrations calling on the world leaders to "put people first". Thus the coalition of unions, left wing groups, environmental, religious and charitable associations, anti-poverty campaigners and others who called the national demonstration on 28 March demanded "a transparent and accountable process for reforming the international financial system" which will "require the consultation of all governments, parliaments, trade unions and civil society, with the United Nations playing a key role". They claim that "these recommendations provide an integrated package to help world leaders chart a path out of recession", and can open the way to "a new system that seeks to make the economy work for people and the planet", with "democratic governance of the economy", "decent jobs and public services for all", a "green economy" and so on and so forth.
These political forces in no way challenge the falsehood that the capitalist state can steer us out of the very catastrophe it has led us into. They merely claim that by mobilising people ‘from below', we can put enough pressure on the state to make it implement truly democratic, human, and ecological policies that will benefit mankind and the planet. In other words, they peddle illusions and encourage us to channel our energies into campaigning for the reform of an unreformable and doomed social system.
Another message issued loud and clear at the G20 talks: resistance is futile. Of course, the official line goes, we respect people's right to protest peacefully and democratically. We even understand why people are angry about those greedy bankers. But step outside the bounds of acceptable protest and you're nicked, or more precisely, ‘kettled' by well-trained and well-armed police troops who will keep you hemmed in for hours regardless of whether you are an anarchist in a black mask or an elderly or disabled person badly in need of the toilet. The use of these tactics on the first day of the G20 talks in London was a deliberate display of state repression, aimed at discouraging the social discontent and revolt that the bourgeoisie knows full well is on the horizon in all countries.
Not that trashing a bank in the context of a set-piece demo (as we saw on 1 April in London) already constitutes that revolt. But the signs of genuine and massive social unrest are plain enough to see when you look at the recent waves of rebellions by students, teachers, unemployed and many others which swept through Europe recently, culminating in the Greek December; at the oil refineries wildcats in Britain; at factory occupations against redundancies in France, Waterford, Belfast, Basildon and Enfield; at mass strikes in Egypt, Bangladesh, or the Antilles; at the hunger riots in dozens of countries. The signs are also to be discerned in the growing number of young people discussing revolutionary ideas on the internet, forming discussing circles, questioning the false solutions offered by the mainstream media and the ‘left', opening up debates with communist organisations....All these are the green shoots of revolution which are being nurtured by the crisis of capitalism all over the planet.
Resistance is not futile. Resisting capitalism's economic attacks and political repression, resisting its ideological toxins, is the only starting point for a real movement to change the world.
WR 4/3/9
The striking thing about these occupations is, first, that workers responded very rapidly to the announcement of redundancies on the worst possible terms (minimal redundancy payments and no guarantees of last week's wages being paid...), occupying the plant in Belfast and almost immediately afterwards in Enfield and Basildon. Although the Basildon occupation seems to have ended, the workers have stayed outside the plant to voice their anger.
Secondly, there is a very strong feeling of solidarity behind these actions and a real desire to extend the struggle. The occupation in Belfast encouraged the Enfield workers to follow their example. An Enfield worker put it simply: "the workers in Ireland occupied - so we thought, now it's our turn to do something." (Socialist Worker online, 4/4/9). Because the plants used to be owned by Ford and many workers are still working under Ford contracts, the occupying workers straight away talked about sending delegations to Ford plants in Dagenham and Southampton. Workers from other sectors also came to the three plants to show their support, and there was a demonstration outside the Enfield plant where all were welcome.
The main aim of the occupations was not to set up a new company ‘under workers' management' but to put pressure on the bosses to either improve the redundancy deal or withdraw it and find some way of keeping the plant going. The discussions about extending the struggle to Ford were motivated by the same concern.
Occupations can become a trap for workers if they end up shut up inside rather than trying to spread the struggle outwards. The Visteon occupations, even though they are still under union control and face considerable obstacles and difficulties, indicate that we are entering a period where the search for class-wide solidarity more and more becomes a central element in every struggle.
Amos 4/4/9
The killing of two soldiers and a policeman in Northern Ireland in early March was only news to the extent that the shootings were ‘successful'. Since the new power-sharing government was established in May 2007 there have been a number of attacks on the security forces by ‘dissident' republicans.
The Independent Monitoring Commission has reported a more concentrated period of attacks than at any time since 2004. Previously shot policemen have survived, and there have also been parcel bombs, booby-trapped bombs under cars, a landmine attack, and a roadside bomb that are among 20 gun and bomb attacks on police and army that have marked the last 16 months of ‘peace' in Northern Ireland.
This is obviously not at the levels of violence of the 1970s or 80s, but it underlines the inherent tension in the situation. There are, apparently only a limited number of ‘dissident' republicans, but, as Irish history has shown, small groupings also play their part. Gangs like the Real or Continuity IRA assert their ‘rebel' credentials, but their capitalist programme of Irish nationalism, and the degree to which such groups are penetrated and manipulated by state security forces, make them players (if mainly as pawns) with the other bourgeois forces that face each other in Ireland.
The relationship between Irish nationalist and pro-British forces is not one of peace but truce. While there was almost complete unity across the political spectrum in opposition to the March killings, talk of Ireland "staring into the abyss" was typical. In Northern Ireland there is a form of apartheid, of separate development of the two ‘communities', where most people live in areas that are overwhelmingly of a single religion. The Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago, but in Belfast there are 83 walls left in place to keep the population divided.
A few days after the killings there were rallies ("peace vigils") in Belfast, Newry, Derry, Lisburn, Downpatrick and Craigavon in which the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) played a prominent part together with the politicians. An ICTU spokesman said that the people of Northern Ireland "want only peace and absolutely no return to violence of any kind". A return to military violence depends on the actions of the paramilitaries and the official forces of state repression.
But that is not the only violence that capitalism has to offer, there is also the force of its economic crisis, from which Northern Ireland is not immune. As a recent Bloomberg item reported (18/3) "Unemployment has soared by 76 per cent over the last year, the biggest annual increase in at least 38 years. Politicians' efforts to rebuild Northern Ireland's economy after more than three decades of violence have been hampered by the first global recession since World War II." Mid-Ulster has been particularly badly hit with claimant totals in Cookstown, Dungannon and Magherafelt going up 149%, 161% and 186% respectively. These are only small towns but they are the three largest increases in the UK over the last year.
At the end of March/beginning of April job losses were announced at telecoms company Nortel, engineers FG Wilson, Ford subcontractor Visteon and nearly 1000 jobs at the Bombardier aerospace company. That's about 2% of Northern Irish manufacturing gone in a single week. Workers replied by occupying the Visteon factory in west Belfast, an action that almost immediately spread to Enfield and Basildon in England.
In the same week, in Belfast and Derry, three men were shot in the legs in traditional punishment attacks.
The economy of the Irish Republic, once touted as the ‘Celtic Tiger', is also not immune from the global crisis. It was the first country of the eurozone to go into recession in 2008, and every prediction for 2009 is quickly revised to acknowledge a rapidly worsening situation. In the last three months of 2008 the Irish economy shrank by 7.5% in comparison with the same 2007 period. The construction industry has been particularly badly hit with a 24% drop in output. The current official forecast of a 6.9% contraction in the economy this year is very optimistic. Unemployment, already at 11% is forecast to average over 14% next year. The Irish Finance Minister, Brian Lenihan, said, "Ireland is facing a very difficult recession, somewhat worse than the rest of the world."
As Reuters (25/3/9) reported "Even at the targeted 9.5 percent of GDP this year, Ireland's budget deficit is the worst in the euro zone. This marks a stunning reversal of fortune for the former ‘Celtic Tiger' economy which has been hit by a double whammy of a global recession and the bursting of a local property bubble." The Irish government has not hesitated to try and get the working class to pay for the crisis, "More than two decades of peaceful industrial relations were ruptured last month when [Irish Prime Minister] Cowen pushed ahead with a public sector pay freeze and a pension levy."
On 22 February there was the biggest of a series of demonstrations with more than 100,000 showing their anger on the streets of Dublin. ICTU, which operates on both sides of the border, played a major part in the organisation of the demo, which is to be expected, as it is, in its own words, the "largest civic society organisation on the island of Ireland". That doesn't diminish the very real depth of feeling among those who were protesting.
Leftists and unions in Ireland made much of the 7-week occupation by workers of the Waterford Wedgwood crystal factory in Kilbarry. Workers from the occupation led the 22 February demonstration. The unions tried to get a new owner for the business. There were many donations of money and food. The main furnace was maintained to ensure that the factory was viable. In the end a private equity firm took over. The only guarantee is that for six months 110 full time and 50 part-time jobs will be retained, where once 700 worked.
Occupations raise certain difficulties. At its best the occupation of a factory can be a moment in the extension of the struggle other workers. At its worst it can mean the death of the struggle, isolated in one location and/or just concerned with the running of a capitalist enterprise. For the working class the extension of the struggle to other workers in different sectors of the economy is one of the means for strengthening its sense of its own power and force in society.
As elsewhere, the trade unions undermine, derail and sabotage struggles. In addition to the ICTU examples, the Irish SWP have pointed out how union leaders "left 13,000 CPSU members to strike alone. SIPTU and IMPACT even sent out letters to members to tell them - wrongly - that solidarity action was illegal." Far from being exceptional, this is just a more obvious example of how unions stand against moves toward workers' solidarity.
With the deepening of the crisis the attacks of the Irish bourgeoisie are multiplying. There is to be the second emergency budget in six months on 7 April. The Irish central bank want it to include massive cuts in public spending (that is, cuts in the wages of those who work in the public sector, and cuts in benefits), and others want to include increases in taxation, in particular on those whose wages have previously been too low to be taxed. Lenihan says, "Everybody will have to pay something." In opposition to this a nationwide strike was planned for March 30. However, a few days before this was due to happen, ICTU called it off, with the prospect of entering into talks with the government. Taoiseach Brian Cowen "said he saw ‘considerable merits' in the many aspects of the 10-point plan for economic recovery drawn up by ICTU" (Irish Times 25/3/9).
North and South the effects of the economic crisis hold the key to the situation. If the bourgeoisie gains the upper hand it will be able to impose its austerity regime in the Republic, and in the North there will be little to prevent it using sectarian conflict to carve up and weaken any working class response to its attacks. And even when sectarian conflict runs counter to some of the bourgeoisie's more ‘rational' policies, the economic crisis threatens to sharpen the decomposition of capitalist society, with its tendency towards gangsterisation and irrational, fratricidal violence.
On the other hand, if the working class reacts to the economic crisis with its own demands and methods, we will no doubt see expressions of the counter-tendency, the one that leads it to breaking through the sectarian divide. This is something which has appeared in many past workers' struggles, most notably the 2006 post office strike where workers from both sides of the divide very consciously held a joint march through traditional Protestant and Catholic areas.
Put in another way, these tendencies point to the two mutually antagonistic historical alternatives facing the working class in Ireland. They are the same as those facing the class everywhere: capitalist barbarism on the one hand, class struggle and socialism on the other.
Car 3/4/9
The response to protests against the G20 on 1 April has drawn criticism of the police tactic of ‘kettling', forcing demonstrators, and anyone else in the area, into a confined space and keeping them there for hours without food, water or toilet facilities. This is not a new tactic and its use has to be seen in the context not just of the whole repressive arsenal wielded by the democratic state, but also of its ideological campaigns.
First of all such a response to the demonstrations on 1 April, a form of collective punishment, was wholly out of proportion to the protests. Some RBS windows were broken, following a sustained media campaign to blame the bankers for all our woes, hardly a great threat to British capital. But the response was in line with the media build-up to the G20 - the great importance of the meeting to provide an international response to the recession on the one hand, the danger from violent protests on the other. The arrest of 5 people in Plymouth with imitation weapons and "some politically sensitive material" (according to the police) linked to the forthcoming protests, was given big publicity, as was anyone wanting to talk up the possibility of a fight with the police. The presence of Obama, the publicity given to the bigger demonstration on Sat 28th March (which passed without incident but had been built up with headlines like the Evening Standard's "100,000 plot to take over London") all added to the general hysteria. All this publicity to intimidate protesters, and make it appear that the only alternatives if you don't like the system are a harmless protest, or equally impotent violence.
When the demonstrators outside the Bank of England were finally released at 8pm they were let out one by one, photographed and had to give their names and addresses. This will all be kept on a police database along with all the other information the state keeps. In this Britain leads the world: "The UK's database is the largest of any country: 5.2% of the UK population is on the database compared with 0.5% in the USA. The database has expanded significantly over the last five years. By the end of 2005 over 3.4 million DNA profiles were held on the database" boasts the Home Office website, and the number of profiles held has increased to over 4 million, including 500,000 who have never been charged and 39,000 children. Other databases include ‘ContactPoint', on all children in England, ‘ONSET' for the Home Office to predict which children will offend in future, the ‘communications database' which will monitor all itemised phone calls, emails, mobile phone locations... The list is too long for a short article. In any case, the state spends £16 billion a year on IT and tolerates a huge failure rate in these projects - only 30% succeed - showing the priority it gives to collecting information to use when it wishes to in the future.
This information is all held by the same democratic state that has the Terrorism Act on its statute books, complete with 28 day detention without charge. The same one that co-operates in the torture of its citizens and residents, when it deems it not politic to carry it out itself (see ‘Britain asks its friends to do its dirty work' [24]in WR 322 and ‘A short history of British torture' [25]in WR 290). We should therefore neither be surprised at a particularly repressive response to demonstrators, nor lulled into any sense of security when they are not making obvious use of the information they have collected.
For the bourgeoisie's media this is all a question of human rights or a proportionate response. We are permitted to read critical pieces showing that individual police were spoiling for a fight just as much as any protester; the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has written a report criticising the majority of government databases for breaking data protection laws. However the way the state views all these ‘rights' was made very clear by the House of Lords after a claim for compensation for a previous ‘kettling' in May 2001: "There is room, even in the case of fundamental rights as to whose application no restriction or limitation is permitted by the Convention, for a pragmatic approach..." (quoted in The Guardian 2.4.09). This could not be clearer - no matter how fundamental, unrestricted or unlimited any right is claimed to be, for the ruling class it is nothing but a pragmatic question whether to honour it or to arrest, ‘kettle', torture, or shoot a suspect on the underground. In fact there is no contradiction between democracy and repression working hand in hand for the defence of the capitalist system and its state.
Alex 4/4/9
It's true that the massive injections of credit into the money markets, the equally massive budget deficits and now the latest round of ‘quantitative easing' has enabled the bourgeoisie to prevent a total implosion of the financial system in most of the central countries. But none of this has actually resolved the underlying crisis. The bourgeoisie now accepts that the world is facing its most brutal recession since the end of World War II. According to some commentators, over 40% of the world's wealth has been destroyed by the ‘credit crunch'. Countries such as Japan and Germany are suffering massive collapses in exports (-49.4% and -20.7% for the year respectively) and industrial production (-10% and -22.8% for the year respectively) at a rate rivalling the Great Depression. Much of Eastern Europe is threatened with outright disaster on the scale of Iceland, and Greece, Ireland, Italy and Spain are not far behind. The ‘emerging markets' that shone as beacons only last year are also beginning to show the strain - China's lay-offs alone number tens of millions - as these economies are caught up in the same tsunami as the rest of the world. Both the OECD and the IMF are now predicting the world economy as a whole will contract this year - a phenomenon unprecedented since the end of World War II.
Capitalism exists as a global economic system and the crisis is no less global. But the world economy is also divided into disinct economic units locked in brutal competition for resources, markets and profit. The highest synthesis the bourgeoisie can reach is the nation state. In decadent capitalism unfettered competition only exacerbates the crisis and the threat to the entire system. In the 1930s, the bourgeoisie responded to global crisis by a series of beggar-thy-neighbour policies which only made the crisis worse until some nations attempted to resolve their domestic crisis by stealing the spoils from other capitalist states. This was the underlying cause of World War II.
After the war, the bourgeoisie concentrated its efforts on trying to forge a united front to tackle the crisis on a more global level. Economic policy was co-ordinated through the bloc-system and the development of international instruments such as the OECD, IMF and World Bank. Forums such as the World Trade Organisation have allowed the ruthless competition endemic to capitalism to be pursued according to ‘rules' that prevent the situation degenerating into total chaos. The G20 is another such body, a forum allowing the most powerful states to discuss economic issues together.
The circumstances of the latest G20 meeting are historically unprecedented. After 40 years, since the end of the post-war boom, all the policies which the bourgeoisie have used to systematically manage (or delay) crises are on the brink of failure. The main mechanism for maintaining demand in the face of massive over-production - ever-increasing amounts of credit - has now left the economy in a similar situation to a patient who has overused antibiotics: the effectiveness of any counter-measures have been reduced to virtually zero. Credit has become part of the problem: the whole of the system is now, literally, bankrupt.
Faced with this prognosis, the bourgeoisie is trying desperately to marshal a response that can finally end the crisis and return to the elusive path to ‘growth'. But the bourgeoisie is faced with the unpleasant question: what do they do now? Some parts of the bourgeoisie bewail the loss of the manufacturing base in Europe; and talk about ‘rebalancing' the economy, expanding manufacturing and ending the addiction to credit. Can this lead the way to a new economic Eldorado? Hardly! Although the financial powers (especially the US and UK) have been the epicentre of the crisis, the major manufacturers (Germany, China and especially Japan) are confronting dislocations every bit as profound as the ‘profligate' countries. This is because it was only the massive liabilities of the debtor countries which provided a market for the exporting countries in the first place. All the current-account surpluses and foreign-currency reserves of the manufacturing powers have turned out to be just as illusory as the so-called ‘wealth' generated by the property bubble.
Because the vast quantities of credit poured into the system have failed to produce acceptable results, the bourgeoisie is now trying to up the dosage to even more massive levels. The US wants to co-ordinate this on an international scale and has been pressuring Europe to join in a global fiscal stimulus. This met with some resistance at the beginning of the G20. The weaker members of the eurozone are already facing bankruptcy and would probably have suffered a currency collapse were it not for the Euro. Germany, the most powerful economic engine of the EU, was, along with France, very vocal in its opposition to excessive stimulation of the world economy. Ironically, after accusing the UK of "irresponsible Keynesianism", the German bourgeoisie has already pushed through measures even bigger than those of its British rival. Britain's national debt was already dangerously high before the crisis exploded. It's now at such levels that it threatens the country's sovereign AAA rating. The latest auction of British state debt failed to shift all the bonds on offer.
In the end the world leaders came up with a deal in which some of the French-German proposals - such as stronger controls over hedge funds and tax havens - were exchanged for a trillion dollar injection into the world economy. Gordon Brown immediately proclaimed that this amounted to "a plan for global recovery". In reality, this is just a rejigging of the same failed policies whose limitations have been so exposed by the world crisis.
Whichever way the bourgeoisie turns, it is confronted with the ever-growing contradictions of decadent capitalism. As their united efforts become increasingly ineffective, the temptations of "each to their own" will become harder to resist. France has already tied state aid for car manufacturers to conditions on keeping investment within the country. Obediently, Renault has begun to shift production back to France, announcing the closure of a factory in Slovenia. Other European powers blather about the dangers of protectionism, but it's clear they've had the same thought.
It may still be possible for the ruling class to maintain a united front against the economic storm but the obstacles against this are increasing. It may also be possible for them to squeeze some kind of economic ‘recovery' out of the wreckage of the world economy - but this can only delay the inevitable. For the working class, the results will be largely the same: a vicious assault on jobs, wages and living conditions that will make the last 40 years look like an oasis of prosperity. There is only one answer to this irreversible decline: world revolution!
Ishamael 21/3/09
The Congress, held in March, aimed to provide an update to the work of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC produced its last report in 2007. The Congress takes place in the run-up to the 15th United Nations Conference of Parties to the Climate Change Convention (COP-15), also to be held in Copenhagen, in December.
During the Congress a report by the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre predicted the biggest danger to the Amazon rainforest was from global temperature rises, not logging. "It found that a 2C rise above pre-industrial levels, widely considered the best case global warming scenario and the target for ambitious international plans to curb emissions, would still see 20-40% of the Amazon die off within 100 years. A 3C rise would see 75% of the forest destroyed by drought over the following century, while a 4C rise would kill 85%." (‘Amazon could shrink by 85% due to climate change, scientists say', guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 11 March 2009).
The destruction of the rainforest could lead to a "positive feedback situation", a vicious circle in which the release of CO2 stored in the forests adds to the effects of climate change, further destroying rainforests. The Congress concluded that there was an increasing risk of abrupt and irreversible climatic shifts.
At the end of the conference the scientists gave their 6 key messages to politicians ahead of COP-15.
1. The worst case scenarios of climate change, projected by the IPCC, are being realised.
2. Modest changes to the climate can have big effects on the poor.
3. Action needs to be taken rapidly to avoid "dangerous climate change"
4. The negative effects of climate change will be felt unequally. The poorest, future generations and wildlife will be affected the most
5. Ways already exist to effectively counter climate change.
6. We need to remove barriers to change like subsidies, vested interests, weak institutions and ineffective governance.
What are the chances the politicians will listen and act on their recommendations? Given the enormity of the findings, can't the politicians put their differences aside for the good of humanity?
While we can applaud the efforts of scientists throughout the world to understand the climate and the man-made causes of climate change, there is one factor missing from the scientist's equations: the capitalist system itself.
The fundamental forces driving the capitalist system alienate man from nature. Capitalism is a system based on the exploitation of the proletariat; it is a system that requires expansion to survive and it is a system that, though global, cannot go beyond competing nation states in its organisation.
The fact that climate change will affect the poor more than the rich will not jolt the bourgeoisie into action. The bourgeoisie's contempt for the exploited is visible in the abject poverty of millions throughout the world. Attempts by the working class to defend and improve its conditions of existence have been frequently violently suppressed. Even the laws introduced to improve public health in the 19th century were spurred not by the condition of the working class, but by the realisation that the rich were vulnerable to the diseases caused by insanitary conditions in the cities.
The Congress concluded that methods already exist to counter climate change. However, the proposed green economic measures are described in purely capitalist terms: new green jobs in new green growth industries, cost savings from not having to deal with health problems and environmental destruction, etc. Maybe capitalism can survive in a sustainable way? Maybe exploitation of the working class can continue without destroying the environment? The green lobby serves this tasty carrot up for inspection by the world's leaders, but so far they have declined the offer. Fundamentally, maintaining the environment is a cost to the capitalist system like maintaining the health of the working population. It is a sum that is diverted from re-investment in capital. The US government were unimpressed in 2007 when the IPCC announced that efforts to counter climate change would ‘only' cost between 0.2 - 3.0% of annual GDP.
One of the myths of the left and the green movement is that the failure to act on important environmental and social issues is caused by a weakening of the state apparatus. That a strengthening of international institutions governing greenhouse emissions would lead to a reversal of the catastrophic situation we now face. The truth about the state is that it operates to defend the bourgeoisie's overall national interests. When the governments of each country face each other over the negotiating table they face each other as imperialist rivals. This can be seen in the negotiations over greenhouse reductions. When Britain reduced its traditional industrial base at the end of the 20th century it was able to promise greater reductions on CO2 emissions than some of its major rivals. This was a typical ploy, not based on any serious concern for the state of the planet.
And when George Bush wouldn't sign any agreement on climate change that didn't include ‘developing nations', it was in defence of US imperialist interests.
The current negotiations leading up to COP-15 are no different. While the US points to the fact that China has greater CO2 emissions than any other country. China points to the west saying that it consumes most of the products that it produces. "‘As one of the developing countries, we are at the low end of the production line for the global economy. We produce products and these products are consumed by other countries... This share of emissions should be taken by the consumers, not the producers', said Li, who serves in China's powerful National Development and Reform Commission. He added that between 15% and 25% of all the country's global warming emissions resulted from manufacturing exports." (‘Consuming nations should pay for carbon dioxide emissions, not manufacturing countries, says China', guardian.co.uk, 17/3/9).
The same article points to the fact that European nations have tried to get around emissions targets by offsetting their pollution through carbon trading with ‘developing nations'. Promises the EU have made to give money to ‘developing countries' in order to help them introduce cleaner technologies have been put on hold until countries like China and India give greater commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Even the way emissions are calculated is open to contestation.
No state can afford to be generous in a cut-throat global market, especially in the current economic crisis. The talks in Copenhagen in December are being held against the background of the biggest economic crisis in the history of capitalism. Reaching a deal that undermines economic recovery would be an offset too far.
Hugin 4/4/9
"The new tyrants which have driven out the old are in all things so bad or worse than the old tyrants were, only they have, or pretend to have, a better faith and a new form of tyranny." (Anon, Tyranipocrit Discovered, 1649)
The year 1649, a full circle of 360 years ago, saw two momentous events in the class struggle. On the one hand, the English bourgeoisie, led by parliament and the forces around Oliver Cromwell, took the unprecedented step of executing King Charles I and instituting a republic. Though the English republic was shortlived, its proclamation was a powerful statement of the political victory of the rising bourgeoisie over the decaying feudal aristocracy and its monarchical form of government.
In April of that same year, however, another, apparently marginal development showed that the rule of the bourgeoisie, which was only just consolidating itself, was also fated to be a passing moment in history. Inspired by the communist ideas of Gerrard Winstanley, William Everard and others, a group of ‘True Levellers' or ‘Diggers' began cultivating the waste land of St George's Hill in Surrey. Soon to be followed by similar groups elsewhere in the shires of England, the True Levellers took on this name because while the radical party of the Levellers had demanded an extension of political democracy well beyond the limits that Cromwell was prepared to tolerate, Winstanley and his comrades considered that the essentially political revolution that had just taken place would only institute a new form of oppression and exploitation unless private property was abolished and the earth became a common treasury for all mankind. Like Babeuf and others on the extreme left of the French revolution over a hundred years later, they thus prefigured the revolution of the proletariat and the perspective of replacing capitalism with communism.
The article that follows, written by a close sympathiser of the ICC, examines the economic and social background to the English revolution. A further article will look in more detail at the radical political and intellectual developments which the revolution brought into existence.
The class struggles most commonly known as the ‘English Civil War' (1642-1651) constitute one of the earliest and most decisive episodes in the epoch of bourgeois revolutions that gave rise to modern capitalist society. The outcome of these struggles - which included military, political and religious conflicts throughout the British Isles, as well as three separate civil wars and the temporary replacement of the English monarchy with a republic - was a decisive victory for the ascendant capitalist class, removing the barriers to capital's unfettered growth and ensuring the supremacy of its interests within the state. So decisive was this victory that in 1660 the monarchy could safely be restored without undermining any of capital's fundamental gains.
But the Restoration was also necessary to try to put the lid back on the Pandora's box of class struggle. As only a small minority in feudal society, the bourgeoisie was forced to mobilise other oppressed classes and strata in order to wage its military struggle against the monarchy. But the demands of the oppressed and exploited for a share in capital's victory and for more radical political, economic and religious change went far beyond the bourgeoisie's own very limited objectives and posed a serious threat to the new capitalist order. In the rapids of revolution, with the breakdown of traditional methods of social control and repression, there was a brief but spectacular flowering of radical ideas, sects and movements, in which the most politically advanced minorities of the exploited masses boldly challenged the basis of the bourgeoisie's power in the existence of private property, and fought to articulate an alternative political programme based on common ownership and the abolition of class society.
The struggles of the exploited in the English civil war were eventually defeated by the new bourgeois republic through a judicious use of lies and repression, and having thus ensured capital's ‘peaceful' advance for over a hundred years, the English bourgeoisie tried hard to expunge the very idea of violent revolution from its history; to this day it prefers to celebrate the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution' of 1688 that merely settled the arrangements for the efficient running of the capitalist state.
The class struggles in mid-17th century in Britain were thus a formative experience for both the rising bourgeoisie and the embryonic proletariat, and are still a source of valuable lessons today; not least because they show how from the moment of its birth the proletariat has struggled to become conscious of its own interests as a revolutionary class within capitalism and fought to create a classless, communist society.
This article examines how the conditions for the bourgeois revolution in England matured within decaying feudal society.
The massive class confrontations of the 1640s in the British Isles were only the culmination of class struggles within decaying feudal society over the previous three centuries.
By the 14th century the foundations of the feudal system had been undermined throughout western Europe, creating the conditions for the emergence of a new mode of production. The first signs of capitalist production appeared as early as the 14th and 15th centuries in the city states of Italy, followed in the 16th century by the Netherlands provinces of the Spanish empire. In England serfdom disappeared in practice by the last part of the 14th century, hastened by the Black Death which created a scarcity of labour and made land freely available, loosening feudal controls over tenants. The immense majority of the population then became free peasant proprietors, albeit still under feudal trappings.
For capitalist accumulation to take place it was first necessary for a supply of workers to exist, free to sell their labour power to those who owned the means of production. Such a labour supply did not exist in feudalism, so it was first necessary to forcibly tear these free peasant proprietors from their ownership of any means of subsistence, along with the minimal guarantees of existence afforded by remaining feudal arrangements. The history of the rise of capitalism, therefore, is nothing less than the history of the expropriation of the peasantry and their ejection onto the labour market as "free, unprotected and rightless proletarians".(1) For Marx, England demonstrated this brutal process in its classic form.
Apart from a brief time after the Black Death when wages were high, the history of the English peasantry in the three centuries leading up to the civil war was one of progressively worsening conditions. To profit from the rising price of wool in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the feudal lords, with the connivance of the bourgeoisie and the support of the state, dissolved their bands of feudal retainers and drove the peasantry from the land, enclosing common lands to transform arable land into sheep walks. This process was redoubled in the wake of the Reformation of the 16th century when the monarchy plundered the lands of the Catholic church and dissolved the monasteries, throwing many thousands more onto the labour market.
But this new class of landless labourers, excluded from the ownership of their land and able to subsist only by the sale of their labour power, could not possibly be absorbed by existing capitalist production. Thousands robbed of their mode of life were turned out onto the road, forced to migrate to the expanding towns and cities where growing populations meant that labour was cheap and wages low.(2) From the moment of its birth, the proletariat not only experienced the brutal degradation of its living conditions, but was treated as a most dangerous threat to feudal society, provoking a raft of vicious legislation designed to punish the dispossessed for the ‘crime' of their own dispossession: "Thus were the agricultural folk, firstly forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wage labour."(3)
This forced transformation of the peasantry into a class of landless wage labourers was not without its story of resistance; in the period following the Black Death, revolt smouldered beneath the surface of decaying feudal society throughout western Europe, periodically breaking out into open rebellions like those of the textile workers in Italy and Flanders in 1378 and 1379, and in Paris in 1382. There were a number of local uprisings in England in the same period, including the great peasants' revolt of 1381, which was provoked by attempts to collect a poll tax, although its main demand was for the abolition of serfdom against the attempts of the feudal nobility to reassert control over the peasantry and to restrict the wages and mobility of landless wage-labourers. This insurrection displayed a high level of organisation, with two armies converging on London, drawing in the urban population and spreading to the north and east of England before being crushed.
Such revolts were typically defensive in their demands, opposing attacks on what were perceived as traditional communal rights and seeking to return to a lost, often romanticised past. In England this took the form of demanding a return to ‘true English freedom' that supposedly existed before the Norman Conquest, and the call for a struggle of ‘freeborn Englishmen' against ‘alien tyranny' was an enduring theme of English radical thought.(4) Often there was also a strain of what Engels called ‘peasant-plebeian heresy', expressing demands which went far beyond the bourgeoisie's own opposition to the feudal church to demand the restoration of ancient Christian equality among the classes:
"To make the nobility equal to the peasant, the patricians and the privileged middle-class equal to the plebeians, to abolish serfdom, ground rents, taxes, privileges, and at least the most flagrant differences of property - these were demands put forth with more or less definiteness and regarded as naturally emanating from the ancient Christian doctrine."(5)
There had always been a strain of popular anti-clericalism and religious mysticism in England. The Lollard movement, which began as a middle class reform movement in the mid-14th century, contained a strongly subversive peasant-plebeian element, and the Lollard preacher John Ball played a leading part in the 1381 uprising, preaching a sermon which included the famous question that has echoed down the centuries: "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" (i.e. ‘when Adam dug, and Eve spun, where then were the nobility?'). Because the propertyless masses were outside of feudal and even embryonic bourgeois society, their heresies tended to throw into question private property itself, anticipating at least in visionary form a future society without classes. John Ball was reported to have preached that: "things cannot go right in England and never will, until goods are held in common and there are no more villeins and gentlefolk, but we are all one and the same."(6)
Lollard preacher John Ball played a leading part in the 1381 uprising, preaching a sermon which included the famous question that has echoed down the centuries: "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" (i.e. ‘when Adam dug, and Eve spun, where then were the nobility?'). Here it is reproduced by William Morris.
After the 1381 revolt was put down, popular resistance in England went underground, although Lollard ideas remained influential despite measures to suppress them. In fact, accusations of Lollardy or Anabaptism tended to be made loosely against any expression of religious or political dissent. Class tensions remained very close to the surface of feudal society in this period, exacerbated by acute economic hardship, and further uprisings occurred, this time more explicitly against land enclosures, in the mid-16th and early 17th centuries.
Ultimately the revolts of the peasantry in decaying feudal society were limited by the historical conditions in which they took place. The peasantry was not a revolutionary class bearing new relations of production; on the contrary it was doomed to disappear with the remorseless advance of capitalism, and its agonising transformation into a class of wage labourers was still underway. But by the 16th century we can distinguish the first struggles of the emerging proletariat, expressed in a communist vision whose highest point of clarity was to be found in the programme of Thomas Münzer and his party in the German Peasant Wars. This vision, spread by German refugees fleeing persecution, took root among the propertyless masses in the British Isles.
If the first precondition for capitalist accumulation to take place was a supply of ‘free' labour robbed of any means of production of its own, the second was the existence of a class who owned money and the means of production, and who were hungry to increase the value of the capital they had appropriated by buying the labour power of others. This new class was based on two main kinds of capital: agricultural and industrial.
In the 15th century, some feudal landowners in England began to use their land for profit, getting rid of their bands of useless feudal retainers and employing wage labourers. By enclosing the common lands and applying improved methods of cultivation to raise productivity, they revolutionised agricultural production; which also had the effect of further impoverishing the great mass of the agricultural population. With the rise in prices for agricultural products, these landowners or gentry were transformed into a wealthy class of agricultural capitalists.
Industrial capital grew outside of the restrictions of the feudal towns and guilds, accelerated by the destruction of rural domestic industry which created a new home market, supplied by the forced migration of proletarians to the expanding towns and cities. Prices rose rapidly during the 16th century, enriching the new class of merchants and middlemen who were the agents of this growth: the burghers or bourgeoisie. From a relatively backward European economy exporting raw materials, England turned into a manufacturer and exporter of finished goods to the continent, and following the discovery of America and the opening up of the world market, English pirates and merchants began to plunder the New World and to penetrate India, Russia and the Middle East, funded by the new money-markets of the City of London.
This bourgeoisie was an ambitious and energetic class, aware that it was the bearer of a new, dynamic society and supremely confident of its ultimate victory. Initially it was able to consolidate its position in feudal society without an open confrontation with the state, using its economic power to constantly revolutionise production and undermine outmoded social relations. But at every turn it found its advance blocked by the feudal institutions and laws that defended these relations: landowners keen to enclose more common land found themselves thwarted by the ‘commission for depopulation'; manufacturers seeking to maximise profits by reducing wages were prevented by ‘orders-in-council', and merchants and industrialists found their expansion into new markets blocked by the crown's monopolies. If it attempted to evade the crown's decrees, the bourgeoisie faced prosecution in its courts, and it was subject to arbitrary taxes like ‘ship money' to fund the crown's foreign adventures in which it had no say. Clearly, if it was to realise its destiny as a dominant class, the bourgeoisie had to remove all these obstacles to capital's advance and assert the supremacy of its own interests within the state.
This inevitably meant a struggle against the power of the monarchy that lay at the centre of the whole oppressive system of state control. Under the Tudors and Stuarts (1485-1649), the English monarchy tried to place itself in the driving seat of the new productive forces, concentrating power in its own hands at the expense of the already weakened nobility, while at the same time attempting to erect barriers against capitalist development. In this way, the monarchy was for a time able to breathe life into a system on the verge of collapse, but by hastening the decline of the nobility the monarchy destroyed its principal ally against the bourgeoisie, thus ensuring its own ultimate downfall, while its centralising measures provided the necessary foundations of the modern capitalist nation state. To the extent that it helped to destroy vestiges of feudalism and further reduce the power of the nobility, the bourgeoisie was for a time prepared to tolerate the monarchy's centralising role, while conducting its own struggle for supremacy as a long drawn out campaign rather than in a direct assault, with the overall aim of transferring effective power to Parliament.
At a deeper level, the bourgeoisie found its advance impeded by the conservative ideology that underpinned the largely static feudal order, enforce by an authoritarian church that interfered in every aspect of social and economic life. At a time, for example, when the bourgeoisie was fighting to establish the absolute right of an individual to dispose of their private property as they saw fit, the institutions of the feudal state asserted that this right must be subordinated to medieval conceptions of social obligation and to the needs of the Crown. What the bourgeoisie required was a transformation in religious and philosophical thought that would sanction its own activity and justify the division of society into classes.
The 16th century saw important developments in philosophical method and scientific enquiry which only served to undermine the authority of the feudal Church and provide a powerful rationale for capitalist development. The growth of the productive forces itself led to great advances in exploration, astronomy, medicine and mathematics, and promoted the growth of secular and humanist ideas. In the sphere of religious thought, the Protestant Reformation also signified the decay of feudalism and the weakening grip of the church on social and economic life. While the religious conflicts of 15th and 16th century Europe certainly had an independent and complex life of their own, we can say that Protestantism as a movement represented an adaptation of religious thought to the new mode of production. It preached the pursuit of economic self-interest rather than social obligation, and the virtues of individual responsibility, self-discipline, hard work and thrift, thus providing a perfect rationale for the bourgeoisie's pursuit of profit. The bourgeoisie's adoption of this ethic as a vehicle to advance its own interests helped weld it into a disciplined force determined to carry through a political revolution against the old order, with the Puritan movement in particular acting as the ideological vanguard of the bourgeois revolution in England.
Capital also demanded an army of labour whose members were both submissive to authority and unquestioning of their position in the new order; or at the very least unable to effectively protest. This required new, more effective forms of ideological control over the proletariat and again, with its repressive insistence on discipline, hard work and self-denial, the bourgeoisie found in Protestantism the perfect rationale for imposing this control. The Protestant ethic also set itself firmly against medieval conceptions of charity for the poor, believing poverty to be the result not of circumstance but of moral failing, thus sanctioning the division of society into classes as Divine Will and amply justifying repressive measures against ‘idle' proletarians.
Ideologically armed, the bourgeoisie was still only a very small minority within feudal society and needed to mobilise the support of other classes and strata in order give it the necessary weight in its political struggle against the forces of the monarchy. It was not possible for the bourgeoisie to mobilise other classes and strata around economic and political grievances alone; above all it was by exploiting the widespread religious conflicts of the period. The very real persecution of Puritanism by the authoritarian Church enabled the bourgeoisie to present its own political struggle against the monarchy as a popular struggle for free expression and religious toleration, and by exaggerating the threat of Catholic plots and whipping up widespread fear of ‘popery', at certain crucial moments it was able to rally large sections of the population whose material interests would otherwise have allied them with the Crown.
Given that religious differences broadly reflected the uneven development of capitalism, their exploitation inevitably emphasised the nationalist character of the English bourgeoisie's struggle against the monarchy. Support for the Reformation was strongest in the economically advanced south and east of England, and in the Scottish Lowlands, while the reaction against it came largely from the north and west, Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, where the influence of feudal and pre-capitalist societies still dominated.(7) The threat - both real and exaggerated - of an alliance between the monarchy and the forces of Catholic disaffection, and fear of foreign intervention by its French and Spanish rivals, was to play a powerful role in determining the English bourgeoisie's policy at crucial moments during the civil war. In a deeper sense, these nationalist conflicts were an integral part of the bourgeois revolution, and specifically of the English bourgeoisie's struggle for supremacy in the British Isles with the aim of establishing itself as a leading economic power on the world stage.
By the end of the 16th century the conditions for the bourgeois revolution were maturing in western and northern Europe. In 1588, following a popular uprising against the feudal absolutist Spanish monarchy, the bourgeoisie in the Netherlands successfully established an independent republic. In England, capitalist accumulation was well established and the rising capitalist class was advancing on all fronts. But it had not yet achieved a definitive victory: the feudal state still defended outmoded feudal relations and obstructed the advance of capital; the monarchy remained reluctant to concede political power to the men of property, and the archaic social doctrines of feudalism defended by an authoritarian church lingered to impede the growth of the productive forces. The immediate aim of the bourgeoisie was to force the monarchy to give up power to its representatives in parliament and remove these barriers to capital's further expansion.
The same forces that created the conditions for the bourgeois revolution also gave birth to a new class of landless wage labourers, the forerunner of the industrial proletariat. This class was still at a very early stage of its formation, but it constituted a significant weight within society and was capable of intervening in the class struggle to defend its own interests. From all its experience of suppressing the class struggle in decaying feudal society - the peasants' revolts of the 14th century, the peasant-plebeian heresies of Lollardy and Anabaptism, uprisings against enclosures in the 16th century - the ruling class as a whole was well aware of this threat from below, and consequently of the need for the skilful use of propaganda and lies, and repression when necessary, in order to prevent the political struggle between the forces of the monarchy and the bourgeoisie from becoming a far more dangerous popular movement.
MH 31/3/9
see also
Lessons of the English Revolution (Part 2): The response of the exploited [40]
Lessons of the English revolution (part 3): The revolutionary movement of the exploited (1647-49) [41]
1 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, Pelican, 1978, p.876.
2 By 1642 London was the largest city in Western Europe. This was despite the fact that the death rate was higher than the birth rate; in other words its growth as a metropolis was only possible because it acted like a demographic drain, sucking in thousands of newly created proletarians from the rest of Britain and Ireland, who died in their droves. This hints at the agony hidden behind the phenomenon of ‘the expansion of the towns and cities'.
3 Marx, Capital, vol 1, Pelican, 1978, p.899. Bourgeois historians generally ignore the expropriation of the English peasantry or hide it in plain sight among a mass of other phenomena. One recent historian who does refer to it, correctly identifying it as part of the same brutal process as the better-known ‘Highland Clearances', does so only in order to deplore its damaging effect on ‘the national consciousness' and ‘sense of British nationality' (Norman Davies, Europe, A History, Oxford University Press, p.632).
4 The leaders of the 1381 revolt stated that they recognised only ‘the law of Winchester' - probably a reference to the era of the Anglo-Saxon king Alfred the Great- and would pay no tax ‘save the 15ths which their fathers and forebears knew and accepted.' In East Anglia there were demands for a return to ‘county kings' that had last existed in the 7th century (Paul Johnson, A History of the English People, Weidenfeld and Nicholson,1985, pp.143-4).
5 Engels, The Peasant War in Germany (www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/peasant-war-germany [42]).
6 In the Chronicles of Jean Froissart, Penguin, 1968, p.212. See also Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, revised edition, OUP US, 1970, pp.198-204.
7 In northern and western England there was a series of uprisings against the Reformation in the 16th century, including the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace, the 1549 Cornishmen's Revolt and the 1569 Rising of Northern Earls, all of which ended in defeat. Ireland also saw a series of revolts. On the other hand, Robert Kett's 1549 rebellion in Norfolk represented frustration with the slow pace of change. In the Lowlands of Scotland, where English influence was strongest, the Reformation resulted in the establishment of a form of Calvinism (Presbyterianism) as the official religion, although economically the region remained a feudal society within the separate kingdom of Scotland.
On the 25th anniversary of the miners' strike in Britain there have been plenty of reminiscences in the media: televised reunions between police and strikers, pictures, news items, all wrapped up in a general message of what a shame it all was, how the miners were led by ‘extremists' or, on the other hand, how the Thatcher government, ‘took on the unions' and defeated them.
In addition to this obscuring of the real lessons of the miners' strike, topping them even, comes Arthur Scargill. "Now, for the first time, the then president of the NUM writes his account of the most divisive and bitter industrial dispute in living memory" (The Guardian 7/3/9).
Before we turn our attention to Scargill's account of events, the first thing we want to do is to situate the miners' strike in Britain in the international context of the class struggle. The mass strike in Poland of 1980 had suffered a major set back, not least through an alliance of Russia, Britain and the United States and the Solidarnosc trade union - but within a year or two workers were once again fighting back against the austerity measures being imposed by the ruling class across the planet. The strikes in Britain were part of a wave affecting Italy, Germany, Belgium, the US, France, Holland and others. The strike by the miners, because of the stakes, numbers and the militancy involved, became a focal point for the world's working class. The ground had been laid and the stakes were high. In fact, in 1981, 50,000 miners came out on wildcat strike against a plan to shut 50 pits and get rid of 30,000 jobs. It was in this wave that Scargill's Yorkshire NUM did its utmost to keep its miners working and there was no talk from him about ‘class war' and ‘struggle', earning for him instead the labels of "scab" and "traitor" from the pickets and, on occasions, the need for a police escort. Prior to the 1981 movement, the miners were involved in struggles from 1972-74 which were very positive, again part of an international wave, and indeed their struggles go back through the century in a constant fight against attacks where both Labour and Tory governments have cut miners' wages and tens of thousands of jobs with the acquiescence of the NUM.
Another point to emphasise about the 1984 strike is the development of the self-organisation of the workers which, in the first weeks of the strike, took both the unions and the police by surprise, and this despite the repression prepared by the police on the one hand, and the division of miners into different areas and regions as set up by the NUM on the other. From the first day of the strike it was the workers who took the initiative to call other miners out. The NUM were running to keep up and it called for an all-out strike over pit closures - in Yorkshire only. The flying pickets were particularly successful in calling other miners out, not through intimidation or force but by discussion and argument. By the end of the first week the NUM was trying to cut down on the mass picketing, bringing it in line with NUM general policy. And while the government quietly announced improved redundancy payments, the NUM announced that there would be no strike pay. By the second week the militant minority had brought out over half the miners and Harworth pit in Nottinghamshire was closed down by 300 Yorkshire pickets despite the massive police presence and against NUM instructions. In South Wales, where the majority of pits had already voted against joining the strike, the miners came out in response to the actions of flying pickets from Yorkshire. The initial vote not to strike was something of a parochial revenge against Yorkshire for not joining the South Wales strike and movement a couple of years earlier (something that Scargill was abused for by the miners, but more importantly, was due to the divisive regional set up of the NUM). This therefore showed the ability of the workers to discuss contentious issues, clarify them and take action. In the first weeks of the strike, miners were moving around in numbers very effectively, organised and in some cases armed for self-protection against the police; and they were bringing out other miners with no hint of violent confrontation. The left wing NUM official, Henry Richardson, appealed for the pickets to withdraw. Police and their coaches were pelted with bricks and stones; a High Court injunction against the NUM was ignored by the miners; the Yorkshire NUM leader, Jack Taylor, moaned that the union had never condoned violence, and Scargill said: "I want to take the heat out of the situation". Despite many deep illusions persisting with workers about the unions, the initial movements of the miners in those first weeks, despite the NUM's attempts to cripple them and the state to intimidate them, showed that the lessons of the period internationally, the self-organisation and extension of the struggle, had to a verifiable extent been assimilated and put into effective action by the miners. Not only were other pits and NUM areas targeted by the pickets and brought out, but the flying pickets called out a larger number of miners by focussing their attention on areas where there wasn't such a massive police presence such as there was in Nottingham. And not only were the attempts at active solidarity aimed at other miners, but pickets early on in the strike went to power station workers, rail workers and seamen, with many of these initiatives tending to go beyond or against their union's instructions. In the face of this the bourgeoisie was not passive. A massive, organised police force occupied areas of South Yorkshire and Nottingham, implementing a programme of cordoning off whole areas, intimidation and provocations, while the media developed a campaign about miner fighting miner and the need for democracy. But it was the efforts of the NUM and Scargill that fatally undermined the strike. At the same time as the state was organising its forces, Scargill and the NUM set up a campaign around the demand to "stop foreign coal" and other corporatist and nationalist slogans similar to that of the recent BNP, Labour Party and trade union campaign around "British jobs for British workers".
Scargill's Guardian article is typical of the memoirs of smug bourgeois politicians: slippery and very selective, anxious to prove that he was right all along if only everyone had listened to him. Having learned of the National Coal Board's plans to shut 95 pits and cut a hundred thousand jobs, he says: "It became clear that the union would have to take action, but of a type that would win maximum support and have a unifying effect". The actions of Scargill and his NUM were tailored to have the opposite effect to "maximum support and unification". To build on his previous scabbing over strikes, Scargill, now NUM president, brought in an overtime ban in November 1983 of which he is very proud, saying that it had "an extraordinary impact". Its impact was to give plenty of notice to the Coal Board, allowing it time to manoeuvre, to build up, maintain and move coal stocks; it also allowed time for the government to prepare its forces of repression. Over this 5-month period miners' wages were effectively cut by 20% a week, reducing their capacity to build up sustenance for the strike (particularly with no strike pay). Along with his fixation on the slogan "Block Foreign Coal" - workers' solidarity replaced by nationalism - Scargill's overtime ban hobbled the miners from the beginning, the very point where a wildcat strike can be most effective. Like all trade union rule books, the NUM's reinforced the possibilities of machinations, confusion and bureaucracy, areas in which Scargill was an expert. Such a rule book favoured the manoeuvres and manipulations of the ‘leadership', as with Rule 41 permitting "areas to take official strike action if authorised by our national executive committee" as Scargill puts it. The question wasn't a national ballot for a strike or not, but the extension and self-organisation of the struggle versus the union's bureaucratic rule book and its division into antagonistic areas and fiefdoms of union bosses and cliques.
Within the framework of its defence of Britain's coal industry and the nationalism that goes with it, the NUM directed miners into set piece wars of attrition that flowed directly from its overtime ban, especially the concentration on coal stocks and Nottinghamshire at the expense of widening the struggle. Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire was set up by Scargill for mass picketing and in fact it became a focal point, a fixation of forces where the miners felt the force of the law. It was a trap that diverted the miners away from spreading the struggle. The ex-president criticises other areas of the NUM for not supporting him over Orgreave (by not sending more pickets) and for dispensations given to steel works. But this area-based union with its rule book was a nest of vipers, each looking after their own interests and manoeuvring against the others. Scargill compares Orgreave to "Saltley coke depot in Birmingham in 1972 - a turning point after which that strike was soon settled". What he doesn't say is that the main reason it was "settled" in '72 was because the miners' picket was joined by one hundred thousand engineers from Birmingham (and other workers), threatening to take the movement away from the NUM's control completely and onto a new level of struggle that the state was quick to see. Another dead-end, another pointless and energy-sapping point of fixation, was the set up with the Nottinghamshire NUM and the emphasis on picketing out those pits still working. The fixation on this heavily policed area (that the miners had avoided when spreading their struggle under their own initiative) was to the detriment of the self-organisation and extension of the struggle to other workers - the only chance it had of succeeding. Scargill raises the question of not calling a national ballot saying that: "The real reason that NUM areas such as Nottinghamshire, South Derbyshire and Leicester wanted a national strike ballot was that they wanted the strike called off... Three years earlier in 1981, there had been no ballot when miners' unofficial strike action - involving Notts miners - had caused Thatcher to retreat from mass closures..." What he doesn't say is how ridiculous he would have looked going for a ballot when the majority of militant miners had already voted with their feet and their actions. And he doesn't say that it didn't prevent him calling for a ballot for his Yorkshire NUM in 1981/2 when miners elsewhere were wildcatting against a wage cut; something many miners remembered.
Scargill in his post-25 year justification not only criticises other NUM areas but the steel unions, the electrical union, the Labour Party, the TUC, the T&GWU, the rail unions and the Nacods safety deputies' union. All of them were certainly looking after their own interests and some of them were doing their own secret deals with the Thatcher government. Just like the NUM they all had their own agendas and "rule books" to follow and just like the NUM all these unions were fully integrated into the state apparatus. He says, "at the very point of victory we were betrayed". But the lesson of the 1984 miners' strike for the working class today is that all unions, with their rule books, their bureaucracy, sectional and corporatist set ups, and relations with the Labour Party, are part of the state and work against the self-organisation and extension of struggles under the control of workers themselves.
Baboon. 31/3/9
In a disgusting travesty in the aftermath of Hillsborough, the Sun, on police information, accused the fans of hooliganism, stealing from and urinating on the dead and the dying. But in reality the fans were the real heroes, immediately improvising and assisting. And people that get crushed to death expel the contents of their bladders. Earlier in the miners' strike, the media showed its ‘objectivity' with the BBC reversing the footage of the armed police attack on unarmed strikers at Orgreave, presenting the workers as ‘starting it' and therefore responsible for their own injuries.
Twenty minutes before kick-off at Hillsborough police monitored the Leppings Lane crush on CCTV. They did nothing while people were crushed to death standing up or as barriers gave way. Police patrolling feet away on the pitch seemed helpless at best, ignorant and abusive at worst, putting the crush down to hooliganism. Although the police eventually opened a gate to let people on to the pitch (the match had started and Beardsley nearly scored for Liverpool on 4 minutes - luckily he didn't, because the resulting celebrations might have made the situation even worse) the police response was still one of castigating ‘hooliganism'. With the match stopped and ambulances arriving at the stadium from everywhere, the police refused to let them in, telling them that there was still fighting. Forty four ambulances and over eighty trained staff were kept outside by the police while the wounded inside were left to die as the traumatised fans did what they could to help. One ambulance driver, Tony Edwards (himself traumatised by the event) drove through the police lines to the Leppings Lane end. He said (Observer, 15/3/9): "... There was no fighting. The survivors were deciding who the priority was and who we should deal with. The police weren't". Despite his willingness and first hand insight, Edwards wasn't called to the Taylor Enquiry, or Whitewash as it should be more accurately known.
The Enquiry had fine words for the football supporters, as more recently did the Sun in its ‘tribute'. There's more of this spew to come from the bourgeoisie. But all the sickening hypocrisy cannot hide the facts that the police as agents of the state are there to repress and keep down the working class, not to assist or help it. The disgusting events of Hillsborough show this clearly.
Baboon 25/3/9
"They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaida leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will." (Guardian 1/8/8) "Mr Obama ... said President George Bush had chosen the wrong battlefield in Iraq and should have concentrated on Afghanistan and Pakistan. He said he would not hesitate to use force to destroy those who posed a threat to the United States, and if the Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf, would not act, he would." (ibid, 4/8/8)
President Musharraf resigned last August and since then we have witnessed a qualitative deterioration in the national security situation. Musharraf was followed by the husband of the assassinated Benazir Bhutto, the notoriously corrupt Asif Zardari. The attacks on Mumbai last November (see "The terrorist slaughter in Mumbai" and "Growing tensions between India ad Pakistan fuel terrorist attacks" on our website) marked a further escalation of imperialist tensions. India was clear about who it blamed for the attacks. Pakistan, for its part, suffered its own attacks when a group of militants attacked the Sri Lankan cricket team, injuring many and killing at least 6 soldiers.
More recently, a police training academy in Lahore was attacked and briefly taken over by militants charging their way in with guns and grenades. At least 12 people were killed and there followed an 8-hour stand off before the police regained control. This demonstrates the knock-on effects of US bombing in the border regions: "A suspected US drone today fired two missiles at a hideout allegedly linked to a Taliban leader who has threatened to attack Washington. The air strike killed 12 people and wounded several others, officials said. The attack came a day after the Pakistani Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, claimed responsibility for a deadly attack on a police academy in the eastern city of Lahore. Mehsud said the attack was retaliation for US missile strikes on alleged militant bases on the Afghan border."(Guardian 1/4/9).
The cumulative effect of this situation has led Islamabad to concede the implementation of sharia law in the Swat area. This shows the weakening of the Pakistan state when it has to make concessions to another form of law within its own boundaries. In addition to this the publicity over the video of a young woman's public flogging has been used as part of the campaign to justify future attacks on Pakistan.
One of the key problems faced by the Pakistani government in tackling the Taliban is the deep rooted links between the Pakistani security agency, the ISI, and some of the jihadist elements. These connections were forged in the heat of the confrontations between the American and Russian blocs, particularly during the 1980s as the Americans funded the creation of a huge jihadist force in Afghanistan: the Mujahadin. Many of these fighters, after the defeat of the USSR went on to form the basis for the Taliban. There has never been a clean break between the Pakistani army and the jihadists. Any attempts at a break were destined to failure as the army is, in the last analysis, the sole force capable of holding the state together.
After the Mumbai attacks, then Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice stated that "all of Pakistan's institutions should be facing the same way" - meaning that the government had to get to grips with the rogue elements inside the ISI. Despite the gigantic propaganda campaign about Obama, bringing ‘change we can believe in' he is in almost perfect continuity with George Bush Jnr - in the same way that the latter implemented the policy for the invasion of Afghanistan concocted by Bill Clinton.
As for the Taliban, the name has become a catch-all for a variety of forces. There are those who want to overthrow the government and install the kind of rule previously seen in Afghanistan. Many of these elements criss cross the border regions variously fighting in Afghanistan or Pakistan as required.
There are also the tribal groups that have never accepted any kind of rule from Islamabad, especially in the Baluchistan/Waziristan regions. Then there are the increasing numbers of desperate and beleaguered peoples who have no hope of education or work and whose children often end up in the clutches of the religious schools, the madrassas. There is no shortage of people to recruit from - as there are over 1 million internally displaced people in Pakistan. Overall, it has been estimated that there are currently 1.5 million children in madrassas where, in the main, they are only taught Koranic verse. It is in these schools that the Taliban make their suicide recruitment drives, assisted by the fact that every US air strike has a tendency to kill innocent civilians and therefore create a real hatred and desire for revenge which the Taliban can exploit. The steady stream of killings and attacks have mounted up for the army; in the last 5 years 1500 Pakistani soldiers have been killed in fighting with the various insurgency forces.
There is an accelerating slide into chaos. The US has a real fear of the consequences of a collapse of the civil administration. In particular there is the question of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. The US has belligerently asserted that it would invade to secure the bases, if it felt it served its interests. Any invasion would be extremely provocative and drastically worsen the social situation.
There is also the question of relations between Pakistan and India, already at straining point before the Mumbai attacks, after which many factions openly called for the bombing of Pakistan. Any attack on Pakistan would necessarily drag China (a key Pakistani backer) and thus also the US into the fray with disastrous consequences for the region.
Against this tendency there is only the potential of the struggle of the international working class. In particular, in the region, we have seen the waves of struggles in Bangladesh, posing a real proletarian alternative to the catastrophe of decrepit capitalism.
Graham 1/4/9
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/the%20state3.jpg
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[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/lindsey-oil-refinery-strike
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/g20-protests
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/wildcat-strikes
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/g20
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[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
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[23] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/irish-congress-trade-unions-ictu
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/2009/wr/uk-torture
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/worldrevolution/200512/1558/short-history-british-torture
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/police-agents-state
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/kettling
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/terrorism-act
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/economic-crisis-1929
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/credit-crunch
[31] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/oecd
[32] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/world-bank
[33] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/george-w-bush
[34] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/climate-change
[35] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/imperialist-rivalries
[36] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/scientific-congress-climate-change-2009
[37] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/ipcc
[38] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/cop-15
[39] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/copenhagen
[40] https://en.internationalism.org/2009/wr/323/eng-rev2
[41] https://en.internationalism.org/content/3295/lessons-english-revolution-part-3-revolutionary-movement-exploited-1647-49
[42] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/peasant-war-germany
[43] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/english-civil-war-1642-1651
[44] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/english-revolution
[45] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/diggers
[46] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/peasants-revolt-1381
[47] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/lollards
[48] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/anabaptists
[49] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/protestantism
[50] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/karl-marx
[51] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/oliver-cromwell
[52] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/charles-i
[53] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/gerrard-winstanley
[54] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/william-everard
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[56] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/john-ball
[57] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/thomas-munzer
[58] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/miners-strike-1984
[59] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/mass-strike-poland-1980
[60] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/miners-strikes-1972-74
[61] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/saltley-1972
[62] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/miners-strike-1981
[63] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/19/union-question
[64] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/arthur-scargill
[65] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/henry-richardson
[66] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/jack-taylor
[67] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/nationalism
[68] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/national-union-mineworkers-num
[69] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/hillsborough-disaster
[70] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/taylor-enquiry
[71] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/steven-gerard
[72] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/peter-beardsley
[73] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/tony-edwards
[74] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[75] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/144/pakistan
[76] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism
[77] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/benazir-bhutto
[78] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/pervez-musharraf
[79] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/asif-zardari
[80] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/baitullah-mehsud
[81] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/condoleeza-rice
[82] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/bill-clinton
[83] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-terror
[84] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-afghanistan
[85] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/isi
[86] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/taliban
[87] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-pakistan