Just a few months ago the dominant media message was that the global economy was in deep trouble. In the US, Mr. Obama and his team came to power warning that the worst of the crisis was yet to come, that things would get worse before they would get any better.  Then they quickly changed their tune. In March when by all measures the economy was still in free fall -in the first quarter economic output declined by 6.1%, the second biggest drop recorded in the last 26 years, after the 6.3% of the fourth quarter of 2008 - Obama and the Fed chief  Bernanke took the lead in a White house campaign aimed to espouse the alleged "good" prospects of the American economy. They even went as far as to say that they could detect early signs of recovery.

In a television interview in March Mr. Bernanke said that the "green shoots" of economic revival were already evident and predicted the end of the recession by the close of 2009. In April,  Obama declared in a speech at Georgetown University that "there is no doubt that times are still tough. By no means are we out of the woods just yet. But from where we stand, for the very first time, we are beginning to see glimmers of hope." 

With not much to brag about, the White House's overly rosy picture of the economy was met with widespread skepticism and  ridicule among economic "experts".  And this was not difficult when layoffs were running around 600 000 a month at the time, and General Motors - once the world's largest automaker and iconic symbol of American manufacturing power - and Chrysler were headed towards bankruptcy protection.

That was then.  Now, after two years of depressing economic news as the so-called Great Recession  unfolded, a new consensus seems to be forming among politicians and economists around the world that the worst of the economic crisis is over. There is even an increasing talk of "recovery" and a growing excitement about the so-called "green shoots" appearing all over  the economic landscape. The OECD chief economist, Jorgen Elmeskov, goes as far as to declare "we clearly have a recovery at hand that seems to have materialized a little earlier than we expected."  On the bases of  Bernanke's "green economic shoots sprouting everywhere" the G-20 meeting in London in early September gave itself  a main task the assessment  of the "global recovery". Thus the consensus holds that capitalism has managed to dodge the bullet,  that the great men in charge of the system have managed to pull the global economy from the brink of the abyss.

Is the Great Recession really over?

It depends on how one sees reality: through the bourgeois economists' view of the recession, or the Marxist analyses of the crisis.

Economists across the world are producing tons of figures to back up their new found optimism. According to this view the tsunami that swept across the global financial service industry is a thing of the past, and credit, the life-blood of the system, is once again starting to flow. Even the credit market has started to thaw and the speculators are coming back in force: the once battered stock markets are everywhere rising - in the US and Europe they are up 50% and 30% respectively from their lows at the beginning of the year. In fact, from March 9th to September 9th,  the US stock market just completed its best six month period  since 1932. Furthermore we are being told that China, the third biggest economy in the world, has avoided the worst of the recession and is posed to grow a healthy 8% this year.

There is in fact so much excitement about the supposed improved economic landscape that the least we can say is that capitalism's acolytes are passing "the half-empty/half-full glass" test with such high marks for optimism  that it borders on delusional. How else can one explain the bourgeois media's rejoicing over the OECD's downward  revision of its forecast for economic contraction in 2009 across the industrialized Group of Seven countries from -4.1% to -3.7%?  Is 0.4 percent expected less contraction something to celebrate? Is it really meaningful?

That the media finds solace in the OECD latest forecast of "slightly improved outlooks for Japan (-5.6% vs. -6.8% earlier) and the European Union economies (-3.9% vs. -4.8%) and an unchanged overall projection for the U.S. at -2.8%" only testifies to the whole bourgeois class's congenital myopia or, at best, its need to mystify reality.

The relentless crisis of capitalism

There is plenty of cold water to throw over this excitement and you don't need to be a Marxist revolutionary to put in doubt the whole fairy tale about "green shoots" sprouting all over the global economy. We will return to this question later, but for now let us here restate what we think is the reality of today's capitalist crisis.

Bourgeois propaganda offers a well diversified menu of explanations for the present capitalist economic troubles.  They range from blaming individuals - speculators and greedy financiers -and government policies - neoliberalism and deregulation - to the fatalistic "business cycle" of the economy. The common thread of these explanations is the view that capitalism's present economic difficulties are more or less just a temporary setback in an otherwise healthy and eternal system. 

For Marxism capitalism's economic crises have always been a product of capitalism itself,   a manifestation of the contradictions of this system as a social mode of production. This violent disruption of production and distribution have been a feature of capitalism since it became the dominant mode of  production, first in Europe in the early 19th century, and from then on throughout the whole world.

In the Communist Manifesto in 1848, Marx and Engels would give this description of the crises which is remarkably fitting today.

"For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity-the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce".

In hindsight we know that the founders of Marxism were wrong to think that the crises of the early 19th century that they were witnessing were already manifestations of capitalism's historical decline. In fact despite the economic and social disruption that they caused, capitalism would come out of these crises poised to continue its historical march conquering for its relations of production one region of the globe after the other. The mechanisms used by the bourgeoisie to get over the crisis -"enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces"... "the conquest of new markets and the more thorough exploitation of the old ones" - still provided the system with the impetus needed for a new level of accumulation.

It is not until the 20th century and the world crisis known as the Great Depression that for the first time this phenomenon took place in the context of capitalism's decadence, the new epoch that revolutionaries identified as commencing with the imperialist inferno of WWI. In this sense the catastrophic proportions of that crisis, which still makes the bourgeoisie shiver in awe, was due in the last instance to the fact that capitalist relations of production had become an obstacle to the progressive development of society. This new historical context, the decadence of capitalism, made the mechanisms used by the bourgeoisie  to overcome the crises  in the previous period at worst useless or at best exceedingly less effective - for capitalism as a whole there were no new markets to conquer.

Thus, threatened by forces that where menacing to break apart its whole social order, the bourgeoisie took refuge behind the State as a last guarantor of the continue survival of bourgeoisie society. State capitalism became the mode of life of every nation to best manage the national economy in crisis, to keep society together, and to defend its imperialist interest in the world arena. However, as is well known, state capitalism policies did not manage to get the world over the crisis of 1929, instead they sunk humanity into WW II, a new carnage far more devastating than the first Great War.

After the respite afforded by the period of reconstruction, world capitalism's crisis once again came to the fore at the end of the Sixties and early Seventies and has persisted for almost four decades like a terminal cancer eating slowly away the life of bourgeois society.  Moving between state capitalist policies that have engineered economic booms, each one weaker than the preceding, and busts, always worst than the last in the cycle, this crisis has never gone away.

It is only in this context of  chronic crisis that we can understand the so-called current Great Recession. From our perspective this event is not  an isolated incident of the life of capitalism, but a  moment in the course of a crisis of the system that has taken on catastrophic proportions.

 Towards  new convulsions

 As we said before is really not difficult to take the air out of the economic "recovery" balloon. As anybody that has been paying attention to the present unfolding slump knows, the current semblance of economic improving environment (Bernanke's "green shoots") is the product of an onslaught of state initiatives the world over aimed at keeping the national and global economy from falling into total collapse. This decisive intervention from governments of all political credos in the economy has fueled a lot of talk about the return of state capitalism. This is of course misleading; state capitalism is not returning because it never went away. In fact in essence there is not even much of a change in bourgeoisie economic policies geared at managing the crisis. The irony is that at the center of these policies is once again the abuse of the credit/debt mechanism, which by creating an artificial demand has helped to keep the system alive for decades, but which  has at the same time also fueled the monstrous speculative bubbles, a virtual casino economy, that has contributed so much to the weakening of the financial system and the violence of the disturbances of the world economy in the bust swing of the cycles.

Some critics of the recovery credo are predicting that there will be in the coming years a double dip economic recession following the present stabilization. We can't say for sure what will happen in the near future, but what is sure is that the measures that today the bourgeoisie has taken to save its system are creating conditions for even more violent convulsions in the future.  This applies first of all to the US economy that has been at the center of the current storm.

 The monstrous amount of debt that the state has taken on in order to keep the national economy afloat can't but in the end backfire by destabilizing even more the global economy and the international financial system. Besides, it is never wise to count the chickens before they hatch; currently there is plenty of data that contradicts the early recovery tale. For instance:

§          the financial industry apparent stabilization is full of qualifications. In general the whole industry is only working thanks to the trillions of dollars pumped into it by the state through direct "bail outs" and the cheapening of credit. The big commercial banks Citigroup and Bank of America and the insurer AIG are only standing because the government took huge stakes in them.  The good bill of health for many of this financial institutions is based on a very convenient accounting trick: they have been allowed to erase from their liabilities the famous "toxic assets", which have wreaked havoc throughout the financial system the moment of the speculative bubble collapse. The reality is that many banks are still sitting on mountains of debt that will never be repaid.

§          the housing market problems that played such a huge role in the current economic bust are far from over. The wave of home foreclosures that  plagued this sector for the last 3 years according to many projections is expected to get a new boost from two sources: on the one hand  unemployed workers unable to keep up with their mortgage payments will fall into default;  and on the other  millions of home owners  will default on their higher monthly payments as their "interest only" mortgages reset to a normal amortization (interest plus principal) in the coming years. In turn these foreclosures will continue to sustain the vicious cycle of oversupply of houses and downward prices that has been driven the housing construction slump and the instability of the financial system.

§          the commercial real estate collapse is far from having run its course and most predictions expect things to get worse in this sector in the coming year. And with the air going out of this highly speculative industry that sustained the construction craze for office buildings, hotels, malls, etc., the banks that underwrote  it will be once again counting their loses and in need of more "bail- outs".

§          the relentless growth in unemployment. In September the US official unemployment rate edged to 9.8 percent, the highest in 26 years and the clearest sign that the crisis is far from over. The unemployment situation is even worse if the long term unemployed who have stopped looking for jobs (what the bourgeoisie calls "discouraged workers")  and  workers working part-time because they can't find nothing better (what the bourgeoisie calls "non-voluntary part time workers"), are accounted for. In total adding these categories, according to official figures of the US Labor Department, 17% of the work force would be  unemployed. This amounts to the astonishing figure of around 25 million workers affected by unemployment. Furthermore according to every expectation the unemployment rate will pass the double digit mark by the end of the year and despite all the official talk of recovery, nobody is expecting the employment situation to improve anytime soon. At best, so called "full employment" (defined as 6 percent unemployment level) is predicted to return by 2013 or 2014. As one indicator of how much capitalism has declined in the course of the last four decades, it should be noted that in the 1970's, full employment was defined as 4 percent unemployment.
 

Only the working class has a solution to the crisis

The bourgeoisie can talk all it wants about "recovery", but the hard reality is that  it has no real solution to capitalism's economic crisis. This is the main lesson of decades of bourgeois gimmicks to manage its system's decay. Today we seem to have entered a new moment in the economic breakdown of the system in which state capitalism's policies to keep the economy afloat seem to have lost their past relative effectiveness, foretelling a future of social instability and growing misery for the working class and other impoverished sectors of the population around the world.

For revolutionaries the only solution to the crisis is to once for all  get rid of capitalist relations of production.  This can only be done by the collective and conscious struggle of the international working class. This social revolution can only be the result of a long struggle through which the working class can build the political force to finally send capitalism to the dustbin of history and build instead a real human community. Today this struggle implies the resistance to submit to the logic of capitalism's crisis (layoffs, wage cuts, benefit cuts, worsening working conditions, etc.) and taking it to its ultimate political conclusion, the confrontation with the state and the overthrow of capitalism. There is no other way out.

Eduardo Smith 10/11/09

For two days in late September, leaders of the G-20 gathered at their traveling semi-annual summit, this time in Pittsburgh and yet again demonstrators flocked to the scene. It was a rather surrealistic event, with leaders of 19 countries and the European Union engaging in an orgy of self-congratulation for supposedly saving the world economy with their decisions six months ago. President Obama, himself joined the meeting and praised the assembled leaders for quickly setting in place new policies to further stabilize the world economy, strengthen world financial markets, and lay the basis for a return to economic growth. Meanwhile, everyone else who lives in the real world seemed confused because they haven't seen hide nor hair of the highly touted economic recovery. At the same time demonstrators traveled, as they usually do at these events, from far and wide and protested against nearly everything under the sun - from the ecological crisis, to the lack of a single-payer medical insurance program, to exploitation of labor in underdeveloped countries, to financial crisis, and all the attendant evils of globalization. Of course, it wouldn't be a G-20 Summit without rioting in the streets by masked marauders and self-proclaimed anarchists,  smashing  windows and clashing with the cops. It was  more subdued than at past G-20 summits, but nevertheless nearly 100 demonstrators managed to get arrested for causing $50,000 in property damage and overzealous police managed to go overboard, unnecessarily shooting tear gas and rubber bullets at innocent bystanders. 

Under the circumstances, it seems like an appropriate moment to take a serious, analytical look at the question of "globalization," what it is and what it isn't.

The Material Reality behind "Globalism"

From the very beginning, Marxists contended that capitalism must by nature build a global system.  In 1848 Marx wrote that the "rounding of the Cape... The East-Indian and Chinese markets, and the colonization of America", in other words the creation in embryo of a world market, was the precondition of the development of industrial capitalism. Marx also noted that the endpoint of capitalist development was the creation of "one nation" where "capitalist production is everywhere established and has possessed itself of every branch of industry".  For Marx, the creation of the world market and the resultant crowding out of all non-capitalist economy is capitalism's great historical act, which makes possible the working class' worldwide revolution.  This point was further elaborated by Rosa Luxemburg who contended that the fight for "colonies and spheres of interest, opportunities for investment", and the resultant "international loan system, militarism, tariff barriers, the dominant role of finance capital and trusts in world politics" were symptoms of this crowding out and signals that capitalism had reached the endpoint of its development as a progressive system.  For the revolutionary elements that would later form the Communist International, "capitalism was entering its period of decline precisely because it had become a global system, a veritable world economy" (IR 111 [3]).

What, then, is the justification given by people who claim that globalism represents something essentially new?  Globalism as such (distinguished from its ancestor, neoliberalism, which grew up in the late seventies and early eighties) began to confront the working class with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc.  With the "fall of communism", according to the prophets of globalization, capitalism could become a global system, a system which would bring prosperity due to the vastly increased amounts of raw material and capital at its disposal.  This contained two important mystifications for the working class.  In predicting a new period of prosperity, it represented an attack on the traditional analysis of capitalism as declining, as well as confronting the ICC's analysis that the collapse of the Eastern Bloc heralded the decomposition of capitalism as a whole (IR 111 [3]).  It also represented an attack on the hard-won acquisition of the interwar and postwar left communists that the USSR and the bloc that it constructed around itself was not separated from the world capitalist system at all.  Not only did capitalist relations (albeit of a caricatured state capitalist variety) exist in the Eastern bloc, but it and the Western bloc carried on international trade in capitalist forms even at the height of the Cold War.  Soviet-style state capitalism had never represented a barrier to the world market.  Globalization dogma thus first confronted the workers' movement not merely as a mystification, but as an outright lie.

It came to mean the destruction of tariff and other barriers to capitalism's penetration of the developing countries, in other words a more thorough than ever ferreting-out of pre-capitalist economic relations where they had been ignored in the past.  In the capitalist metropoles in North America and Europe, it came to mean the ever more comprehensive creation of a "ghost economy" of financial speculation and debt taken on by the state, by consumers, and by enterprises who could not profit any other way, all facilitated by deregulation, the latter, as well as the progressive destruction of expensive state welfare services.  This resulted in a massive transfer of fixed capital and industry from the metropoles to the developing world, allowing more capital to be freed up for financial games in the metropoles, and allowing for capital to more effectively establish itself areas it had exploited only marginally hitherto. Globalism evolved to mean something more complex than the supposed reintegration of the Eastern bloc into the capitalist system.   From a lie concocted in the brains of Fukuyama and Friedman, globalism had grown into something that seemed real.

Globalism in continuity with state capitalism

To what extent does the fact that globalism has become a recognizable tendency in the real world imply that it is a "rupture" with previous capitalist development?  For the portion of the bourgeoisie that supports it, globalism is a sign of capitalism's entry into a new period of ascendance, that is, real historical progress.  They justify this position by inventing a society based on microchips and information-sharing over the Internet that has fundamentally different laws of motion than industrial capitalism.  This new society works in essentially the same way as industrial capitalism, in terms of the wage labor relation and the accumulation of capital, but "information technology" has managed to exorcise the crisis, in the historical and immediate sense, from the system.  There is nothing essentially new in attempts to deny the existence of capitalism's crises: they can be found in classical political economy, in revisionist Social Democratic texts, and in Keynesian manifestoes.  Nor is there anything substantially new in "information technology", except that it represents technical innovation.  The computer is not the savior of capitalism: attempts to make it appear so are given the lie by the most recent manifestation of the open economic crisis.

However, the bourgeoisie, especially in the epoch of decomposition, is not homogeneous, and another part of the bourgeoisie opposes globalization.  To do so, they also claim that globalization represents a "rupture" with the past.  In the golden Keynesian, Fordist age, they claim, capitalism was successfully managed, its destructive tendencies contained, by the power of democratic national states.  The policies of these states not only deferred the crisis, but ensured a more "just" distribution of wealth.  Neo-liberalism and its globalist progeny destroyed this arrangement by handing power to multinational enterprises and undemocratic "international" institutions controlled by those enterprises.  What is necessary, according to this faction, is a return to the most just past.  Nearly all of this position is built on lies.  The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization were never international institutions.  The first two were set up by American imperialism and have operated in its interest ever since.  The WTO has a broader base but is still the tool of a small number of capitalist countries.  Similarly, "multinational" enterprises function not as independent actors, but as tools for the imperialism of the state whence come the majority of their shareholders.  Capitalism cannot transcend nationality.  The Fordist era was not a lost golden age of just social relations, but in fact the deepest depths of the counter-revolution, in which nowhere were capitalist social relations challenged by the bourgeois "democratic" states. 

Last but not least, Keynseianism did not successfully manage the crisis: it returned in full force in the late sixties and blossomed in the seventies.  The return of the crisis was what made the shift away from Keynesianism to neo-liberalism and globalism necessary for the bourgeoisie.  Doing so was the only way in which the bourgeoisie could continue to profit in decomposing capitalism.  This fact lays bare the real nature of globalization.  It is not some sort of "rupture" with the past, but in fact a deliberate a considered revision of state capitalist policy.

An internationalist perspective

Clearly, globalist policies represent an attack on the working class.  In the metropolis, globalism means plant closures, layoffs, wage reductions, and other attacks on living conditions meant to reduce the portion of revenue that goes toward wages and thus maintain profitability.  In the developing countries, globalism means vicious exploitation, the workers in these countries lacking the safety nets that the workers in the metropoles won for themselves during capitalism's ascendance, and which capitalism is trying to destroy.  Thus, even though globalism does not represent anything fundamentally new, in the sense that it is merely another in a long line of state capitalist strategies for managing the economic crisis, it is necessary for revolutionary minorities to formulate a theoretical response, just as the working class finds it necessary to mobilize in defense of its living conditions.  In doing so it is important to guard jealously the traditional internationalist principles of the Communist Left: no compromise with participators in bourgeois government or cheerleaders for imperialist war.  It is on this basis that the ICC denounces as bourgeois mystifications the World Social Forum and its offspring, the major "anti-globalist" forces in existence today, even as it intervenes in order to rescue some of the individuals who are there searching for a revolutionary perspective against capitalism.

It is also on this basis that revolutionaries must intervene in the open class struggle, in order to combat the nationalist, anti-immigrant, and racist attitudes with which capital tries to derail workers' struggles.  However, it is important to recognize that just as globalism represents a material attack on workers' living conditions and just as its fraternal twin, anti-globalism attempts to derail their response onto nationalist grounds, the open identification of capital as an international relation represents an opportunity for the working class.  Just as capital is international, so is the working class, and the open identification of one leads to the realization of the other.  The proletariat's response to globalization must be and can only be the defense of its living conditions, the linking up with other workers, that is, the international class struggle.

R. White 9/28/09

The bourgeoisie has introduced the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) in the last three sessions of Congress over the last five years, even while Bush was still president and before Obama was even nominated.  In 2007 it passed  in the House of Representatives 241 to 185, but in the Senate it failed to get the 60 votes necessary to shutdown debate and have a final vote.  However, it did have a majority, or 51 senators who supported it.  It is very likely that it will pass now.

So, what really is the EFCA?  What will it do?  And, most importantly, why is it being enacted by the bourgeoisie now? The EFCA will make it easier for unions to organize workers, boost their membership, and re-establish their credibility. The unions will more easily organize workers because the EFCA will bypass the current requirement of holding a collective bargaining electing after  30% of workers in a bargaining unit express willingness to become unionized. Over the past 30 years, due to policies in place during  both Republican and Democratic administrations, it was often the case that in the period  leading up to the collective bargaining election, employers would harass workers and even fire pro-union activists,  making it increasingly difficult for unions to win the right to represent workers. EFCA will abolish the need for elections and will grant bargaining rights to unions simply on the basis that a majority of the workers have signed authorization cards. The law will impose stiff  penalties against ‘unfair' tactics by management, such as harassment, ‘illegal' firings, etc. Additionally, EFCA will make sure that the first union contract is in place within a year of union recognition. In recent years, more than 35% of the time, management resisted negotiations and it would take more than two years for unions to get their first contract. The EFCA law mandates the use of mediation if negotiations do not progress quickly and requires arbitration if mediation doesn't quickly result in an agreement. Guaranteeing a contract within a year also will  strengthen the credibility of the union and  minimize the risk to the bourgeois order that angry workers might take matters in their own hands and go out on wildcat strikes, an action that can certainly promote and accelerate the development of class consciousness, which is what frightens the ruling class the most.

The deepening economic crisis requires that the bourgeoisie refurbish its trade union apparatus.  Millions of workers are hurting because of job losses, or, when they are ‘lucky' enough to still have  their jobs, they experience pressure from a tremendous erosion of benefits, a bleak and uncertain future, and even a scaling back of wages themselves. Even if at the immediate level workers' reaction to the economic situation may be more one of fright and disorientation, in the longer term this is creating the conditions for a renewal of class combat and militancy.  Obviously, the ruling class must try to contain the working class' discontent, and, above all, it has to try and dampen the development of class consciousness. The trade unions have long been the central tool used by the ruling class to control the working class, to maintain working class discipline and sabotage the class struggle. Historically, because  class struggles for economic demands inherently have the potential to lead to political confrontations with the state, the bourgeoisie has tried to divert struggles away from the defense of economic demands, either towards struggles for the creation of unions, or to defend existing unions.  For example, in the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, the bourgeoisie successfully diverted the struggles for economic demands towards unionization, as they did in the sitdown strikes in the auto industry. More recently in the 1980s and 1990s economic struggle was diverted toward the defense of the unions, against union busting.  Even though workers would suffer deterioration in their wages, benefits and working conditions, the unions would always declare a victory celebration because at least they had "beat back" union busting.

Today, as the attacks against the working class intensify in the worst economic crisis ever, even worse than the 1930's, the bourgeoisie is setting the stage preventively to divert the class struggle again toward unionization campaigns.  The EFCA is then a recognition that things went too far in weakening this important tool of the bourgeoisie, and the more intelligent sectors of the ruling class understand the necessity to revamp the union mystification after decades of ‘union busting', and are supporting EFCA.

The strengthening of the union mystification will not only help the bourgeoisie in controlling older workers already on the job, but it will put them in position to control  the new generations of workers, as they enter the work force. This sector of the working class is particularly brutally attacked, bearing the brunt of the erosion of benefits, as demonstrated by the creation of new ‘tiers' with diminished benefits and the like for new workers, and a bleak perspective for their future. The bourgeoisie understands the necessity to occupy this social terrain with reformist and pro-union ideas before communist ideas and organizations can influence it.    

Without the unions, the bourgeoisie cannot so easily derail working class discontent and short-circuit the development of class consciousness.  Failing to place the unions in the midst of the workers will leave workers the opportunity to autonomously organize on their own class terrain and with itheir own methods and means to struggle, i.e. the general assemblies and the extension of the struggle.  EFCA is the bourgeoisie's attempt at controlling and derailing the future struggles of the working class, and it has to be denounced as such.  Against the attempts of the bourgeoisie to break our militancy and obfuscate our consciousness, the working class need to self-organize by creating wide open assemblies where all workers can participate and discuss, by electing revocable delegates with mandates to the assemblies, by developing its class solidarity, and by extending its struggles to all workers across categories.

Ana, 9/28/09

The following text was written by a young militant who has been in discussion the ICC for some months now and participated in the Days of Discussion conference last spring (see Internationalism 151, "North American Political Milieu: Days of Discussion Conference [10]"). The text describes the author's efforts to grapple with complex issues pertaining to the union question and the intervention of revolutionaries in the struggle. We think this an extremely important documentation of the process by which new revolutionary militants develop political understanding, familiarize themselves with the theoretical acquisitions of the workers movement, attempt to seek out a collective framework to find the link between theory and practice, and to reflect on their experiences. We salute the combative spirit of the comrade, his commitment to the working class, his political honesty and selfreflection, his materialist method, and in particular his willingness to share his experience with others. 

Dear Internationalism,

Ever since the "financial" crisis (really a crisis of the palliatives applied to the longer term crisis of overproduction) came out into the open last fall, I've been struggling to try to contribute to helping the working class fight back against the attacks of capitalism in crisis.  I had been interested in "revolutionary" politics and theory for about 5 or 6 years ever since I finished college, starting with anarchism, then after a brief flirtation with situationsim, becoming interested in left communism.  Up until that point my knowledge of revolutionary politics was entirely theoretical and academic-I had engaged in online discussions with anarchists, trotskyists and one self-described "council communist," and was a regular reader of Loren Goldner's website, the trotskyist World Socialist Website, and your and the IBRP's sites.  What initially attracted me to left communism was the left communists' understanding of the Russian Revolution's degeneration and emphasis on the activity of workers themselves in the revolution-historically, I was "on the side" of the lefts in the Comintern (Luxemburg and the KAPD were "right" and Lenin was "wrong"), but because of the absence of a revolutionary situation right now in the 21st Century, I did not have a clear idea of what the correct approach for communists to take in the present period would be.  I also was somewhat put off by what I perceived as the left communists' "impractical" lack of "activism." I had no idea what left communists actually did, besides what I perceived as arguing too much about small differences, but I thought they had a correct analysis of many questions (support for "workers' states," nationalism, the Russian question). 

            As the crisis began I got in touch with some Trotskyists and anarchists in my city and began discussions with them about what to do as a communist and how they conceived of their role in the class struggle.  At the same time, I was voraciously reading libcom.org for ideas about class struggle and criticism of Trotskyism and the transitional program specifically.  I had literally no militant experience at all and was trying to understand how, as a communist, I was to relate to the rest of the working class and contribute to the advancement of class consciousness, especially now that the crisis had come out into the open.  About a month later, I contacted Internationalism and began discussing with them.  Around the same time, the city agency I'd been working at for only 1 month announced that due to a $1 million budget gap, they would be laying off 71 employees and drastically scaling back services to residents.  Since I was so new (still on my probationary period) I was told (by union stewards and most other workers) to update my resume and call my former employer to beg for my old job.  I contacted a citizens' group to save city services, and also began talking extensively with Internationalism about what I could do to intervene in this issue, often in very immediate terms-should I join the citizens' group and try to push it towards working class positions?  How would left communists intervene here? etc.  My main concern again was how do revolutionaries intervene in the class struggle and what is their role?

            Discussing things like the Trotskyist transitional program, reading the ICC's incredibly lucid book, Communist Organizations and Class Consciousness [11], and attending the Days of Discussion in April all gave me a much clearer picture of how the ICC conceived of intervention in the class struggle.  I agreed very much with the general approach taken by the ICC, but still thought they had a somewhat extreme position on some things especially on the unions and working in "community based" activist groups.  I continued to read the ICC's texts, especially about the revolutionary nature of the working class, and I also read Herman Gorter's defense of the left in the ComIntern.  As a fight for a new pension and talk of a potential strike came onto the, I again began talking to the ICC, and also posted a thread on libcom.org, about how to convince people to stick together and also to take decisions in their own hands.  Initially I thought the main thing for me to stress as a communist was for workers of different unions to stick together, so I went to a union meeting to ask if we were coordinating our contract negotiations with those of other city-workers in other unions. 

I didn't say much at the union meeting because it began with a motion from the people who were crowded in the staircase, and couldn't see or hear anything, to adjourn until we could get a bigger meeting place.  The president of the local quickly and dismissively took a vote and only counted the front rows, angering the people in the back and causing a big demoralizing shouting match. The format of the meeting was not one of discussion but of monologue. The only people who got to talk were people who were prepared to yell and I had thought I would be able to say all my ideas and have them discussed.  I was disoriented by the president's writing off of the people who were in the back and I honestly don't think I intervened in a positive way at all-I only asked if a meeting between both memberships would be possible and they said "maybe," and I didn't have a response.  I was, however, able to do was talk with coworkers face to face before and after the meeting about their frustrations with the unions-their inaction, their blaming this inaction on the members' lack of militancy/loyalty (the same in their eyes), as well as the co-opting militant workers into committees and steward roles. 

            Talking with Internationalism, they stressed the importance of not taking an immediatist attitude towards this struggle in trying to propose things that are way beyond where people are, or getting myself victimized for any exemplary actions.  The most important thing, they said, was that people begin to discuss what's going on and what they can do about it-that they identify as workers under attack and try to independently discuss as workers what to do about it.  This would be the best guarantee for any kind of real class struggle or political reflection or move toward class consciousness in the whole struggle. 

The next week there was a rally planned with 4 unions: 2 city-worker unions, the transit workers for the regional transit authority, and an SEIU union with workers in the public schools.  The rally began with various democrats running for city and state government denouncing the current administration from a stage, followed by speeches from each union president, answered by each union chanting its local number.  After being told that the official rally was over, "but some folks are going to march around city hall" (which is in the center of a roundabout in the middle of downtown), most people started marching on the sidewalk around it, but then just stood in the road and took the street corner, chanting "no contract, no peace" and "shut it down." I don't think this was sanctioned by any of the union leadership I think the workers just did it and then other people followed suit. After about 15 minutes in one of the busiest intersections downtown, we marched around city hall again, this time in the street (although by this time the police had blocked off the streets for us) with the same chants.  After once around everyone met up at the corner of city hall and was addressed by some men in suits who I later found out were union officials. Their basic message was "it's good you came out for this rally even though there was such short notice--you need to do that even moreso in the future, whatever the union president says, you do-we say ‘jump,' you say, ‘how high?'" Despite the fact that the blocking of the street wasn't their decision, they still chose to use their time to hammer home their message that the union membership can't know about any planned job actions in advance and just needs to wait and listen to the union leaders.

            After all this, I realized that if I wanted to "ever act or speak in such a way that the class consciousness of the workers shall be roused and strengthened" (Herman Gorter, Open Letter to Cde. Lenin, 1920), I would need a clearer analysis of the unions and try to encourage workers to discuss and decide things on their own.  Further meetings called by the union have been nothing more than monologues from these same suit-wearing union officials, and one other march, but in both cases workers either sit and listen to a sermon from the union, or just march in line--and they have no control of the struggle.  Recently, the mayor has threatened to lay off 3000 of us and close down entire city departments unless the state legislature passes a regressive tax for the city to fill the budget gap, so the union has told us to call our representatives and urge them to pass this, and to remove from it punitive pension-related amendments.  None of this action is done as workers, though--it is only as "citizens" begging their representatives. Like the sermons on obedience, the calling of meetings in small halls during the workday with little notification, and all the other actions of the union, it pre-empts, and in a way prevents the independent and conscious action of the workers. 

Workers are for the most part feeling threatened and a good number are eager to struggle (many of the "professionals" are not as eager), but the unions only tell us to wait for them-you could say they serve to abort class consciousness before it is born, or that they act as a contraceptive to class consciousness.  I'm not certain that I share all of the ICC's positions on the unions, but I certainly see the necessity for stressing rank-and-file control of the strike and not trying to work within the union, except to speak to members about the need for discussion during the meetings (which is often not really possible, because there is no discussion during the meetings).  I've tried to read more about the theoretical underpinnings of the ICC's position on unions and am beginning to move closer to their position--especially seeing that the unions, as permanent, legal organs, are basically not allowed to suggest or even condone most forms of struggle that might actually push back the bosses' attacks (solidarity strikes, mass protests that really disrupt things, etc.).  The unions cannot really act as an instrument for workers struggling as an independent class.  They also tend to demoralize people and drastically reduce their willingness to fight, by roping them into ineffective actions that affirm neither their common situation with other workers or their potential power as a class, but only make them feel powerless.  Many of my coworkers are just plain tired of being told to do things by the union that don't work and would rather give in than to struggle the way the union is proposing.  Workers are now suggesting taking furloughs and other givebacks, partly I think because all their frustration was channeled into things that didn't work-the best paid are ready to give back and the worst paid want to fight but don't see the point because all they can conceive of is the union-led fight. This is an essential point about the class struggle requiring active self-conscious and self-confident fighters-if the workers are to be steadfast, they will need to understand deeply what they are doing and why they must be actively engaged in it if they are to resist bourgeois propaganda. 

Another event served in helping me make a break with leftism last year: I attended a protest to close a video-game based army recruiting center for minors and children.  At this rally were a number of Trotskyist, Maoist, liberal, and Christian front groups and across the street was a right-wing counter-protestor with a megaphone elaborating all the connections these groups had to the worst sorts of dictators and nationalist movements, and the whole protest was geared toward liberals, NOT workers.  Nothing the protest was about went directly to anything specific about capitalism, but only a war which was conceived of as an aberration.  This can in no way increase either the self-consciousness OR the self-confidence of the working class as a class.  These kinds of "demands" don't emanate from the proletariat as an exploited and revolutionary class in capitalism but from the minds of idealists-this kind of struggle is not materialist and it seeks to chain the proletariat to causes and concerns based on general human abstract ahistorical and classless morality.  What is revolutionary about the working class, especially in a system that is in permanent crisis, is the fact that it cannot "escape" exploitation-it can only fight exploitation directly by resisting increased exploitation until it is strong enough to go on the offensive and abolish exploitation.  Every defensive "economic" struggle of the working class fights exploitation head on--workers are exploited de facto by competition, and THE way they fight that is by uniting against competition, against "competitiveness" and the sacrifices demanded by private production for exchange to say "no layoffs, no cuts, no nothing" and in doing so, they confront exploitation head on and attack the very heart of the system.  They can't run, they can't hide, they MUST fight.  Marx asserted, "theory is only realized in the masses to the extent that it is a realization of their needs."  What makes the working class revolutionary is only the consciousness of itself and its real material historical interests.  This is precisely what is ignored in substitutionist conceptions--by directing attention toward political concerns (especially in a reformist sense), rather than beginning with the economic struggle which inevitably becomes political, these groups serve as the left-wing of capital, whether that is their intention or not. 

            While I still have many questions about the exact nature of the unions I'm certain that they don't help workers become more self-conscious, more self-confident, and more unified as a class, and they specifically derail the independent action of workers that could actually beat back attacks on their living standards by channeling them into ineffective, divisive, classless, unconscious action.

            I'm trying to clarify and deepen my understanding of the union question as well as the importance of the revolutionary minority, and deepen more and more my understanding of how to intervene in class struggle.  As Communist Organizations and Class Consciousness [11]says,

"Far from following passively the flux and reflux of their class' struggles, the communists' role is to organize themselves so as to accelerate the revolutionary tendencies smouldering within these struggles.  ...once revolutionaries have understood the bankruptcy of an old political system, of a previous organizational form and political practice, their responsibility is not to wait until the rest of the workers have caught up before organizing themselves on a clear basis and putting forward a perspective for the struggle.  ...how is the proletariat as a whole to become aware of the death of these old forms of organization and of the bankruptcy of past political positions if its most conscious elements themselves hesitate to say that they are dead and to propose a new orientation?"

I want to clarify my understanding of the unions and deepen my conviction about exactly how revolutionaries and workers should relate to them, so I can present a clearer vision and not hesitate to try and push the workers' consciousness forward.  What the working class needs above all at this moment in history is to gain confidence in its own strength, not in the strength of union-hacks to bargain above their heads or in the legal methods of struggle they prescribe, but confidence in themselves and consciousness of themselves as an exploited but revolutionary class-a class without whose labor the world stops turning.

J Jogiches 9/15/09

Michael Moore's new movie, "Capitalism, A Love Story" opened at the end of September, touted as an "anti-capitalist" polemic. The film contains some very moving depictions of workers confronting mortgage foreclosures and factory shutdowns. There is footage from the factory occupation in Chicago last December. When the workers talk, they confirm what we wrote in Internationalism  at the time, that the workers did not want to lose their jobs, that they wanted to fight for their jobs. It was the unions and the politicians who stressed that the workers should get what they were "legally" entitled to, which totalled about $6,000 for each worker for vacation and severance money

The bishop of Chicago came to visit the workers and told them that he himself was the son of a steel worker and he understood that their struggle was just and then he blessed them and gave them communion. There was very moving footage of other workers coming as individuals and families to donate food to the workers to show their solidarity.

There was also moving footage of a group of 20 or 30 community people in Miami declaring an eviction null and void and then moving the evicted family back into their home. A guy from the bank comes and tells them they are trespassing and then nine police cars come. There is a lot of yelling and arguing and then the cops and the bank guy leave and the family stays in the house. (At the end of the film, during the credit crawl, we read that the family was permitted to stay in their home permanently.)

The film is filled with the standard Michael-Moore-is-the-focus-of-the-story antics. These antics include Michael Moore trying to meet the chairman of the board of GM, or trying to place the entire board of AIG  or everybody at the NY Stock Exchange under citizen's arrest, or putting yellow crime scene tape around the stock exchange, or driving an armored truck up to Bank of America and announcing that he's there to pick up the $10 billion in bailout money.

The big problem is Moore's politics. His attack on capitalism is largely provocative, not substantive. It's as if he decided to turn all the rightwing hysterical accusations about Obama's "socialism" upside down. The global meltdown crisis of 2008 is attributed to Reagan's deregulation policies that began in the 1980s and continued through the Bush Bush I-Clinton-Bush II years and the supposed defacto takeover of the US government by Goldman Sachs who pushed through policies to benefit their company at the expense of the taxpayers and their competitors. In other words, the real problem is not a generalized capitalist economic crisis but rather the greed of a few elite political/business figures. True, Moore says capitalism is evil, and even interviews three or four catholic clergy who declare that Jesus would have been against capitalism, but in essence his opposition to capitalism is actually opposition to deregulated capitalism. He includes footage of demonstrations by a couple dozen people from leftist groups like the Answer Coalition against the corporate bailouts or foreclosures as the emergence of a mass anti-capitalist movement in the US.

He seems beside himself in how to deal with Obama, who he sees as making Wall Street quake in their boots with his calls for change and points out that they responded by contributing to his campaign. He denounces all of Obama's economic advisers as henchmen for Goldman Sachs, but he is still enamored of Obama.

Against capitalism, the alternative is "democracy" in Moore's view. He interviews Vermont's Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, who claims to be an advocate of democratic socialism, which is defined as the government serving the interests of the middle and working class folks, to protect their rights. Moore has found historically lost footage of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1944 State of the Union message, about a month before his death, in which FDR called for a second Bill of Rights for Americans after the war, which called not for socialism or for the destruction of capitalism, but a welfare state type state capitalism:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

Moore laments that FDR died before he could create this wonderful society in the US, but he says that in the post war period the US sent FDR's people to Europe and Japan where during the reconstruction of Italy, Germany and Japan as well as other countries in Europe, this vision of society was implemented. Just as he did in Sicko, he idealizes the European state capitalist social wage as the glorious goal for Americans. Moore's anti-capitalism would in no way destroy the capitalist state, or implement working class control over the means of production; instead it would turn America into France or Germany or Japan or Norway - all of which are capitalist societies, where the working class has to struggle to defend itself against exploitation. Moore ends the movie with a call for everyone to join him in the struggle for this society with a popularized version of the Internationale, which sounded more like Bobby Darin singing Mack the Knife than a revolutionary song.
Jerry Grevin. 9/20/2009