We are publishing below a translation of an article from Internacionalismo, our section in Venezuela, (dated 12/7/9) which analyses the unfolding events in Honduras.
The political crisis that has been developing in Honduras since the coup that overthrow President Manuel Zelaya on Sunday 28 June is not simply ‘another coup' in this poor and small ‘banana republic' of 7.5 million inhabitants. This confrontation has important geopolitical repercussions, as well as at the level of the class struggle.
Zelaya, businessman and member of the Honduras oligarchy, began his mandate, from the beginning of 2006, as the standard bearer of the Honduran Liberal Party. Since last year he has been moving closer to the Chávist ‘franchise' of the ‘Socialism of the 21st century.' In August 2008, with the support of his party, he got congress to approve Honduras's incorporation into the ALBA (Alternativa Bolivariana para América Latina y El Caribe - Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America and the Caribbean) created by Chávez's Venezuelan government in order to counter-act the influence of the ALCA (Área de Livre Comércio das Américas - Free Trade Area of the Americas) which is backed by the USA. This agreement, which was criticised by some politicians and businessmen, means that the Honduran state is having to pay a hefty oil bill that will have an significant weight on its economy.
With its integration into the ALBA, it has gained a $400 million credit in order to buy hydrocarbons from Venezuela. This credit is to be repaid on advantageous conditions, an important ‘help' for a country whose GDP is $10,800 million according to data from the CEPAL (a UN agency) for 2006, and whose payments for the import of oil is estimated to be more than 30% of GDP, according to the same source. But ‘Socialism of the 21st century' is not a simple commercial franchise, it requires that the governments that buy into it also buy into a series of populist leftist measures; the executive openly controls state institutions and public powers, and attacks the old national ‘oligarchies' . It was for this reason that Zelaya carried out a 180 degree political volte-face in a few months. From being a liberal of the right he's become a leftist defender of the poor and ‘socialism'.
Faced with the forthcoming November elections, since February this year Zelaya accelerated the pressure on the institutions of the state in order to promote his re-election. In May, with the support of popular and union organisations, he pressured the Armed Forces to support the holding of a plebiscite to amend the Constitution with an eye to his re-election: an action that was rejected by the High Command. On 24 June Zelaya dismissed the Chief of the Army High Command, who was immediately reinstated by the Supreme Court, which served as the detonator for the coup of 28 June, the date chosen by the executive for the referendum. On this day Zelaya was compelled by the armed forces to "flee in his pyjamas and without shoes" from Tegucigalpa (capital of Honduras) to San José (capital of Costa Rica). With the support of the army and the Supreme Court, the Congress named Robert Micheletti (President of the Congress) as the new President of the Republic.
It is clear that at the roots of the Honduran political crisis you will find Venezuela's imperialist ambitions in the region. To the extent that Chávism has been consolidated, the Venezuelan bourgeoisie has made advances in pursuit of its aim to make Venezuela a regional power. It is to this end that it has used the project of ‘Socialism of the 21st Century', which is based on the most desperate layers of society and uses oil and the income from it as a means of convincing and coercing. The growth of poverty, the decomposition of the old ruling classes and the US's geopolitical weakening in the world, have allowed the Venezuelan bourgeoisie to progressively advance its own project in various countries in the region: Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Honduras and some Caribbean countries.
With its populist and ‘radical' anti-Americanism , the Chávist project requires totalitarian control of state institutions and the putting in place of a policy of polarisation: ‘rich against the poor' ‘oligarchy against the people', etc, which becomes a permanent source of tension and instability for the national capital. Its execution requires even more constitutional changes through the creation of constitutional assemblies, which give a legal basis to the necessary changes in order to consolidate the new ‘socialist' elites in power, promoting presidential re-elections, amongst other methods. This libretto is fully understood by the bourgeoisies of the region.
Honduras is a prized geo-strategic objective for Chávism: it will give it a beachhead on the Atlantic cost of Central America through the port of Cortes, which also serves the export trade of Nicaragua and Honduras; in this way Venezuela will control a land ‘canal' that unites the Atlantic with the Pacific, through Nicaragua. This control of Nicaragua and Honduras facilitates its control over El Salvador, a situation which will make the development of the Puebla-Panama Plan[1] proposed by Mexico and the USA difficult.
For its part, Honduras has the ‘natural' conditions for the development of the populist leftist project of Chávez, since it is the third poorest country of the Americas after Haiti and Bolivia. The desperate masses, whose growth is inevitably accelerating with the crisis, are the main consumers of the false hopes about getting out of their miserable conditions, hopes that form part of the ‘Socialism of the 21st Century' recipe . The Chávist message is aimed at these masses who need to be permanent mobilised with the support of the unions and the left and leftist parties, and various peasant and indigenous social organisations.
Chávism, the product of the decomposition of the Venezuelan and world bourgeoisie, uses and worsens the expressions of decomposition within the regional bourgeoisie. The necessity to polarise the confrontation between the bourgeois fractions in its turn becomes a dynamic factor of decomposition. The latest Honduran crisis, which has hardly begun, represents a worsening of the situation in the ‘banana republics' of Central America, who have not experienced such a crisis since the 1980s when the conflicts in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua left almost half a million dead and millions displaced in their wake.
Just before the coup Chávez had already put in place his geopolitical machinery, alerting his presidential ‘friends, denouncing the ‘gorillas' of the military, etc. Faced with the coup he called an emergency meeting in Nicaragua of the countries belonging to ALBA, where he announced the suspension of the supply of oil to Honduras and threatened to send troops in case the Venezuelan embassy in Honduras was attacked. He also gave Zelaya access to the resources of the Venezuelan state, principally the international TV channel Telesur, which endlessly covered his situation, showing him as the victim and portraying him as a great humanitarian and defender of the poor. Zelaya's speech at the UN was broadcast on national TV and radio in Venezuela.
Chávez has persistently called on the ‘peoples of America' to defend the threatened democracy from the ‘gorilla military putschists', perhaps to make them forget the fact that he was the head of such a coup in Venezuela against the Social Democratic President Carlos Andres Perez in 1992. It is precisely such ‘military gorillas' who carry out the policy of repression of the Chávist state and its gangs, not only against the demonstration of the opponents of the regime, but against workers' struggles in Venezuela. Internacionalismo has denounced this in various articles on our website.[2]
But this hypocrisy is seen throughout the ‘international community'. The OAS, UN, EU and many other countries have condemned the coup and asked for Zelaya to be reinstated. Many of them have withdrawn their ambassadors from Honduras. However this has been nothing but mere formalism and used by the media to try and increase the prestige of bourgeois democracy and its organisations, which are constantly losing credibility.
To the surprise of the so-called ‘left' and its leftist appendages, the USA also condemned this coup and asked for Zelaya to be reinstated. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the US's ambassador in Honduras, and Tom Shannon, Under Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere, had all been active in the months before the coup, by their own account in order to avoid the explosion of the crisis. We have to ask ourselves: has the US lost control of the situation? Why has North American diplomacy been so weak in the region since the Bush government?
It is clear that the US has been unable to control the struggle between Honduran fractions. This expresses the level of decomposition in the ranks of the bourgeoisie and the geopolitical weakness of the USA in its own ‘backyard', making it difficult to counter-act the effect of the neo-populist governments whose Presidents have been elected by democratic means (often with large majorities), but who once in power take the state by assault and transform them into real dictatorships with a democratic veneer.
However we do not think this is the case. The US has made full use of its condemnation of the coup and its demand that Zelaya be reinstated to try and ‘clean up its image' in the region, which was left soiled by the Bush administration. If Obama had acted like Bush (when, for example, in April 2002, he supported the attempted coup against Chávez) he would have increased anti-Americanism in the region and weakened the strategy of diplomatic opening by the new administration.
The US has allowed the Honduran crisis to ‘run its course' in order to used it to weaken Chávism in the region. By acting as it has, the US has forced Chávez to defend his ‘pupil' Zelaya and thus making clear his incendiary role in the Honduran crisis. This has enabled the US to present the Organisation of American States and other regional leaders as trying to solve the crisis, thus appearing to be only one power among a number. In this way it will be the ‘American Community'[3] in its entirety that will be responsible for ending the crisis, whilst little by little it will become clearer that Chávez and Zelaya were responsible for the crisis. However, the new Honduran government's rejection of the OAS decision toreinstate Zelaya, the ‘failure' of Insulza's trip to Tegucigalpa on the 3rd July, and the actions taken by the Micheletti government to stop the landing of the Venezuelan plane that brought Zelaya from Washington on Sunday 5 July, have worsened the crisis and reduced the pressure of Chávez, who has denounced the ‘Yankee imperialism' behind these events and has called on Obama, ‘victim of imperialism', to intervene more decisively in Honduras!
The situation is undoubtedly complicated for the USA. On the one hand, it is necessary to give Chávez and his followers a lesson; and on the other, the situation could degenerate into an explosive one at a time when it has other geopolitical priorities, such as the intervention in Afghanistan, the crisis with North Korea, etc. Thus, the decomposition of the Honduran bourgeoisie and the whole region, including Venezuela, could lead to an uncontrollable situation.
Zelaya's acceptance of the mediation by the Costa Rican president Oscar Arias, as asked for by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, gives an idea of the central role that the United States is playing in this crisis.
The Honduran crisis is of greater importance than the recent crisis between Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela over the question of the FARC, in which the Chávez government also played a leading role. Nicaragua, allied with Chávez, is confronting Colombia over the San Andrés archipelago in the Caribbean. There has been talk of mobilising troops in these conflicts, including Venezuela concentrating its forces at the border with Colombia during the conflict with Ecuador. Although these mobilisations were aimed at the media in order to distract the proletariat and the population, the reality is that the bourgeoisie of these states, faced with the crisis and decomposition, are more and more using the language and means of war..
Likewise, the influence of Chávez and his followers has been felt in these recent crises and the events in Bolivia, in the electoral fraud that the opposition denounced in the recent municipal elections in Nicaragua; the Peruvian government denounced the involvement of Bolivia and Venezuela in the confrontations in the Peruvian jungle town of Bagua. The Chávez government, a product and a factor in decomposition, has no other option that to carry out these military adventures. It has associated itself with states and organisations that practice radical anti-Americanism: Iran, North Korea, Hamas, etc. On the other hand, in Venezuela there is a relatively serious situation due to the fall in income from oil (essential for the Venezuelan state) due to the crisis and the emergence of workers' struggles, all of which push the government to maintain a climate of internal and external tension.
The USA is having difficulty imposing order in its own backyard. Regional bourgeoisies such as the Mexican or Colombian, who could counteract the action of Chávismo and who could exploit the political crisis in their area of natural influence - Central America - to expand this influence, are consumed by their own internal crises and confrontations with drug traffickers. Conflicts that have reached such a level that an American Senator has even said that in a few months there will no longer be a Mexican State. Colombia, a US bastion in the region, does not have the ability to counteract the offensive of Chávez, with whom it already has a fragile relationship. Brazil, has economic interests in Central America (investment in plantations for the production of biofuels) and has carried out geopolitical actions that have strengthened its position as a regional power. It appears (like the other countries mentioned) to have no great interest in solving a crisis promoted by Chávez, its competitor in the region and without a doubt wants to leave Chávez ‘to stew in his own juice.' Brazil has made efforts to maintain some stability in the region, but it also wants to construct its own imperialist domain and is thus in competition with the United States.
The perspectives for the region are towards worsening tensions, which will undoubtedly lead to a powerful campaign to enlist the proletariat. The bourgeoisie's political propaganda develops in this perspective. We think that the internationalist milieu must have a profound discussion on these questions which are part of our view of inter-imperialist tensions.
This crisis is strengthening the hand of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. Whether Zelaya returns or not the politics of polarisation have arrived in Honduras and are going to be strengthened. In this sense it is a source of division and confrontation within the working class itself, as is the case in Venezuela, Bolivia, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador.
On the other hand, the bourgeoisie is using and will use the situation in Honduras in order to strengthen the democratic mystification - making a self-critique in order to clean up state institutions. In this sense, the electoral mystification is going to play an important role due to the upcoming elections in Honduras.
The crisis is accentuating poverty in one of the poorest countries in Central America: the remittances sent by Hondurans abroad (about 25% of GDP) are beginning to fall. Therefore, social decomposition which condemns the young by their hundreds of thousands to ‘live' off gang violence, criminality and drugs, is inevitably going to accelerate with the crisis and with political decomposition in the ranks of the bourgeoisie. This poverty-stricken mass is the basis for the emergence of other local and regional Chávezs who will sow hope amongst the dispossessed masses, knowing full well that they cannot offer any real solutions.
Therefore the Honduran, regional and international proletariat, and the internationalist milieu, must clearly reject any support for the struggling national or regional bourgeois forces; they have to reject the politics of polarisation induced by the inter-bourgeois struggles, which have already cost many lives in the region, amongst them those of proletarians. The confrontation in Honduras shows that capitalism is sinking ever deeper in decomposition, which leads to confrontation between bourgeois fractions at the internal level, and between the great, medium and small powers at the regional level, confrontations that the crisis is going to exacerbate.
Despite it numerical weakness, only the struggle of the Honduran proletariat on its own class terrain, along with the struggle of the regional and international proletariat, will be able to put an end to all this barbarity.
Internacionalismo12/7/09
[1] This is a for the "socio-economic development" of South Mexico and 7 Central America countries in order to reinforce regional integration.
[3] The OAS is the Organisation of American States, a continental organisation originating in the Cold War under the control of the US as part of its struggle against the Eastern bloc. The adjective "American" must be understood in its proper sense, continental. The General Secretary of the OAS is the Chilean J.M. Insulza
Proletarian voices have been raised against the massacre in Bagua[1]. The comrades of the Proletarian Nucleus of Peru have sent us a position denouncing the brutal massacre of the indigenous population carried out by the Peruvian state in a conflict over their ancient Amazonian communal lands in the name of "bringing progress", which means imposing a high level of exploitation of the region's natural resources
At the same time, we have received, in the form of a comment on our website, a leaflet signed by a group from Lima that defines itself as anarchist - "Young Proletarians" - which also defends very important positions.
These two leaflets were not only a statement of position; they were also distributed on demonstrations that took place in Lima in June after the repression.
We warmly welcome these two initiatives. We greatly appreciate the proletarian courage and engagement that this expresses. As the comrades of the Nucleus put it: "Faced with events such as the massacre in Bagua it is important to give voice to a clearly proletarian perspective in opposition to all the nationalist visions, whether in defence of state capitalism or inter-classism; whether in the name of the ‘citizen' or the ‘struggle for democracy' defended by Ollanta[2] , the unions and the worshipers of ‘Socialism of the 21st Century', that great fraud perpetrated by Chavez and his followers".
We are also publishing a new internationalist position by another group of comrades from Peru, the Circle for Scientific Social Analysis, which defends the same internationalist vision as the other two.
The common point of these three documents is that they address these events from the point of view of the proletariat:
The three documents share a common defence of proletarian internationalist positions, along with a denunciation of nationalist, state capitalist, inter-classist positions that try to divide, dislocate and finally defeat the proletariat and thus in the end the whole of humanity.
This common framework is very important and is what unites all internationalists.
That said, there is a question that is posed in the three texts and which, we think, needs to be the object of a very interesting discussion.
This theme we can sum up as: what attitude must the proletariat adopt faced with the struggles of other non-exploiting strata that are not proletarian?
This problem was clearly posed in Russia in 1917 when scarcely more than 3-4 million proletarians were immersed in a heterogeneous mass of a 100 million peasants. The proletariat had to win this gigantic social layer to its struggle. We think that it was able to do this from its own class base: the struggle to end the imperialist war, the world revolution, the struggle that gave all power to the Soviets or Workers' Councils. Faced with the peasants' demands, a widespread discussion took place amongst the Bolsheviks as well as the international revolutionary movement, which highlighted the position taken by Rosa Luxemburg that criticised the Bolsheviks' policy towards the peasants.
We believe that it will be very interesting to take up this discussion again in order to orientate ourselves in the present situation. However, it is not the same as then. For example, the agricultural sector in the major countries has been brutally reduced over the last 40 years, notably in Latin America where since the beginning of the 60's the peasant population has fallen from 50% of the total population, to being hardly more than 20% today.
The peasants have been forced back into their old communities in the mountains and forests due to the voracity of capitalist expansion. This has seen the introduction of commodity production, principally through the state. This has meant the introduction of a brutal tax burden and the development of cooperative movement[3], forcing people to abandon the agrarian life, which was marked by backwardness, isolation and poverty, but which did offer the advantage of a certain economic and communal stability.
And what perspective are these people offered? Either emigration to Europe or North America or falling into desperation in the great cities that have seen the growth of poverty-stricken areas where millions of people are crowded together in deplorable conditions.
We have to take up this problem in the discussion through addressing questions such as;
ICC 23/7/9
Capitalism is facing the worst moments of its existence and the events in Bagua are a tragic expression of this. What capitalism shows with bloodbaths like the one in Bagua is the fact that it has reached the worst historic phase of its decadence. This decomposition of society is a very important and salient characteristic of decadent capitalism.
Bagua demonstrates why capitalism is caught up in a process of collapse and the scenes of massacres and barbarity are a permanent consequence of this. War is a constant threat, and massacres such as Bagua today are only an expression of the capitalist barbarity that that is drawing closure and putting the whole of humanity in danger.
It is possible that this is not too clear to begin with: many say that capitalism is still a powerful and dynamic system capable of overcome the crisis. This is not the case. Since the First World War capitalism has been in its period of decadence and it entered this new phase of capitalist decadence, the phase of decomposition, at the end of the 80's[4]
The indigenous population's main reason for struggling was the defence of their small property (indigenous, peasant), which is an understandable demand for these exploited sectors, condemned to misery and marginalisation. But this also makes it clear that there was no proletarian character to this struggle. At the same time the proletariat has to do all it can to win over these sectors, especially seeing that many indigenous peoples and peasants are condemned to the process of proletarianisation. We are in agreement with the necessity for the proletariat to show solidarity with the struggles of the indigenous communities in Bagua and elsewhere.
These social sectors need to be won over by the proletariat in its final struggle with capital. We must not mix this up with the idea that these sectors can be protagonists of a similar struggle to that of the proletariat or that they are a mass equal to the proletariat. The unique struggle of the proletariat[5] with its class demands, with its class methods, the perspectives that it contains, can offer a future to the other exploited social sectors and humanity as a whole, and this is why the proletariat must create a platform in which the indigenous communities can integrate their problems and demands.
On the other hand, if we put things the other way round, starting from the idea of a struggle of the proletariat that does not differentiate itself from that of the other social strata, we run the risk that the proletariat will not be able to develop its strength and the same will apply to the other social sectors, that is, they will both be weakened and will be defeated and crushed.
The antagonism between large and small property is thrown into relief here, as the big landowners attempt to extract natural resources from lands seized from the forest dwellers and peasants. For the proletariat it is not a question of the defence of property, but of abolishing it in order to put all the resources of nature at the disposal of humanity.
The struggle for the repeal of laws concerning budgets for schools, roads, water, electricity, for the development of the area, ignore the root of the problem: capitalism. But more specifically it creates illusions, the idea that capitalism through the state is still able to be an agent of progress (and here it is not a question of the dichotomy Modernity vs Backwardness as president Alan Garcia[6] says) . No. What we are presented with in the events in Bagua is the desperation of capitalism that is leading on the one hand to the destruction of the environment and on the other hand towards massacres of populations whose future is not wage labour, but the disappearance of the old communities through being pushed into the big cities, where they are crowded together in miserable conditions in the poverty-stricken shanty towns.
But the dominant ideology of capital is also expressed in "indigenism", the defence of ancestral culture, nationalism, which carries out the role of diverting movements from linking up with proletarian interests when the proletariat shows solidarity with the indigenous population's protests: we can see this when these communities carry ‘tahuantinsuyo' flags and the two coloured scarf. It is also necessary to understand that what made the government massacre them was not "authoritarianism", "genocide" or "anti-democratism": it was precisely DEMOCRACY ITSELF THAT MASSACRED THEM.
Faced with events such as the massacre in Bagua it is important to give voice to a clearly proletarian perspective in opposition to all the nationalist visions, whether in defence of state capitalism or inter-classism; whether in the name of the "citizen" or the "struggle for democracy" defended by Ollanta, the unions and the worshipers of "Socialism of the 21st Century", that great fraud perpetrated by Chavez and his followers. This means a deep rooted denunciation of the left and extreme left of capital.
Finally we must be clear that whilst capitalism is in the process of collapse there are going be more massacres, wars, and capitalist barbarities, typical of the phase of decomposition that capitalism is going through on a daily basis. The proletariat, which is today developing its own strength, is called upon to overcome all this by putting forward its perspective for the future of humanity.
Socialism or barbarism!
Proletarian Nucleus
With the aim of developing a discussion we want to make two observations about the leaflet by the comrades signing themselves Anarchist of Lima/Jovenes Proletarios.
The comrades say "However, the struggling proletariat in Bagua understands this very well, and has gone beyond the democratic games, they understand that the best form of defence is the offensive. Their struggle is our struggle and we are in solidarity with it, since it forms part of the community of the international struggle against the capitalist beast."
We agree with the necessity for the proletariat to show solidarity with the struggles of the indigenous communities in Bagua, the destiny for these populations is proletarianisation, condemnation to being crowded into the great cities in dreadful conditions. These social strata can and must be won over by the proletariat in its struggle for emancipation.
This should not be confused with the idea that these sectors are engaged in a struggle similar to that of the proletariat or that they form a mass that it not different from the proletariat.
Only the struggle of the proletariat, through its class demands, with its class methods, with the perspective that it contains, can offer a future to non-exploiting social strata and a framework within which they can and must integrate their problems and protests.
On the other hand, if the starting point is a struggle where the proletariat is diluted amongst other social strata, we run the risk that both the proletariat and the other social strata will be weakened, exhausted and defeated.
There is another passage that we think it is necessary to address "Their struggle demonstrates one thing: the resurgence and spreading of the struggle within the class, which on the international level cannot be hidden and which sooner or later we will take part in the development of our self-liberation as an oppressed class"
For us it is vital that the comrades have inscribed themselves within the perspective of the international class struggle and we are in total agreement about developments at the international level. However, we are still only at a very embryonic stage, where expressions of solidarity, the autonomous initiatives of our class, are limited to a minority and have not advanced to a high level or generalisation. In order to have a positive influence in the workers struggles it is necessary to make realizable proposals, which advance consciousness, solidarity and a sense of common strength. To do this it is necessary to know where we are now and the length of the road that we still have to travel. We believe that this is the way to advance towards the self-liberation of the oppressed class, as the comrades say clearly themselves.
ICC 16/6/9
The universal face of capitalism has always been the sowing of death
"Death is not Anonymous, it has a name and direction"
B. Brecht
"The state calls its violence Law whilst that of the individual is a crime"
Max Stirner
Yesterday and today capital and its state repression are exposed to the light of day.
The arrogant and proud bourgeoisie and its armed forces have to go from country to country seeking markets, looking for land, natural and human resources, instilling terror and adding new bodies to the long list of those murdered by bullets, hunger, work, exhaustion and fear.
On the 5th June Bagua was "a show ground" for this ferocity and confirms what we have said. It was one of capital's many attempts to appropriate the resources of the rainforest for its market at the cost of the oppression of those living in it.
However, the struggling proletariat in Bagua understands this very well, and has gone beyond the democratic games; they understand that the best form of defence is the offensive. Their struggle is our struggle and we are in solidarity with it, since it forms part of the community of the international struggle against the capitalist beast. Their resistance to submission is ours and all of the oppressed of the world. Nevertheless, if the struggle does not contain the aim of the overthrow of the existing order, the merciless blows of the worsening international crisis of capitalism will rain down on us (as always) Can you doubt this?
Capitalism and humanity are antagonists, and the history of the struggle of our comrades against our class enemy is a clear and living examples of this.
We can longer be deceived by the opportunists who to come to the fore and take advantage of our dead in order to proclaim their support and tell us how they represent us, simply in order to put forward bourgeois interests (political parties, elections, money).
The comrades in Bagua for all their limitations have had the courage to carry out their struggle. Their struggle demonstrates one thing: the resurgence and spreading of the struggle within the class, which on the international level cannot be hidden and which sooner or later we will take part in the development of our self-liberation as an oppressed class
AGAINST THE STATE AND CAPITALISM!
THE EMANCIPATION OF THE OPPRESSED WILL BE THE WORK OF THE OPPRESSED THEMSELVES, OR IT WILL BE NOTHING!
FOR THE SELF-ORGANISATION AND AUTONOMY OF THE OPPRESSED IN STRUGGLE!
Anarchists of Lima
Jovenes Proletarios
Comrades:
The death of proletarians in Amazonia is a clear example of the destruction that the capitalist system is leading to. Each day millions of our class comrades die of hunger, cold and poverty throughout the world.
Comrades, we believe that all the socially created riches of society, which are appropriated by a few, exist due to the private appropriation of social production. And this is legitimised by the bourgeois state. We cannot continue to bear or tolerate this exploitation. We must rely only on ourselves, the exploited classes, the organised proletariat, to struggle for a new system. We must decide what to do with what we produce, we can no longer bear more exploitation, we can no longer follow bureaucratic leaders, we must organise ourselves as an international class. We can struggle against the bourgeoisie through strikes, stoppages, until we have the power to free ourselves.
We must join a demonstration not to passively follow the union banners but in order to discuss with workers how to develop a truly revolutionary struggle against capitalism. The stoppages, strikes, demonstrations and actions that we (the workers) carry out must help our struggle, because what we want is to show that this decrepit system cannot satisfy the needs of the great proletarian masses and can only exist through exploitation. We must seek to build an autonomous organisation outside of the union bureaucracies. General assemblies, struggles that spread to other workers, demonstrations open to the students, unemployed, workers from other branches, are the alternatives that we must follow.
The deaths in Amazonia must make us take account of the fact the class struggle, between exploited and exploiting, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, is as alive as ever. The rich are never going to stop being rich, no matter what Ollanta, Chavez, Evo Morales want us to believe. We do not want reforms, we want revolution, we do not want crumbs, we want everything that is ours. We will build a workers' revolution of the whole proletariat, as well as the students and the oppressed. The economic struggle is the means to holding back exploitation, but our aim must be its complete abolition.
We are all that we create. Do we want to continue living on our knees, hoping that there will be a new president? When will it be us who decide our future? Our mission is to destroy this system, to destroy exploitation of man by man, and not to allow our labour to make the bourgeoisie rich. Labour must be for our society and for ourselves. Comrades, we are marching towards a new society, we must take power. We must organise and manage proletarian power.
Down with the exploiting, oppressive, genocidal capitalist system!
Long live the struggle of the international proletariat!
Circle for Scientific Social Analysis
"Sociedad y Ciencia" [email protected] [5]
"Death is not Anonymous, it has a name and direction"
B. Brecht
"The state calls its violence Law whilst that of the individual is a crime"
Max Stirner
Yesterday and today capital and its state repression does not dazzle anyone, but shines far and wide.
The arrogant and proud bourgeoisie and its armed forces (which surprises no one) have to go from land to land seeking markets looking for land, natural and human resources, installing terror and adding new bodies to the long list of those murdered by bullets, hunger, work, exhaustion and fear.
On the 5th June Bagua was "a show ground" for this ferocity and confirms what we have said. It was one of capital's many attempts to appropriate the resources of the rainforest for its market at the cost of the oppression of those living in it.
However, the struggling proletariat in Bagua understands this very well, and has gone beyond the democratic games, they understand that the best form of defence is the offensive. Their struggle is our struggle and we are in solidarity with it, since it forms part of the community of the international struggle against the capitalist beast. Their resistance to submission is ours and all of the oppressed of the world. Nevertheless, if the struggle does not contain the aim of the overthrow of the existing order, the merciless blows of the worsening international crisis of capitalism will rain down on us (as always) Can you doubt this?
Capitalism and humanity are antagonists, and the history of the struggle of our comrades against our class enemy is a clear and living examples of this.
We can longer be deceived by the opportunists who to come to the fore and take advantage of our dead in order to proclaim their support and tell us how they represent us, simply in order to put forward bourgeois interests (political parties, elections, money).
The comrades in Bagua for all their limitations have had the courage to carry out their struggle. Their struggle demonstrates one thing: the resurgence and spreading of the struggle within the class, which on the international level cannot be hidden and which sooner or later we will take part in the development of our self-liberation as an oppressed class
AGAINST THE STATE AND CAPITALISM!
THE EMANCIPATION OF THE OPPRESSED WILL BE THE WORK OF THE OPPRESSED THEMSELVES, OR IT WILL BE NOTHING!
FOR THE SELF-ORGANISATION AND AUTONOMY OF THE OPPRESSED IN STRUGGLE!
Anarchists of Lima
Jovenes Proletarios
[1] On the morning of 5th July, Peruvian police were let lose against the indigenous population of the Amazonia province (a community of about 600.000 people) who were blocking the a road in order to defend to defend their territory. Since April 15th the Indian communities of the Peruvian Amazon have been mobilising against the measures to exploit their land for the profit of the mining and oil companies in the North East of the country. From the middle of May they were considered to be in a "state of insurrection". The balance sheet of these events is very clear: a number of deaths, certainly more than 30, perhaps hundreds of wounded and forty arrests. Information is rather confused due to the police lock-down of the area.
[2] Ollanta Moises Humala is a Peruvian politician and military man (retired). He is the founding member and president of the Peruvian Nationalist Party.
[3] These monstrous "development" projects, such as the one by the Peruvian state for Bagua, have been implemented in many other countries. For example, in Brazil and Argentina, the development of the "green" production" of "ecological" fuels means gigantic extensive farming whose only result is not only the emigration of the communities that live in these areas, but also terrible ecological destruction.
[4] For a more detailed analysis see https://en.internationalism.org/ir/107_decomposition [6]
[5] We reject the reductionist and partial vision that only sees the proletariat as factory workers. The proletariat is a social class which encompasses large layers both in the town and in the country
[6] Sixteen years previously, having finished his catastrophic first premiership (1985-1990), the boss of the APRA (social democratic party) Alan Garcia we re-installed as the president of Peru in 2006. He was opposed by the nationalist candidate Ollanta Humala.
On July 20, a couple of dozen young workers at the Vestas wind-turbine factory on the Isle of Wight occupied their factory after the management had decided to close it with the loss of over 500 jobs with about another hundred going on the mainland.
This action occurred outside the framework of a trade union, indeed the mainly young workforce was for the most part not in a union. By their action they demonstrated a combativity and a degree of self-organisation that is a characteristic of workers facing factory closures and unemployment. A fortnight into the occupation, the danger is that this struggle will be isolated and strangled by a combination of leftists, environmentalists and the trade unions.
For the company, producing these particular turbines is unprofitable in Britain, thereby, through the logic of capitalism, the factory has to close, full stop. For the environmental argument, this factory is a special case, it has a ‘green' product and therefore Britain should be using it as part of its climate change strategy. Some workers have taken up this line, not surprisingly given the amount of hot air that the British bourgeoisie has expelled on being ‘really serious about tackling climate change'.
But it's no good basing a workers' struggle on the blatant lies of the ruling class and its baseless statement that it will be creating nearly half-a-million ‘green' jobs. There will not be one ‘green' job unless there is profit in it and the attitude of the government over Vestas has made this very clear. This is a workers' fight, a fight for all workers, a class issue, and illusions that there can be ‘green' reforms within capitalism can only be a drag on the struggle.
Working closely with the Greens, has been the RMT union, again pleading the ‘special case' argument and, along with the TUC, appealing to the Labour government for ‘green' jobs. The role of the RMT union is instructive here: parachuting in and saying it would represent all workers in the plant, it signed up a number of workers and initially seemed to provide an impulse to the struggle and help to the workers. But a visitor to the site (see below), expressing solidarity, reports the workers being kept in the background and the union taking over, only allowing RMT officials to their meetings for example. This excludes the families and elements of the community as well as any elements wanting to express solidarity and speak. It cuts off a wider discussion that must confront the need to go to other workers.
In the meantime, the police have acted with their usual ‘impartiality', dressing up in riot gear and interpreting the law as they see fit, intimidating supporters and trying to stop food getting to those strikers still in the factory. They have now been complemented by private security forces. The management have acted ruthlessly in sending in dismissal notices hidden in pizzas; effectively denying the workers involved any redundancy pay or possibly any state allowances - as well as being a wider threat to the whole workforce - which is all perfectly legal.
The legal action by Vestas against the workers was put off and this was hailed as a victory by the leftists and the unions. This could have given them just enough time to strangle the fight, and bury the imperative need for the struggle to spread. Today, 4 August, Vestas got a court order to end the occupation and evict the workers.
A supporter of the struggle who visited the factory and saw the need for it to spread made this clear in a post under the name of Jason Cortez on the libcom website: "the need (is) for some workers to be going to these workers (local factories, hospital, etc) and other workforces to discuss with them how they widen the struggle is urgent". He also made the point that the resin factory next door to Vestas is itself threatened with closure and this would be the obvious starting point.
There is the danger that what's positive about this struggle - the involvement of the young workers - will be incorporated in and exhausted by the whole circus that's been created round the occupation. But the main danger lies with the union, which is now on the ‘inside', taking over the fight. What's needed by the workers is a mass meeting open to all workers and supporters and from here delegated workers to go out and discuss and extend the struggle to other workers. This would be a victory in itself.
Baboon 4/8/9
A week-long strike of 70,000 construction workers in early July stopped work on World Cup 2010 projects including stadiums, airports, motorways and rail links. This was by no means the first major strike this year; there were more than half a million working days lost in the first six months, nearly double the number over the same period last year. In 2009 there have been significant strikes in the road freight industry (involving 60,000 workers), on South African Airways and in the health service.
There has also been a wave of protests in many townships against the lack of basic services. More than a million people in South Africa still live in shacks, many without access to electricity or running water. Although 2.8 million houses have been built since the ANC came to power in 1994, there are still officially over two million households (around 8 million people) living in "informal settlements". The houses might exist but the allocation, as with so many other local services, is prone to nepotism and corruption. It's not surprising that local councillors have been popular targets of protests.
The often-violent protests have been reminiscent of the township protests of the 1980s. As well as demonstrations, police cars have been stoned and set on fire, shops looted, buildings burned and roads blocked. As opposed to past protests that tended to focus on individual complaints, the recent wave was more generalised, against a whole range of privations. Also, although some foreigners were attacked it was not on anything like the scale of last year when 60 people died.
The police used tear gas, rubber bullets, stun grenades and mass arrests. A government spokeswoman said that the ANC had a "deep understanding" of the problems of "poor service delivery" but "the law must take its course" and the state would "deal ruthlessly" with the protests. Zuma said that the police would "respond with sensitivity" but would "take swift action" against anything deemed unlawful.
With the gap between rich and poor wider than it was 15 years ago under white minority rule, with life expectancy under 50 (which is not only because of the 1000 who die every day from HIV/Aids), and with 75% of black children living in poverty, the protests can be expected to re-ignite in the future.
There were also many strikes in late July. 40,000 workers in chemical, pharmaceutical and paper industries were on strike at the same time. There was a strike involving workers at Massmart stores, a chain with more than 250 stores across the country, with workers staging protest demonstrations in many locations. Doctors struck for two weeks, and there were also strikes in the transport sector. The SA Transport and Allied Workers' Union said it would make a "last ditch effort" to prevent a strike of Metrorail workers - but failed. There was also a two-day strike that affected the South African Broadcasting Corporation. Strikes in the vital gold, platinum and coal industries were threatened, but the unions and the enterprises came to an agreement.
One of the biggest strikes involved 150,000 municipal workers over five days. The South African Municipal Workers' Union warned striking workers that their demonstrations, which took place throughout the country, should be peaceful. In practice there were clashes with the police, with the latter using rubber bullets and pepper spray in same places.
As far as the unions are concerned The Times (28 July) wrote "So far, the unions have been careful to emphasise that they are not fighting the ANC Government they fought to see elected, and have aimed their anger at incompetent officials and corrupt local government representatives." This is not surprising as Cosatu (the country's biggest union federation) is part of the government (with the ANC and the South African Communist Party). However, criticisms from the unions are definitely growing. For example they criticised the police for their heavy-handed treatment of recent strikes and protests, and have said they won't hold back on wage demands despite the economy being in the first recession in 17 years. It is to be expected that the unions will further distance themselves from the government if they want to retain any credibility.
The official unemployment rate in South Africa is 23.6%, but in reality it's probably at least a third of the working age adult population. Government statistics show that the number of people in employment fell by 267,000 in the last quarter, following more than 200,000 jobs lost in the first quarter. Among Zuma's promises was one for the creation of 500,000 new jobs. Understandably this has been retracted. A former housing minister had said that shacks would be "eradicated by 2014". No one expects this to happen either. As with the township protests, workers' struggles can be expected to continue
Since the ANC came to power a substantial black middle class has emerged, but most of the population have seen no improvements in their lives since the end of apartheid. The impact of the global recession is going to make things worse. No sector is safe. Even the Anglo American Corporation, a South African giant in coal, gold, diamonds (it owns De Beers) and platinum has suffered. It has just announced a 69% decline in profits and wants to make $2bn of cuts in costs by 2011: "this includes slashing 15,405 jobs out of a target headcount reduction of 19,000 by the end of this year" (Guardian 31/7/9) It's estimated that a typical miner has between 7 and 10 dependents, so the impact of more widespread unemployment will be devastating.
Since 1994 the ANC and its allies have amply shown their ability to play a part in the management of South African capitalism. The working class has shown in its recent strikes that it is part of a world-wide revival of struggle that comes up against the capitalist state whatever clothes it wears.
Car 1/8/9
On 24 July thousands of Chinese steel workers in the north eastern city of Tonghua clashed with police during demonstrations over a proposed take-over deal. It led to the kicking, beating and throwing down stairs to his death of the general manager of the Jianlong Steel Holding Company. This event received more publicity than workers' actions in China usually do, probably because it showed workers' frustrations and desperation rather than their ability to organise themselves or express solidarity for others.
In fact, workers' struggles have been reviving in China as much as other countries because their experience of capitalist exploitation is the same.
Before turning to an interesting recent report it is worth recalling the basics of workers' lives in China. After all, there are many (on the left and the right) who say that China is ‘socialist' or ‘communist'. There are also some Trotskyists who describe China as a ‘bureaucratically deformed workers' state'. Also available is the view that China was once ‘socialist', or at least ‘progressive', but went downhill with the death of Mao Zedong and the re-emergence of Deng Xiaoping at the end of the 1970s. As we approach the 60th anniversary in October of Mao's proclamation of the establishment of the People's Republic of China, it's worth recalling why there is nothing in this for the working class to celebrate.
Before the 1945-49 civil warbetween the Chinese Communist Party and the Guomingdang there had been, since 1937, in an alliance in the war against Japan in which they both recruited people to die in the interests of their various exploiters.In all parts of the country, including those dominated by the Maoists, strikeswere forbidden as disruptive to the war effort. And when finally the CCP came to dominate the whole country (except Taiwan), far from smashing the Guomingdang state it was incorporated into the stalinist state. After all, the Guomingdang state had already taken over a large part of a number of major industries, so it was entirely fitting that the CCP with its explicitly state capitalist policies should take it over. In contrast to the Guomingdang, which was riddled with widespread corruption and had presided over galloping inflation, the CCP's approach corresponded more closely to the needs of the Chinese national capital.
What needs to be remembered when the '60 glorious years' are being marked is thatthe working class hadn't mobilised itself in defence of its own interests, andthat no new relations of production were introduced by the new government. The working class still sold its labour power for wages, the capitalist state still stood, and it was very common for the existing functionaries to remain in place. As for private businesses, when they were taken over by the state the owner often stayed on as manager.
Above all, it is necessary to forget the ‘socialist' rhetoric of the Chinese ruling class, as it no more corresponds to any reality than does the talk of ‘freedom'a nd ‘humanitarianism' by the bourgeoisie throughout the rest of the world.
The example of the ‘Great Leap Forward' should be enough. This was the name given to the Second Five Year Plan that was due to run from 1958-63. The intention was to reorganise agriculture, but, even when bad weather is taken into account, the famine of 1958-61, in which, in different estimates, between 16 and 50 million people died, was caused by the state's policies. Because of a commitment to industrialisation many crops were left unharvested. Due to a campaign against sparrows there were devastating swarms of locusts. Grain continued to be exported in order to fuel propaganda about the supposed success story of Mao's regime. It was only when exports were stopped and imports increased that the famine began to diminish.
The period of the famine is still officially known as the ‘three years of natural disasters', which was the cause cited by theChinese state for the famine. Since the coming to power of Deng and his factionit has become acceptable in Chinato criticise Mao and some of his policies. What no one says is that the Chinese capitalist state has consistently shown itself as negligent of its subjects as any of the so-called ‘entrepreneur' capitalists with their workers, customers and the planet.
China Labour Bulletin is a Hong-Kong based organisation that campaigns for ‘free trade unions' and the enforcement of existing labour laws in China. Although they clearly have their own agenda their material is interesting even if you don't accept their conclusions. Every two years they publish "an in depth study of the workers' movementin China" and in early July they published their third report, Going it Alone: The Workers' Movement in China(2007-2008)
In this latest study they analysea hundred examples of workers' struggles in China over the last two years (involving numbers from "over 40" to "over 10,000" workers to "several hundred" schools and kindergartens) and try to draw out significant trends. Perhaps inevitably theysee the situation as particular to China. What's interesting is how similar is the experience of workers across the world.
For example they report on thegrowing gap between rich and poor. "A wide-ranging survey carried out between May and September 2008 by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences clearlyshowed that the gap between the richand the poor in China continues to grow. In 2007, the per capita annual household income of the top20 percent of urban and rural residents was 17 times higher than the lowest 20 percent. Average annual household income levels in eastern China [where thefinancial and industrial sectors are concentrated] were 2.03 times higher than in western China, and 1.98 times higher thanin central China.The most pressing concerns cited by respondents to the survey were: ‘rising prices' (63.5 percent), ‘difficulty and cost of getting medical treatment' (42.1 percent) and the ‘excessive income gap' (28 percent)." (Going it Alone ... p6.)
According to the World Wealth Report, compiled by Merrill Lynch and Cap Gemini, there were, at the end of 2007, 414,900 people in China worth more than one million dollars excluding their principal residence. At the end of 2008 "The global recession and local stock market crash caused the number of millionaires to shrink by 12pc to 364,000" (Daily Telegraph 24/6/9.) There are still dozens of billionaires in this reduced total.
Something else that will be familiar to workers everywhere is growing unemployment. Officially there are about seven million people out of work, with a government figure of 4.3% for urban unemployment (this figure does not include migrantworkers or graduates). Most analysts believe the real total is much higher. Asthe CLB report says: "In February 2009,Chen Xiwen, director of the office of the Central Leading Group on Rural Work, revealed the results of an extensive survey of 15 migrant worker-exporting provinces, which estimated that 15.3 percent or 20 million of China's 130million migrant workers had lost their jobs in the previous year" (Going It Alone ...p5)
Earlierthis year the Washington Post (13/1/9) came up with somesimilar figures "Unemployment is now estimated to be at its highest levels since the Communist Party took over in1949. Estimates by government research agencies for urban jobless top 18million, or 9 percent of the workforce .... This figure doesn't include thegrowing number of jobless among the 160 million migrant workers who are mostly employed in factories. The rural unemployment rate could be as high as 20 percent. In addition, 1 million college graduates are not expected to be able to find jobs this year."
More recently Wang Yadong, a senior official at the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security's employment section said that "China's current employment situationis still grave and the pressure for job creation remains large" (AFP4/8/9). Quoting the official figures (and, remember this is the government that claims to have made a profit from the Olympics) "Wang said around 147 million migrant workers had moved to cities forjobs by June but more than 4 million had yet to find one" (ibid.) This figure is on top of the millions who have already had to return home "Moreover, 3 million university graduates, including those who had left last year, were still unemployed" (ibid) -thus showing that previous predictions were too optimistic.
The reason that the state saysthat the situation is "grave" is simple. The "Chinese authorities fear that rising unemployment could provoke unrest in the country" (ibid).In fact they've already got it.
Going It Alone refers to an article that appeared earlier this year. "The Hong Kong-based political magazine Cheng Ming quoted senior Party sources as saying the number of mass incidents in 2008 was 127,467, almost 50 percent higher than the last officially released figure of 87,000 in 2005". A ‘mass incident' can beany strike, demonstration, blockade or other form of struggle that involves ahundred or more people. In the first three months of this year there were 58,000 ‘mass incidents'. If this tendency continues 2009 will break the records with more than 230,000 ‘mass incidents'.
One of the strengths of this report is that it has looked at individual struggles and tried to draw out some characteristic tendencies. It's worth quoting whatthey see as three major trends.
"Workers took matters into their own hands. Bypassing thelargely ineffectual official trade union, they used public protest as a means of forcing local governments to intercede on their behalf. And, in many cases,workers were successful.
Strikes ignited other protests in the same region, industryor company subsidiaries. The wave of taxi strikes that swept the county at the end of 2008 exemplified both the spread of industry-wide protests and the willingness of local governments to negotiate with the workers.
Workers' demands became broader and more sophisticated. Previously, disputes were mostly related to clear-cut violations of labour rights, such as the non-payment of wages, overtime and benefits, but in the last two years collective interest-based disputes came to the fore, withworkers seeking higher wages and better working conditions, and protesting arbitrary changes in their employment status and pay scales. One of the major causes of discontent was, for example, attempts by managements to circumvent the new Labour Contract Law by forcing employees to relinquish long-term contracts and rejoin the company on short-term contracts or as temporary labour."
Some of these tendencies are to be found elsewhere in working class struggles. What is different is the "Labour Contract Law", not in what it does, worsening workers' conditions (along with other recent legislation), but in how it has become afocus for individual or small groups of workers. In the New York Times (22/6/9) you could read "Workers are fighting back. Earlier this month, the government said Chinese courts were trying to cope with a soaring number of labor disputes, apparently from workers emboldened by the promise of the new contract labor law.
The number of labor disputes in China doubled to 693,000 in 2008, the first year the law was in effect, and are rising sharply this year, the government says."
These disputes are individual wrangles, a diversion from the potential of collective struggle. It's not as though there's not plenty to fight about. As the New York Times article says "A year and a half after a landmark labor law took effect in China, experts say conditions have actually deteriorated in southern China's export-oriented factories, which produce many of America's less expensive retail goods.
With China's exports reeling and unemployment rising because of the global slowdown, there is growing evidence that factories are ignoring or evading the new law" (ibid.)
As the CLB report put it "Even after the implementation of the Labour Contract Law on 1 January 2008, companies were still blatantly flouting the law or using underhand methods to circumvent it. A survey of more than 300 workers conducted by the Dagongzhe Migrant Workers Centre in Shenzhen showed that unscrupulous employers would provide workers with contracts in English rather than Chinese, force them to sign two separate ones or documents with two different company seals, or use other devious tricks to get around the provisions of the law. Employers also raised dormitory and food costs and increased penalties for turning up to work late and other violations of company rules. The survey showed that 26.6 percent of workers still did not have a contract, and that 28 percent of contracts offered wages lower than the legal minimum. Nearly two thirds of the workers interviewed said they had to work longer than the hours stated in their contract. And according to the Ministry of Human Resources, in China as awhole, in 2008, some 15.6 million workers lacked labour contracts." (Going It Alone...p11.)
The analysis in the report is straightforward. "The unprecedented wave of labour legislation in this period was no accident. It was a direct response to the pressure exerted by the workers' movement over the previous decade. A government committed to maintaining social order and harmony could no longer afford to ignore the strikes and protests staged by workers on an almost daily basis across the country" (ibid p13.)
The CLB think that all the labour legislation is a good thing, when, in reality, it provides a false focus for workers' energies. Fortunately, as they show themselves, workers have found many other ways of expressing their discontent.
The causes of the struggles studied were quite clear. "More than a third of the cases (at least 36) related to clear violations of legal rights, such as the non-payment of wages, overtime or social insurance contributions, or the failure to pay the compensation prescribed by law after the termination of employment contracts."
"However, in another third (at least 35) of the cases, workers did not simply seek redress for rights violations; they demanded higher wages, improved final severance packages from SOEs [state-owned enterprises], shorter working hours, improved welfare benefits and reductions in workload. Some retired and laid-off workers sought higher retirement payments and basic subsistence allowances.Other disputes arose over proposed changes in employment status, arbitrary changes to working conditions, meals and housing allowances, as well as demands for government investigations into alleged management malpractice during the restructuring of state-owned enterprises" (ibid 14/15.)
With the impact of the recession on China's export industries, unpaid wage arrears and no compensation for being laid off are common. "In China's manufacturing heartland, Dongguan, there were 117 incidents in September and October alone of factories closing and the boss running away, leaving at least 20,000 workers without pay" (ibid p15.)
Factory closures have shown the sharp dealing of the bourgeoisie and the expression of workers' anger.
"On 9 November 2007, several hundred workersat Nicewell Ceramics' Guangzhou plant blocked roads near local government buildings to protest wage arrears ofmore than two million yuan. Two days earlier, the chairman of the Taiwan-based parent company had informed the city government that he had been forced by "gangsters" to flee the idled plant.
On 13 February 2008, more than 250 workers at the Lichang Shoe Industries factory in Panyu blocked the Luoxi Bridge after the plant was closed and the manager absconded, leaving wages and social insurance contributions unpaid. According to workers, before the Chinese New Year holiday, the manager tricked workers by telling them to return to work after the holiday. When they did, they discovered he had disappeared with the cash box.
More than 1,000 worker sat the Chunyu Textiles factory in Wujiang city, Jiangsu, blockaded an expressway on 27 October 2008 after themanager fled abroad, leaving employees with four months' wages unpaid. The company had been crippled by debts but rather than go through formal bankruptcy proceedings which would have given workers some protection, the boss elected to simply run away" (ibid p15/16.)
Although these examples used road blocks, the report also includes examples of strikes, occupations, marches and other forms of struggle and protest.
With all strikes there is the curious question of their legality. "The right to strike was removed from the PRC Constitution in 1982, ten years before the advent of the ‘socialist market economy,' on the grounds that it was not necessary under China's socialist system. Since then the status of strikes in China has been a legal grey area - they are neither legal nor illegal" (ibid p22.)
The ‘right to strike' is a bit like the minimum wage. "The minimum wage was introduced in China in 2003, but it has rarely represented a decent or living wage, and at the end of 2008, minimum wages across the country were frozen in response to the global economic crisis" (ibid p15.)
If the status of strikes is unclear the response of the state is not. "Police intervened in at least 61 of the 100 cases reviewed here. On occasion, police action sufficed to temporarily stifle workers' anger and prevent escalation, but it often created more tension and ultimately led to violence. In at least 19 incidents, there were physical clashes between protesters andpolice, and some workers and police officers were injured" (ibid p24.)
The report gives some examples of violence against workers. "On 15 January 2008, Wang Chao, a migrant worker from Sichuan had an arm chopped off by thugs armed with knives and steel rods, hired by a state-owned construction company in Nanjing to attack workers' representatives when they sought payment of wage arrears. Wang was taken to hospital just in time for re-connective surgery" (ibid p26.)
"On 4 January 2007, workers at the notorious Italian-owned DeCoro furniture factory in Shenzhen staged several protests after the company announced relocation plans. Management only allowed employees to stay on if they accepted a 20 percent pay cut. The plant had witnessed numerous protests in the past, such as in November 2005, when some 3,000 employees struck inprotest at the beating of workers' representatives who asked the Italian managers for an audit of wages" (ibid p16).
"When claiming their wages for several months' work at a food processing plant on the coast of Shandong inearly July 2008, a group of migrant workers from Henan were surrounded and threatened by factory security guards and local gangsters. One of the workers was beaten and threatened with a knife. In an interview with CLB Director HanDongfang, one of the workers said that at this point, the factory boss yelled: ‘Kill him! Kill him! Kill him and bury him here! Make sure that not one of them gets out of here, forget about their wages. Don't be afraid they'll go to court! Just let them go to court. Don't worry about the Labour Bureau, they are all my friends, and failing that we have the provincial governor on our side'" (ibid p26/27.)
As elsewhere in the world, the bourgeoisie knows it has the law and the state onits side.
More positively the CLB report says that "In addition to examining the one hundred cases above, an analysis of the workers' movement in 2007-08 cannot ignore the emergence of widespread industry-specific protests in this period. Two protests, one by middle and primary school teachers, and the other by taxi drivers are particularly noteworthy." They highlight "the way they ebbed and flowed and spread across the country" (ibid p27.)
In the case of the teachers' strikes they "involved several hundred primary and middle schools as well as kindergartens across China. The number protesting rangedfrom several dozen to several thousand, and strikers mainly came from poorer rural areas in Sichuan, Chongqing, Hubei, Hunan, and Shaanxi" (ibid p27.)
In a conclusion the CLB sum up some of their main points "Workers had to cope with galloping inflation in 2007 and mass layoffs in 2008. By the end of the year, an estimated 20 million migrant workers had lost their jobs, while those who retained their positions often had to accept significantly reduced wages as the global economic crisis took its toll on China's export-oriented manufacturers. Although incomes rose overall during this period, so did the gap between the rich and the poor. Economic hardship, social disparity and rampant corruption among local Party and government officials ledto outpourings of anger and resentment across the country" (ibid p45.)
While much of this report gives a good account of examples of the class struggle there is one crucial element missing. The CLB wants to see either the state unions functioning properly or new unions representing the interests of workers. The historical experience of the working class demonstrates that no form of union can any longer fulfil this function. In this report you can see a number of forms of organisation, limited in many ways, but, as CLB's summary ofthe report says "The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), the sole legally mandated trade union, is now seen by the majority of China's workers as irrelevant to their needs, and as such they increasingly take matters into their own hands" (ibid p3.)
The CLB also maintains a confidence in China's labour laws, so long as they are implemented ‘properly'. Ultimately, what they propose is a reform of the state's attitude, alongside the development of ‘proper' unions.
In an article (26/7/9) on the death of the manager in Tonghua the CLB says "The incident at Tonghua reflects the deep anger felt by many employees at China's state-owned enterprises (SOEs) at their treatment during restructuring and privatization. Although the majority of SOEs were privatized in the late 1990s, the after effects are still felt today and many other SOEs, like Tonghua, are still going through the process of restructuring." This ‘restructuring' is forced on the capitalist class by the depth of the international crisis and the need of each national capital to compete on the world market. It makes no difference whether the enterprises are state-owned or privatised.
The experience of the international working class shows that workers should have no illusions in the unions or the rest of the capitalist state or the possibility of the bourgeoisie finding another way of responding to the economic crisis.Workers should have the confidence to "increasingly take matters into their own hands." Car 5/8/9
The first element of production is reproduction and it’s this element of reproduction that forms the basis for so much of Darwin’s work. There’s no linear, predetermined movement from the animal kingdom, through prehistory, to capitalism and the perspective of communism, but Darwin, from his vigorous scientific method, investigation and speculation, joins the theoreticians of the workers’ movement in laying bare the fundamentals of animal and human society, the laws and perspectives of which have produced the possible positive negation of the present state of things. Darwin’s work is important for the perspectives of a communist society because it demonstrates the basis for the development of mankind from the development of a cognitive (conscious and unconscious) moral and social force. It is all the more important now to learn and re-learn these lessons, when capitalism, the ultimate ‘dog eat dog’ society, decomposes under its own contradictions into crisis, incoherence and irrationality. Darwin only once mentions the phrase “survival of the fittest” in this book and that’s to take a clear position against it – in fact the whole book is a clear position against that bourgeois interpretation, as well as dog eat dog capitalist competition generally.
In the elaboration of the materialist conception of history, The Descent of Man is as important as Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society, and together these two books make a fine whole and a great contribution to the workers’ movement. One could write a fair sized text, using direct quotes from Descent, to make Darwin look like an apologist, even a triumphalist for English bourgeois society from a liberal point of view, at the same time expressing some of the worst prejudices of the ruling class. But this is insignificant compared to the analysis undertaken and probably shows some of the contradictions that Darwin lived and worked under and the pressures he felt. Later in the book he himself he says, in a reproving fashion (he has a sense of humour so I thought this might be tongue in cheek), “but I here exceed my proper bounds” in suggesting the equality of the sexes through education available to all. The depth of the work is great and the analysis builds on The Origin of Species: for the first time Darwin mentions “evolution”, takes it further, and back again, on the primacy of sexual selection, firstly in animals and then in man, in developing confidence, consciousness and morality and from this, Darwin poses a future for humanity even if he couldn’t see the agency identified by Marxism. Darwin was a man of the times and his work, driven by a scientific impetus and humanitarianism, was taken up and distorted by expanding capitalism in order to justify the superiority of the current order of bourgeois society. Against the explicitly racist conclusions of the pro-slavery Reverend John Brodie Innes, Darwin replied, “my views do not lead me to such conclusions about negroes and slavery as yours do: I consider myself a good way ahead of you, as far as that goes”. The bourgeois world took some of Darwin’s words and phrases and used them to justify their system of competition and the survival of the fittest. But we have to conclude that whatever his reflections of current prejudices, from which none of us are individually immune, this work well transcends these weaknesses and abuses and deals a deadly blow, not just to religion, but to bourgeois ideology generally and demonstrates a material basis for revolutionary change.
For the second time, with Descent, Darwin’s work had to be provoked into the public arena and it was the same man, Alfred Russel Wallace, who performed this service again in 1864. Wallace confronted the reactionary Anthropological Society in London, where he talked about the production and the cooperation of labour, the survival, not of the fittest, but mentally the brightest and the most moral. Darwin used his arguments to repudiate Malthus. Wallace had jumped in with an analysis applied to the development of man through production and cooperation, though according to some opinion in this field, his position was a compromise. Wallace rejected sexual selection as the basis for the development of the community, which is why Darwin devotes much of the book to this phenomenon among animals and showing its antiquity in man. Wallace eventually ended up in spiritualism, seeing the morality of man coming from a higher power, the spirit and not the natural world. Reflecting on this reactionary step of Wallace, Darwin said: “I hope you have not murdered completely your own and my child”. These words are particularly poignant given Darwin’s passionate detestation of infanticide.
The book follows on from Origins in demonstrating that there are no separate creations and that natural selection is the chief agent of change, with variations of the latter acting on individuals that benefits the community through mental powers that are “wholly different”. I think that his need to demonstrate the importance of sexual selection in animals and apply it to early man led Darwin to greatly underestimate what Morgan loosely describes as ‘savagery’, the whole period of prehistory that today could be said to cover some two-and-a-half million years up until around some ten or twenty thousand years ago. Darwin uses Morgan’s work on the American beaver and consanguinity in his book and he met Morgan at Down House, his home near Downe in Kent in 1871. But Morgan was still to finish his work on Ancient Society that so greatly enhances and deepens Darwin’s own work. Darwin talks of savages and barbarians and the uneducated in the same terms: they are unable to see beauty, and they have “insufficient powers of reasoning”, “weak powers of self-control” and likens them to “domesticated animals”. He suggests support for the civilised races supplanting and trampling on native populations, the Tasmanians for example. But all this is contradicted by the overall analysis, conclusions and tenor of his work as well as in other specific quotes throughout the book. I will return to this question.
Though nothing like the scale over the last century, archaeological evidence was appearing at the time that demonstrated the validity of Darwin’s analysis (and of some of his speculations: Darwin was scientific in his conclusions and said so when he couldn’t be absolutely positive). Ancient monkey and other animal fossils were being found as well as varieties of stone tools, clearly evidence of human existence before the Ice Age. His friend Thomas Huxley had a cast of large brained hominid, the species of Neanderthal that could have been so important for his analysis (what would he have made of the relatively recent finds in the Shanidar Cave of northern Iraq that show archaeological evidence of morality in a Neanderthal dwelling some sixty thousand years ago). But I think that Darwin had fixed on sexual selection as the key: “He who admits the principle of sexual selection will be led to the remarkable conclusion that the nervous system not only regulates most of the existing functions of the body but has indirectly influenced the progressive development of various body structures and of certain mental qualities”. He thus saw the development of man’s qualities and senses, “through the exertion of choice”, “and these powers of the mind manifestly depend on the development of the brain”. Here alone is a striking contradiction of his words above about savagery and barbarians. There is no sexual selection without choice and without that there would be a lesser effect on the offspring produced by animal and man. After some almost obligatory remarks about the highest ranks of bourgeois society, Darwin gets down to the nitty-gritty about the development of diversifying standards of beauty, communal marriage, tribal connections in relationships, with strong and complex relations between the tribe and offspring, itself coming from mutual protection and aid, with Darwin insisting on the persisting strength of the relations between mother and child. Morgan, Darwin says, thought it more complex than this, thinking that communal and loose forms of marriage must have been universal (which I think correct). But however long the relationship from a choice that emanates from the social instincts - brief, seasonal, the whole year - it “suffices for the work of sexual selection”. The latter he saw as “more powerful at a remote period than the present day, though probably not yet wholly lost”. He’s clear that in savagery the role of women’s preference in choice is a factor of sexual selection and the good of the tribe and preferences for both sexes would also have meant an acquisition, a further impulsion of the species. He talks about women’s’ discrimination and taste, showing that it’s not a matter of numbers, lower female to male ratio for example, that would equalise out anyway. The most successful sexual selection made the most successful progenitors.
Darwin underlines the importance of sexual selection, inherited from the animal kingdom, a positive, instinctive recognition of others, which developed into complex relationships including gentes, clans and tribes with all their sympathies, interrelations and rules. Within and from this came the positive development of the family. In his book Ancient Society, written in the 1870s after nearly 40 years work, the fundamentals of which are still entirely valid, Morgan saw the family “progressing to a higher form”, an active element within the gens. This is expanded throughout Morgan’s book and demonstrated in his complicated classifications of the earliest Hawaiian and Rotuman system of relationships, then the Seneca-Iroquois and Tamil and finally the Roman and Arabic system of relationship. Marx and Engels adopted this work virtually intact. Darwin doesn’t mention incest in Descent, but this concerned him personally given his marriage to his first cousin. Bourgeois Victorian society preferred to marry their ‘own’, often marrying into familial circumstances with the attendant hypocrisy. Though there doesn’t seem to be a problem with first cousins, his wife’s family had been inbreeding for generations and Darwin was worried about it. Three of his children died young and he put one of his son’s illnesses down to a “deep flaw in his constitution”, even writing to a friend “we are a wretched family and ought to be exterminated”. Morgan noted that even in the most basic social complexes studied, the Australian Kamilaroi for example, neither the male nor the female could marry into their own gens, the prohibition being absolute. He called the sexual relations between brother and sister an “abomination”, “evil”, showing pockets of mental and physical deterioration, which we can see here and there today. Morgan demonstrated that even in the earliest forms of relations, what he called the “Malayan”, blood line and marriage, where brother partnered with sister, because of the complexities of kinship relation, this often meant first, second, third, or even more distant cousins marrying as “brothers and sisters”. In his Ethnological Notebooks, Marx depicts the horde organisation as the “Oldest of all... with promiscuity: no family; only mother-right could have played a role here”. And goes on to say that “The larger the group recognising the marriage relation, the less the evil of close interbreeding”, “... the gradual exclusion of own brothers and sisters from the marriage relations, spreading slowly and then universal in the advancing tribes still in savagery... illustrated the operation of the principle of natural selection”. The development of the family and the social organisation that brings it about is expressed in the full title of Morgan’s book: Ancient Society or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery though Barbarism to Civilization. Darwin did address the question of incest in his earlier Variations of Plants and Animals, his longest work with a hundred pages on pigeons alone. He well knew about the injurious effects of inbreeding on animals and birds, and recognised that closely related breeding pairs generally produced poor or damaged stock. There’s a chapter in the book entitled: “On the Good Effects of Crossing and on the Evil Effects of Inbreeding”. He said that avoiding closely related marriages, an “almost universal practice of all races at all times” was an argument of “considerable weight”. In the book he says: “A considerable body of evidence has already been advanced, showing that the offspring from parents which are not related are more vigorous and fertile than those from parents which are closely related”. Natural selection would augment this into instinct and thus I would think, something “unconsciously acquired”. Instinctively, as with the rejection of it in the chimpanzees studied by Jane Goodall, incest appears as lazy, insular and restrictive, not at all the attributes of natural or sexual selection. Darwin distanced himself from this view in a later addition to Descent, but there seemed to be some pressure from the family. His whole work, one intuitively feels, reinforces his main position, as he concluded from his work on plants: “Cross-fertilisation is generally beneficial, and self-fertilisation injurious”.
On races, where one can find perfunctory reactionary quotes elsewhere, he writes: “all the races agree in so many important matters of detail of structures and in so many mental peculiarities that these can only be accounted for by inheritance from a common progenitor...” In the development of man “...the intellect must have been all important to him, even at a very remote period...” and the use, adaption and inheritance of this intellect meant “the continual improvement and exercise of... other mental faculties”. The development of the moral qualities whose foundation lies in the highly complex and ever present, enduring nature of the social instincts and family ties, leads man, he says “unavoidably”, to look both backwards and forwards, a great impulsion of consciousness. Wallace’s work on seeing survival as from mentally the brightest and the most moral collaborators is taken up in Descent, with Darwin showing morality and compassion as the highest human instincts. As with Wallace’s original position, Darwin shows man’s adaptation as mental rather than physical, ie, his intellectual and moral faculties (and confidence, that he mentions elsewhere) and this collective expression would have strengthened the whole tribe. Even in a brief reference to the Bronze Age and the warrior peoples of that time (whom Darwin tends to underestimate here and there) he says that their success was more due to their “superiority in the arts” (and what art!). Like Wallace, Darwin also sees the development of mental powers from tools but disagrees with Wallace on his ideas about “imitation” (possibly like Dawkins’s “memes”), instead emphasising it as “practice”, which I think is a more solid way of putting it.
Man is a social animal with an instinctive morality, “Man himself a natural object” as Marx says, “his essence being his relations in society and in social production, including the production of himself” (Ethnological Notebooks). Sympathy, Darwin says, is “a fundamental element of the social instincts”, these social instincts acquired from animals, the herd, the troop, etc. And a moral being is “one who is capable of comparing his past or future actions or motives and of approving or disapproving of them”. Lower animals didn’t have this capacity and Darwin goes on to say: “But in the case of man, who alone with certainty can be ranked as a moral being, whether performed deliberately after a struggle with opposing motives, or impulsively through instinct, or from the effects of slowly-gained instincts”. He’s completely clear about how the “puniest” of men from the age of savagery, surviving in the most adverse conditions, against the most fearsome beasts, could develop their “intellectual powers”, with an awareness of the future being important for morality and humanity. Morality “aboriginally derived from the social instincts for both relate at first exclusively to the community”. Just as in the lower animals, these instincts are acquired by man for the good of the community. Being weak relative to his conditions man had no choice but to develop in order to struggle against them, and it was these adverse conditions themselves that continually spurred mankind on in spheres of organisation, production, morality and consciousness.
Going further, on the question of races, he suggests that these sympathies expressed should be extended to the whole human species and that they are stopped only by “artificial barriers”. Darwin also see the importance of belief systems developed in savagery, saying that “no being could experience so complex an emotion until advanced in his intellectual and moral faculties at least to a moderately high level” and that these features “show us what an indefinite debt of gratitude we owe to the improvement in our reason”.
As to the “survival of the fittest”, which is only mentioned once in the book as far as I can see, Darwin says, referring to it specifically, “We should however bear in mind that an animal possessing great size, strength and ferocity and which, like the gorilla, could defend itself from all enemies, would not perhaps have become social. And this would most effectively have checked the acquirement of the higher mental powers... sympathy and love for his fellows. Hence it might have been an immense advantage to man to have sprung from some comparably weak creature”. He returns to this question in Chapter 5 and again his position contradicts that of the “survival of the fittest”. Individual strength or forcefulness in early man would not necessarily make an advantageous partner, being more likely to be killed or injured and thus less able to produce offspring with their qualities. But it’s morality that infuses the whole tribe, so a slight general (not individual) increase in morality, a concern for the common good, courage, sympathy, etc., would be natural selection.
This is an eminently readable book written by a scientist somewhat tortured by the personal contradictions he finds himself in, but which he takes on with diligence, method and a sense of humour in order to produce a great work. He didn’t stop despite the pressures that must have been all around him. There’s an endearing episode when, in thinking about morality in animals, he hears the story of a baboon which ‘adopted’ a kitten and as the kitten’s claws grew it inadvertently kept scratching the baboon. So to get around this problem, the baboon chewed the kitten’s claws down. After hearing this tale, Darwin got hold of the family kitten and attempted to chew its claws off in the interests of science. He concluded that it was possible.
Apart from the breathtaking overall analysis there are some real gems from Darwin here and there. For example, throughout the 20th century it was generally thought that cultivation, agriculture proper, started up in one place and spread throughout the globe. This is a position exemplified in the work of Gordon Childe and ex Oriente lux. From research over the last decade, it now seems clear that agriculture developed independently in at least half-a-dozen areas of the planet as did the sedentism that preceded it, as did the development of metallurgy, as did the emergence and existence of the state. In Chapter 5 Darwin almost casually predicts this. He clearly describes the universal tendency to sedentism (though he doesn’t call it by this name) as the prerequisite for civilisation, almost necessitating the cultivation of the ground. He does this effortlessly and convincingly, generalising from one ancient Tierra del Fuegan dwelling, Like David Lewis-Williams on this question (Inside the Neolithic Mind, Lewis-Williams and David Pearce), he talks of accidents (waiting to happen) propelling agriculture forward. Later in this chapter, he reaffirms this view of an independent development in relation to culture, cultivation, animal domestication and, further back, to the development of tools. There are some jarring statements in this chapter referring to the poor and the masses completely reflecting bourgeois ideology, but it ends affirming the “view that progress has been much more general than retrogression; that man has risen, though by slow and interrupted steps from a lowly condition to the highest standard as yet attained by him in knowledge, morals and religion”.
Towards the end of the book Darwin once again expresses his distaste and disgust with elements of savagery: “For my own part I would have as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon, who descended from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs – as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions”. Really, he could have been talking about bourgeois society, particularly capitalism in its period of decay: child killing on an industrial scale, torture, sacrifices by the million, repression, oppression, ruthlessness and irrationality. He already has insights into this with his denunciation elsewhere of “the polished savages of England for their complicity in slavery”.
Baboon, 18/7/9
We are publishing an article from the Alliance of Revolutionary Socialists, a group in Russia and Ukraine, the product of a recent split in the Internationalist Union of Proletarian Revolutionary Collectivists.
The Alliance condemns participation in bourgeois elections and democracy as a disguised form of the dictatorship of capital. It rejects any support for the existing trade unions, which it sees as instruments in the hands of the bourgeoisie whose function is to subject the working class to the interests of capital. It also rejects the idea of creating new radical trade unions, It pronounces itself in favour of workers’ general assemblies and of the necessity for world revolution.
As well as the information that this article contains on the reality of the class struggle in the countries of the former USSR, and without necessarily agreeing with all the points of view it develops, we welcome and support the arguments it puts forward against the anti-working class mystifications of ‘nationalisation’ and ‘workers control’ which the leftists defend. These critical arguments can only be of interest to anyone concerned with the class struggle and the political strengthening of the workers’ struggle.
For further information about this group, go to their website revolt.anho.org, (email : [email protected] [16]).
The current world crisis of capitalism is provoking a wave of proletarian protests, and will inevitably provoke them in the future. In the CIS, the first serious sign of things to come was the workers’ revolt at the Kherson machine-building factory this February. By now it is clear that the reactionary Party of Regions has subdued the workers’ struggle, and it is time to analyse the reasons behind this defeat. We have to learn from mistakes, and in order to save the approaching future struggles in the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States, which nominally succeeded the USSR – ICC note) and the world from a similar fate, we must pick out the key factors in the defeat.
On the 2 February, workers from the Kherson machine-building factory marched along the main street of he city (Ushakov street) towards the regional administration, where they presented their demands to the authorities… Among them were the following:
- payment of back wages (total of 4.5 million hryvni . 100 hryvni are equivalent to about 13 US dollars)
- nationalisation of the factory with no compensation
- a guaranteed market for the produce, which is complex agricultural machinery
Having seen their demands ignored, the workers broke into the factory grounds and occupied the administrative building on the 3rd of February. Various Trotskyists and Stalinists have claimed there was a takeover of the whole factory, but in reality the owner’s security personnel remained at the factory, and it appears to have been a power-sharing situation at best.
On the 9 February, an independent trade union was established at the Kherson machine-building factory, replacing the old trade union cell of the FPU. The new trade union, called Petrovets, joined the structure of the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions of Ukraine, led by Mr. Wolynets, i.e. it effectively entered the confederate structure currently serving as a tool of the Timoshenko bloc. At this point we must explain the political situation within the city. The Ukrainian bourgeoisie is currently divided into the ‘orange’ league (the loose Yushenko and Timoshenko alliance) and the ‘blue-white’ league (the Party of Regions led by Yanukovich). The owner of the Kherson machine-building factory, Mr. A. Oleinik, is also a prominent member of the Party of Regions; and while the Party of Regions’ domination of the Kherson regional administration is almost at 60%, the appointed head of the administration (as placed there by Yushenko) is Boris Silenkov – an ‘orangist’. This gives some clue about the internal struggles between bourgeois cliques over Kherson, and both cliques attempted to take advantage of the Kherson workers’ revolt. In the end, the stronger Party of Regions established control over the workers, bringing the workers’ revolt to and end by taking away their independence and converting them into a tool in its hands.
Mr. Oleinik’s interest amidst all this is also clear; to use the workers in obtaining leverage over state resources and in gaining access to the treasure trove of state orders, credit and subsidies – and he was successful. On the morning of 13 February, the Party of Region’s representatives parked two combine harvesters in front of the regional administration building, thus initiating a ‘blue Maidan’(1) with the aim of displacing Silenkov. The trade union cell at the Kherson machine-building factory agreed to participate in this!
Here is what Trotskyists from “Socialist Resistance” write : “On 13 February, 2 million hryvni were given to Mr. Oleinik by the regional authority… Thus the only winner so far has been the owner, who thanks to the workers’ action obtained a decent sum from the authorities. It must be noted that the given sum was not from the reserve fund, and therefore was taken from funds intended for public sector workers, pensions, benefits, etc.”.
The ‘social compromise’, so much cherished by the bourgeoisie has been reached: Oleinik got the money and the workers got a promise that they may at some point get a glimpse of some of it.
After this ‘compromise’ the demand for nationalisation was taken up by the workers – or at least by the trade union representatives speaking on their behalf.
“On 14 February ”, as UKRINFORM (2) quotes Oleinik, “the workers’ collective annulled the nationalisation demand, and agrees with me resuming control over the enterprise. Now, I will fight for the right to work and for the functioning of the enterprise together with the workers’ collective”.
Something that the Trotskyists and Stalinists almost took for a spark that will start the fire in Ukraine, and what was in fact a genuine proletarian protest, alas one with mistaken demands and perspective, in the end mutated into a money-making venture for the capitalist. And this occurred precisely due to the false perspective.
But of course; the demand for nationalisation was initially a demand not for social revolution, but for state support for a capitalist enterprise, its rescue by the bourgeois state. And so it did; exactly in the manner that it can, by giving a sum of tax money, the very “sum that was not from the reserve fund, and therefore was taken from funds intended for public sector workers, pensions, benefits, etc.” to the capitalist. If the Trotskyists and the Stalinists sincerely hoped that the bourgeois state could act in some other manner, they can only blame their own short-sightedness.
So now we can draw conclusions. Destitute workers, deprived of income for some months, rose up for collective struggle. During the struggle they made some mistaken demands; but at least got full support from Marxists advancing in status at their expense. This bourgeois slogan (which allegedly makes neoliberals tremble in fear) was immediately snatched up by a bourgeois clique. In a couple of days the workers bent back down, having seen the errors of their demands and having no alternative ideas at their disposal.
During the events at Kherson machine-building factory, the Stalinists and the Trotskyists advocated a ‘nationalisation under worker control’. We should investigate the compatibility of this position with the growth of proletarian class-consciousness and revolutionary action, and whether or not it leads to subordination of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie and its state.
What is the main difference between demands for nationalisation on the one hand and a struggle for concrete material demands on the other? The demand for nationalisation, i.e. for the transfer of the enterprise into state property (i.e. the bourgeois state – there is no other state) implies a struggle for an alternative capitalist strategy, for the strengthening of state capital against private capital. Those who venture to advise the bourgeoisie on taking up such a strategy become effectively mere advisors to capital – and no more than that.
However, as one might say, why not struggle for a form of capitalism that is more materially advantageous to workers? Must we really be ideologues and stick to a utopian vision of a global socialist revolution while ignoring the immediate needs of people who are suffering?
Well, we must say that we are not ideologues, and that we are opposed to reformism. This is not due to some utopian visions, but due to the realisation that the concept of a type of capitalism materially advantageous to workers is utopian in itself.
In order to understand that the bourgeois state’s nationalisation policies cannot materially advance the working masses, one has only to observe modern Russia. Putin’s rule saw to the increase of interventionism, to the advance of the bureaucracy that tamed the pseudo-oligarchs, to the domination of heavily state-owned corporations in key profitable sectors of the economy, where bureaucracy and business jointly prosper from the masses’ poverty. Yet all of this did not lead to the improvement of the workers’ material conditions; nor did it lead to the bourgeois progress – after 8 years of growth the Russian economy had not even reached its level of 1990. It is now evident that the interventionism of Putin’s rule did not serve the interests of the working masses at all (which is only to be expected) and did not even serve to the realisation of a progressive modernisation of the Russian economy; instead, it served only to the parasitic consumption of the exploiters’ class – the two-headed hydra of bureaucrats and businessmen.
Furthermore, surely the classical example of the Belarus Trotskyist Razumovskiy, who is from “Socialist Resistance”, and a supporter of nationalization, shows how effectively the elements of private and state capitalism can intertwine around exploiting the proletariat. The very Belarus where a vast state-capitalist sector did not obstruct the state’s intention for neo-liberal reforms (see “Banishment from a social paradise” by F. Sanczenia: )
Despite classical Marxist concepts (3), the state, after all, is not a neutral instrument, not a field of battle between the rulers and the ruled, but by its own nature is an exploiter in itself. It is not an estranged, mysterious entity with its own separate interests, but consists of quite concrete chiefs, bureaucrats and cops who are exploiters and subjugators by themselves, as well as being tied to other exploiters’ and subjugators’ private-capitalist interests. Regardless of the proletarian masses’ pressure on them, this exploitative gang can never cease being what it is; even when it offers certain concessions to the struggling masses, it does this with the aim of subduing revolutionary spirit, replacing it with illusions and later taking the concessions away. The imperative of the Communist movement is not pressurising the bourgeois state, but destroying it. This aim is not a utopian vision, but a means to further survival of humankind.
We only support demands that do not contradict the revolutionary imperative. We support workers who struggle for the improvement of their material conditions, provided that their struggles are based on a direct control and self-organisation, whereby workers form new types of social relations without relying on state-integrated trade unions, let alone relying on the state itself! Only in such a struggle can workers understand that their Right to Life is violated by the existence of the capitalist system, and that this system must be destroyed. Only in such a struggle can workers obtain the experience of self-organisation that is necessary for the destruction of the old world and the creation of a new world.
Both the Stalinists and the Trotskyists, who, as it turns out, are not that different after all, advocate nationalisation, justifying it with the restoration of a functioning enterprise and helping workers to survive. However, nationalisation can result in re-selling of the enterprise to a different private owner, as has been shown in our first article. It is by no means certain that the current bourgeois state of Ukraine, which is in a condition of permanent crisis, can see to any kind of restoration of the enterprise.
‘Leninist-Bolsheviks’ justify their advocacy of nationalisation by portraying it as a special case, a ‘good’ nationalisation of sorts – one under worker control. They portray this ‘worker control’ as a miraculous drop of wine that can turn a bucket of bourgeois poison into a sweet Communist brew.
We have previously addressed the issue of workers control in our article “The Workers’ Movement: What shall it be?”:
“For example, let’s consider the demand for ‘worker control over enterprise accounts’. The demand for worker control assumes that the ownership and authority over the enterprise (and the whole of society) remains with the bourgeoisie, while the workers merely control the functioning of this authority in their immediacy. It is certain that as long as the bourgeoisie retains its grip on authority, it will not permit real worker control over its authority. Meanwhile, when the workers have power sufficient for ousting bourgeois monopoly on control, there isn’t much sense in stopping half way. Why arrange worker control over bourgeois authority when the latter can be ousted completely? Therefore, the demand for worker control in the conditions of absolutist capitalism is unrealistic in the majority of cases (exceptions will follow shortly), and is outright harmful in revolutionary conditions.
The bourgeoisie will meet the demand for worker control only in exceptional circumstances, and precisely then the illusions of its protagonists will be harshly shattered. Enterprise owners will lift secrecy barriers around their commerce and open accountancy books with the aim of convincing the workers of the enterprise’s dire financial situation and of the need for putting aside class struggle in order to avoid bankruptcy. The bourgeoisie, skilled in double accountancy and various other manipulations, will undoubtedly reach its aim, and the realisation of ‘worker control’ will only become a tool for reaction and exploitation.
Overall, these Trotskyist concepts of ‘transitional’ capitalism controlled by the workers are just a tidy utopia, which in fact causes harm by distracting proletarians from genuine struggle for class interests and revolution.”
To stress, we must re-emphasise this: ‘transitional’ demands, such as worker control and nationalisation are not simply methods of advancing material conditions of the exploited. Such little presents from the state in fact severely undermine the autonomy of worker action by integrating it into the system of exploitation.
In the case of an already established worker control, with an existence of some sort of dual power within the workplace, we must positively consider demonstrating to the workers the instability and a short potential life span of such power-sharing practice, explaining the inevitable transformation of such arrangements either into a restoration of the full power of capital, or into an establishment of full power of workers’ assemblies. But supporting demands for worker control is simply an idolisation of an unstable and unsustainable situation, and is therefore blatantly misguiding of the proletarian masses.
“Firstly we must note that the modern bourgeois Ukraine is undergoing a severe economic, social and political crisis: The takeover of the Kherson machine-building factory by its workers; The backlash against gas companies that were intending cutting gas supplies to Ivano-Frankovsk; An uprising in Mekeevka, which was suppressed by Berkut (the Ukrainian version of the Russian OMON).
Such is the intensity of the situation up to now. There is a triple crisis in Ukraine while the global crisis is only just beginning:
1) An economic crisis, tens of factory closures, a huge government debt and prospect of defaulting.
2) A social crisis, mass unemployment, growing mass poverty and swelling protest.
3) A political crisis as the Ukrainian state is in a permanent collapse. The leading power groups cannot agree on a common strategy. The army is paralysed.” (M. Magid: “The Ukraine two steps away from a social upheaval… or a collapse?”)
We cannot yet tell how this crisis will end; will the Ukrainian elites stabilise the situation, will the Ukraine burn in a fire of imperialistic wars between bourgeois cliques, or will a social revolt ignite and spread, turning into a social revolution? We cannot tell, but one thing is clear: for the revolution to succeed, the working masses must not trust a single bourgeois clique, power group, official trade union, party, state or capitalist, they must not turn into a tool of any bourgeois grouping, they must preserve their own class independence, they must fight for their own emancipation. Our task, the task of the protagonists of social revolution, is to popularise such consciousness.
We were accused of lacking a positive program, of having nothing to offer to the workers. We must object; this is not so, and we were left behind because our group does not have direct contact with the Kherson workers. If we did have a chance to participate in their struggle, we would have offered the following to them:
- seizing the running of the factory into the authority of a workers’ assembly
- getting the scrapped equipment back [Here we must note that there are 1500 workers in the factory, and including their families and friends, the given collective presents a rather significant force, and with a real prospect for an application of such a force in the conditions of the Ukrainian triple crisis, the authorities would have to seriously consider fulfilling the demands of returning the equipment.]
- demanding the immediate payment of back wages
- agitating for workplace overtakes by worker collectives in other cities and in other enterprises of Kherson and the Ukraine
- trying to create a city workers’ council in Kherson
We think that it is necessary to convince workers of the state’s hostile nature, and of the need for them, together with all the other working and oppressed people, to take care of themselves, to develop links with each other, to develop ways of organising production and marketing without any intermediates (i.e. the state and the capitalists).
We fully understand that ‘socialism in one factory’ is not possible, that it is doomed to failure when isolated. However, the proletarian struggle can succeed only after a series of defeats; even after suffering defeat, the Kherson workers have acquired invaluable experience, which is not only theirs, but is now appropriated by the Ukrainian and the global proletariat.
…In 1919, many protagonists of the Bavarian Council Republic viewed in their victory as totally fulfilled, and thought that it is possible to start constructing communistic relations in all aspects of social life. But the great Communist revolutionary, Eugen Leviné , disagreed; he understood that the isolated Council Bavaria was doomed, and that with the given deadly hostile forces it is pointless to contemplate communistic changes in culture and education, but is instead necessary to struggle to the very end, to inflict maximum damage upon the enemy and by a glorious defeat to inspire the German and the global proletariat to future struggle. Defeat during a fierce struggle gives the proletariat invaluable class lessons as opposed to defeat during compromise. This also holds true for the strike movement. If a strike is broken after the workers allow themselves to be fooled, the only result is complete demoralisation. But if the strike is defeated after a fierce struggle due to a lack of forces, the result is a learned lesson; one which shows that given enough forces, the forces of a whole collective, a whole city or even country, victory is a real prospect.
Currently, proletarian class struggle occurs in two weakly interacting dimensions. In one, there is the spontaneous, ‘wild’ proletarian protest, whereby the protesting workers have a very indefinite understanding of how and for what to struggle; these are easily deceived and suppressed by the class enemy. In another, there is a multitude of small revolutionary groups, which are rather weakly connected to the masses. With the given relative isolation of the two dimensions of proletarian struggle, there is no real prospect of a victorious social revolution. Only once the working masses understand the impossibility of eliminating their misery within the framework of the capitalist system, and once they comprehend the necessity of an absolute social revolution – then and only then will this revolution morph from ideas of some small groups into a regular revolutionary practice of the proletariat. Only when the struggle is developed under the control of the struggling masses themselves, while the most progressive elements find an integrated revolutionary organisation that can combine the struggle for concrete demands with the struggle for wider social revolution, only then will capitalism’s final hour arrive…
The ARS Collective
(1) From Ukrainian «Майдан Незалежности» (Maidan Nezalezhnosti), Independence Square, the central square in Kiev. Was used by the protesting masses during the ‘Orange Revolution’ in the winter of 2004-2005. See
(2) Ukrainian Information Bureau
(3) – ICC note: The ARS writes in a footnote that “we distinguish between Marx’s revolutionary ideas and the reformist ideology of Marxism (social-democracy, its modern successors, Trotskyists, etc)”. However, for us the ‘classical ‘ Marxist conception of the state is precisely that it is not neutral but is an instrument of class rule, and it is the Stalinists and Trotskyists who have distorted this ‘classical’ position. .
There has been a great deal of publicity for the recent 40th anniversary of the American Apollo 11 moon landing of July 1969, plenty of “one small step(s)” and so on - although some of the astronauts’ original quotes from Genesis and other books of the Bible have all but disappeared. There’s no doubt that this was a major achievement of technology and collective work and that individual bravery was involved. It was a testament to the productive capacity of capitalism but not to its development. On the contrary it shows its nature where production, where all its major achievements, are essentially geared more and more for war and destruction rather than the advancement of humanity as a whole.
The whole propaganda campaign around space exploration shows the capacity of capitalism to distort real human aspirations, to take those real feelings of the challenge and adventure of space, feelings that undoubtedly will be of interest in a communist society, and use them as a cloak for imperialism. The pictures from the 1969 mission of the Blue Planet in the darkness of space can only inspire wonder and curiosity. By the way, let’s make it clear at the beginning that we don’t think that the moon shot was a stunt or a conspiracy, nor do we subscribe to the view that the moon is in fact an orbiting space station (neither that it’s made of green cheese!). This definitely happened and it happened for the very material reasons of imperialism imposed on the nations involved as the Cold War became entrenched.
The military campaign for what Donald Rumsfeld came to call ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ began in the 1950s with the Eisenhower administration as tensions between the United States and Russia, between eastern and western blocs increased. At the end of World War II, Britain, Russia and America were all trying to ‘repatriate’ German rocket scientists. But the Americans had already spirited out of Germany Wernher von Braun, the brilliant physicist and aeronautic engineer, along with high ranking Nazi war criminals and senior scientists in order to boost its rocket technology (von Braun, as a good Nazi, criticised the US administration and its military organisation for its “inefficiency”!)
The 1957 launch of the Russian Sputnik satellite, apart from its propaganda value, gave a further impulse to the arms race through the development of ballistics technology. As important as orbiting satellites are for the militarisation of space, it was the technology of the launcher, the R-7 Semyorka rocket, which immediately threatened the United States. The election of John F. Kennedy, who promised in his 1960 campaign to improve US missiles against Russia, brought a further impulse to the development of inter-continental ballistic missiles that continued for years in order to close the so-called missile gap. Kennedy wrapped this advance of the space/military programme up in his carefully crafted persona and sold it on as a dream of mankind. There was nothing peaceful and unifying for mankind in this. In fact it meant the development of the division of the world and the advanced militarism to back it up, posing further threats to the existence of life on the planet.
Eisenhower’s ‘peaceful purposes’ for space exploration were also echoed by Kennedy in the US’s drive for the militarisation of space, which now includes references to ‘national security’ and threatens to become offensive. With the rise of Chinese imperialism and its military expansion into space, the US has responded: “We are going to have to have the capability to take things out of orbit... And we’d better not be second” (USAF General Michael Ryan, Reuters, 2 August 2001). As the Bush administration’s review of National Space Policy said in 2000: “The United States will preserve its rights, capabilities and freedom of action in space; dissuade or deter others from either impeding those rights or developing capabilities intended to do so; take actions necessary to protect its space capabilities; respond to interference; and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to U.S. interests.” The Cheney/Rumsfeld et al Project for the New American Century, which is more or less still US foreign policy with some refinements, essentially made the development of the militarisation of space (“... akin to Britain’s dominance of the oceans in the 19th century”) a priority within the Bush administration – the main lines of which Obama seems set to continue.
Rumsfeld warned of a ‘new Pearl Harbor’ in space, and, in a major report to the National Space Council, 11 January 2001, which outlined the necessity to confront China in space. On 11 January 2007 (no coincidence in the date) China destroyed one of its own satellites 537 miles above the Earth. It represented a major escalation of the space/arms race. China has threatened to respond to US interference in its militarisation of space and both it and Russia will not stand by while the US ‘weaponises’ space. While space is militarised, it is not yet weaponised, ie, there are no weapons-firing systems on satellites at the moment (as far as we know). But the technology already in place has significant military value and the US Treasury has recently handed over $200 billion to develop a war capacity based on wireless and internet technology, none of which are possible without secure access to and control of space. There are also developments of kinetic and anti-satellite high energy laser technologies, high velocity weapons and other such weaponry, that are precursors to space-based armaments that could be used to strike targets on Earth.
The Obama administration has already expressed the need for the continuation and strengthening of the USA’s control of the military use of space. He is going to review the National and Aeronautical Space Council, for “Foreign and national security consideration”, according to a former science advisor to President Clinton, in continuity with the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon and Bush administrations. The aim appears to be to break down the residual barriers between civilian and military space, merging NASA with the Pentagon; and we can expect the latter to exert its weight over the former, though NASA has already had continuous links with the military.
China, India, Japan have all launched space satellites essentially for their own imperialist interests. Behind the European Space Agency’s adventures we see the usual five dogs fighting in a sack as their own imperialist interests and rivalries prevail in space as well as here on Earth. Meanwhile, tensions and developments between the two major elements here, China and the USA mount, and capitalism turns the ‘dream of mankind into a ‘giant leap’ towards a nightmare.
Baboon 6/8/9
On June 25, a public meeting took place in the city of Santiago-the second most important city in the Dominican Republic-organized by the Internationalist Discussion Nucleus of the Dominican Republic (Núcleo de Discusión Internacionalista de la República Dominicana, NDIRD). This is NDIRD's second public meeting, to which the ICC was invited to give a presentation on the theme of "The Crisis and Decadence of Capitalism."[1]
The meeting was opened by the NDIRD comrades, who discussed the importance of open, fraternal public meetings with the goal of disseminating the left communist perspective. The ICC's presentation was limited to 20 minutes, so that the largest amount of time was utilized for debate.
In total, more than 25 people attended the meeting. The presence of a significant number of young people (close to half of all attendees) is both noteworthy and characteristic of public meetings conducted in other parts of Latin American in which the ICC has participated. The attendees were sincerely interested on the theme of the meeting. The debate that followed expressed a genuine anxiety over the crisis of capitalism, and its effects on the working class and humanity as a whole.
Below is a brief review of some of the questions brought up during the meeting:
A young woman asked this question in response to part of the presentation in which we stated that in order for capitalism to expand, it requires solvent markets; that is, it requires markets with the capacity to consume the commodities produced. Capitalism's entry into its decadent phase-a period that began around the time of the First World War-brought about the progressive diminishing of such solvent markets. To counter "this reduction of solvent markets outside of the capitalist sphere, the bourgeoisie began using credit as a palliative measure, a measure that has been heavily used from the 1960s on. Hence, a decadent capitalism created an artificial, credit-based market in order to survive." (Presentation).
For this reason, since the 1970s, countries on the periphery of capitalism-including Latin American states-began a process of massive indebtedness in order to be able to purchase the goods and services produced in the First World. That is how, in the last four decades of the last century, peripheral nations accumulated debts so massive they were practically impossible to repay, and which only continued to grow. Payments on these debts constituted a significant percentage of each nation's GDP.
An example, from recent history, of artificial markets is the rapid growth of the real estate market in the United States, which was based on the credit-based purchases of real estate. This ‘real estate bubble' burst, "When credit could not be repaid because of the worldwide crisis and mortgage interest rates began edging up, the credit system collapsed. At this point, what came to the fore were the internal contradictions of capitalism; of the saturation of solvent markets. This is at the same time a credit crisis and a palliative."
The answer we gave to this question is that the 1929 crisis was the first great crisis of the period of decadence, the effects of which were felt in the 1930s, and which led to the Second World War. We also stated that the recovery that followed WWII was important, and was a product of Keynesian policies, the growth in productivity, and the more efficient exploitation of pre-capitalist economies in the periphery and of what was left of such economies in the industrialized world. While these measures worked for a while, by the 1960s they had become inefficient, as capitalism entered into another crisis. In response to the new crisis, the bourgeoisie resorted to the massive extension of consumer credit; this measure allowed capitalism to postpone a debilitating collapse of its economy, a collapse which we are now witnessing.
We submit that the current crisis will be more devastating that the Great Depression of 1929. As we argued during the presentation, the current crisis is a credit crisis. The only way out for the bourgeoisie is more massive levels of indebtedness, which will inevitably lead to an even greater crisis in the future.
This question was asked by one of the attendees, who was worried that in the "free trade zone" of Santiago, where there's a high concentration of factories and assembly plants, the economic crisis has brought about high levels of unemployment. We answered that one of the most painful aspects of the crisis of capitalism is the rapid growth in unemployment. This, however, does not mean the proletariat is disappearing, as there cannot be a bourgeoisie without the proletariat to exploit. A worker does not cease to be part of the proletariat because he/she is unemployed; in fact, we have been witnessing protests by the unemployed of some nations. In addition, the proletariat is not comprised solely of factory workers. Public sector employees, teachers, health care workers, etc., are also part of the working class, sectors of the proletariat that are by no means small or insignificant in Latin America.
Without a doubt, the economic crisis greatly affects the working class, who bear the brunt of the recession. But these are also the circumstances that lead them to the class struggle, in the Dominican Republic as well as abroad.
In our presentation we stated that the current economic crisis-which is also the next stage in the ongoing crisis of capitalism-has consequences that are not limited to the economy or the class struggle. It also informs nations' foreign policies. A constant variable in the history of capitalism has been the national bourgeoisies' fights over available markets. We do not expect the current crisis to change that. However, this crisis is taking place at a time when imperialist blocs have disappeared, evidenced by the fall of the Soviet bloc and the ongoing weakening of American imperialism. These circumstances have led to anarchy in foreign relations, in which each nation's bourgeoisie attempts to impose itself in regional and global geopolitics. Two recent examples are the pathetic attempts of Iran to set itself as a regional power in the Middle East; and Venezuela's use of crude oil and "21st Century Socialism" ideology to make inroads in the geopolitics of Latin America.
The international conflicts that have taken place after the fall of the Soviet bloc will only intensify as the crisis continues to unfold. The proletariat should avoid taking sides in such conflicts, as support for any of the national or regional bourgeoisies only benefit the ruling class.
This question reflects in the most definitive manner what we wrote in the introduction to this piece: "expressed a genuine anxiety over the crisis of capitalism, and its effects on the working class and humanity as a whole."
The ICC argued that now more than ever, the future of humanity is being affected by the contradictions of capitalism. This calls for an answer from the only revolutionary class: the proletariat. Though the crisis creates more and more misery and pauperization, it also pushes the working class toward the class struggle. Of course, nowadays the conditions of struggle make things more difficult, as it is not clear how to conduct the struggle, or what to do when a factory closes its doors. Another obstacle is the proletariat's doubts about its revolutionary capacity. But as the crisis unfolds, particularly as the working class continues to experience further attacks on its living standards-with the full blessing of the state-we will see an international proletariat with renewed solidarity and a willingness to fight. In this context, the proletariat will develop its class analysis, and gradually will recover confidence in its strength.
The ICC, as a revolutionary organization, attempts to the best of its abilities to encourage the development of this dynamic. The choices we face are simply, socialism or barbarism-a barbarism that would destroy the entirety of humanity. Faced with such choices, groups such as the NDIRD, which hold an internationalist perspective, play an important role for the Dominican and international proletariat. Much like those of us who are here, who express doubts and ask questions in the context of internationalist analysis, we must debate with one another.
Despite the short time available for the meeting (approximately 1.5 hours), we were able to engage the attendees in debate, which took place at the same time as we all enjoyed a traditional Dominican drink.
Many of the attendees expressed enthusiasm for future opportunities to participate in similar public meetings. As one of the NDIRD comrades observed, the attendees demonstrated genuine interest for debate and for the internationalist perspective.
We warmly salute the coordination of this meeting, as well as the political and organizational abilities of the NDIRD. We encourage the NDIRD to continue to organize public meetings, and we pledge our support.
This meeting was a reassuring event, as it demonstrates that the internationalist perspective has the capacity to unite the proletariat of any country, however small it may be.
ICC, July 14, 2009.
[1] See "Reunión Pública en República Dominicana: Al Encuentro de las Posiciones de la Izquierda Comunista," https://es.internationalism.org/node/2446 [22] ).
In what follows, we publish Alicante Health and Social Services Workers Assembly's solidarity communiqué with two workers collectives in struggle: Vigo metal workers (see "Vigo: Los Métodos Sindicales Conducen a la Derrota [26]") and Vesuvius de Langreo workers (who published this communiqué on their blog: https://vesuviussomostodos.blogspot.com [27]).
The themes of solidarity and the extension of the struggle are a key preoccupation for many workers, especially younger ones. These themes express a still embryonic form of consciousness regarding the crisis of capitalism and the impossibility of fighting in isolation, with each sector of the working class fighting by itself, each company's workers struggling by themselves. These themes of solidarity and the extension of the struggle express a break from union tactics that focus only on the enterprise, the individual sector, the corporation, the particular.
From this perspective, it's a positive sign when workers' collectives take the initiative to write solidarity communiqués to express their thoughts and make proposals, contributing in this manner to the expansion of discussion and activity regarding class solidarity and the extension and unification of the struggle.
ICC
We, the AFEMA (Alicante Workers' Assembly) - who have spent several months in a struggle to obtain due payment of wages, and against the precarious conditions in which we service the disabled - want to express our most profound support for and solidarity with the workers from the Vesusius factory in Langreo, and the metal workers in Vigo.
Both of these collectives, in much the same way as our own, are facing an attack on their living conditions. Using the current economic crisis as an excuse, we are threatened by closures, lay-offs, the EREs, and a standard of living in free fall. All of us, the working class as a whole, are being attacked by a system that does not take into consideration the needs of people.
We believe that, despite appearances, our struggles have a common origin and share the same interests: the fulfillment of our needs; the fight for decent living conditions for ourselves, our comrades, our families, etc.; the defense of our class interests. These are the reasons that have lead us to express fraternity to all workers engaged in class struggles, attempting in this manner to create a forum in which workers can express solidarity with one another, a solidarity which is our main class weapon.
As our struggle (modestly) evolved, we came to two conclusions that we consider to be essential:
We, once again, salute our comrades' struggles at Vigo and Langreo, as well as the struggles of all workers regardless of location, as it is our understanding that their struggle is our own, and hoping that one day we will be able to contribute to their fight more than just words.
ONE CLASS, ONE FIGHT!
--Platform of the AFEMA (Alicante) Health and Social Services Workers Assembly
Links
[1] https://es.internationalism.org/node/2589
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/venezuela
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/hugo-chavez
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/coup-honduras
[5] mailto:[email protected]
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/107_decomposition
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/peru
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/bagua-massacre
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/britain
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/vestas-occupation
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/south-africa
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/china
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/contribution-discussion
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/charles-darwin
[16] mailto:[email protected]
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/russia-caucasus-central-asia
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/apollo-11-moon-landing
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/primitive-communism
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/development-agriculture
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/colin-renfrew
[22] https://es.internationalism.org/node/2446
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/public-meetings
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/dominican-republic
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-left-influenced
[26] https://es.internationalism.org/node/2585
[27] https://vesuviussomostodos.blogspot.com/
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/spain
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/alicante
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/langreo
[31] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/vigo