The escape from "natural selection" through the development of humanity

 The most important point first: immediately following are the words of Alfred Russel Wallace, written in 1864, very clearly explaining the power of, the escape from and the overturning of "natural selection" by the development of humanity:

"But in man, as we now behold him, this is different. He is social and sympathetic. In the rudest tribes the sick are assisted at least with food; less robust health and vigour than the average does not entail death. Neither does the want of perfect limbs or other organs produce the same effects as among animals. Some division of labour takes place; the swiftest hunt, the less active fish, or gather fruits; food is to some extent exchanged or divided. The action of natural selection is therefore checked; the weaker, the dwarfish, those of less active limbs, or less piercing eyesight, do not suffer the extreme penalty which falls upon animals so defective....

    In proportion as these physical characteristics become of less importance, mental and moral qualities will have increasing influence on the well-being of the race. Capacity for acting in concert, for protection and for the acquisition of food and shelter; sympathy, which leads all in turn to assist each other; the sense of right, which checks depredations upon our fellows; the decrease of the combative and destructive propensities; self-restraint in present appetites; and that intelligent foresight which prepares for the future, are all qualities that from their earliest appearance must have been for the benefit of each community, and would, therefore, have become the subjects of ‘natural selection'. For it is evident that such qualities would be for the well-being of man; would guard him against external enemies, against internal dissensions, and against the effects of inclement seasons and impending famine, more surely than could any merely physical modification. Tribes in which such mental and moral qualities were predominant, would therefore have an advantage in the struggle for existence over other tribes in which they were less developed, would live and maintain their numbers, while the others would decrease and finally succumb...

But while these changes had been going on, his mental development had correspondingly advanced, and had now reached that condition in which it began powerfully to influence his whole existence, and would therefore, become subject to the irresistible action of ‘natural selection'. This action would rapidly give the ascendancy to mind: speech would probably now be first developed, leading to a still further advance of the mental faculties, and from that moment man as regards his physical form would remain almost stationary. The art of making weapons, division of labour, anticipation of the future, restraint of the appetites, moral, social and sympathetic feelings, would now have a preponderating influence on his well being, and would therefore be that part of his nature on which ‘natural selection' would most powerfully act; and we should thus have explained that wonderful persistence of mere physical characteristics, which is the stumbling-block of those who advocate the unity of mankind...

    We are now, therefore, enabled to harmonise the conflicting views of anthropologists on this subject. Man may have been, indeed I believe must have been, once a homogeneous race; but it was at a period of which we have as yet discovered no remains, at a period so remote in his history, that he had not yet acquired that wonderfully developed brain, the organ of the mind, which now, even in his lowest examples, raises him far above the highest brutes;--at a period when he had the form but hardly the nature of man, when he neither possessed human speech, nor those sympathetic and moral feelings which in a greater or less degree everywhere now distinguish the race. Just in proportion as these truly human faculties became developed in him would his physical features become fixed and permanent, because the latter would be of less importance to his well being; he would be kept in harmony with the slowly changing universe around him, by an advance in mind, rather than by a change in body. If, therefore, we are of opinion that he was not really man till these higher faculties were developed, we may fairly assert that there were many originally distinct races of men; while, if we think that a being like us in form and structure, but with mental faculties scarcely raised above the brute, must still be considered to have been human, we are fully entitled to maintain the common origin of all mankind...

    Here, then, we see the true grandeur and dignity of man. On this view of his special attributes, we may admit that even those who claim for him a position as an order, a class, or a sub-kingdom by himself, have some reason on their side. He is, indeed, a being apart, since he is not influenced by the great laws which irresistibly modify all other organic beings. Nay more; this victory which he has gained for himself gives him a directing influence over other existences. Man has not only escaped ‘natural selection' himself, but he actually is able to take away some of that power from nature which, before his appearance, she universally exercised. We can anticipate the time when the earth will produce only cultivated plants and domestic animals; when man's selection shall have supplanted ‘natural selection'; and when the ocean will be the only domain in which that power can be exerted, which for countless cycles of ages ruled supreme over all the earth...

    Briefly to recapitulate the argument;--in two distinct ways has man escaped the influence of those laws which have produced unceasing change in the animal world. By his superior intellect he is enabled to provide himself with clothing and weapons, and by cultivating the soil to obtain a constant supply of congenial food. This renders it unnecessary for his body, like those of the lower animals, to be modified in accordance with changing conditions--to gain a warmer natural covering, to acquire more powerful teeth or claws, or to become adapted to obtain and digest new kinds of food, as circumstances may require. By his superior sympathetic and moral feelings, he becomes fitted for the social state; he ceases to plunder the weak and helpless of his tribe; he shares the game which he has caught with less active or less fortunate hunters, or exchanges it for weapons which even the sick or the deformed can fashion; he saves the sick and wounded from death; and thus the power which leads to the rigid destruction of all animals who cannot in every respect help themselves, is prevented from acting on him...

In concluding this brief sketch of a great subject, I would point out its bearing upon the future of the human race. If my conclusions are just, it must inevitably follow that the higher--the more intellectual and moral--must displace the lower and more degraded races; and the power of ‘natural selection', still acting on his mental organisation, must ever lead to the more perfect adaptation of man's higher faculties to the conditions of surrounding nature, and to the exigencies of the social state. While his external form will probably ever remain unchanged, except in the development of that perfect beauty which results from a healthy and well organised body, refined and ennobled by the highest intellectual faculties and sympathetic emotions, his mental constitution may continue to advance and improve till the world is again inhabited by a single homogeneous race, no individual of which will be inferior to the noblest specimens of existing humanity. Each one will then work out his own happiness in relation to that of his fellows; perfect freedom of action will be maintained, since the well balanced moral faculties will never permit any one to transgress on the equal freedom of others; restrictive laws will not be wanted, for each man will be guided by the best of laws; a thorough appreciation of the rights, and a perfect sympathy with the feelings, of all about him; compulsory government will have died away as unnecessary (for every man will know how to govern himself), and will be replaced by voluntary associations for all beneficial public purposes; the passions and animal propensities will be restrained within those limits which most conduce to happiness; and mankind will have at length discovered that it was only required of them to develop the capacities of their higher nature, in order to convert this earth, which had so long been the theatre of their unbridled passions, and the scene of unimaginable misery, into as bright a paradise as ever haunted the dreams of seer or poet."

 If one can possibly sum this up, particularly the sense of the last extract, it's in the words "Man has not only escaped ‘natural selection' himself, but he actually is able to take away some of that power from nature which, before his appearance, she universally exercised"  -and this is the contribution of Wallace to scientific materialism.

It would be wrong to see Alfred Russel Wallace as the "forgotten man" in the shadow of Charles Darwin. He was anything but. Neither is this piece a song for an unsung hero; Wallace, unlike many scientists, was rightly feted in his own time and recognised as the brilliant scientist that he was. He was naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist. He lived and worked to a ripe old age and was still buzzing when he was 90 years old. The popular scientist, David Attenborough, to his credit, has just finished a speaking tour on the works of Alfred Russel Wallace. I think the reason that so little is made of him in this year of the commemoration of Darwin's work, is how much his work was a profound development on the motor force of history and thus a direct attack on bourgeois order, and how much he pushed Darwin in this direction despite the latter's sometimes reluctance. The above quotes are extracts from his paper presented in March 1864 to the Anthropological Society of London (which went completely over their heads - see their subsequent discussion) entitled ‘The Origins of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of "Natural Selection"'. This text, which forced Darwin "out of the closet" in relation to the development of man, and provoked his work The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, very clearly expounds the analysis developed by Patrick Tort on the "reverse effect of evolution" on natural selection one hundred and nineteen years later (see the ICC's website ‘On Patrick Tort's The Darwin Effect').

Early doors - Wallace gives the first great push to the publication of Darwin's Origins of Species

According to Wikipedia, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) was born the eighth of nine children in Wales to a middle class family whose fortunes were about to take a dive. They moved to north London where Alfred was withdrawn from grammar school aged 13 because of the family's financial difficulties. He became an apprentice surveyor, associated with many workers and travelled around England and Wales for work. He was unemployed for a while and worked as a civil engineer, teacher and lecturer. During this period he read Richard Owen and Thomas Paine as well as Malthus. His friendship with the 19 year old entomologist, Henry Bates, came at a decisive moment in his life. Wallace spent much of his working life outdoors and he loved to collect insects (hence the subtitle of a book on him: "The other insect-collector"). During this period, exchanging letters with Bates, he read the anonymous evolutionary work Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in 1847, Darwin's Journal and Lyell's Principles of Geology. Inspired by the chronicles of travel written by Darwin, von Humboldt and William Henry Edwards, Wallace and Bates decided to travel to the Amazon to collect insects and other species.  They were also to investigate the transmutation of species. Returning to England in 1852, the ship caught fire and Wallace and the others spent 10 days in an open boat before they were rescued. All Wallace's collection was destroyed in the fire but they were insured, which enabled him to survive back in England. Aged between 31 and 38, Wallace travelled around what is now Malaysia and Indonesia. During these times, he became convinced of the reality of evolution, and, according to his autobiography (My Life), posed the question:

"The problem then was not only how and why do species change, but how and why do they change into new and well defined species, distinguished from each other in so many ways; why and how they become so exactly adapted to distinct modes of life; and why do all the intermediate grades die out (as geology shows they have died out) and leave only clearly defined and well marked species, genera, and higher groups of animals?"

Coming out of a fever somewhere on the Malay Archipelago in Ternate (or possibly the island of Gilolo), and, strangely enough, thinking about Malthus, he came up with the answer:

"It then occurred to me that these causes or their equivalents are continually acting in the case of animals also; and as animals usually breed much more quickly than does mankind, the destruction every year from these causes must be enormous in order to keep down the numbers of each species, since evidently they do not increase regularly from year to year, as otherwise the world would long ago have been crowded with those that breed most quickly. Vaguely thinking over the enormous and constant destruction which this implied, it occurred to me to ask the question, why do some die and some live? And the answer was clearly, on the whole the best fitted live ... and considering the amount of individual variation that my experience as a collector had shown me to exist, then it followed that all the changes necessary for the adaptation of the species to the changing conditions would be brought about ... In this way every part of an animal's organization could be modified exactly as required, and in the very process of this modification the unmodified would die out, and thus the definite characters and the clear isolation of each new species would be explained."  Years earlier, Wallace had already become somewhat dissatisfied with simply collecting, describing and recording species; he writes to Bates: "My early letters (1847)... suffice to show that the great problem of the origins of the species was already distinctly formulated in my mind".  By 1853, Wallace nearly had it cracked in an essay entitled ‘The Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of the Species' and shortly after, he wrote: "Of late years, however, a great light has been thrown upon the subject by geological investigations, which have shown that the present state of the earth, and the organisms now inhabiting it, are but the last stage of a long and uninterrupted series of changes"; and to try to explain anything current without reference to those changes could only lead to "wrongful conclusions".

That the idea of natural selection came to Wallace in a fever is not so different to how Charles Darwin developed the concept, if you describe fever as a ferment of the mind; Wallace from a malarial fever and Darwin's from a slow-burning psychological fever brought about by the contradictions of bourgeois society and the analyses that he had to confront it with. Wallace wrote: "Every species has come into existence coincident both in time and space with a pre-existing, closely allied species" (all underlinings by Wallace and all his emphases I've underlined). Using the branch, the limb, boughs, twigs and "scattered leaves" as an example, the law "not merely explains but necessitates what is". Wallace wrote to his brother-in-law: "It seems to me, however, as clear as daylight that the principle of Natural Selection must act in nature. It is almost as necessary a truth as any mathematics. Next, the effects produced by this action cannot be limited. It cannot be shown that there is any limit to them in nature" (Letters and Reminiscences, James Marchant). From the Malay Archipelago, after coming out of the fever and working on it over two evenings, Wallace sent Darwin his text: ‘On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart from the Original Type'. Darwin was amazed to see that it was almost identical to his 1842 analysis that hardly anyone knew anything of. Darwin was advised by his friends to present both papers, which he did to the Linnaean Society in London, 1858, and Darwin's extended views became The Origin of Species. Neither Wallace nor Darwin attended the meeting as Darwin's son was being buried on the day it took place.

Some naturalists, hearing of Wallace's discovery in the Malay Archipelago, wrote to him immediately, criticising his "theorising" when what was necessary was the collection of more facts, they said. This was the only conclusion to his text that reached him as he continued working in solitude in a remote area of Sarawak, apart from one other; Charles Darwin wrote to Wallace on May 1st 1857: "... I can plainly see that we have thought much alike... and come to similar conclusions... I agree to the truth of almost every word of your paper". After Wallace's text appeared in Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Darwin agonised somewhat over publishing his views in what was to become his Origins of Species. But Wallace's work had already publicly crossed a Rubicon and it spurred Darwin on and more or less forced him to publish his own great work. Both men had hit on the same discovery almost simultaneously, though obviously not without a great deal of previous work from both themselves and many others. On his "moment of truth", ie, when the reality of "natural selection" hit him, Darwin wrote to Sir Joseph Hooker in 1885: "... and I can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me", it is that, "the modified offspring of all dominant and increasing forms tend to become adapted to many and diversified places in the economy of nature" (Life of Charles Darwin, one-volume edition).  Wallace hadn't any idea of the development of Darwin's work and both came up with the idea of the "survival of the fittest", the "survival of the most-suited", in relation to organic development almost as one, in a "sudden flash of insight", as Wallace put it. Simultaneous scientific discoveries are not at all unusual, dating back through written history. Indeed multiple scientific discoveries occur, particularly in epochs of social upheaval. It's not surprising given that in pre-history we see the independent discoveries giving rise to developments of pottery, agriculture, metallurgy, etc. But this particular discovery cemented these two very different but very similar men together for life and despite many, many scientific disagreements and personal agonies, they sparked off one another and it's very hard to imagine the advances of one without the other. If the Origins of Species (which Wallace said he had to read five times to understand properly) had been the only result of the two men's work, then that would have been well enough, but as the first part of this text shows, there was a lot more to come. It wasn't enough for Wallace to push Darwin forward once; he did it twice and the second time was even more profound.

The strong, positive and persisting relationship between Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin clarified the issue of the development of humanity

Wallace and Darwin were different men with different personalities, living in different circumstances, but both were humanitarians, both warriors for scientific discovery and truth and both comrades-in-arms in order to achieve that objective, and both suffered their own personal agonies. They were also friends for life. There have been more or less co-ordinated attempts to pervert the analysis of both men in the interests of capitalist exploitation; "social Darwinism" for example, or the way that Wallace's interest in spiritualism is used to try to debase or nullify his great scientific work.

In their travels and general levels of comfort during their early researches, Darwin didn't suffer from the financial constraints that Wallace experienced. Both loved and were equally astounded by the wonders of nature that they came across, but while Darwin's living conditions were that of an upper-class Englishman, Wallace was more down to earth. Not only was he bowled over by nature, but also by man, saying that his "most unexpected sensation of surprise and delight was my first meeting and living with man in a state of nature - with absolutely uncontaminated savages!... and the biggest surprise of all was that I did not expect to be surprised". Wallace goes on to talk about their dignity, their "free step and self-sustaining originality". This was far different from Darwin's attitude to "savages" which bordered on, and sometimes spilled-over, into contempt. Darwin limited (if one can use the word limit) himself to being astounded by nature, but "unaffected by the hand of man". Wallace, like Lewis Henry Morgan, lived with "savages", which though in many ways necessitated by financial constraints was also for Wallace all part of the fun and adventure. For Darwin, these savages were "men who do not possess the instincts of (domesticated) animals".

Wallace spent years building up his great collection (and sometimes losing it) in sometimes difficult and dangerous circumstances. His work was laborious and physical throughout his years in Java, Sumatra, Borneo, New Guinea, Timor, etc. About the same time, Darwin was carrying out his great work around South America, Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, etc., in more comfortable circumstances - not that one should hold that against him.

Their attitude on the missionaries they met is also interesting. For Wallace, he thought that the Catholic priests "lived for the good of the people they live among". For Darwin, the Protestants had a more civilising effect on the people! A few words on religion from Wallace because it's noteworthy that this never changed despite his later interest in spiritualism: "I think Protestants and Catholics equally wrong" and "I have since wandered among men of many races and many religions. I have studied man and nature in all its aspects, and I have sought after truth. In my solitude I have pondered much on the incomprehensible subjects of space, eternity, life and death. I think that I have fairly heard and fairly weighed the evidence on both sides and I remain an utter disbeliever". Wallace also pronounced himself thankful for seeing much to admire in many religions and the necessity of many religions. For his part, Darwin underlined the importance of religion and of the old religions. Wallace tried to interest Darwin in radical politics, but Darwin most certainly didn't want to know. I think his reaction is quite funny: on July 12th 1881, Wallace sent Darwin a book entitled An Enquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depression and of Increase in Want with Increase in Wealth, which he called "startling and original". In part, Darwin replied three days later: "I will read the order ‘Progress and Poverty' (a text Wallace had already sent him). But I read many years ago some books on the political economy (I think that this includes the copy of Capital that Marx sent him, of which he read only three pages), and they produced a disastrous effect on my mind, viz, utterly to distrust my own judgement on the subject and to doubt everyone else's judgement". I like the way that Wallace persisted in egging on his mate and I like the way that Darwin reacted - a moderately horror-struck and addled-minded friend.   

Prior to Origins coming out, Wallace wrote to Darwin asking if his book would mention man. Darwin replied "No. I think I shall avoid the whole subject." But though he had a long way to go, the general impetus from both men's work was pointing very much in that direction, driving them on into even more startling conclusions. Darwin had raised the question of man with, and galvanised a significant number of, bourgeois scientists and academics, many of whom, more or less openly, shared Darwin's trepidation for bourgeois order from such an analysis.

Their correspondence was ever fruitful and Wallace once again pushed Darwin forward with his ‘The Origins of Human Races....' mentioned above. While working on The Descent of Man (what Darwin called "a little essay on the origins of mankind") Wallace challenges and modifies Darwin's views. One clear example: Darwin was of the opinion that the constant battles between savages led to the selection of those with physical superiority. Wallace wrote back on May 29, 1864: "I think that (this) would be very imperfect, and subject to so many exceptions and irregularities that it could prove no definite result. For instance, the strongest and bravest men would lead and expose themselves most, and would be subject to wounds and death. And the physical energy which led to any one tribe delighting in war might lead to its extermination by inducing quarrels with all surrounding tribes and leading them to combine against it." Darwin dumped his ill-thought position on this and adopted Wallace's critique wholesale - and that is how it appears in Descent. Darwin also incorporated into Descent, Wallace's idea of harmony within the group in order to explain the emergence of morality and compassion, for him "the highest human attributes" and "a social value to sympathy and selflessness".

In the Penguin paperback edition of Descent, James Moore and Adrian Desmond write in the introduction: "Wallace, having pipped Darwin once, now did it again. In 1864 the tyro, home from the Far East with nothing to lose, confronted the white-supremacist Anthropological Society in person. He said the races had diverged from a common stock by natural selection. ‘Moreover, with the dawn of the human mind, bodily evolution ceased... By building shelters, making weapons, raising crops and co-operating humans had neutralised environmental pressures. The survivors were no long physically the fittest but mentally the brightest and most moral collaborators'".

Both men had studied Malthus earlier in their lives and had used his analyses of competitive individual struggle for the development of their ideas for natural selection at an organic level, i.e., "survival of the fittest", "survival of the most adapted", etc. Indeed, Wallace used the term "survival of the fittest" often, but always in relation to organic development. And Moore and Desmond above note that Malthus himself had wondered how altruism had survived, how it could survive to leave more offspring (the test of "fitness") when the weakest were by definition more vulnerable. Both Wallace and Darwin solved the contradictions that troubled Malthus by turning his concepts upside-down and inside-out.

On Wallace's 1864 paper in May of that year, Darwin wrote: "It is really admirable, but you ought not... to speak of the theory as mine; it is just as much yours as mine". The strength of the men's feelings for each other is shown in further correspondence. Darwin wrote to Wallace: "I hope it is a satisfaction to reflect - and very few things in my life have been more satisfactory to me - that we have never felt any jealousy towards each other, though in some sense rivals. I believe I can say this of myself with truth, and I am absolutely sure that it is true of you". To Darwin from Wallace: "To have thus inspired and retained this friendly feeling, notwithstanding many differences of opinion, I feel to be one of the greatest honours of my life". I can't here go into their scientific differences, particularly on sexual selection which would take a book in itself. But Wallace attached considerable importance to it in both animals and humans and popularised Darwin's views, eventually coming to disagree with at least some elements of it (and making valid criticisms here and there, particularly of species coloration and  the role of women) , but their correspondence continues apace with respect and sincerity. On a personal level, both corresponded to each with compassion, not least on the death aged 7 of Wallace's eldest son Herbert. Darwin had suffered from the terrible blows of the loss of his children; his eldest daughter Anne aged 10 of TB (which further shook Darwin's belief in Christianity), son Charles aged 1 in 1848 and daughter Mary just a few weeks old.

Spiritualism, the supernatural and bourgeois ideology

About a year after coming up with one of the most profound materialist analyses of the epoch outside of The Communist Manifesto, Alfred Russel Wallace fell into spiritualism in a big way. How could this happen? How could a few months after publishing a text rooted in science and materialism on the whole history of mankind, could someone believe in séances? Could it be that the monumental enormity of Wallace's work provoked some sort of irrational contradiction in his mind? I don't think so, because Wallace went on to defend his and Darwin's analysis very clearly, deepening it even, as well as developing other great materialist works. Could it be personal or family tragedies? Again, that doesn't fit the man or into the timescale. Both men were individuals and like any individual, yesterday or today, would be subject to various thoughts, pressures and ideology. It would be speculative to say why Wallace developed this way of thinking. He wrote: "...I have pondered much on the incomprehensible subjects of space, eternity, life and death..." - and he seemed to enjoy his foray into the world of the supernatural and, from what I can see, it didn't affect his work in any detrimental way. If Wallace's bent was towards spiritualism, then Darwin's Achilles Heel was bourgeois ideology (see below). On natural selection on the body then the mind, adaptability to the environment, capacity for improvement and the elastic capacity for co-ordination, Wallace wrote: "... a superior intelligence had guided the development of man in a definite direction, and for a special purpose, just as man guides the development of many animal and vegetable forms". In his The World of Life, written by Wallace in 1910, this developed into the idea of an omnipotent God, the spiritual nature of man and the other world of spiritual beings, but what he originally meant by this isn't at all clear. Thomas Huxley, who remained his friend, called spiritualism "disembodied gossip" - but Huxley went on to become a proponent of "social Darwinism", something that Wallace, spiritualism or no spiritualism, always implacably opposed. He had developed these supernatural "theories" before the end of the 70s and by 1913, just before his death, wrote to James Marchant, saying: "Whether the Unknown Creator is a single Being and acts everywhere in the universe as a direct creator, organiser and director of every minutest motion... or through infinite grades of beings, as I suggest, comes to much the same thing." Faced with Wallace's clarity in his scientific analysis, this is not at all clear and must remain, for the purpose of this defence of his scientific materialism, an unanswered question for the moment.

In a paper called ‘The Quarterly', dated 1869, Wallace revived Lyell's Principles of Geology and showed for the first time publicly, much to the shock of Darwin, his turn to the other world of spirituality. Wallace tries to show in this review how a higher form than evolution and natural selection was responsible for the mind. Darwin's copy of this paper is strewn with notes, underlinings, exclamations and the word "NO". He famously wrote to Wallace in March 1969: "I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child". But their correspondence and work continued in a constructive and fraternal manner, with Darwin writing: "As you expected, I differ grievously from you, and I am very sorry for it". Wallace wrote back saying that he had tested out a series of remarkable physical and mental phenomena and felt that forces beyond science were at work. He also thanked his friend for not being unkind to him about his "heresies" and "excesses" in these fields. And Wallace also thanked Darwin for his "great tenderness" in this respect.

Wallace also got involved in the dubious "science" of phrenology and took a position against compulsory vaccinations, though to some extent this was based on his awareness of the unsanitary conditions they were carried out in and some of the dubious practices used[1]. But all this is completely insignificant compared with his work. And if we looking at this in terms of "lapses", then Darwin's were very much into the realms of bourgeois ideology. You would need to read Descent with blinkers on not to see the repetitions of some of the worse bourgeois filth and his expressed contempt for savages and barbarians and his dismissal of the working class. Similarly, Darwin supported the bloody colonial expansion of the British bourgeoisie and expressed no mercy to its victims. And Darwin could still write in Descent: "The careless, squalid, uninspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits", along with other Malthusian garbage. Again, you would have to read Descent with your eyes closed not to see Darwin's concessions to eugenics, later praising his cousin's Francis Galton's work on the subject as an "admirable labour". As Moore and Desmond note, later editions of Descent gave more credibility to eugenics as Darwin seemed to come under Galton's influence further, even drawing back on his previous clarity regarding the negative effects of in-breeding. Wallace on the other hand was clear that "contemporary society was too rotten to decide who was fit and unfit".  One of their points of difference on sexual selection was Darwin's insistence on the evolutionary pinnacle of the British aristocracy. Writing in chapter 20 of Descent on different standards of beauty he said: "Many persons are convinced, as it appears to me with justice, that our aristocracy, including under this term all wealthy families in which primogeniture has long prevailed, from having chosen during many generations from all classes the more beautiful women as their wives, have become handsomer, according to European standards". However, these faltering steps in no way call into question his great strides. And the same is true for Alfred Russel Wallace. These were men of their time, individuals outside of a revolutionary framework (and even inside that, both Marx and Engels showed their individual prejudices), of flesh and blood and with many human frailties putting their positions forward against the tide in an epoch of social ferment.

As James Marchant writes in Reminiscences and Letters, while Wallace had his "head in the clouds" in his spiritualism, his feet stayed very firmly on the ground. "Wallace lived to see the theory of evolution applied to the life-history and the starry firmament (...) to the progress of the mind, morals and religion, even to the origins of life - a conception which had completely changed man's attitude towards himself and the world and God. Evolution became intelligible in the light of that idea that came to him in that hut in Ternate and changed the face of the universe". Wallace lived to see his and Darwin's ideas tested by time and continued to defend these ideas and produce great materialist works. On a lecturing tour in Boston, USA, 1886, a newspaper wrote of his talk: "The first Darwinian, Wallace, did not leave a leg for anti-Darwinism to stand on" (his first Lowell lecture) "It was a masterpiece of condensed statement - as clear and simple, and compact - a most beautiful specimen of scientific work" (quoted by Marchant). Wallace proudly proclaimed that some of his critics had said that he was more "Darwinian than Darwin" and admitted "they are not wrong". Wallace continued to develop and deepen the theory of natural selection: "None of my differences with Darwin imply any real divergence as to the overwhelming importance of the great principle of natural selection, while in several directions I believe I have extended and strengthened it".

Wallace's politics, and by way of a conclusion

Inspired by the ideas of Robert Owen at 14 years old, Wallace discussed at work and in village inns with labourers and farmers the existence of "the law-created pauper" resulting from the General Enclosure Act. He wrote: "But all the robbery, all the spoliation, all the legal and illegal fiddling had been on their side... They made the laws to legalise their actions, and, some day, we, the people, will make laws which will not only legalise but justify our process of restitution" (which will be) "justified alike by equity, by ethics, and by religion"

In his "Social Environment and Moral Progress", his conclusion is startling: "It's not too much to say that our whole system of Society is rotten from top to bottom, and that the social environment as a whole in relation to our possibilities and our claims is the worst the world has ever seen" (this was doubly underlined). He goes on to say that these evils are due, "broadly and generally, to our living under a system of universal competition for the means of existence, the remedy for which is equally universal co-operation", which demands, "a system of economic brotherhood, as of a great family, or of friends". For him Capital, the result of stored-up labour, was in the hands of the few. He denounced the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few, while many went without. "We have ourselves created an immoral and amoral social environment", the course of which had to be overturned by initiating a new era of "moral progress".

Wallace certainly had illusions in parliament, reforms, nationalisation, even supporting the Lloyd George government at one stage. But in his ‘Revolt of Democracy', addressed to the Labour Party, he denounced the clergy and science for upholding "the competitive and capitalistic system of society as the only possible and rational one". He was affected by the great strikes of 1908, which showed how the whole of capitalism was dependent on the "working classes". He advocated equal opportunities, the overcoming of restrictions to one kind of labour for "the greatest possible diversity of character", the economic independence of women, sex-love (against the in-bred marriages of the bourgeoisie) and the special role of women in natural selection. He wrote about: "... the suffering of so many infants needlessly sacrificed through the terrible defects of our vicious social system". He supported a higher form of sexual selection underlying the role of women and seeing woman's future role as "far higher and more important than any which has been claimed in the past". He clearly and constantly denounced eugenics as it was developing from a scientific and political standpoint, seeing it as the "meddlesome interference of an arrogant scientific priestcraft".

An acquaintance, a Mr. D.A. Wilson who visited Wallace in 1912 when he was ninety, wrote: "He surprised me by saying he was a Socialist. It appeared to be an unconscious modesty, like a schoolboy's... There was no sign of age but physical weakness and you had to make an effort to remember even that. His eyes kindled when he spoke, and more than once he walked about and chuckled... he reprobated the selfish wild-cut competition which made life harder and more horrible for a well-doing poor man in England than among the Malay or Burmese before they had any modern inventions. Co-operation was the upward road for humanity". Man had grown out of beasthood by co-operation, and by it civilisation began. Wallace was reading Confucius and Kropotkin and supported strikes by railworkers, the 8-hour day and double time for all overtime, seeing these as international concerns. James Marchant reports that apart from eminent scientists across the world, many workers wrote directly to Wallace and, according to him, he answered every letter.

So, in this year of the anniversary and celebration of Darwin's work and life, a failure to mention the contribution of Alfred Russel Wallace would be severely remiss. These two great scientists and thinkers sparked off of one another, and both "changed the face of the universe" - there's not one without the other. And in the scheme of things (and "schemes of things" don't come much greater than Wallace and Darwin's scheme of things) any faltering steps or possibly strange diversions are absolutely insignificant and entirely understandable. In fact, if these faltering steps, the foibles weaknesses of both men, were a necessity for their enormous strides, then so much the better for them.

Wallace's work reinforced the materialist conception of history and in so doing reinforced the perspective for any future society. The existing society for Wallace, a society where competition is king, where the weak go to the wall, and one which is basically immoral, is one that can be scientifically determined to go the way of the dodo given the right conditions.

Baboon, 24/1/10

see also these articles

The persistence of religious obscurantism [2]

On Patrick Tort's The Darwin Effect [3]

Darwin and the workers movement [4]

TV review: Charles Darwin and the tree of life [5]

[1] The conditions and practices sometimes used by the bourgeoisie surrounding vaccinations are shown in the Milwaukee smallpox outbreak of 1894. The attitude of the authorities was clearly class-based, with the wealthy allowed to quarantine themselves and the poor and immigrants forcibly removed to isolation hospitals and forcibly vaccinated. The latter responded by not reporting incidents of smallpox, hiding its victims and eventually rioting against forced removals and vaccinations. The authorities had once against shown what some disaster specialists call "elite panic". It's the ruling class's expression of "social Darwinism" in opposition to the altruism, solidarity and mutual aid shown by the "lower orders" in times of disaster. The positive self-organisation of the latter is shown in such fairly recent disasters as Mumbai, Hillsborough and New Orleans, as is the social Darwinist response of the bourgeoisie that people in trouble will turn into animals so we must repress them from the beginning. This whole question is fully explored by Rebecca Solnit in her book, A Paradise Built in Hell.

In the weeks beforehand the media and politicians were full of grand phrases that the summit held the fate of humanity and the planet in its hands. On the first day of the summit 56 newspapers around the world, in countries such as France, Russia, China, India and Britain, carried a common editorial under the heading "Fourteen days to seal history's judgement on this generation". "We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west." These pious wishes came to nothing but the editorial contained some truth: "The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C - the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction - would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea."[4]

Capitalism is already destroying the planet

In fact, the situation is even more serious than this. 26 million people may already have been displaced as a result of climate change,[5] while a rise of 1°C, which would require CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere and is considered impossible to achieve, will lead to the melting of glaciers that provide the water for crops for 50 million people, to 300,000 people being affected each year by diseases such as malaria and diarrhoea and the death of most of the world's corals. The existence of some low-lying islands and countries will also be threatened. A rise of 2°C, which has become the accepted target, will spell disaster for millions of the planet's inhabitants: "The Amazon turns into desert and grasslands, while increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere make the world's oceans too acidic for remaining coral reefs and thousands of other marine life forms. The West Antarctic ice sheet collapses, the Greenland ice sheet melts and the world's sea level begins to rise by seven metres over the next few hundred years. A third of the world's species will become extinct".[6] During the summit the findings of research into the acidification of the oceans were released that showed that ocean acidity, which occurs when the level of CO2 absorbed by the oceans increases, has increased by 30% since the industrial revolution. This aspect of climate change, so far relatively little studied, could have profound consequences: "Ocean acidification could trigger a chain reaction of impacts through the marine food web, beginning with larval fish and shellfish, which are particularly vulnerable. This will affect the multibillion-dollar fishing industry and threaten the food security of many of the world's poorest. Most regions of the ocean will become inhospitable to coral reefs thus affecting food security, tourism, shoreline protection and biodiversity".[7] Furthermore, there is no known way to reduce ocean acidity levels other than allowing natural processes to take effect, which could take tens of thousands of years.

The laws of capitalism threaten the world

Human activity has always had an impact on the environment but from its early days capitalism showed a contempt for the natural world to match its contempt for the humans who laboured in its factories, mines and fields. In the 19th Century the industrial cities and towns in Britain poured filth and pollution into the environment undermining the health of the population as a whole and of the working class in particular. In the recent past Stalinism turned large parts of Russia into a wasteland while today in China the contamination of waterways and land is being repeated once again, but this time the contaminants are possibly even more poisonous than in the past.

This situation does not arise simply from the ill-will and ignorance of this or that member of the ruling class but from the fundamental laws of capitalism, which we summarised in a recent issue of our International Review:

-         "the division of labour and, even more, the reign of money and capital over production, which divides humanity into an infinity of competing units;

-         the fact that the goal of production is not use value, but exchange value, commodities which must at all cost be sold, whatever the consequences for humanity and the planet in order to realise a profit."[8]

Profit and competition are what drive capitalism and the consequences now threaten the world. The ruling class, in contrast, present capitalism as based on meeting human needs, arguing that it responds to ‘consumer demand' for the necessaries and luxuries of life and pointing to the improvements in income and quality of life that have been achieved for millions of people. There is some truth in this, in that capitalism has developed the means of production beyond anything that could be imagined in the past and there have been real improvements for many, especially those in the most developed countries. But this has only been done when it coincides with the real purpose of capitalism: making profits. Capitalism is an economic system that must continually expand or it will collapse: businesses must grow or they will fail and their carcass will be picked over by their competitors; nation states must defend their interests or they will be made subservient to their rivals. As this is inconceivable to the ruling class it is necessary to make any sacrifice to keep their economy, their society and their positions intact. This is why in a world of abundance millions starve; why, despite disarmament agreements and declarations of human rights, wars rage without end; why billions have recently been poured into propping up the economy while millions of human beings go without adequate healthcare and education. It is also why, despite the overwhelming evidence of climate change, the bourgeoisie is incapable of saving the planet.

International summits are arenas of national competition

The laws that drive capitalism affect every aspect of the society it has created, including international summits. Such meetings, whatever their declared purpose and even when apparently common interests are at stake, are always nothing but struggles for advantage between competing nations. The ceremonies, grand speeches and ringing declarations about human rights, ending poverty and saving the planet are just a mask to deceive us. The Copenhagen summit, like Rio de Janeiro and Kyoto before it, demonstrated this amply.

At Copenhagen both economic and imperialist interests clashed and since, while they overlap, they are not necessarily identical, this made the situation all the more complex with shifting alliances and changes of position.

Much was made during and after the summit of the supposed clash between developed and developing nations. There are clearly some common interests between developed economies just as there are between those reliant on supplying basic commodities, such as coffee or metal ores, but there can be no lasting unity. The EU came to the summit with a common agreement to cut emissions of greenhouse gases by 20% by 2020 and the suggestion that this might increase to 30% if the talks went well. Within this group are economies with a greater or lesser industrial sector. Britain, with a much-reduced industrial sector, has been at the forefront of pushing for more ambitious targets, in contrast to Germany with its still relatively large industrial sector, while former eastern bloc countries like Poland oppose cuts beyond 20%. According to official figures, Britain is on target not just to meet but to significantly exceed its Kyoto target of a 12.5% reduction on greenhouse gas emissions compared to 1990. At the summit Gordon Brown rushed around taking the moral high-ground and trying once again to play the world leader. In fact Britain's performance is a consequence of the changes in its economy and reflects the fact that emissions are calculated on the basis of production rather than consumption: "The structural changes which have taken place in the UK economy over the last 30 years have resulted in significant deindustrialisation. As a result, the carbon intensity of the UK economy has fallen and the UK now imports large quantities of products which are relatively carbon-intensive to manufacture. UK consumption is therefore indirectly responsible for the emissions associated with these imports. Were the balance of imports and exports to be taken into account, UK reported emissions would be significantly different".[9] In fact, they would show an increase by as much as 19% since 1990.[10] In short, British capitalism has outsourced its pollution just as it has outsourced production. At the imperialist level, Brown's desperate activity at this summit, as during the ‘credit crunch', is partly an attempt to compensate for the continued decline of Britain as an imperialist power.

The US is also involved in deindustrialisation and the relocation of production to countries where the costs are cheaper but it still retains a substantial industrial sector. The intensity of competition felt by this sector has resulted in its being particularly active in opposing anything that it perceives as putting it at a disadvantage with its competitors. This is one of the reasons why the US is continually embroiled in trade disputes, why efforts to reach a new world trade agreement have so often failed and why it refused to ratify the Kyoto Treaty. In the final years of his administration Bush was forced to concede that climate change was real but the US has proposed its own targets and pushed for countries like China to also make cuts. Nothing has changed under Obama other than the rhetoric. The US remains opposed to significant cuts and any binding agreement and particularly loath to do anything that could benefit China for both economic and imperialist reasons.

One hundred and thirty-two countries defined as ‘developing' grouped together in the G77 at the summit. With relatively small economies and little industry their common aim was to push for the maximum financial assistance possible. They came to the summit with a demand for financial assistance of $400bn a year while a number also demanded that the maximum temperature increase accepted should not be more than 1.5°C. They also sought to keep the Kyoto treaty that requires signatories from developed countries to make cuts in emissions and which many of latter hoped would disappear into a single new Copenhagen agreement.

China has been the target of much ‘concern' about its emissions now that it has become the single biggest producer of greenhouse gases in the world. The rapid development of its economy has drawn vast sums of money towards it and enabled it to assume a much greater and more active role internationally. It has developed important economic links with many developing countries, often providing them with assistance to develop their production of primary commodities, which are then supplied to China to feed its industry. This growing economic strength has underpinned a low-key but determined effort to extend its imperialist influence around the world. To accept any meaningful limits on its emissions would mean limiting its economic growth and political power thus, while, it has proposed to reduce the carbon intensity of its industry (the amount of carbon per unit of production) it has strongly opposed any cuts and the demands by the US for independent verification. At the summit it associated itself with the G77 while also being part of a separate grouping with Brazil, South Africa and India known as BASIC that opposed the positions of the richer nations. Within this group, Brazil has defended its position as a major producer of biofuels despite the fact that it is taking production away from vital food production.

The manoeuvring at the summit

The summit was marked by the manoeuvrings of the participants, which included deliberate provocations and confrontations. One of the methods used was the widespread and not particularly hidden leaking of documents, as one journalist commented: "...the leaks became more regular until by the end there was a flood [...] Secret documents were deliberately left on photocopiers, others were thrust into journalists' hands or put on the web. People were photographing them and handing them around all of the time."[11]

On the third day of the conference the first crisis was provoked when the so-called ‘Danish text' emerged. This had been produced prior to the summit by a secret informal group known as "the circle of commitment" that included the US, and the host of the summit Denmark. The text, which had no formal status since it was drafted outside the UN framework, would have ended the Kyoto treaty with its legal requirement for emission cuts by signatories, imposed a 2°C increase as the accepted target and made changes to the funding arrangements. It was suggested that the intention was to impose it on the summit late in the day when the foreseen stalemate had arisen. This led to an outcry from G77 countries who accused the developed countries of trying to hijack the summit and impose their own agreement.

This was followed by a proposal from a number of developing countries for the increase in global temperatures to be kept below 1.5°C since any increase above that could spell disaster for small island states like Tuvalu. The proposal called for legally binding cuts to be agreed. It was immediately opposed by other countries, including China, Saudi Arabia and India, and divided the G77 group. The dispute that followed led to the suspension of part of the talks for several hours.

In the following days a revised UN text was introduced and disputes continued firstly over whether the Kyoto agreement should continue as a separate track or be incorporated into a new agreement and secondly over the funding to assist developing countries. Various proposals for fast track funding and long term funding surfaced and a number of countries, including Britain, repeated their call for the introduction of a tax on financial transactions (the Tobin tax) to fund climate change measures. The UN text seemed to be an attempt to reach a compromise with developed countries cutting emissions by 25-45% to keep the increase in temperature below 2°C. Developing countries would also be required to cut their emissions by 15-30% while the Kyoto agreement would remain in force. In reality the cuts proposed by the developed countries did not even reach the lower percentage proposed, while loopholes in the agreement would allow emissions to increase by 10%.

As the talks entered their second week, with heads of government due to arrive to sign the non-existent agreement, the confrontations sharpened, with the heads of some African countries threatening not to attend unless the agreement was changed. The dispute over the future of the Kyoto treaty led to a further suspension of part of the talks until it was finally agreed that it would continue. The dispute over monitoring also increased with India and China opposing US led demands for external verification. By the middle of the week the chaos could not be hidden: the chair of the summit resigned to be replaced by the Danish Prime Minister, proposals and counter proposals about emissions cuts, funding and verification flowed back and forth with more and more amendments being proposed to the UN draft agreement effectively creating a stalemate. It was rumoured that a revised version of the ‘Danish text' was about to be released while the G77 prepared a counter text. Further splits in the G77 emerged when Meles Zenawi, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia and head of the African group of countries at the summit, proposed that they accept a deal under which $100bn would be given in financial assistance to poorer countries by 2020, rather than the $400bn they originally demanded. He was attacked by others for selling out the lives and hopes of Africans. This ‘compromise' came after intense negotiations involving Zenawi and a number of the more developed countries and led to accusations that he had succumbed to pressure and that countries reliant on ‘aid' for much of their economies are in no position to argue with the purse holders. Finally, a leaked UN document showed that the emissions cuts proposed at the talks would result in an increase of 3°C.

Much was made on the penultimate day of America's acceptance of the target of $100bn financial assistance as a breakthrough paving the way for Obama to come and save the day. In fact the agreement was conditional on China accepting the verification it had already rejected while the money would have to come from non-government sources. On his arrival Obama repeated the demand for China to accept US verification demands leading to an angry response from China and the refusal of President Hu Jintao to attend a meeting of heads of state with Obama. The summit ended with a desperate attempt to cobble an agreement together with numerous texts circulating, private meetings between Obama and the Chinese Prime Minister and negotiators working into the early hours and again on the final day. In the last hours a group led by the US, Britain and Australia forced the Danish President out of the chair and pushed through a compromise amongst a small group of the most powerful nations. The final text appeared just before midnight and was immediately attacked by those excluded as a deal done in the dark and a coup against the UN.

The summit began with a two hundred-page draft agreement covering a wide range of areas. It ended with a few pages of vague statements and promises for tomorrow cobbled together on the final night by a few of the main players outside the international framework of the UN they all claim to uphold. The final act of the summit was merely to note the existence of the agreement.

In the end the Copenhagen summit achieved one thing: it showed that the bourgeoisie is not fit to hold the fate of the world in its hands and that until this class and the economic system that supports it is swept away neither humanity nor the Earth itself has a future.

North 03/01/10.

[1]. Financial Times 22/12/09.

[2]. Guardian 19/12/09

[3]. Independent 19/12/09

[4]. Guardian 07/12/09

[5]. Suffering the Science, Oxfam Briefing Paper, July 2009.

[6]. Guardian 19/12/09

[7]. Ocean Acidification: The Facts. European Association on Ocean Acidification (EPOCA) https://www.epoca-project.eu/index.php/ [12] Outreach/RUG/

[8]. International Review 139. "The world on the eve of an environmental catastrophe II: Who is responsible?"

[9]. UK greenhouse gas emissions: measurement and reporting. National Audit Office, March 2008.

[10]. Too good to be true? The UK's climate change record. Helm, Smale, Phillips. December 2007.

[11]. Guardian On-line 20/12/09

One year ago, there were three weeks of massive struggles in the streets of Greece over the police murder of a young anarchist, Alexandros Grigoropoulos. But the movement on the street and in the schools and universities had great difficulty linking up with the struggles in the workplace. There was only one strike, that of primary school teachers for one morning, in support of the movement, even though this was a time of massive labour unrest, including a general strike, and the links still couldn't be made.

However, in Greece the workers' actions have continued beyond the end of the protest movement up until today. Indeed Labour Minister, Andreas Lomberdos, has been warning that the measures needed in the next three months to lift the national debt crisis that is threatening to kick Greece out of the euro-zone might result in bloodshed. "There is little we can do to prevent that" he added. Earlier last month the Greek Prime Minister in an address to the Parliament had said that the national debt crisis is "the first national sovereignty crisis since 1974", and the new socialist government are talking of uniting all of the bourgeois parties and is seeking to forge an emergency national unity government that will be able to suspend articles of the constitution protecting the right to public assembly, demonstration and strike.

Even before the government has tried to implement its ‘reforms' (read attacks on the working class) to solve the debt crisis, there has been a large wave of workers' struggles. The past couple of months have seen strikes of dockworkers, Telecom workers, dustbin men, doctors, nurses, kindergarten and primary school teachers, taxi drivers, steel workers, and municipal workers, all for what seems like separate reasons but actually all in response to attacks that the state and capital has already been forced to make to try to make workers pay for the crisis.

The fact that the state is now being forced to implement even more severe attacks against an already combative working class show the depths to which the crisis has effected Greece. Minister Lomberdos spelled it out very clearly when he said that these measures "can only be implemented in a violent way". However, attacks made against all sectors of workers at the same time open up the real possibility for workers making a common struggle over joint demands.

Place this against a background of increased student protests, protesting farmers blocking roads all over the country, and the trial of the policemen who murdered Alexandros beginning on the 22nd of January after already having been postponed and moved out of Athens to prevent unrest, as well as other policemen being arrested for torture, and a renewed campaign by numerous armed leftist groups including a bombing of the parliament, and the country certainly seems to be sliding out of control.

Still what is important at the moment is that the working class is prepared to fight in its own interests for its own methods, and to be particularly carefully of ‘false friends'. The KKE (Greek Communist Party), which only a year ago was calling protestors secret agents of "foreign dark forces", and "provocateurs" is now saying that "workers and farmers have the right to resort to any means of struggle to defend their rights". It won't be long, however, before they return to their old tune. Furthermore, many of the workers' struggles have been controlled by the trade unions and have been one day or two day limited affairs.

Finally, the armed groups have no way forward to offer the working class. Workers build class solidarity, consciousness, and confidence through taking part in their own struggles, and developing their own forms of organisation, not through sitting at home and watching bombs set by leftist radicals on TV. The sound of a workers' mass meeting discussing how to organise their own struggle scares the ruling class more than a thousands bombs.

DD 24/1/10

With Robert's death, the ICC has also lost a friend from a long way back. Thanks to his openness, his desire for political clarification and his great patience, he played an important role in the appearance of a pole of comrades who, at the end of the 80s in the German-speaking region, moved towards the positions of the communist left. Particularly in Switzerland, where a section of the ICC eventually emerged out of this process. 

Robert didn't go in the same direction. However, Robert, and the other comrades of the GPR, remained close comrades and political friends of the ICC in whom we had the greatest confidence.

One of Robert's best qualities was his capacity for solidarity and his consistent opposition to any spirit of competition between the different organisations of the communist left.

The ICC mourns the loss of Robert.

ICC, January 2010.

Our comrade Ro tragically departed from life on the night of 6/7 December. He was one of the founding members of the group which in 1983 was called the Gruppe Internationalistische Kommunisten (GIK), and which carried on the political and theoretical tradition of the Autonome Gruppe Kommunistische Politik (AGKP) which had dissolved itself. Its founder members had come together around an agreement that the political and theoretical acquisition of the AGKP had been to remove itself from the chaos of the capitalist extreme left that had come from the movement of 1968, and end up adopting left communist political positions.  The theoretical-political material of the communist left seemed to the founding members to be the only possible political orientation for anyone who wanted to situate themselves on the proletarian political class terrain, to fight for the organisational and political autonomy of the proletariat as a precondition for its future victory. Only the left communist current had succeeded in politically resisting the horrible counter-revolution which had taken the form of an almost complete control by social democracy, Stalinism, Maoism and Trotskyism, and in transmitting to us the political lessons drawn from this gigantic counter-revolution. Ro and his comrades in struggle felt they had the responsibility to put forward, within the working class in Austria,  the revolutionary theory that had initially been defended by the left communists in the face of the Stalinist counter-revolution, and, to the best of their capacities, to offer workers the possibility of renewing the link with their revolutionary traditions.     

Since we all come from the circle of sympathisers of the AGKP, it is incumbant on us to critically appropriate, on the basis of a profound examination, all the theoretical material of the AGKP and, to the extent that it appears to us to be insufficent, to go forward on the basis of the lessons drawn by the communist left, in order to set the group on the most solid political basis possible.

Since, during the 1980s, there were massive attacks on the working class, with the restructuring of industry (under the VÖST slogan), the group had to take up the task of carrying out a political intervention through leaflets etc within the struggles of the workers that were breaking out here and there. The difficult theoretical work, the discussions with the revolutionary milieu, the political positions gradually matured and were formulated in a platform, and in this process comrade Ro played a leading role. The GIK, which following a change of name is now called the GPR, owes a great deal to Ro's meticulous approach, to his capacity to ask questions, find out information, analyse and search rigorously for clarity, for the fact that it possesses a coherent platform (which we call lines of direction) that clearly rests on the acquisitions of marxism and the historical experiences of the class struggle. Ro leaves behind him a theoretically solid GPR which he stamped with his tireless commitment and whose political weapons he helped to forge.

The loss represented by Ro's death is immense. The group has lost one of its most passionate comrades who, through his proven political judgement, his political experience, his indefatigable capacity for analysing political events, enriched the group and its political work.     

We had all been looking forward to the return of his intellectual presence once his illness had been overcome. We mourn the loss of comrade Ro, which is heavy with consequences for our political practice.

We thank the groups of the revolutionary milieu of the working class for sharing with us the burden of the comrade's departure, for expressing their solidarity towards our political work , which is aimed at the emancipation, no doubt still far ahead of us, of the working class from economic exploitation and the political yoke of the bourgeoisie.

GPR, December 2009

December saw a return to massive protests in Iran. The funeral of ‘dissident' cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri in Qom drew hundreds of thousands of people into the streets and by the time of Ashura widespread confrontations between protesters and the security forces were occurring across the country, resulting in 15 deaths on that day, according to Iranian state TV, and thousands of arrests in total. Reports coming out of Iran suggest that the death toll is much higher than claimed, and there have been some stories of police refusing to fire on protestors and joining protesters, as well of protestors attacking and taking over a police station.

Despite the fact that it is difficult to know exactly what is going on there at the moment, it is important for communists to try to analyse and understand what is happening. Perhaps the best way for us to start is by outlining the approaches that we reject, and what we see as the problems with them.

The first thing to say is that we see the approach taken by some so called ‘anti-imperialists', particularly in the Western countries as being completely reactionary. At its worst this comes across as support for the Iranian state in putting down a ‘petit-bourgeois CIA backed movement'. To us it is obvious that although the CIA are of course trying to influence this movement, the sheer amount of people involved in it suggests that this is not something cooked up in Washington, but is a movement with genuine widespread support within Iran.

On the other extreme we don't fall into the same trap as those leftists who are now cheering ‘people power'. There is an immense difference between a working class revolution to bring about socialism and the series of ‘colour' revolutions, with the events in Iran already being crayoned in as the ‘green revolution', that we have seen across Europe in the last twenty years or so.

Supporting different factions of the ruling class as they squabble over who should control this or that state offers absolutely nothing to working class people. Mousavi and the opposition can certainly be characterised in this way. Mousavi was prime minister of Iran for eight years in a government, which was well known for its refusal to tolerate dissent, in the early years of the Islamic republic and is even related by blood to the ‘Supreme leader', Ali Hoseyni Khamenei (Mousavi's grandmother is Khamenei's paternal aunt). Although he talks about ‘reforming the system', he is very much a part of it himself.

And yet his campaign has attracted widespread support and brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets, risking life and limb in the protests. Of course not all of this can be put down to support for Mousavi. Many people are simply dissatisfied with the regime, and have used the anger resulting from the state's obvious rigging of the election results to express that dissatisfaction. Of course there is also support for his programme, particularly amongst women. With women making up 60% of the student body in Iran, and Mousavi promising to disband the so-called morality police force and ensure that Iranian women are treated equally, this goes at least part of the way to accounting for the huge participation of students in the protests.

The question of whether victory for Mousavi's movement could make any real changes in workers' lives is also one that we have to ask ourselves. Certainly on the economic front it can create little difference. Political parties of all colours can do little apart from attempt to manage the crisis, and the only way to do this is by attacking workers' living standards. Whatever promises are made on this front cannot be anything except empty. Even if one sector of the working class is spared from a particularly brutal attack, it only means that other sectors must be attacked more harshly. On the social from it seems likely, given his past record, that for all the talk about women's rights even if he did come to power Mousavi would be forced to make compromises with the state, and little would actually change. The religious conservatives in the regime wouldn't just go away with a change of President, just as Tayip has found in Turkey that becoming Prime Minister didn't get rid of the Kemalists from the state apparatus. Besides, there seems to be a general, if extremely slow, move towards liberalisation within the state itself. Certainly walking around Tehran these days and seeing how people dress compared to a couple of decades ago gives that impression.

So where do the communists stand on events in Iran today? That the Green movement is a completely bourgeois movement with nothing to offer workers seems to us very clear. Also it seems that it is also losing momentum. While the initial protests brought hundreds of thousands out into the streets, the numbers today seem to be getting smaller and smaller. It seemed possible in the early days of the struggle that the working class might make impose itself on the situation. After the repression used by the police against demonstrators in Tehran, workers at the massive Khodro car factory walked out on a twenty four hour strike, not in support of either candidate in the election, but against the violence used by the state. But apart from a few statements from the bus drivers' union, this was the limit of workers' participation in the movement as workers. Yes, of course there were many workers involved in the protests, but they were there as isolated individuals, not as a collective force. In these situations, in a cross-class movement, which all of the various reports coming out of Iran from different leftist groups seem to agree that it was, without acting as a collective force, workers can only be submerged in the great mass of ‘the people', a mass that is being used by other class forces to further their own interests.

What the ICC wrote in 1979 commenting on the Iranian revolution still rings true today. In fact the absence of the working class from the struggles of the last year confirms it: "For all the talk of people in the streets overthrowing the regime, what was clear in 1979 was that the strikes of the Iranian workers were the major, political element leading to the overthrow of the Shah's regime. Despite the mass mobilisations, when the ‘popular' movement - regrouping almost all the oppressed strata in Iran - began to exhaust itself, the entry into the struggle of the Iranian proletariat at the beginning of October 1978, most notably in the oil sector, not only refuelled the agitation, but posed a virtually insolvable problem for the national capital, in the absence of a replacement being found for the old governmental team. Repression was enough to cause the retreat of the small merchants, the students and those without work, but it proved a powerless weapon of the bourgeoisie when confronted with the economic paralysis provoked by the strikes of the workers."

It is likely that the Mousavi movement will slowly fade away, possibly with some of their demands being incorporated into state policy. Iran is not on the verge of any revolution. The coming months will see the death of the ‘Green Movement', not that of the regime. This could be a very bloody process, but unless workers can enter the struggle in their own interests, not those of bickering politicians, it is what inevitably must happen.

DD 24/1/10

From Rivoluzione Internazionale no.144, February-March 2006

The response to our first article

               In the last issue of the paper we published the first in this series of articles and in response we have received several letters from sympathisers of Lotta Comunista (LC). These comrades expressed their disagreement with the critique that we made concerning the lack of an international vision in Cervetto's view of the construction of the party. We are very pleased to have received these letters because our interest is not to make a critique for its own sake of Cervetto or of Lotta Comunista, we want rather to stimulate reflection and debate on a very important question; how to work towards the construction of the future world party. For this reason we will reply to the questions raised by these readers before going into the question of consciousness, the relationship party/class and the unions. These latter questions will be dealt with in a future article.

The points raised by the comrades are as follows:

• "The criticism of the supposed ‘nationalism' of LC in that it remains in Italy, seems out of place to me. LC has centres in France and publishes its books in all the western languages; so its books are distributed in all the European countries";
• "I do not think that Cervetto limits himself to Italy ‘alone'. Of course Cervetto talks about Italy but this is because it is the country in which he lives. I do not think that his attitude is exclusive in its argumentation. On the contrary, I think that he puts forward a model from which to begin (in that particular period) in order to arrive at the international dimension. Wasn't this basically what the old Russian Bolshevik party proposed with the founding of the 3rd International?"

Let's say right away that we know quite well that LC has published books in other languages and that we have also come across its militants or sympathisers in other European countries, such as France, Germany, Great Britain and even at the conferences organised in Russia that was dedicated to Trotsky. However, is this enough to give the stamp of internationalism to LC? Any political organization tends to have an echo and partners internationally; there is even still in existence a Socialist International composed of various Social Democratic Parties in the world. Do we want to say that these are internationalist parties? Being present at an international level does not give a political group an internationalist character. Regarding the idea that "Cervetto talks about Italy ...because it is the country in which he lives", this is more or less the uncritical heritage of the Second International, according to which in every country it is necessary to build a party that corresponds to the specific needs of that country. As we pointed out in the previous article, this was valid in the ascendant period of capitalism; although even at the time it was backed up by an international vision and framework (see the 2nd International). On the reference to the Bolshevik party, we should bear in mind that the latter was created and developed in the historic period at the cusp between the ascendant and the decadent period of capitalism. A great tribute is due to this party and to Lenin himself for having seen the change in the historic period that was taking place, for having understood the need to change the conception held of the party: no longer a mass party but a world party of a revolutionary minority (3rd International)[1].

Having said this, we recognise that the weakness that we have indicated and which comes from the framework of the 2nd International, is important but is not in itself decisive in deciding whether an organisation is proletarian. We can cite the example of the IBRP, whose organisation is essentially federalist as regards its presence in various countries and, in complete contradiction with historical experience, it explicitly defends the idea that the individual national organisations must have time to develop on the basis of local problems before being able to merge into an international party [2].

In our previous article we concluded by saying that Cervetto's vision of the party is not a proletarian one but not because LC does not have militants in other countries or has only a few, nor is it because it began its activity in Italy. It is rather because, apart from a formal adherence to internationalism, the method and direction taken by Cervetto corresponds to a logic that is not consistent with the necessities a proletarian party both theoretically and also in terms of practical activity in as far as organisation and intervention within the class is concerned.

What theoretical method?

In his writings, Cervetto has often said that for the construction of the party it is necessary to operate on two levels: theoretical elaboration and intervention into the class struggle. We are in complete agreement but what does this actually mean? As far as theoretical elaboration is concerned: the entire history of the workers' movement shows how the various vanguards have always tried to measure themselves against the political expressions of the past and with those newly emerging in other countries on the key issues facing the class struggle. They did so in the knowledge that they were not alone in the world and that these minorities were the expression of the heterogeneity in the development of consciousness in the international proletariat. From Marx to Lenin, from Luxemburg to Bordiga and, even in the terrible period of the counter-revolution, from Bilan to Internationalisme [3], the method adopted has always been to verify one's own convictions in relation to the facts and through critical discussion with formations within the international workers' movement, taking account of their various experiences and making a self-criticism where necessary. This is the only possible method that enables an activity directed towards the regroupment of revolutionary forces for the construction of the world party.

The vision of Cervetto - and therefore of LC - completely lacks any understanding of this process. The viewpoint of Cervetto (and of LC), clearly expressed in "Class struggle and the revolutionary party" and in subsequent texts, is not only a localist one that is closed within the national framework, it is also one that makes no reference to the real world or to the lessons of the historic defeat of the revolutionary movement and so ends up as the creation of a mind that may well be ingenious but is nevertheless totally subjective. The result is that they start off from the assumption that they are the only heirs of Marx and Lenin in the whole world and then go on to completely overturn the precious political work carried out by the latter and to deform its content. On the other hand, precisely because they have no knowledge of the history of the workers' movement except for a very little bit of Lenin and because they do not even know of the existence of the groups within the proletarian camp, many sympathisers of LC tend to give credit to Cervetto for positions that he has taken from others and expressed badly at that. One example is that LC has always maintained that one of the great merits of Cervetto is that, at the end of the 1950s, he elaborated the theory of "unitary imperialism" (that is the imperialist nature of Russia) and identified the tendency towards state capitalism. Apart from the fact that the PCInt [4] already defended this position, if we go back in time we can see that Bilan in the 1930s and Internationalisme in the 1940s had elaborated a very clear position on this question, to the point that in 1936 Bilan was able to correctly denounce the war in Spain as imperialist slaughter whereas Cervetto in the period following the Second World War was an anti-fascist partisan.

What method for political activity?

With this framework as a starting point it is not difficult to understand how Cervetto reached his theorisation of the party. With the truth - or rather the science - in his pocket and with the idea that all it is necessary to do is to transmit this science to the workers, the party instrument invented by Cervetto is an organisation that takes root in Italy by all means at its disposal, even by force if necessary. It aims to have as many militants as possible and to gain a position of power in the nerve centres of the system. It then tries to extend its presence to other countries in order to go forth and elucidate its science to the workers of the whole world. To do this all ‘tactical' methods are valid, what is important is to choose the right time and the right place.

Are we banalising Cervetto's position? We do not think so.

What is LC's practical activity? Let's see.

The main activity of LC is work within the unions and more than once Cervetto's texts give the absolute priority as propaganda aimed specifically at the rank and file of the PCI [5]. The idea is to recruit new militants from within a base considered more receptive (workers are to be found within the unions, within the PCI there is to be found left politicised elements). In order to put this into practice, at the end of the 1960s LC sent its new militants recruited from the student movement to work in the factories, to become workers. The idea was that if you are a ‘worker' communist not only will proletarians listen to you more readily but you can also get yourself elected as a union representative, enter the various union organs and so acquire a broader base that listens to you. This policy of taking root by force has at times pushed LC into concentrating its field of action where it felt that conditions were most favourable for recruitment, for example Genoa in 1966 which became, in the words of G. Poggi (who founded LC together with Cervetto) in an article , the "spearhead of the resurgence of Leninism in Italy". When the situation was no longer favourable in Genoa, the centre of action became the student movement because: "The revolutionary party must develop,..., at an organisational level by using the possibilities at its disposal", so that "The crisis in the schools must be used in a Leninist way and must be used for the ends of the working class and its struggle against the international capitalist and imperialist system" and so "the student masses" become "by their very nature a sector that incubates new political cadres, more sensitive than other strata to this transitional crisis (restructuring of the scholastic sector, our note) and susceptible to the formation of groups and a base for new political movements that express the new conditions." Obviously, "The cadres coming out of student agitation and the cadres coming out of agitation in the factories will join together in the struggle and in the Leninist party. If on the other hand, the student agitation ends up supplying new groups for imperialist struggles, for reformist opportunism or for new capitalist structures, the fight for the construction of the Leninist party will have found additional obstacles to overcome, as it has so many times in its history. This is the basic problem for the development of the Leninist party." (the quotations are taken from "Theses on the Leninist tactic for the crisis in the schools," Cervetto, May 1968, our emphasis). Therefore the students are seen as the nerve centre of the workers' struggle whereas, at the same time, school teachers and civil service workers and those in the service sector generally are considered to be parasites living off the surplus value extorted from the industrial working class.

What is LC's working method? It is not worth going into the now famous practice of door-to-door sales. What is however indicative of the non-proletarian conception of the group is the intimidatory and gangsterish behaviour that LC has always adopted towards those that it considers to be its rivals in the field. Those who lived through 1968 cannot have forgotten the violent confrontations between the militants of LC and those of Avanguardia Operaia or of the Movimento Studentesco di Capanna [6] for territorial control, particularly of the student quarters in Milan. This attitude has not changed over time. We can mention an incident on 25th January 2004 in Genoa at a meeting called by the publishing house, Graphos, and the Circolo di Studi Politici Labriola on the Iraq war. On that occasion a dozen LC militants prevented the meeting from taking place by means of threats, insults and aggression against those present, stating explicitly that they were from the security arm of LC, "workers from Ilva", sent by the leadership with orders to stop the meeting because among the participants there were ex-militants of LC who had left with disagreements [7]. Insults such as "dirty fascist" and "neo-nazi"referred to the fact that Graphos had published books by negationist authors [8].

Such practices - elaborating great principles and then trampling these same principles underfoot when you need more leg-room -  do not belong to the traditions of the working class. And LC does it in the name of "tactics".

• LC says that parliament, elections are no longer instruments that can be used for the class struggle. At the same time, on the referendum revoking divorce in 1974, it told the class to vote NO.
• It claims to be against all parliamentary parties, that of the Stalinists in particular, against the state and against democracy. Then, in the 1980s, it signed a press statement condemning terrorism, together with the PCI, the Christian Democrats, the Socialist Party and other bourgeois parties, inviting "all workers to fight back against the serious attack being carried out by economic and political forces that tend to destabilise democracy in our country".
• It says that democracy and fascism are just two different sides of capitalism and then in the 70s, when anti-fascism was the war-horse of the entire capitalist left; it practiced militant anti-fascism, promoting among other things a petition to outlaw the MSI (the old right-wing party from which Fini's current AN party originates). To this very day it whole-heartedly defends its entire anti-fascist trajectory and the role played by Cervetto himself as a partisan of the Resistance within the GAAP (Anarchist Groups of Azione Proletaria). That is, they defend the most potent anti-working class weapon used in the post-war period by the bourgeoisie and especially by Stalinist parties such as the PCI, to defeat the proletariat by dragging it into the defence of the "democratic" face of capital against the "reactionary" one, as had already happened in Spain in 1936. To say, "Long live the workers' Resistance" (this is the title of an LC brochure from 1975) is to invite acceptance of the actions of those very partisan formations that, arms in hand, eliminated those proletarians who refused to back their own national bourgeoisie by shooting at other proletarians wearing a different uniform, in short eliminated the revolutionary vanguards that denounced the true nature of the anti-fascist struggle [9]. It means in fact disseminating the democratic mystification and so contribute to blocking the development of consciousness on the part of the working class that there is no state or homeland worth defending. It means therefore to concretely trample all over proletarian internationalism.
• Last but not least, Cervetto passed himself off as the only real Marxist and Leninist after Lenin and LC give complete credence to this role and the entire trajectory of Cervetto and company. OK! What are LC's origins? In 1951 Cervetto, Masini and Parodi, all ex-partisans coming out of the anarchist movement, form the GAAP as a "classist" tendency within the anarchist movement. Their idea is to combat the "nihilism" of the latter on the basis of a return to the study of Marx. In Autumn 1956 the GAAP constitute a Movement for the Communist Left together with a Trotskyist group (GCR), Azione Comunista (a group formed as a tendency of the PCI of Seniga, Raimondi and Fortichiari [10]) and with Battaglia Comunista (PCInternazionalista, the only genuinely revolutionary group and which, fortunately, left this regroupment quickly). Very soon only the GAAP and Azione Comunista remained under the joint name of "Azione Comunista". This was so up until 1965 when there took place the definitive split between Raimondi's Maoist fraction on the one side and Lotta Comunista on the other. As can be seen, while studying Marx and Lenin, it did not seem at all strange to regroup with a tendency of the PCI and with a Trotskyist group; that is, with groups coming from political currents that support and defend Russian imperialism. In the same way, it took a good ten years to break with those who defend Chinese imperialism. This is in a context in which the groups of the Communist Left had already clearly denounced the imperialist nature of these states. As regards anarchism, which had already been broadly criticised by Marx and by Lenin himself and an important part of which was extraneous to the workers' movement when it supported the massacre of the workers and their defeat in the war in Spain in 1936, the only "scientific" critique that Cervetto makes of it is that it has now been surpassed: "If anarchism has remained cut off from reality it is because it has been surpassed by history. It is useless to make recriminations or study all the aspects of its surpassing" ("Strategy and tactics for a revolutionary party" in L'Agitazione no.7, October 1956). So it is quite normal that in 2001 Lorenzo Parodi (a leader of LC) defended the fact that in 1949 they were "still willing to call ourselves anarchists, although we were no longer so, because we had to recuperate the groups of young people willing to reject anarchist nihilism", "Genoa Pontedecimo 1951", Lotta Comunista no.367, March 2001).

What Marxist coherence! What Leninist rigour!

As we have seen, the entire political activity of LC is inspired by a logic that revolves around acquiring territorial control with complete disregard for the process of maturation within the working class. In fact it is the exact opposite of the process of clarification. In the next article we will see how this is connected to the deformed way in which Cervetto (and LC) have interpreted Lenin's 'What is to be Done?'.

Eva

see also

The conception of the party held by Cervetto and Lotta Comunista (part one) [22]

The conception of the Party held by Cervetto and Lotta Comunista (part three) [23]

[1]              To deepen the question of the historic phases of capitalism and its relation to the formation of the party, see our pamphlet The decadence of capitalism and the article "On the party and its relationship to the class [24]" (International Review no.35, 3rd quarter 1983).

[2]              For more on this question, see the article "The constitution of the IBRP: an opportunist bluff (part one) [25] & (part two) [25]" in the International Review no.40 and 41 (published in English, French and Spanish).

[3]              Bilan, Left Fraction of the PCI that had emigrated to France in the 1930s and Internationalisme, French Communist Left that, in the 1940s, continued the work begun by Bilan of appropriating the lessons of the past.

[4]              Partito Comunista Internazionalista.

[5]              PCI: the old Italian Stalinist party.

[6]              The reference is to two extra-parliamentary political movements that came out of the student movement in Milan.

[7]              From a communiqué from Graphos ([email protected] [26]) dated 27/01/2004, to which there has never been a reply from LC, as far as we know.

[8]              Negationism or historic revisionism is the name given to the school of thought, generally composed of right wing historians, who tend to deny the existence of the Jewish holocaust.

[9]              One example is the physical elimination of the internationalists Atti and Acquaviva.

[10]           We should bear in mind that Seniga was the trusted man of the hard-line Stalinist, Secchia, who by grace of this trust, ran off with the funds of the Italian Communist Party and disappeared... He then took up his political activity again with Cervetto and company. For an account of this, see M.Mafai, The Man who Dreamed of the Armed Struggle.

From Rivoluzione Internazionale no. 146, June-September 2006.

In the last two articles, part one [22]& part two [30], we saw how, apart from a formal mention of Lenin on the question of the party, the theoretical framework and the political practice of Cervetto and of Lotta Comunista (LC) do not correspond to a conception and methods of the working class. In this article we will see how this bourgeois vision is not a result of an inadequate understanding of Lenin's teaching, but rather of a real distortion of the latter, particularly of What is to be Done? This is to such an extent that it leads to positions and, above all, to a political practice, that were by no means those either of Lenin or of the various expressions of the Communist Left that LC pretends to incarnate.

Is LC the political heir of Lenin?

Cervetto claims to have based the whole of his doctrine of the party on an idea expressed by Lenin in What is to be Done? According to this, "Modern socialist consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge. (...)The vehicle of science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia... Thus, socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without and not something that arose within it spontaneously. ... the task of Social-Democracy is to imbue the proletariat with the consciousness of its position and the consciousness of its task" (from What is to be Done?; II "The Spontaneity of the Masses and the Consciousness of the Social Democrats"; B. "Bowing to Spontaneity"). We have often voiced our critique of the idea that consciousness comes from outside the class. At the same time we agree with the valid criticism that Lenin develops in this text against the Economists of the period, for whom the revolutionary vanguard of the class served merely to support the proletariat's struggles for its immediate demands[1]. We will not develop this aspect here because the non-proletarian nature of LC is not a consequence of its adhering to the erroneous position of Lenin. The Bordigist current - to which groups like Programme Comunista, Le Proletaire, Il Partito in Florence, etc belong - bases its conception of the party on this same vision. However our critique of the Bordigist conception of the revolutionary party and of the Bordigist current generally, albeit profound and determined, has never cast doubt on its belonging to the revolutionary camp. The point is that Cervetto in his basic text "Class struggle and the Revolutionary Party" completely distorts the idea expressed by Lenin in his polemic against the Economists. Moreover Lenin himself modified it after 1905: "From a strike and demonstrations to isolated barricades. From isolated barricades to the mass erection of barricades and street fighting against the troops. Over the heads of the organisations, the mass proletarian struggle developed from a strike to an uprising. (...) The movement was raised from a general political strike to a higher stage. (...). The proletariat sensed sooner than its leaders the change in the objective conditions of the struggle and the need for a transition from the strike to an uprising. As is always the case, practice marched ahead of theory."[2] These are the words of the same Lenin who wrote What is to be Done? They are the words of a Marxist who, on the basis of the experience of his class, is able to understand that the soviets coming out of the 1905 revolution in Russia were not just any old means for proletarians to organise in order to pursue their demands. He recognised that they were rather the organisational form that corresponds "to a higher level" of political maturity reached by the class, to the realisation that only by unifying their forces and deciding themselves how to struggle, with what aims and with what instruments, proletarians can put an end to the unbearable conditions in which they live.

The vision of the working class that emerges from the whole of Cervetto's text is, on the contrary, that of a class that is ‘genetically' incapable of going beyond the struggle for immediate demands, for the defence of its conditions as wage earner, unless it is led by the party. Even when Lenin says "The best elements of the working class marched at the head, dragging in their wake the hesitant ones, awaking those who were sleeping, encouraging the weak", talking about the link between the economic strike and the political strike as revealed by the experience of 1905, Cervetto gives us to understand that this link "was the result of the struggle of the proletarian vanguard (elsewhere identified with the party, our note), which dragged the class and the exploited masses into generalised struggle." (Class Struggle and Revolutionary Party, pg 62).

However, this is more than just a distortion. Especially in the chapter "The Natural Superiority of the Proletariat", the proletariat is in fact presented as a manoeuvrable mass that the party must first snatch from the hands of the bourgeoisie. Then, once compacted, it is to be used to take advantage of the conflicts between bourgeois factions (both petty and big bourgeoisie) that have divergent interests in order to break up the bourgeois front and make the revolution: "Only when it has weakened the bourgeois forces of the contribution of the proletarian forces that they use, can the revolutionary party count on its natural superiority (which, as previously explained, is given by the numerical superiority of its ‘compactness', that is, by the concentration of the proletariat in the large factories, our note) against the bourgeois forces that, once deprived of the proletarian contingents, inevitably come into conflict and open up the way to the crisis of disintegration in which the proletariat will remain the only compact force" (idem, pg 60). This conception of Lotta Comunista is very similar to that of degenerating Trotskyism, for whom "the emancipation of the proletariat is the not the result of a struggle which places the proletariat as a class against the whole of capitalism, but is the result of a series of political struggles in the narrow sense of the term, and in which the working class, allied in succession to diverse political factions of the bourgeoisie, will eliminate certain other factions and by stages and degrees will succeed in gradually weakening the bourgeoisie, in triumphing over it by dividing it and beating it in separate bits" (The function of Trotskyism,  Internationalisme, publication of the Gauche Communiste de France - n° 26, September 1947) In all this there is nothing left of revolutionary marxism.

The vision coming out of this is no more or less than that of a military strategy that studies how best to position its army (its amorphous cannon fodder) in order to best exploit the weaknesses in the enemy's defences and defeat it. This vision has nothing to do with the understanding that has always been defended by the revolutionary vanguard; that is, the awareness of the revolutionary nature of the working class and of the dynamic of developing consciousness that leads to revolution.

In fact, the so-called Leninist orthodoxy that LC has banded about in every issue and every article of its paper from the beginning, has only served to legitimise as revolutionary a political practice that is not at all revolutionary. Every theoretical elaboration must be verified by the facts. As we have seen in the previous articles, the history of the founders of LC and of LC itself is a whole series of great theoretical affirmations that are trampled under foot by concrete action. Let's go back briefly to a central question; work in the unions, in order to see how the politics of this group are based on a vision of the working class as a mass to be manoeuvred by the party.

LC and work in the unions, or the policy of how to ‘make room for oneself'

On the question of the unions, Cervetto in the first instance, followed by LC up to the present day, pretend to base themselves on the position of Lenin and the Bolshevik party, according to which the revolutionary vanguard should work within union organisations because the latter still have a positive role to play in the development of the class struggle. This is in spite of the fact that the 1905 experience showed that the soviets are the form taken by the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is well known that the union question stimulated a big debate at the 1st Congress of the 3rd International in 1919 between the Bolsheviks and the other revolutionary organisations, particularly those from Germany, Switzerland and England. The former supported the thesis because they came from a country ruled by a backward regime of Czarist absolutism in which the unions had emerged fairly recently (in 1905 in fact, when the revolutionary upheaval dragged them into the movement, often under the leadership of the soviets). The other organisations on the contrary came from countries that were more mature at the level of capitalist development and had more experience of unionism, so even at this early stage they were able to denounce the union as an organism no longer feasible for the development of the class movement[3]. The differences on the union question have continued to exist within the communist left, where the position of the Bolshevik party on the unions has been taken up by other political formations, in particular by the Bordigist current. But the position and the resulting practice of LC have nothing to do with this. Cervetto, in his so-called scientific elaboration of the question, does not even bother to examine - not even to criticise them - the positions expressed by other revolutionary forces of the period or subsequently. Nor does he make an historic evaluation of these positions. Apart from this, what is the political practice that comes out of this supposed faithfulness to Lenin? In his 1957 Theses, in the point on the Union Question, we read "On the principle that our action must go towards 'revolutionary activity in the unions' and not within unionism, the Communist Left (that is LC according to the author, our note) must organise its own union current within the CGIL and use every initiative and instrument at its disposal to advance this organisation (union ballots and meetings, elect leaders for union work, union bulletin, etc). Given the nature of the only union current existing within the CGIL that is revolutionary -the committees for union defence - the Communist Left must make an agreement with the anarchist comrades within it, with the aim of an eventual alliance to build a single union current composed of the revolutionary minority within the CGIL."

So whereas for Lenin work in the unions in Russia at the beginning of the 1900s meant encouraging proletarian regroupment, unity in the common struggle, furthering developing consciousness of its own strength as a class, for LC it is no more than a policy of entryism. A policy that is undertaken in order to create a following and so acquire a position of strength within the union structure by making alliances with anybody whatsoever as long as it helps it to become part of the leadership. It is no accident that it chooses the CGIL as a forum for its activity because, being ‘left-wing', it has members who have already chosen a political direction and are therefore easier to recruit by those who present themselves as revolutionary. In coherence with this vision, LC's role has always been to support the unions and their specific function within the capitalist camp against the working class. This is to contain the workers' reaction to their own exploitation within the framework of the ‘democratic contracting' permitted by the rules of the system, blocking any attempt of the class (in the words so dear to Cervetto) to go from the ‘economic struggle' to the ‘political struggle', from the defensive struggle for its own living conditions within capitalist society to the offensive struggle to destroy this system of exploitation.

LC against the maturation and the development of workers' struggles

During the struggles of the hot autumn in Italy in 1969, the workers began to identify the unions as their enemy and the latter, realising that the internal commissions were no longer adequate to control the working class, began to depend on more efficient instruments such as the ‘factory councils'. In this situation LC, apart from raving about these being comparable to the soviets, did all they could to give class credibility to a whole series of organs of union management which had defended the formation of the factory councils. "Within the unions themselves there are men holding 'syndicalist' positions, 'trade unionist' positions,... who are trying to bring into being the big union with positions linked to the big factories. ... These positions ... are to be found expressly in the documents developed in conferences and meetings of the leadership, etc..." (from LC's text "Factory Councils, internal commissions: an analysis of a political conflict"). The documents that LC mentioned were from the Central Committee of the FIOM, from the National Secretariat of the FIOM, from the provincial leadership of the FIM, FIOM, UILM of Genoa and so on.

When in 1987 the school workers organised outside the unions to carry out the struggle on the basis of sovereign general assemblies in which the workers decided how to struggle, LC tried to bring the workers back into the fold by defending the idea that they should not abandon the CGIL. When they saw that they had no success, they scorned the struggle, calling it "southern" (because it developed mainly in the south of Italy) while inciting the CGIL to get a move on and call an extraordinary congress to try and regain credibility within the movement.

In 2002 there was a whole mystificatory campaign on the part of the CGIL with the referendum around article 18 of the labour laws. This campaign aimed to drag young workers in particular onto the terrain of ‘democratic consultation' as a form of ‘struggle' against precarious and flexible work (already generally introduced in Italy thanks to the unions). Did LC denounce this? Not at all, except for the usual criticism of ‘opportunist leaders', of Pezzotta and Cofferati et al. What orientation did LC give to the proletariat? "... only a vision going against the stream based on a clear Marxist strategy can give a lasting meaning to union defence, an intelligence to class pride, a future to the communist struggle against opportunism" (LC, March 2008, pg. 16). What does this mean? Who knows! Maybe we can make sense of it by looking at the assessment that LC made of it four years later when it compares the movement last spring of the young French workers against precarious work[4] with the demonstration organised by the unions in Rome 2001 around article 18. It says "We wrote that the CGIL of Sergio Cofferati, with the support of the opposition parties, rejected flexibility measures that would have risked leading the union to unconditional surrender. This hard struggle forced the government to withdraw the measures and threw the group of managers of Confindustria into crisis." Unfortunately "the illusory aim of the referendum" to extend article 18 to businesses with less than 15 workers, "that was never attempted by the unions, an indication of how weak the union confederation has always been", led to the "inevitable disaster" that "put an end to the period of struggles around article 18; the flexibility measures were put into practice..." (LC March 2006, pg 16). In other words, full support for union policy both economically and in terms of sabotaging the class. It is just that everything was badly managed. This demonstrates the need to get elected as delegates, to take on positions in the leadership, in other words to win positions of strength within the union structure. The proletariat remains imprisoned within the bourgeois framework? They are prevented from understanding what weapons the bourgeoisie uses against them, from becoming conscious of their revolutionary class nature and their strength, from understanding who to fight and how? What's the problem? The party science will take care of that at the opportune moment. For now it is important that this party-science makes a place for itself strategically within the structure.

This is the ‘consciousness' that Lotta Comunista wants to import from the outside into the working class.

This kind of ‘consciousness'; this method has always been denounced by Marxists, Lenin above all, as not belonging to the working class.

To conclude this short series of articles, we want to draw attention to the following point: nearly everyone considers LC to be a revolutionary group and it boasts itself that it is a group of the Communist Left. This is possible because LC hides behind the errors of the historic groups of the Communist Left. With the IBRP it shares the idea of building the party at a national level before moving on to the international party. With the Bordigists it shares the idea that consciousness comes from outside the class and that it is necessary to work in the unions. In addition, let's not forget that Cervetto frequented Battaglia Comunista for a time and even wrote some articles for Prometeo. This is why we have insisted, and go on insisting, that in the case of LC it is not a matter of a mere accumulation of errors, of wrong positions. What basically characterises LC are power politics that aim at winning a position of strength within the union by using the working class as a mass to be manoeuvred. The relations of force used against their own militants who are no longer willing to follow "the directives coming from the centre" and their absolute refusal to question the political practice of conquering strategic positions, makes LC a group which has no place among proletarian organizations.

Eva, 2 June 2006

see also

The conception of the party held by Cervetto and Lotta Comunista (part one) [22]

The conception of the Party held by Cervetto and Lotta Comunista (part two) [30]

[1]  On the question of consciousness see our pamphlet in French and English "Class Consciousness and the Role of Revolutionaries" and in Italian the articles "Class Consciousness and the Role of Revolutionaries" in Revista Internazionale no.3 and "On the Role of Revolutionaries in the Proletarian Struggle: a reply to the Petrified Marxism of Programma Comunista" in Rivoluzione Internazionale no.12, April 1978).

[2] Lenin, Rapporto sulla rivoluzione del 1905 in Selected Works, Riunite Edition (our emphasis), published in English as Lessons of the Moscow Uprising. For the evaluation of the 1905 revolution made by the revolutionary forces of the period, see our article "The 1905 Revolution; the Proletariat affirms its Revolutionary Nature" in nos.140 and 141 of Rivoluzione Internazionale.

[3] See the article "The Political Positions adopted by the 3rd International" (in the series "The Decadence Theory at the heart of Historic Materialism") in the International Review no.123, 4th quarter 2005. For the ICC's analysis of the union question see the brochure "The Unions against the Working Class".

[4] For the significance and importance of the movement in France, see the articles in this issue of the paper and the previous one and the Theses on the Movement of the French Students on our internet site www.it.internationalist.org [31].

A little while ago, the fellow-candidate of John McCain, potential president of the United States, Sarah Palin, unhesitatingly supported the thesis that man and the dinosaurs co-habited the Earth 6000 years ago; whereas science demonstrated that the last dinosaurs disappeared from the surface of the planet more than 65,000,000 years ago, well over 64 million years before the appearance of the first homo sapiens. This ignorance of the historic evolution of the species comes directly from the religious creationist doctrine still widely broadcast today. The vogue of this dogma is shown in the reinvention of the universe through a flourishing of creationist Christian museums in the United States since 2005 (notably in Kentucky, Cincinnati, in Ohio, and in a theme park in Lancashire, England, on the initiative of a group of American businessmen "explaining" the birth of the Universe in 7 days in accordance with a literal reading of the Bible). It's difficult to take these Disneylands or comic opera Jurassic Parks seriously, with their Hollywood approach and their exploitation of ignorance and credulity. However, the success of this obscurantist ideology is worrying: more than 20% of the Flemish population and almost one out of every two Americans for example, according to opinion polls, lean towards a creationist vision of the world and are hostile to the theory of evolution demonstrated by Charles Darwin.

The Darwinian theory of evolution against creationism

A hundred and fifty years ago, in November 1859, Darwin published The Origins of Species. This work, which was based on the accumulation of observations of nature, and of experimentation, overturned the whole vision of the origins of man and his place in the universe. It demonstrated for the first time that a common base existed for the development of species and of living beings, founding itself on and going beyond the previous work of naturalists such as Buffon, Linnaeus and Lamarck[1]. The theory of Darwin aimed to demonstrate, in a rigorous and scientific dialectical fashion, the faculty of adaption of living beings within their environment and to integrate this theory into a new conception of the evolution of species. It provided evidence for the existence of a common genealogy to living beings, so placing them in a direct line within which the human being was no longer a superior type chosen and created by God, but the chance product of a differentiation between species. It was a radical questioning of the teachings of the Bible and of its Genesis, which refuted the idea of a divine creation and showed up the weakness of all the monotheist religious traditions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam). This materialist and scientific work of Darwin was straightaway violently attacked, notably from the same religious dogmas that had pilloried Galileo and then Copernicus (theoreticians who were first by their scientific discoveries to have rejected the religious geocentricism which pretended that the Earth was the centre of the Universe and, above all, the centre of divine creation).

The scandal created by this discovery of Darwin lay not so much in showing the evolution of species but in the fact that the interactions at work in this evolution did not submit to any finality in nature[2]. "The tree of life" did not resemble a great hierarchical genealogical tree with a base and a summit whose outcome was man, homo sapiens, but a bushy tree whose base founded all the most ancient forms of life of which man was only one particular species among the millions of innumerable ramifications still present on Earth. This vision induced a relationship and common descent between man and the most elementary forms of life such as the amoeba. This seemed insupportable to those who were, often unconsciously, still affected by religious backwardness. Still today, Darwin's approach and method are called into question with virulence, whereas all the scientific contributions in palaeontology, biology, genetics and in many other domains of knowledge, have only confirmed the validity of Darwin's theory[3]. The religions have however, been constrained to mask the pursuit of their anti-Darwin crusade by propagating an ideology aiming to maintain religious thought behind an alternative pseudo-"scientific construction": "intelligent design". In effect, creationism is no longer defended by the church as at the time of Darwin. One remembers the debate which opposed the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, to Thomas Huxley, an ardent defender of evolutionism in 1860. Wilberforce mocked the latter, asking him if it was "from your grandfather's or grandmother's side that he was descended from a monkey". Huxley replied that he "would have no shame in having a monkey for a grandmother, but would have if I was related to a man who used his talent to obscure the truth!" The Catholic Church never dared to put The Origin of Species on the list of banned books but it officially condemned it and for a long time refused to talk of evolution in the scholarly programmes that it lavishly produced. Religion has adapted today by putting forward a craftier and more pernicious doctrine: "intelligent design".  According to this "theory", there has been evolution but it has been desired and "guided" by a divine power. Thus man is not a product of nature but rather the fruit of the will of an all-powerful creator who "programmed" it.

This variant of creationism profits from the present revival of the popularity of spiritualist, obscurantist and sect-like ideologies. These reactionary ideologies are often spread by certain factions of the bourgeoisie who find among them material to manipulate populations disorientated and despairing as a result of the misery and barbarity of the capitalist world and its lack of any perspective. This pushes them to avoid objective reality, by taking refuge in faith, blind belief in a beyond, in a "superior order", invisible and all-powerful, which escapes all rational thought. The belief in an omnipotent creator God, as in the resurgence of all sorts of sects (which, moreover, profit from their clientele like all good capitalists), is used by the ideologies of the New Age to crystallise all the fears and concerns produced by the impasse of capitalist society. This demonstrates the pertinence of the analysis given by Marx in 1843 in his Critique of the political philosophy of Hegel: "Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people".

Religion is always the first bulwark of conservative and reactionary forces to dull consciousness against scientific advances. It tries to adapt itself in order to preserve the status quo by pretending to be a refuge from the misfortunes of society.

The reactionary theory of "intelligent design"

"Intelligent design" tries to insert itself into the ranks of scientific theory, under cover of trying to conciliate evolution and creationism. It presents the one and the other as competitive "philosophical" choices by fraudulently trying to give the latter a scientific base. The precursor of "intelligent design", the Jesuit, Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), tried in the 1920s for example, to show that there existed a teleology, a finality of evolution called "the Omega point", defined as the divine pole of convergence and harmonisation culminating in the "no-osphere", a sort of celestial beatitude animated by the divine spirit... Much more than Catholicism, it's in Protestantism and its diverse varieties of "Evangelical Churches", basing themselves on a literal reading of the Bible, that the most relentless adversaries of Darwin are found (it is moreover the reason for the success of Intelligent Design in the United States throughout the "Bush years" where the government more or less openly supported it). The objectives of the present propagandists of the "intelligent plan" have been clearly defined by the Think Tank at the origins of the movement, the Discovery Institute, in a document for internal use called The Wedge. Leaks from this document were made known in 1999. In this document, the principal objectives of the Discovery Institute are defined without the least ambiguity[4]: in the first place the question posed for it is "to vanquish scientific materialism and its moral, cultural and scientific heritages through the understanding that nature and human beings have been created by God". It plans for the short and medium term "to see the theory of intelligent design become an accepted alternative in the sciences, and in scientific research undertaken since the perspective of the theory of design; to help to begin the influence of the theory of design in spheres other than natural science; even new major debates in education, the relative subjects of life, penal and personal responsibility pushed to the front of the national agenda". It is in fact in the key areas of education and the law that the offensive of this dogma is pushed, while it tries to sow confusion in scientific circles. It is disseminated in all spheres of society, through numerous forms of publicity and opinion-making. The Internet has opened up an immense reservoir for spreading its propaganda, just like the missionaries and their "conversions" at the time of the colonisation of new territories. The main aim is to pass "intelligent design" off as a "scientific" hypothesis in competition with Darwinism. It also demonstrates its ambition of "seeing the theory of intelligent design as the dominant perspective in science; of seeing applications of the theory of design in specific fields including molecular biology, biochemistry, palaeontology, physics and cosmology in the natural sciences; psychology, ethics, politics, theology, philosophy, literary matters and even into the arts". But this public exposure of the fundamentalist aims of "intelligent design" has its reverse side: it has dealt a major blow to its promoters who, unable to deny the existence of the document, today peddle a more mitigated version of it.

However, this undertaking has already been spread around and this is particularly so in the Muslim world. In Turkey, Harun Yahia, real name, Adnan Oktar, at the head of mafia-like lobby, has offered to distribute this propaganda for free and widely among teachers and the bosses of colleges and schools. He has flooded schools throughout the world with his Atlas of Creation and also via the Internet. He has also produced more than 200 documentary films and 300 works already translated into sixty languages. The attempts to render unrecognisable the real history of life on this planet, like all the lies invented by ruling classes throughout the history of humanity, are part of the same effort to block the development of the consciousness of the greatest number (and of the proletariat in particular), to stupefy them and prevent them from freeing themselves from their chains. Obscurantism serves to mask the real reasons for the putrefaction of capitalist society.

Science and consciousness

Religious belief is opposed to science and the scientific approach. For religion and the theological tradition, knowing something, the knowledge of what could be, is, in the final account, a divine essence and remains inaccessible to the majority of mortals. The materialist approach of science (facts and the study of reactions, differences or similarities, and the conditions that underlie them, are the basis of scientific experiment) is neither a "philosophy" nor an "ideology" but the necessary condition for a conscious and historical approach towards understanding the relations between man and his natural conditions, including his own behaviour as an object of study; it is an approach towards the limits of knowledge that does not fix any limits in advance. The development of science is totally associated with the development of consciousness in humanity. Science has a history but it is not linear, nor mechanically linked to technical progress or to advanced technologies (which excludes all "positivism" and any idea of "progressivism"). It closely fits in with the social relations of production by which it is conditioned. Belief bases itself on the fears of the unknown.  Opposite to religious prejudice (which is above all an ideology at the service of the existing order), the development of consciousness is the motor element which accompanies the development of science. Thus the scientific method does not fear its hypotheses being called into question or its acquisitions being overturned because this is the way that it evolves, this is what makes it dynamic. As Patrick Tort said (l'effet Darwin, page 170):  "Science invents and transforms itself. Ideology recuperates, adjusts and re-shapes itself".

And, as he said in an article in Monde de l'Education dated June 2005: "the ‘dialogue' between science and religion is a fiction invented by politics. Nothing in fact can negotiate                                                                 nor be exchanged between the immanent search for objective knowledge and the appeal to the supernatural that characterises the posture of belief. If one admits just once that an element of the supernatural can contribute to constructing the scientific explanation of a phenomenon, one would straightaway renounce the methodology of all science. The scientific method does not negotiate. It's necessary that all the trickery of individualist liberalism is used (...) in order to convince us that there's a choice between scientific explanation and theological interpretation, or that they could be  combined, as if the law of a falling body was the business of personal conviction, of elective democracy or of ‘liberty'."  

In fact, "politics" has no sense in this quote except as the politics of the dominant class. Here's why the scientific approach of a Copernicus, a Marx, an Engels or a Darwin has been and still is for the most part fought against and deformed with such desperation by the supporters of an unchanging social order.

Some precursors to Darwin

Buffon, Linnaeus and Lamark were, after the publication of Darwin's theory of evolution, largely decried and even partly thrown into the dustbin of history. All the excessive parts of their theses were designated as gross and shameful errors. However, in reality, each one of them contributed to the advancement of knowledge, the work of one and its limits being overcome by the others. This is why we can say that these three precursors of Darwin were authorities for his work.

Thus, it's not by chance, that they point to resemblances between man and ape and the possibility of a common genealogy.

The attention that Buffon (1707-1788) gives to the internal anatomy places it among the precursors of comparative anatomy. "The insides of living beings are basically the design of nature", he wrote in les Quadrupedes. Buffon went against religion: he deliberately placed man at the heart of the animal kingdom. Even if he didn't stop at the exterior aspect, man having a "soul" endowed with reason which placed him at the summit of creation, he affirmed that man is similar to the animals by his physiology.  He showed that there existed many varieties of man, black as well as white; after several generations, a group of white men in a particular environment would become black; there only existed a single human species and not several. He concluded that the human varieties came from an initial stock which adapted according to the conditions that it lived in.

Linnaeus (1707-1788) was a "determinist" naturalist. For him, living species had been created by God at the time of Genesis and had not varied since. The first aim of his system is to demonstrate the grandeur of the divine creation. However, from the fact of the importance that he accords to the reproductive organs of plants, it's important to note that the pertinence of his system of classification inevitably invokes an evolutionary hypothesis.  Thus, if such a species surprisingly resembles such a neighbouring species, why not presume that one preceded the other in time? The choice of organs of reproduction as criteria also went in the sense of a dynamic and evolutionary interpretation of history.

Lamark (1744-1829) is a naturalist known for having proposed the first materialist and mechanist theory of life and the evolution of living beings. He is equally one of the rare evolutionists to have understood the theoretical necessity of the evolution of living beings. His transformist theory is based on two principles: his thesis on evolution stipulates that individuals adapt during their lifetimes notably by more or less using certain organic functions which develop or weaken in relation with the usage or non-usage of the organs. Here's an example that Lamark wrote about the giraffe: "Relative to its practice, it is curious to observe the product of it in the particular form and size of the giraffe (camelo-pardalis): we know that this animal, the largest of the mammals, lives in the African interior, and it nearly always lives in places that are arid and without pasture, obliging it to graze the foliage of trees and continually forcing itself to reach it. The result of this long-time constant habit, in all individuals of this race, is that its front legs become longer than those at the back, and that its neck is so stretched that the giraffe, without standing up on its back legs, raises its head and reaches up to six metres in height (nearly 20 feet)" (Lamark, Philosophie zoologique, p. 256).

W, 24/11/9

[1] See the box for a brief resume of the work of these three scientists.

[2] On could add to these "scandals" caused by science the resistance to advances made by palaeontology (confirmed moreover by Darwin's deductions) which pointed to the high plateaux of Africa as the birthplace of humanity, which also dealt a fatal blow to the so-called "superiority of the white race as the bearer of civilisation" (see The Origins of Man by Richard Leaky).

[3] We have seen in previous articles that the Darwinian vision has equally been greatly perverted and deformed, with reactionary interpretations going from the "social Darwinism" of Spencer to the eugenics of Galton. These ideas were however explicitly rejected by Darwin himself (see ‘Social Darwinism: a reactionary ideology of capitalism' on the ICC's website).

[4] See the articles "Creationism" and "Intelligent Design" on the Wikipedia website.

We reproduce below the account of the Tekel tobacco-workers' strike, published by the ICC's section in Turkey.

On December 14th 2009, thousands of workers of Tekel[1] enterprises from dozens of cities in Turkey left their homes and families in order to travel to Ankara. The workers of Tekel took this journey with the aim of struggling against the horrible conditions forced upon them by the capitalist order. This honorable struggle of the Tekel workers which has been going on for more than a month now, carried the idea of a strike in which all workers would participate. By doing so, the workers of Tekel started leading and carrying forward the working class movement in the whole country. What we will try to give the account of here is the story of what happened so far in the Tekel struggle. It should not be forgotten that what this account concerns not just the Tekel workers, but the workers of the whole world. We owe our warm thanks to the Tekel workers for making the writing of this article possible by pushing the struggles of our class forward, by their determined struggle and by explaining to us what they went through, their experiences and thoughts.

We think that firstly it would be in order to explain what caused the workers of Tekel to launch this struggle. The Tekel workers are struggling against the 4-C policy of the Turkish state. The state has been employing tens of thousands of workers other than the Tekel workers under the 4-C conditions. These conditions are what is coming to tens of thousands of workers soon, the sugar factory workers being among the first future victims. Besides, lots of sectors of the workin class have been experiencing similar attacks under different names, and such attacks are waiting for those who haven't been hit by them yet. What is this 4-C then? This practice was actually a ‘blessing' put forward by the Turkish state when the number of workers who were to lose their jobs due to privitations increased. It includes, aside from a serious pay-cut, public workers being shifted to different sectors within the state under horrible conditions. The worst of the conditions introduced by the 4-C policy is that it gives the bosses of the state an absolute power over the workers. Thus, the wage, which is determined by the state and is already a massive pay-cut for the workers, is merely a maximum price. It can be reduced by the state enterprise managers arbitrarily. Also, working hours are completely abolished for those who are to work under the 4-C conditions and the bosses of the state enterprises gain the right to arbitrarily make the workers stay at work for as long as they want, until the workers "finish the task assigned to them". The workers get no money whatsoever in return for this "extra" work after regular public employees' working hours or during holidays. Under this policy, the bosses have the power to fire the workers arbitrarily, without being obliged to pay them any compensation. Besides, the period workers can work in a year is between three months and ten months, nothing being paid to the workers in the months they aren't asked to work and the duration of their work again being arbitrarily determined by the bosses. Despite this, the workers are forbidden to find a second job even if they are not working at a certain period. The social security payments of the workers are not made anymore under the 4-C policy, and all health benefits are taken away. The privatisations, just like the 4-C policy started long before. In the Tekel enterprises, initially the cigarette and alchohol departments were privatised, and then the process led to the leaf tobacco factories being closed. We are of the opinion that today, it is clear that the problem here is not just the privatisations. We think it is obvious that the private capital which is taking the workers' jobs, and the state, that is the state capital, wanting to exploit the workers by condemning them to the most unimaginable conditions are jointly making the attack.  In this sense we can say the fight of the Tekel workers is born out of the class interests of all workers and represents a struggle against the capitalist order as a whole.

We think it would also be in order to explain the situation of the working class movement in Turkey around the period the Tekel workers launched their struggle. On 25th November 2009, a one day strike organized by KESK, DISK and Kamu-Sen[2] had taken place. As we said, the Tekel workers took the journey to Ankara on 14th December, several weeks after this one day strike. The same week that the Tekel workers came to Ankara, two other workers' struggles took place. The first one was the demonstrations by firemen who were to lose their jobs at the beginning of 2010, and the second was the one day strike by railway workers in protest at the firing of some of their workmates for their participation in the strike on the 25th November. The riot police, seeing that class struggles were on the rise, brutally attacked the firemen and the railway workers. The Tekel workers were not treated any differently either. Besides, the number of railway workers who lost their jobs for participating in the strikes rose to nearly fifty. Lots of workers were taken into custody. It was to take some time for the firemen to recover from these attacks. As for the railway workers, unfortunately they haven't managed to make a come back to the terrain of class struggle so far. What put the workers of Tekel in the vanguard by the end of the week which started with December 14th was the fact that they managed to stand up against the repressive measures of the state, and that they kept their struggle going and alive.

So how did the Tekel struggle begin? There already was a considerable minority who wanted to struggle, yet what was to trigger the struggle took place on 5th December, in an opening ceremony attended by prime minister Tayyip Erdoğan[3]. The Tekel workers, with their families, went up unexpectedly against Erdoğan in this ceremony in order to ask what was going to happen to them. They interrupted Erdoğan's speach saying "The workers of Tekel are waiting for you to give the good news". In reply Erdoğan said: "Unfortunately elements such as these have been appearing in Turkey so far. Such elements want to make money without doing any work, by laying down. We closed the era of making money by laying down (...) They have said the property of the state is a sea and who doesn't eat it are pigs. This was how they looked at this issue. This is not how we look at it. Here is your seniority compensation. If you want we can use you under 4-C, if not go and set up your own business if you are going to. We said this too. We had an agreement with their trade-union. I talked to them, I told them ‘You have this much time. Do what is necessary'. Although we had an agreement, well there the process came to the end and one or two years passed. These are still here saying things like we want to keep our jobs and continue the same way, we want to retain the same rights in other places. No, we talked about these things. Ten thousand Tekel workers cost us forty trillion a month."[4] Erdoğan had no idea what kind of trouble he had just gotten himself into. The workers, most of whom had supported the government previously, were now angry. How to launch a struggle was discussed by the workers in the workplaces. A workers from Adıyaman[5] explains the process like this in an article he wrote, published in a leftist daily: "That process stimulated the workers fellows who haven't been participating in the struggle which was tried to be waged, as small as it was. They started seeing the real face of the Justice and Development Party because of these words the prime minister spoke. The first thing they did was resign their party membership. In the discussions that started in our workplaces, we decided to protect our labor all together" [6]. The trade-union[7] which Erdoğan had said that he agreed with, and which had not taken any serious actions in the process called for a gathering in Ankara. As a result the workers took the roads, travelling to the capital.

The forces of the state staged a sneaky attack against the workers from the start. The riot police stopped the buses carrying workers, and declared that they weren't going to let the workers from the Kurdish cities where Tekel factories are concentrated, but that the workers from the Western, Mediterranean, Central Anatolian and Black Sea regions could pass. This aimed at pitting the Kurdish workers and the other workers against each other, and thus dividing the class movement on ethnic lines. This sneaky attack in reality tore down two masks of the state: that of unity and harmony and that of the Kurdish reform. Yet the workers of Tekel did not fall into this police trap. With the workers from Tokat leading them, the workers from outside the Kurdish cities protested against this position of the police, and insisted with determination on all workers entering the city together and no one being left behind. The riot police, unable to calculate the stance the government was to take, ended up having to allow the workers to enter the city all together. This incident made workers coming from different cities, regions and ethnic backgrounds form deep bonds on class terrain. Following this incident the workers from the Western, Mediterranean, Central Anatolian and Black Sea regions were to express that the strength and inspiration they took from the resistance, determination and consciousness of the Kurdish workers was to contribute greatly to their participation in the struggle and that they learnt much from those workers. The workers of Tekel had won their first victory upon entering the city.

On December 15th, the Tekel workers started their protest demonstration in front of the national headquarters of the Justice and Development Party in Ankara. A Tekel worker who came to Ankara that day explains what happened like this: "We marched to the national headquarters of the Justice and Development Party. We lit a fire at night and waited in front of the building until 10 PM. When it got too cold, we went to the Atatürk Gym. There were five thousand of us. We took out our carpets and cardboards and spent the night there. In the morning, the police pushed us to Abdi İpekçi Park and encircled us. Some of our mates marched to the Justice and Development Party headquarters again. When we were waiting in the park, we wanted to go and meet up with our mates, and those waiting in front of the Justice and Development Party headquarters wanted to come to us: the police attacked with tear gas. Then at 7 PM we managed to meet up with out mates in the park. We had walked for four hours. We spent the night in the park, in the rain."[8] On the other hand, the most brutal attack by the police took place on December 17th. The riot police, obviously acting on orders and perhaps in order to make up for not being able to prevent the Kurdish workers from entering the city when they first arrived, attacked the workers in the park with great violence and hatred. The aim was to disperse the workers. Yet this time also there was something which the forces of the state had failed to calculate: the workers capacity for self-organization. The workers, dispersed by the police, managed to organize themselves without the help of any bureaucrat and met up in a massive demonstration in front of the Türk-İş[9] headquarters in the afternoon. On the same day, the workers, having nowhere to stay, occupied two floors of the Türk-İş building. On the days following December 17th, the demonstrations of the Tekel workers were to take place on the small street in front of the Türk-İş headquarters, at the center of Ankara.

The struggle between the workers of Tekel and the Türk-İş administration marked the days following this date until the New Year. Actually, even at the beginning of the struggle, the workers did not trust the trade-union bureaucrats. They had been sending two workers from all cities with the trade-unionists to all the negotiations. The purpose of this was for all the workers to be informed of what really was happening. Both Tek Gıda-İş and Türk-İş, and the government expected Tekel workers to give up in a few days in the face of the freezing cold Ankara winter, police repression and material difficulties. The doors of the Türk-İş building were, unsurprisingly, locked up in a very short time to prevent the workers from entering the building. Against this, the workers started a struggle in order to be allowed to use the toilets in the building and for the woman workers to be able to rest in the building and this struggle resulted in a victory for the workers. The workers had no intention of going back. A serious support by the Ankara working class and above all students from proletarian backgrounds was given to Tekel workers with regards to the material difficulities of finding places to stay: perhaps a small but nevertheless important part of the Ankara working class mobilized to host Tekel workers in their homes. Rather than giving up and going back, the Tekel workers gathered every day on the small street in front of the Türk-İş building, and started discussing how to make their struggle go forward. It did not take long for the workers to realize that the only solution to get over their isolation was for their struggle to extend to the rest of the working class.

In this context, militant workers from all cities who saw that Tek Gıda-İş and Türk-İş weren't going to do anything for them tried to establish a strike committee, with the foremost purpose of transmitting their demands to the trade-union. Among these demands were the setting up of a strike tent and the New Year being celebrated by workers collectively, with a demonstration in front of the Türk-İş building. The trade-union executives opposed this initiative taken by the workers. After all, what need was there for the trade-union if the workers were going to go ahead and take the control of their struggle into their own hands! This attitude had a veiled threat behind it: the workers who were already isolated feared the possibility of being left all alone if the trade-union withdrew its support. Thus the strike committee was abolished. Yet the will of the workers to take the control of their struggle into their own hands was to retain its existence. Quickly, the workers launched efforts to form bonds with the sugar factory workers who are to face the same 4-C conditions soon, and they went to the workers neighbourhoods and universities they were invited to and explained their struggle. In the meanwhile, the workers were continuing their struggle with the Türk-İş administration which was not behind the workers in any way. The day the Türk-İş board of executives met, the workers forced the doors of the trade-union headquarters. The riot police mobilized to protect Mustafa Kumlu, the chairman of Türk-İş from the workers. Workers started shouting slogans like "We will sell out who sells us out", "Türk-İş to duty, to the general strike", "Kumlu, resign". Kumlu dared not face the workers until he had announced a series of actions, including strikes which were to happen every week, starting from a one hour strike and doubling in period every week and a demonstration in front of the Türk-İş building to take place every week. He was afraid for his life. Even after Kumlu's declaration of a series of actions though, workers still did not trust Türk-İş. When a Tekel worker from Diyarbakır[10] declared in an interview he gave that "We won't follow any decision taken by the trade-union administration to end the struggle and go back. And if a decision to end the struggle without there being a gain made as they did last year, we are thinking of emptying the Türk-İş building and then burning it down"[11], he expressed the feelings of lots of other Tekel workers.

Türk-İş backed down from its action plan when the first one hour strike had a participation rate of 30% of all trade-unions. Türk-İş executives were as terrified of the generalization of the struggle of the Tekel workers as the government was. Following the cheerful New Year's demonstration in front of the Türk-İş headquarters, a closed vote was taken among the workers in order to decide whether to go on or return home. 99% of the workers voted to continue with the struggle. Meanwhile, a new action plan, suggested by the trade-union, started being discussed: following January 15th, there was to be a three day sit-in, followed by a three-day hunger strike and then a three day death fast. A demonstration with massive participation was also to take place, as the Türk-İş administration promised. The workers initially thought that a hunger strike would be a good idea. Already being isolated, they did not want to be forgotten and ignored and they thought a hunger strike could avoid this. Also, they were feeling that they were stuck in front of Türk-İş and felt the need to go on action somehow. A hunger-strike could have acted as an intimidation for Türk-İş also.

One of the most significant texts written by the Tekel workers appeared in those days: a letter written by a Tekel worker to the sugar factory workers. The Tekel worker from the city of Batman[12] wrote the following: "Our hardworking and honorable sugar factory worker brothers and sisters, Today, the honorable struggle that Tekel workers have undertaken is a historical chance for those whose rights are being taken away. In order not to miss this chance, your participation in our honorable struggle would make us happier and stronger. My friends, I would like especially to indicate that for the time being trade-unionists would promise hope you that ‘we will take care of this affair'. However, as we have passed through the same process, we know well that they are well-to-do people and have no life-death concern. On the contrary, you are the ones whose rights would be grabbed and whose right to work would be taken from you. If you are not to take part in the struggle today, tomorrow would be too late for you. All in all, this struggle will be victorious whether or not you are in it and we have no doubt or mistrust in ourselves to take care of this. Because we are sure that if the workers become united and act as a body, there remains nothing that they cannot succeed in. With these feelings, I salute you with my deepest intimacy and respect in the name of all workers of Tekel."[13] This letter not only called on the sugar workers themselves to join the struggle by themselves; it also expressed what had happened in Tekel with all its clarity. At the same time, it expressed the consciousness shared by many Tekel workers that they were struggling not just for themselves but for the entire working class.

On January 15th, the Tekel workers came to Ankara to participate in the sit-in we previously mentioned. Now there were nearly ten thousand Tekel workers in the Sakarya Square. Some of their families had came with them. The workers had take sick-days and holidays to come to Ankara and most of them had to go back several times to renew their holiday permits. Now, nearly all Tekel workers were together. A demonstration with a wide participation was planned for January 16th, Saturday. The forces of order feared this demonstration since it could provide ground for the generalization and massive expansion of the struggle. The possibility of workers who arrived on Saturday for the demonstration spending the night and all day Sunday with the Tekel workers could result in strong and massive bonds being formed between the arriving workers and the Tekel workers. Thus the forces of order insisted on moving the demonstration to Sunday, and Türk-İş, with a typical manoeuvre, further weakened the demonstration by preventing the workers from Kurdish cities coming. It was also calculated that spending two nights in the icy Ankara winter, staging a sit-in in the streets would break the resistance and strength of the Tekel workers. It would turn out on the demonstration which took place on January 17th that this calculation was a serious mistake.

The demonstration on January 17th started calmly. The workers who gathered in Ankara and several political groups started marching from the Ankara Train Station at 10am into Sıhhiye Square. In the demonstration, attended by tens of thousands of workers, first a worker from Tekel, then a firemen and a sugar factory worker spoke from the platform. The explosion took place afterwards. After the workers, Mustafa Kumlu, the chairman of Türk-İş took the stage. Kumlu, who neither cared about the struggle nor about the living conditions of the Tekel workers to spread nor about its spread made a completely moderate, conciliatory and empty speech. Türk-İş had made a particular effort to keep the workers away from the platform and had placed the metal workers who were completely unaware of what was going on in front of it. Nevertheless, the Tekel workers, asking the metal workers to let them pass, managed to come right in front of the platform. During Kumlu's speech, the Tekel workers did their best to interrupt him with their slogans. The last offence that did the trick for the workers was the announcement that following Kumlu's speech, Alişan, a pop singer who has no relation whatsoever to the working class movement, was going to give a concert in the demonstration area. The workers occupied the platform, started shouting their own slogans and despite the fact that the trade-union executives turned the sound system down, they workers who came to the demonstration managed to join these slogans. For a while, the trade-union completely lost control. Only the workers had it. Trade-union executives, rushing to the stage, started giving radical speeches on the one hand and trying to get the workers to leave the platform. When this didn't work, they tried to provoke the workers against each other and against the students and workers who came to support them. The trade-unionists tried to pit the workers who have been present in Ankara from the beginning of the struggle against those who arrived recently, and they tried to target those who came to offer their support. In the end the trade-union executives managed to make the workers who occupied the stage go down, and convinced the workers to rapidly return to the street in front of the Türk-İş building. The fact that speeches regarding hunger strikes and death fasts being put forward in order to play down the slogans about the general strike was, in our opinion, interesting. In any case, returning to the Türk-İş building was not enough to extinguish the workers' anger. Slogans such as "General strike, general resistance", "Türk-İş don't test our patience" and "We will sell out who sells us out" were being shouted in front of the union building now. A few hours later, a group of workers numbering around 150 managed to break the bureaucratic barricade in front of the Türk-İş doors and occupied the building. Tekel workers who were searching for Mustafa Kumlu in the building started shouting "Enemy of workers, servant of the AKP" when they reached the door of Kumlu's room. Following the demonstration on January 17th, efforts to launch another strike committee began among the workers. This committee was to be made up of workers who didn't think a hunger strike was a suitable way to go forward for the struggle and that the only way forward was to extent the struggle. The effort to form it was known by all workers and supported by an overwhelming majority. As for those who didn't support it, they weren't speaking against it either. Among the things seen as the tasks of the committee, other than transmitting their demands to the trade-union, was realizing communication and self-organization among the workers. Like the previous strike-committee, this committee also was made up entirely of the workers and was completely independent from the trade-union. The same determination of self-organization made it possible for hundreds of Tekel workers to join the demonstration of the health sector employees who went on a one day strike on January 19th. On the same day, while only a hundred workers were allowed to participate in the three-day hunger strike, three thousand workers joined them, despite the fact that the general feeling among the workers now is that it is not the appropriate way for the struggle to go forward. The reason behind this was that these workers did not want to leave their mates going on the hunger strike alone, that they wanted to engage in solidarity with them, that they wanted to share what their friends were to go through.

Although the Tekel workers have been having regular meetings among themselves according to the cities they came from, so far a mass meeting with all the workers participating hasn't been possible. This being said, since December 17th, the street in front of the Türk-İş building had the character of an informal but regular mass assembly. Sakarya Square these days is full of hundreds of workers from different cities, discussing how to push the struggle forward, how to expand it, what to do. Another important characteristic of the struggle was how the workers from different ethnic backgrounds managed to unite against the capitalist order despite all the provocations of the regime. The slogan "Kurdish and Turkish workers together", shouted since the first days of the struggle, expresses this very clearly. In the Tekel struggle, lots of workers from the Black Sea region danced to Şemame, and lots of Kurdish workers made the Horon dance for the first time in their lives[14]. Another point where the approach of the Tekel workers has been very significant is the importance they have been giving to extending the struggle and workers' solidarity, and this is not based on a narrow national perspective but on one which includes the mutual support and solidarity of the workers of the whole world. Also the Tekel workers managed to prevent the parts of the ruling class in opposition to use the struggle for their own purposes and do not trust opposition parties either. They are aware of how the Republican People's Party[15] attacked the workers who were fired from Kent AŞ[16], how the Nationalist Movement Party[17] has its share in shaping state policies and how it is anti-working class. A worker expresses this consciousness very clearly in an interview he gave: "We understood what all of them are. Men who voted for the privatisation law are today telling us about how they understand our situation. Until now, I always voted for the Nationalist Movement Party. I met revolutionaries only with this struggle. I am in this struggle because I am a worker. Revolutionaries are always with us. The Nationalist Movement Party and the Republican People's Party make five minute speeches here and then they leave. There were those among us who cheered for them when we first came here. Now, there is no such situation."[18] The most striking example of this consciousness was how the workers of Tekel prevented the speakers from the fascist Alperen Organization[19], the same one which attacked Kent AŞ workers who were demonstrating in the Abdi İpekçi Park because they were Kurds. The Tekel struggle also made a great contribution to the firemen who were brutally attacked after their first demonstration by giving them morale which enabled them to return to the struggle. Generally, Tekel workers have given hope not only to the firemen but to all sectors of the working class in Turkey who want to struggle.

The Tekel workers have managed to put a strike in which all workers will participate on the agenda. This is why today the Tekel workers are proudly standing at the vanguard of the working class in Turkey, and are carrying our class which has been in slumber for years into joining with the struggles of the workers of the whole world. This is why they are holding the seeds of the mass strike which, from Egypt to Greece, from Bangladesh to Spain, from England to China has been shaking the world for the last few years. This honorable struggle is still ongoing, and we think that it is not yet the time to draw its lessons. With the idea of a hunger strike and a death strike being pushed forward on the one hand and the idea of a strike committee made up of workers who don't find the idea of a hunger strike fit for the struggle and want to extent the struggle; with Türk-İş bureaucrats who are nothing but a part of the state on one hand and workers who want a general strike on the other, it is hard to predict what lays ahead for the struggle, where it will go, what its results will be. This being said, we have to stress that no matter what the outcome of the struggle is, the honorable stance of the Tekel workers will bear very important results and leave priceless lessons for the whole working class.

Gerdûn, 20.01.10

[1] Tekel used to be the state monopoly company consisting of all tobacco and alcohol producing enterprises.

[2] Leftist Public Workers Unions Confederation, Revolutionary Workers Unions Confederation and the major Public Employees Unions Confederation, known for its fascist symphaties.

[3] Also the leader of the ruling Justice and Development Party, the AKP

[4] https://www.cnnturk.com/2009/turkiye/12/05/erdogana.tekel.iscilerinden.p... [35]

[5] A city in Turkish Kurdistan.

[6] https://www.evrensel.net/haber.php?haber_id=63999 [36]

[7] Tek Gıda-İş, Food, Alchohol, Tobacco Workers Union, member union of Türk-İş

[8] https://www.evrensel.net/haber.php?haber_id=63999 [36]

[9] Confederation of Turkish Trade-Unions, the oldest and largest trade-union confederation in Turkey which has quite an infamous history, having been formed under the influence of the US in the 50ies, modelled after the AFL-CIO and has been sabotaging workers' struggles since.

[10] Known as the unofficial capital of Kurdistan, Diyarbakır is a metropole in Turkish Kurdistan

[11] https://www.kizilbayrak.net/sinif-hareketi/haber/arsiv/2009/12/30/select... [37]

[12] A city in Turkish Kurdistan.

[13] https://tr.internationalism.org/ekaonline-2000s/ekaonline-2009/tekel-isc... [38]

[14] Şemamme is a very famous Kurdish dance, and Horon is a very famous dance from the Black Sea region of Turkey.

[15] The Kemalist, secularist, left-nationalist party, member of the Socialist International, extremely chauvinistic.

[16] Municipality workers from İzmir, a metropole at the coast of the Aegean sea. These workers were fired by the Republican People's Party who controlled the municipality they worked for and then brutally attacked by the police while protesting the Party's leader.

[17] The mainstream fascist party.

[18] https://www.kizilbayrak.net/sinif-hareketi/haber/arsiv/2009/12/30/select... [37]

[19] Murderous gang connected to the Grand Union Party, a radical fascist split from the Nationalist Movement Party

Introduction

This article was published on our website just three days after Haiti's capital and other minor towns were leveled by a 7.0 magnitude earthquake. Almost two weeks after this catastrophe the main points made in the article remain completely valid. However several aspects require updating. First of all, the extent of the disaster is now much clearer. The number of confirmed deaths is now 150 000, but it is estimated that 200 000, maybe more, died, while the injured are 194 000. For the survivors the odds are not good. A health crisis is brewing, illnesses are running rampant, and shortage of clean water and a sanitation system in ruins will only make things worse in the immediate future. People are going hungry, 2 million people are in need of food assistance and over one million are homeless, many living under horrible conditions and obliged to scavenge for survival.  What about the assistance of the so-called "international community"?  One thing is obvious. Despite the enormous media circus trumpeting the "human side" of capitalist governments all over the world, the aid for the earthquake victims has been largely inefficient. The 20 000 American troops and 18 warships, the UN's 12 500 peacekeepers and police, and the dozens of charitable organizations have hardly made a difference addressing the population's needs, whose despair and anger are growing daily.  The tragedy in Haiti is living proof of the urgent necessity to do away with capitalism, this system that has outlived its historic mission and which today can only deliver misery, pain, and death.

Murderers. Capitalism, its states, its bourgeoisie, are nothing but murderers. Tens of thousands of people have just died because of this inhuman system.

Tuesday, at 16.53 local time, an earthquake of 7 on the Richter scale ravaged Haiti. The capital Port-au-Prince, an octopus like slum housing nearly two million people, was purely and simply razed to the ground. The toll is terrible. And it's getting worse by the hour. Four days after the catastrophe, on Friday 15 January, the French Red Cross has already estimated 40-50,000 dead and "a huge number of grave injuries". According to this charity, at least three million people have been directly affected by the earthquake[1]. In a few seconds, 200,000 families lost their ‘houses', often made out of rough bits and pieces. Large buildings also fell like a house of cards. Roads, already decrepit, the airport, the ancient railway tracks: nothing stood up to it.

The reason for this carnage is revolting. Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world. 75% of its inhabitants survive on less than two dollars a day and of them 56% on less than one dollar a day! On this side of a poverty-stricken island nothing at all has been done to face up to earthquakes. And yet, Haiti is a well-known earthquake zone. All those who claim today that this quake was of an exceptional and unforeseeable violence are lying. Professor Eric Calais, in a geology course delivered in Haiti in 2002, pointed out that the island was traversed by "fault-lines capable of producing quakes of a magnitude of between 7.5 and 8"[2]. The political authorities in Haiti had been officially informed of this risk, as proved by this extract taken from the website of the Bureau of Mines and Energy (which is linked to the ministry of public works): "all of the last few centuries have been marked by at least one major earthquake in Hispaniola (the Spanish name for the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic - ed): the destruction of Porte au-Prince in 1751 and 1771; the destruction of Cap Haitien in 1842, the earthquakes of 1887 and 1904 in the north of the country with major damage to Porte-au-Prince and Cap Haitien, the earthquake of 1946 in the north east of the Dominican Republic accompanied by a tsunami in the region of Nagua. There have been major earthquakes in Haiti, there will therefore be major earthquakes in the future every few dozen or hundred years: this is scientifically evident"[3](our emphasis). And so, faced with something so scientifically evident, what measures have been taken? None! In March 2008 a group of geologists drew attention to the considerable risk of a major earthquake in two years time; and in May of the same year certain scientists even held a series of meetings on this question with the Haitian government[4]. Neither the Haitian state, nor all the states which are now crying crocodile tears and calling for "international solidarity", the US and France above all, have taken the slightest preventative measure to avoid this predictable drama. The buildings erected in this country are so fragile that they don't even need an earthquake to collapse: "in 2008, a school in Pétonville collapsed for no geological reason, killing nearly 90 children"[5].

 Now that it's too late, Obama and Sarkozy can announce a "great international conference" for "reconstruction and development"; the Chinese, British, German or Spanish states can send all their food parcels and their NGOs. They are still criminals with blood on their hands.

If Haiti is so poor today, if its population is deprived of everything, if the infrastructure is non-existent, it's because for more than 200 years the local bourgeoisie and the bigger Spanish, French and American bourgeoisies have confronted each other over the resources of this small island, over who controls it. Through its daily paper The Guardian the British bourgeoisie is even quite capable of pointing out the responsibility of its imperialist rivals: "The noble ‘international community' which is currently scrambling to send its ‘humanitarian aid' to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce. Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti's people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's phrase) "from absolute misery to a dignified poverty" has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.

Aristide's own government (elected by some 75% of the electorate) was the latest victim of such interference, when it was overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering in resentment. The UN has subsequently maintained a large and enormously expensive stabilisation and pacification force in the country.....The international community has been effectively ruling Haiti since the 2004 coup. The same countries scrambling to send emergency help to Haiti now, however, have during the last five years consistently voted against any extension of the UN mission's mandate beyond its immediate military purpose. Proposals to divert some of this ‘investment' towards poverty reduction or agrarian development have been blocked, in keeping with the long-term patterns that continue to shape the ­distribution of international ‘aid'"[6]

And that's only part of the story. The USA and France have been fighting for control of this island through coups, violence and armed militia that terrorise men women and children on a daily basis.

The media circus around ‘international solidarity' is therefore unbearably repulsive. The different states are making all the publicity they can about ‘their' NGOs. ‘their' food parcels, showing the best pictures of the people ‘their' aid workers have saved from the ruins. Even worse, while bodies pile up, France and America are involved in a ruthless war for influence. In the name of humanitarianism, they have sent in their military fleet to take control of operations under the pretext of the need for coordinating the operations.

As with every catastrophe, all the declarations about long term aid, all the promises about reconstruction and development, will amount to nothing. Over the past ten years, in the wake of earthquakes, there have been:

-          15,000 dead in Turkey, in 1999

-          14,000 dead in India, in 2001

-          26,200 dead in Iran in 2003

-          210,000 in Indonesia in 2004 (the under-water earthquake having given rise to a gigantic tsunami which claimed victims as far away as Africa)

-          88, 000 deaths in Pakistan, in 2005

-          70,000 dead in China, in 2008

Each time, the ‘international community' has been suitably moved and sent in miserable amounts of aid, but never real investments aimed at bringing lasting improvements to the situation, by erecting anti-earthquake buildings for example. Humanitarian aid, real support for the victims, prevention, are not profitable activities for capitalism. When it exists, humanitarian aid is used as an ideological smokescreen to make people think that this system of exploitation can be human after all,  if it's not directly an alibi for justifying the dispatch of military forces and gaining influence in this or that region of the world.

A single fact reveals the bourgeois hypocrisy of the humanitarianism and international solidarity of the states: the French minister of immigration, Eric Besson, has just decreed the "temporary" suspension of deportations of illegal immigrants back to Haiti. That says it all.

The horror striking the population of Haiti can only engender tremendous feelings of sadness. The working class will, as after each hecatomb, react by responding to the various calls for financial aid. It will show once again that its heart beats for humanity, that solidarity has no frontiers.

But, above all, such a horror must feed its anger and its will to fight. The real responsibility for the 50,000 or more deaths in Haiti lies not with nature or fate but with capitalism and its states.

Pawel, 15 January 2010             

[1] Libération , https://www.liberation.fr/monde/0101613901-pres-de-50-000-morts-en-haiti... [44]

[2] Libération (https://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/home/2010/01/s%C3%A9isme-en-ha%C3%A... [45]).

[3] https://www.bme.gouv.ht/alea%20sismique/Al%E9a%20et%20risque%20sismique%... [46]

[4] Científicos alertaron en 2008 sobre peligro de terremoto en Haití sur le site Yahoomexico (Assiociated Press du 15/01/2010)

[5] PressEurop (https://www.presseurop.eu/fr/content/article/169931-bien-plus-quune-cata... [47]).

[6] https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/13/our-role-in-haitis-... [48]

James Cameron's Avatar is turning into something of a sensation. Everything about it is extravagant: filmed in 3D, computer generated images of unprecedented sophistication (the production platform data storage apparently reached one petabyte[1]) - everything about this film is extravagant, including the cost. And like any work of art, Avatar offers us a certain image of the society in which we live.

The film's story is blindingly simple. On the planet Pandora, a powerful Earth corporation has discovered deposits of a rare and precious mineral; it despatches on site machines and workers (who remain invisible throughout) to open a mine. The only problem, is that the planet, covered by a magnificent virgin forest, is already inhabited by a humanoid people, blue-skinned and three metres high, who have no intention of being kicked out without fighting back. The mining company is thus accompanied by an armed force which looks remarkably like the American army, along with bombers and helicopters and "mekkas" straight out of a Japanese manga. Any resemblance to the conquest of America, the rape of Vietnam, or the pillage of the environment being carried out today in the Amazon is of course anything but accidental. In the hope of convincing the natives - the "Na'avi" - to let themselves be moved on without bloodshed, and above all without bad publicity, the company has also sent a research team equipped with technology allowing them to create Na'avi bodies - "avatars" - which are "inhabited" by the minds of human "pilots" who remain in the shelter of their base camp. The avatars can thus move freely on the planet's surface (the atmosphere is poisonous for humans) in order to "win the confidence" of the natives. One of these "pilots", the ex-marine Jake Scully whose human body is stuck in a wheelchair, falls in love with a beauty from the local tribe (a sort of blue Pocahontas) and joins her people to lead the struggle against the invaders.

So much for the story - what about the film as a whole? Visually, you can't complain. Not only is the CGI perfectly convincing (the Na'avi look as "real" as the humans), the designers have really let their imaginations go to create a whole Pandorian exo-biology, with a vast fresco of plants, animals, and even insects, all with a coherence and an attention to detail which recalls some of Miyazaki's best anime films. It's impossible not to be captivated when the Na'avi take off on their great flying reptiles and when we - thanks to the depth of 3D projection - can realise one of humanity's oldest dreams and fly alongside them.

It's just as well that the film is visually impressive, because the plot is a wretched mish-mash of rip-offs from other films. The "noble savages" living in harmony with nature (Green), the decent whites who try to stop the massacre (a frequent theme in the Western genre), the stranger who falls in love and seeks the acceptance of the tribe (Dances with Wolves), the insensitive and brutal military commander (Apocalypse Now, but without the madness and the culture), the female scientist in a macho world (Sigourney Weaver reprises her role in Alien) - nothing's been left out. Even the ending, where the whole ecosystem is set in motion to repel the invader, is filched from Harry Harrison's Deathworld novels. What interest can there possibly be in such a film?

In fact, this film is interesting not for the story - banal - nor for the characters - cardboard cut-outs - but for its themes. Who are they aimed at? What ideology are they plugging?

Before being a work of art, Avatar is above all an enormous financial investment (between $250 and $300 million) which has to make a profit. This, moreover, is impossible merely by relying on the US market: according to an article in The Economist of 28th November, two thirds of the profits from a blockbuster come from outside the United States. To succeed, the film must therefore appeal to emotions which are widespread in the world population, or at least among the youth of the industrialised world. In this sense, the Situationists of the 1960s were right to say that the "society of the spectacle" (ie capitalism) stages our own dreams in order to sell them back to us.

In terms of sales, Avatar has undeniably been a success, having already earned more than $1 billion in ticket sales. It is striking that it has been a huge hit in France and Germany, the two European countries where opposition to the war in Iraq was especially strong. One reason is undoubtedly the unflattering image (to say the least!) that the film offers of the US Marines, and even more the fact that they take a pasting and are forced to leave with their tails between their legs.

That said, James Cameron manages to make it up to his American audience. At the beginning of the film we learn that the soldiers in question "used to be marines, fighters for freedom", but that they have become mercenaries since; the hero is himself an ex-Marine. One can therefore blame their brutal militarism, not on the state and its loyal servants, but on the private armies like those currently deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan by the "security firms" which provide logistics and "protection" to big companies like Halliburton, but also, and increasingly, directly to the US army.

As far as the "good guys" are concerned, the Na'avi obviously represent humanity's old dream of a life once more in accord with nature. They hunt, but they kill their prey with respect, they manage to live peacefully in the forest despite its dangers. Cameron doesn't bother with metaphysics - the ties between the Na'avi and the natural world depend on the fact that the planet is itself a living creature (an idea pinched from Stanislas Lem's novel Solaris, recently made into a film by George Clooney) and all the planet's inhabitants are equipped with a sort of bionic USB key that allows them to "plug in" to other animals and plants. The film is a long string of improbabilities. The male Na'avis are blue Apaches and "great warriors", though it's hard to see how since they had nobody to fight before the humans came. The females are the males' equals - they even go hunting - which doesn't stop them being stuck in "feminine" roles (there are no female warriors for example). And so on and so on.

But it works! The film ends with a burst of adrenalin and the audience is delighted to see the natives kick the mining company off the planet (probably the most unlikely part of the whole story!).

It's sheer fantasy of course. Nonetheless it is interesting to compare this fantasy, which has hit the screens in the midst of an economic catastrophe, with those created during the last crash. In the 1930s, a large part of Hollywood's output was devoted to films full of playboys, millionaires, and adventurers - the world of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. That dream no longer works. In Avatar, big business is definitely the bad guy. Today, the dream that pulls in the biggest profits for the capitalist fantasy machine, is the dream of a world from which capitalism has been definitively banished.

Jens, 21/01/2010

[1] 1 petabyte = 1,000 terabytes, 1 terabyte = 1,000 gigabytes

It is with the greatest sorrow that we have to inform our readers of the death of comrade Jerry Grevin (who also published under the initials JG) in the United States. He suffered from a sudden heart attack on the afternoon of Thursday February 11th and died immediately. For all the comrades, this comes as a terrible shock and especially for our American comrades who worked with him on a daily basis.

Many comrades have known comrade Jerry for more than 30 years and know his profound commitment and dedication to the cause of communism which began in his youth through his very active participation in the anti-Vietnam war movement, before he joined the ICC in the 1970s. In the ICC, the comrade has been at the heart of the life of the American section, including during the difficult period the ICC went through during the 1990's, and he has been a driving and enthusiastic force in the recent development of our contacts in the United States. All the comrades who knew Jerry also remember his zest for life and his sense of humour in the face of all the difficulties that life inevitably brings. The loss of comrade Jerry is not only a loss for the American section, it is a terrible loss for the whole ICC and for our class.

We will be publishing a longer tribute to the comrade in our press shortly. In the meantime we want to communicate our solidarity to all Jerry’s comrades, family and friends and our determination to carry on with the revolutionary work he believed in so passionately.   

A soldiers tale

    All the endless anticipation could not prepare you

All the training casually comes and goes

If you have been pulled and stretched in every way

Have been sent to the edge of the crevice

and been tempted to look down,

All the while feeling yourself on the crest of

grim madness and bloodthirsty insanity

If you've had to kill or be killed and so killed 

in anger and hate and blind panic,

When friend and foe alike blur

with barely time to register or regret,

To try and duck something that could kill you

before you'd thought to duck

If you've had to carry someone in your hands

as their life dribbled away with every jerk and heave

Heard the last exhalations of two hundred

cursing and shouting the name of their most beloved 

Maria or Mark or God

Have fought the protestations of your innards

ejecting themselves at the visceral scenes

(now safely locked away)

After all of this, and all of that  -

what does a return to normality mean?

Graham

At the beginning of January, in Rosarno, a town of 15,000 people in Calabria in the south of Italy, there were violent confrontations between local and immigrant workers. On 7 January, air gun pellets were shot at African immigrants in broad daylight. Two of them were seriously wounded. The pellets were fired by some ‘youths' but behind them was the hand of the ‘ndragheta', the Calabrian mafia. They are the region's bosses and pay the wages of local agricultural workers. For years, they have been making use of cheap African labour, which is in plentiful supply. These immigrant workers work for long hours and miserable wages[1], and at night are parked in an insalubrious former cheese factory. This year, however, this cheap labour force has become an encumbrance.

Firstly, the economic crisis is hitting Rosarno as it has hit the rest of the world. The oranges and mandarins are not selling; right now it's more profitable to leave them to rot on the trees than to harvest them. The majority of the African workers are therefore no longer useful and have lost their jobs. At the same time, new anti-immigrant legislation has been adopted in Italy: it reinforces the witch-hunt for illegal immigrants and penalises bosses for employing them. For the little work that's left, the mafia has therefore turned to ‘legal' immigrants from Eastern Europe (in particular from Ukraine and Romania). 1500 Africans and their families, who have come to Italy just to survive, are therefore caught between super-exploitation and unemployment. Anger and tension have risen bit by bit in their ranks: these semi-slaves, hitherto fairly docile, have begun to hold demonstrations. The ndragheta then decided to scare them into flight by firing on them. From beasts of burden, the immigrants are now prey.

However, instead of just lying down and taking all this, these workers went en masse onto the streets, burning bins and cars, smashing windows and wrecking buildings. In reaction, hundreds of local inhabitants, armed with iron bars and sticks, began a hunt for black skins, shouting "get back to Africa" and "we want to kill them". These confrontations left 67 wounded (31 immigrants, 19 policemen and 17 local inhabitants). It would seem that here again the mafia played a central role in stirring up the local population and putting themselves at the head of these improvised militias[2].  It was not difficult to instil such hatred in a population hit by poverty and unemployment, which officially affects 18% of the working class in this region.

But poverty alone is not enough to explain why a part of the population allowed itself to be pulled into a nauseating racist vendetta, or why the immigrants responded by smashing up stuff belonging to local people. In reality, the primary cause of these clashes "between poor people", as the international press put it - in other words, between workers - is despair, the total lack of any perspective: "It was a hell, we couldn't understand anything; it's true that we smashed everything we could, but it was because we are so angry. We are desperate, and if you add despair to anger, it's easy to go off the rails. When we got back to the cheese factory, we looked ourselves in the eyes and we were ashamed of what we had done. I cried the whole night thinking about the terrified people" (Godwin, a Ghanaian day-worker, 28 years old, quoted in La Repubblica, 9/1/10).

Only workers' struggles can restore confidence in the future, can allow people to see that a different world is possible, a world not of hatred but of solidarity. If we contrast these events with what happened recently in Britain, in the strikes in the oil construction industry, we can see how the struggle of the workers can begin to question nationalist divisions. In the unofficial strikes that broke out at Lindsey and elsewhere last year, despite all the slogans about "British jobs for British workers", which were promoted by the unions but which many workers took up themselves, we also saw the beginnings of a challenge to nationalist ideology, for example in the banners calling for Italian and Portuguese workers to join the strikes. Such developments in consciousness, even if they were only clearly expressed by a minority, were possible because the workers were fighting on their own class ground. The pogroms in Rosarno, the clashes between Italian and immigrant workers, were a pure expression of a society in decomposition; but when workers fight for their own demands, the way is open to overcoming all such divisions and offering real hope for the future.  

Pawel/Amos 7/2/10

[1] The pay is one euro for a basket of mandarins and 6 cents for a kilo of oranges with a maximum wage of around 15 euro a day for 12 to 14 hours work

[2] Apart from the actual mafia, the cruelty and cynicism of the whole Italian bourgeoisie in these events should also be emphasised. The Berlusconi government has been profiting from them by launching a xenophobic campaign and justifying a whole series of anti-immigrant measures. The minister of the interior, Maroni, thus asserted "The situation in Rosarno is difficult, the result of a clandestine immigration that has been tolerated for all these years without anything effective being done ". In fact, the state, on the one hand, hunts down illegal immigrants and expels them in order to limit numbers, and, on the other hand, allows the bosses to exploit massively and shamefully (when it doesn't do it itself directly) a cheap labour force, thus improving ‘national competitiveness'. There are over 50,000 immigrant workers living in Italy in insalubrious housing similar to that in Rosarno. Getting back to the recent events and the ‘protection' offered by the state to immigrants who have been the victims of pogroms: when they intervened, the police injured a lot of the immigrants and afterwards, in order to ‘protect' them, found nothing better to do than push them into  ‘retention centres' in order to ‘control their situation' and deport all those whose papers were not in order! This is the inhumanity that the bourgeoisie is capable of, whether it presents itself in the guise of the mafia or of very respectable high officials of the state!

We have recently heard of the death of José Ferran, an anarchist militant, a Spanish political refugee in the wake of the war in Spain between 1936 and 1939. We want to pay homage to this fighter of the working class, because, although he had deep disagreements with some of our political positions, he still maintained contact with the ICC for 30 years, taking part in our public forums and discussing with us at the Wazemmes market in Lille[1]. It's there that we saw him in public for the last time: at the age of 95, he came to buy our paper Révolution Internationale, which he did nearly every month, taking the opportunity to hold long discussion with us, especially about those of our positions that annoyed him the most, in particular the question of the state. The ICC militants who knew him will not forget these intense verbal jousts, these animated but always fraternal discussions with a sincere comrade who was so profoundly attached to his class. 

[1] Later José had to go into a retirement home, and when we visited him there, he complained a lot about the residents' lack of political discussion and concerns!

The recent struggles of the Tekel workers in Turkey (Turkey: Solidarity with Tekel workers' resistance against government and unions! [61]) has shown that workers are not willing to lie down and accept the worsening conditions imposed upon them by the economic crisis. We have recently published a statement of solidarity from the Nucleo Proletario in Peru (Solidarity from Peru for the Tekel workers [62]) . Below we publish two more statements of solidarity which show that the struggles of the workers in Turkey are not just a local affair but are the concern and inspiration for workers of all countries. The first is a joint statement from two groups in Peru the Grupo de Lucha Proletaria and the Organización Anarco Punk, the second from the Internationalist Discussion Circle of Ecuador-South America. As with the statement by the NPP, the one by the GLP and Organización Anarco Punk contains a certain overestimation of the degree to which the Tekel workers succeeded in creating their own independent organs of struggle, but this does not diminish the importance of these documents as expressions of a growing awareness that the class struggle has the same fundamental needs all over the planet.

Declaration of internationalist solidarity

The militancy of the Tekel workers is an example to all of us!

The Tekel workers have given to the workers of the world an example of unequalled struggle, at a time when the crisis of capitalism is worsening the living and working conditions of millions of workers throughout the world. At a time when the decomposition of decadent capitalism is making the development of workers' consciousness difficult, we have seen that against all predictions the proletariat of Turkey has developed its consciousness and strength, showing that they have the weapons with which to struggle against the state, its parties, the unions and capitalism. They have made their solidarity, their confidence, their lessons and reflections constant tools in their struggles.

This letter is a salute to the titanic effort that the proletariat of Tekel/Turkey has shown in its present struggles. What we have to highlight here is the workers' capacity to self-organise their struggle with full class autonomy and showing an unrivalled development of consciousness. This is an example that the workers of the world have to take up.  The Tekel workers' have shown:

1. That the unions are state and management organs who are always at their service like dogs, and who act as a hindrance to workers' struggles and who only represent the interests of the bourgeoisie and the state.
2. The proletariat of Tekel have demonstrated the self-organisation of their struggles, faced with the unions, political parties and the state.
3. They have counter-posed proletarian internationalism to nationalism and fascism
4. They have demonstrated self-confidence, in their strength and capacity to develop their struggles beyond frontiers.
5. Furthermore they have been doing all they can to develop their struggle in an expanding collective manner and spread it to other struggling workers
6. The workers have developed important weapons for their struggle such as solidarity[1] and mutual help.
7. The Tekel workers have shown a development of consciousness despite the difficulties of their struggle. Furthermore they have put forwards the idea of the mass strike amongst the workers something, we have also seen in Egypt, Spain, Greece and China...
8. The struggles of the Tekel workers against the capitalist order show the workers of the world their future path.

The struggle of the Tekel workers is an example of the struggle for life, for dignity.

From our Turkish brothers we can take the example of their forms of self-organisation of the struggle, of class autonomy. Capitalism trembles when it sees its proletarian enemy awaken and fiercely shake itself in order to break its chains of servitude and exploitation. The working conditions (reduction of wages, precarious work, increase in working hours, massive unemployment) that face the workers in Turkey are the same as those throughout the planet and are without a doubt brought about by the prevailing mode of production: the capitalist system of exploitation. This living experience of struggle continues.

Solidarity with the struggle of the proletariat of Turkey; proletarians of the rest of the world, follow their example! Workers of the world unite!

Grupo de Lucha Proletaria / Organización Anarco Punk, Peru 23/02/2010

Solidarity with the strike of the Tekel workers -Turkey

Dear comrades:

Please accept the fraternal greetings of the Internationalist Discussion Circle of Ecuador-South America.

Through unofficial means of communication, in this part of the world, on the other side of the Atlantic, we have learnt about the struggle that you have been waging for more than a month. As proletarians from this part of the planet we recognise in your struggle against the capitalists of the TEKEL factory, demands that are absolutely just, honest and necessary.

The working class is the same in all countries and the bourgeois exploiters are the same in Ecuador as they are in Turkey; with our hands the workers create the wealth on every continent and unfortunately for us have to exist miserably on slave wages which we do not allow us to live with dignity as human beings. The bourgeoisie is not content with exploiting us; they also want us to believe that workers are different by race, religion and nationality. But unlike the bourgeoisie we are not Ecuadorians, Mexicans, Germans, Turks, Kurds, Chinese, French, we are workers. The earth is worked by labour, therefore proletarians have no homeland because our destiny is the same: to struggle everywhere for a better future for humanity, of which our and your children are part.

We know that the bourgeoisie will use and is using every means at its disposal: repression, the unions, parliamentary negotiations, etc in order to demoralize you with the clear intention of weakening your struggles and your fighting spirit. However, the fact you have resisted for more than a month is the clear proof that your unity is not only worthy of applause but will serve as an example to other proletarian comrades in Turkey and in other countries such as this one.

Dear comrades, the capitalist mode of production which organises the world in all our countries, and whose disastrous effects are not different in the Americas, whose mechanisms of exploitation we already cannot bear, will in the not too distant future probably lead to the most spectacular proletarian uprisings that modern humanity has seen. Capitalist decay permeates every country, and its effects are impossible to hide through deception and intimidation. That is why your struggle is evidence of what is awaiting the world bourgeoisie

It is time to take back from the bourgeoisie what they have robbed from us: our freedom as human beings.

The proletariat of Turkey is not alone. There are thousands of workers who identify with your situation and who salute your actions as living proof that the working class is still standing and will not stop until it gets what by right belongs to it.

Long live the workers of TEKEL

Long live the unity of the workers of the world

Down with the bourgeoisie and its nations

Discussion Circle of Ecuador-South America 2/10.
 

[1]     "Solidarity is a practical activity of mutual support between human beings in the struggle for existence. It is a concrete expression of the social nature of humanity. As opposed to impulses such as charity or self-sacrifice, which presuppose the existence of a conflict of interests, the material basis of solidarity is a community of interests. This is why solidarity is not a utopian ideal, but a material force, as old as humanity itself." (International Review No 111 Orientation text 2001: Confidence and Solidarity in the proletarian struggle, part one [63].)

We are publishing here two short reports on recent meetings in London and Manchester which showed some small steps forward in developing collective discussion and activity among genuinely internationalist groups and tendencies.

WR public forums: internationalism at the heart of the struggle against war

WR's last two London forums have focussed on the question of revolutionaries and war. Why? Why not the crisis, surely that is currently the focus of workers' thoughts, especially with the threat of unemployment hanging over so many. Perhaps true, but despite the attempts of the bourgeoisie to anaesthetise the working class to the barbarism of war through the use of professional armies and their claims of ‘defending democracy' from fundamentalism or totalitarianism, war remains a constant presence in decadent capitalism. In Britain the ruling class may be able to use the patriotism displayed at Wooton Bassett to ideologically bolster their claims that the conflict in Afghanistan is ‘humanitarian' and ‘against terror', but they can't hide the fact that scores of young people, who more often than not are effectively economic conscripts, are returning home in body bags while chaos continues to reign throughout the region.

There is another factor: the undefeated nature of the working class. Since the end of the period of counter-revolution in the late 1960s the working class internationally has continued, through many ups and downs to develop its combativity. We only have to look at the recent strikes in Turkey, Greece and Britain to see evidence for this. The bourgeoisie is only too aware of this, and it is these struggles, or the threat of what they may lead to, that are important factors in holding back a slide towards more generalised war. The failure of the bourgeoisie to fully dominate the social scene, prevents it, however sophisticated its ideology, from marching us to world war as it did in 1914 and 1945. 

By its very nature the working class is an international class, it has no country to defend, no side to support in wars between capitalist states. Workers in all countries must, as Lenin wrote in 1914, turn imperialist wars into civil wars, and fight the only war that can end all wars: the class war. The ideological fog of patriotism that descended in 1914 and 1939, which obscured this necessity, has to some extent been blown away by the class struggle but revolutionaries must work for its complete dispersal in order for the working class to see the capitalist state for what it really is: a militaristic monster drunk on blood.   

It was these ideas that dominated the discussion at both of our meetings.  At the first meeting in November, on internationalism and WWII (presentation available online), the focus was on the how the bourgeoisie uses ideology to defend imperialist war and what the proletarian alternative to war is. But it was the discussion at the second meeting in February, on how internationalists respond to war, that was the most interesting. Over the last few years the ICC has seen the world-wide development of a new internationalist milieu. Some of these new groups identify with the communist left tradition while others identify with anarchism and syndicalism. But whatever their origins they have internationalism at the heart of their politics. These developments have forced us to rethink our attitude towards anarchism. It is a broad movement with a range of positions and left communists, rather than relying on old schemas, must find a way of working alongside the internationalist elements in this milieu whenever possible. With this in mind WR explicitly invited comrades of the Anarchist Federation, Solidarity Federation and the Communist Workers Organisation to the meeting with the idea of clarifying where we agree and where we disagree and how internationalists can intervene together in the future.

What was made clear in the meeting was that all present (comrades from the CWO and AF along with some unaligned anarchists) agreed on the centrality of internationalism in response to imperialist war. The presence of a member of the Trotskyist International Bolshevik Tendency made this explicit when all present denounced their version of anti-imperialism, essentially a crude anti-Americanism, based on calling on the exploited and dispossessed to support their own bourgeoisie, the ‘lesser evil' against the bigger imperialism. There was also some agreement, based on the shared experience of the No War But the Class War groups in London and Sheffield, on how left communists and other internationalists can discuss and work together. The stunts and frenetic activism of the past were rejected in favour of further discussion and principled united interventions at any forthcoming war campaigns and pacifist demonstrations.

This meeting represents a small step forward in relations between internationalists in Britain and as such must be welcomed but there is much more work to be done.  This preliminary discussion needs to be developed and we call on all internationalists, whatever current they identify with, to contact us, organise joint meetings and take the discussion forward.

Kino 8/3/10

Manchester Class Struggle Forum on elections

At a time when Britain is facing a general election that has become all the more newsworthy because of the general concern for a ‘cleaner' politics following the MPs' expenses scandal, it is important that a forum has been created in Manchester where individuals can participate in discussion that attempts to articulate a proletarian perspective. And the Manchester Class Struggle Forum which is organised by the Manchester branch of the Anarchist Federation and supported by The Commune, took up the question of elections in its first meeting.

Most of the people in the meeting shared the view that voting has no value for the working class today and that despite many workers still having illusions in the Labour Party here (someone in the meeting referred to it as the ‘lesser evil'), the LP has, almost since its formation in the early 1900s, demonstrated its complete loyalty to the ruling class rather than the working class. And it's not just in Britain: left-wing governments everywhere have a record of imposing austerity (another person mentioned PASOK in the current situation in Greece as an example) and supporting war (the trade unions and the Labour Party have a strong pedigree here both last century and this and the recently deceased left firebrand, Michael Foot, was referred to as an enthusiast for the Falklands war).

Although the reading list circulated before the meeting (Gorter's Open Letter to Lenin and Lenin's Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder) and the presentation directed attention to the debates in the Third International in which anti-parliamentarism became a key position of the Left Communists, there wasn't scope in the time allowed to develop a real discussion of this, but different views of Lenin and the Bolshevik's intentions/concerns at this stage (1920) of the Russian Revolution were aired.

The other political groups present were the ICC and Solidarity Federation and there were a number of people who were not in any groups. The meeting was conducted in a fraternal atmosphere and the forum will meet again on Thursday, April 1st.

Duffy 8/3/10

During the last few days, our readers will have noticed that our web site has been subject to unavailability and unexpected extended down time. This is due to an increase of traffic over the last few months, which ended up by exceeding the capacity of out server. 

We are in the process of migrating all our sites over to a new, more powerful server. The work of rebuilding our sites is still ongoing and will oblige us from time to time to shut down for maintenance. We apologise in advance, and thank comrades for their patience! 

These last few months, the French media have reported copiously on the suicides of France Telecom employees (33 in 18 months, almost two per month). It's not the first time that the news has headlined cases of suicide at work or because of work. The same thing happened two years ago at Peugeot and Renault.

It is also important for revolutionaries to examine the question of suffering and suicide at work. In the first place, this is because everything concerning the conditions of life of the exploited class is one of their permanent preoccupations. But also, and above all, because the emergence and development of this phenomenon is a very expressive symptom of the state in which the capitalist system finds itself today - a state which with unprecedented urgency underlines the necessity to overthrow this system and replace it with a society capable of satisfying human needs.

The emergence of this phenomenon in France

Suicide at work is not an entirely new phenomenon because it's been known for a long time among farmers. A fundamental cause exists for that: in this profession the space between private and professional life is generally mixed up. The house of the farmer and the farm which is being worked on, are, the majority of the time, in the same immediate area.

What is new since the beginning of the 1990s is the appearance and increase of suicides at work in other sectors, in industry and above all the service sector. When someone kills themselves at home or outside of their work, it's not easy to prove that the principal cause of this gesture lies in suffering linked to work. This is what the bosses play on in order to avoid responsibility when the family of the victim tries to get their gesture recognised as work-related. On the other hand, when the suicide takes place at the place of work itself, avoidance of the issue by the bosses is more difficult. We should thus interpret suicide at work as the expression of a very clear message: "It's not because of sentimental break-up, a divorce or my ‘depressive nature' that I die, it's the bosses or the system that they represent which is responsible for my death".

The increase in the number of suicides at work or because of work thus shows the development of a much more massive phenomenon of which we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg: the increase of suffering at work.

Suffering at work is evidently not new: work-related sicknesses have existed for a long time, in fact since the industrial revolution which transformed human labour into a real hell for the majority of wage earners. From the beginning of the 19th century, socialist writers have denounced the conditions of work to which capital submits the human beings it exploits. That said, since this time and up to the end of the 20th century, suicide wasn't part of the response made by the exploited to suffering at work.

In fact, suicide is much more the result of mental, rather than physical suffering. But mental suffering isn't new either: bullying and humiliations on the part of all levels of bosses have also existed for a long time. But in the past, this suffering of the exploited wouldn't end up in suicide except in exceptional circumstances.

How is this phenomenon analysed by specialists?

Suicide has been studied for a long time, notably by the sociologist Durkheim at the end of the 19th century. Already, Durkheim had identified the social and not simply the individual roots of suicide: "If the individual gives in to the least shock of circumstances, it's because the state society finds itself in makes a victim quite ready for suicide."

Similarly, the studies of suffering at work, including its mental aspects, go back as far. That said, studies of suicides as a consequence of suffering at work are much more recent given the more recent development of this phenomenon. Several hypotheses have been advanced, and a certain number of facts have been established in order to explain the emergence of this phenomenon. We can particularly look at the reflections of Christophe Dejours, who is a psychiatrist, an ex-work doctor, lecturer and author of several celebrated books on the question (such as Souffrance en France: la banalisation de injustice sociale or Travail, usure mentale - Work, mental attrition).

Some hypotheses

1) The "centrality of work": work (understood not only as a means to earn a living but as a productive and creative activity beneficial to others) plays a central role in the mental health of each individual. From this, suffering in this sphere of life has consequences that are ultimately more dramatic than suffering coming out of the private or family sphere. Concretely, if someone is suffering in their family life then that has fewer repercussions in their life at work than the contrary.

2) The recognition of work and its quality from others: in a hierarchical society such as ours, this recognition evidently manifests itself in the consideration that one gets from the bosses and in the wages that one receives for the job (this can be called "vertical recognition"). But there exists another form of recognition that is ultimately more important for the workers in their daily lives: it's the recognition of their work by colleagues (called "horizontal recognition"). It is the sign that the worker is integrated into the community of "people at work" with whom one shares experiences and know-how, as well as the taste for "doing a job well-done". Even if workers are not liked by superiors or the boss because they won't conform to their demands, they can nevertheless maintain their equilibrium as long as comrades at work don't play the bosses' games and keep their confidence in others. On the other hand, everything is overturned if the confidence of other workers is lost.

Some facts

1) The growth of extra work: it's something which seems paradoxical because, with the development of new technologies allowing the automation of many tasks, some have announced "the end of work" or at least the possibility of significantly reducing the workload. For the last two decades, the contrary has been the case. The workload hasn't stopped increasing to such a point that, in a country like Japan, they've invented a new word for it, Karoshi, which specifies a sudden death (by cardiac crisis or cerebral vascular accidents) of subjects having no particular pathology but who are "killed at work" in the proper sense. It's a phenomenon that not only affects Japan even if it is more pronounced there. It has equally been observed in the United States and Western Europe.

The other manifestation of this weight of work which has necessitated the creation of a new word is "burn-out", which is a particular form of depression linked to exhaustion. It's an expressive term: the worker is reduced to a pile of cinders having had their energy burnt up.

2) The development of pathologies resulting from bullying and harassment.  These pathologies have been well studied today: depressive syndromes, memory trouble, spatial and temporal disorientation, sleep loss, persecution feelings, psychosomatic troubles (notably affecting the womb, glands, etc.).

Christophe Dejours analyses this phenomenon thus:

"Harassment at work is not new. It's as old as work itself. What is new are the pathologies. It's new because there is so much many more of them now and there were much fewer beforehand. Between harassment on one side, and the pathologies on the other, we must see how people at work have been made fragile by these manoeuvres of intimidation. This process of becoming more fragile can be analysed and the results are quite precise. It is linked to the destructuring of what are called the defensive resources, in particular collective defence and solidarity. It is the determinant element in the increase of pathologies. In other words, pathologies from harassment are, above all, pathologies of solitude." (Christophe Dejours, ‘Alienation et clinque du travail', Actuel Marx, no. 39).

"Twenty or thirty years ago, harassment and injustices existed, but there weren't suicides at work. Their appearance is linked to the destruction of solidarity between wage earners." (Interview with Christophe Dejours published in Le Monde, 14.08.09)

Here he touches on a very important element of mental suffering linked to work and which in great part explains the increase of suicides: the isolation of the worker.

... and some interpretations

How do the specialists understand this phenomenon of the isolation of workers?

To explain it Dejours accords a particular importance to the establishment these last two decades of individual performance-related evaluations.

"Individualised appraisals, when they are linked to contracts of objectives or a management of objectives, when centred on results or on profits, lead to the setting up of generalised competition between workers, even between services in the same firm, between sub-companies, branches, workshops, etc.

This competition, when it's associated with the threat of redundancy, leads to a profound transformation of relations at work. Relations at work are already degraded when they are more or less associated with bonuses. But when the appraisal is not coupled with benefits but with sanctions or threats of redundancy, its noxious effects become patent. Individualisation pushes towards everyman for himself, competition leading to disloyalty between colleagues; distrust is insinuated between the workers.

"The final result of the appraisal is the profound destruction of confidence, collectivity and solidarity. And, added to that, it wears down defensive resources against the pathological effects of suffering and of the constraints of work" (‘Alienation et clinique du travail').

He also underlines that one of the successes of these new measures of subordination lies in their passive acceptance by the majority of workers, notably in a growing climate of fear of losing one's job faced with increasing unemployment.

He considers that the establishment of these new methods corresponds to the triumph of liberal ideology during the last 20 years.

Dejours is also concerned with what he calls "ethical suffering": the fact that the workers, gripped in the vice of increasingly insupportable workloads and the necessity to show the realisation of untenable objectives fixed in advance for them, are led to do a bad job, and very often disapprove of the work they do, telemarketing for example. This is an ethical suffering which equally affects the teams who have to set up these new methods and who are being asked to turn themselves into torturers.

Finally, he notes that the question of the increase of suffering at work has been ignored in the claims put forward by the trade unions.

Our own analysis

What link can there be between these analyses of specialists (in this case, Christophe Dejours) and the vision of our organisation?

In fact the ICC can instantly recognise itself in these analyses even if, evidently, the point of departure is not identical. Christophe Dejours is first of all a doctor whose vocation is to care for sick people, in this case people who are sick through their work. But his intellectual rigour obliges him to go to the root of the pathologies he proposes to treat. For its part, the ICC is a revolutionary organisation which fights capitalism with the perspective of its overthrow by the class of wage workers.

But if one takes up each of the points he presents, one can see that they can be very well integrated into our own vision.

The "centrality of work"

It is one of the bases of the marxist analysis of society:

- the role of labour, that's to say the transformation of nature in the rise of the human species has been advanced by Engels, notably in his work ‘The role of labour in the transition of ape to man';

- relations of production, that's to say all of the links between human beings in the social production of their existence, constitute for marxism, the infrastructure of society; other  spheres of the latter, juridical relations, modes of thought, etc., depend, in the last instance, of these relations of production;

- Marx considered that in communist society, when labour is emancipated from the constraints of capitalist society which very often transforms it into a real calamity, it will become the primary need of humanity.

Recognition by others:

It is one the essential bases of solidarity and associated labour.

Solidarity is one of the fundamentals of human society, a characteristic which with the struggle of the proletariat assumes its most complete form, internationalism: solidarity is no longer manifested towards the family, members of the tribe or the nation, but towards the whole human species.

Associated labour supposes that one can count on one and all in the productive process, that one is mutually recognised. This has existed since the beginning of humanity, but in capitalism it takes on its greatest extension. It is really this socialisation of labour which makes communism necessary and possible.

The increasing workload

The ICC, with the whole of the marxist vision, has always considered that the progress of technology in no way allows, by itself, a reduction of the workload in the capitalist system. The "natural" tendency of this system is to take still more surplus value from wage labour. And even when there is a reduction in the working week (as was the case in France with the 35-hour's) there was an intensification of rotas, shifts and cuts in breaks, etc. It's a reality which is taking on even more violent forms with the aggravation of the crisis of capitalism which exacerbates the competition between capitalist enterprises and between states.

The loss of solidarity which leaves workers much more vulnerable faced with harassment and intimidation

This is a phenomenon that the ICC has analysed during the last two decades under two angles:

- the retreat in consciousness and combativity within the working class resulting from the collapse of the so-called "socialist" regimes in 1989 and the campaigns around the alleged "definitive victory of liberal capitalism" and the "end of the class struggle";

- the deleterious effects of the decomposition that capitalism engenders, notably "everyman for himself", "atomisation", the "destruction of relations on which all life in society is based" (‘Decomposition, final phase of the decadence of capitalism', International Review no. 62, 2nd quarter 1990).

These two factors greatly explain the fact that in the past twenty years capitalism has been able to introduce new methods of servitude without provoking a response from the working class.

Those who kill themselves because of their work are, in general, those who try to resist this growth of barbarity at the workplace. Contrary to many of their colleagues, they are not resigned to submitting to this increase in the workload, the bullying and contempt which is applied to their efforts to "do a good job". But as there is not yet any collective resistance, or sufficient solidarity between the workers, the resistance and revolt against injustice remains individual and isolated. The one and the other are both condemned to failure. And the ultimate consequence of this failure is suicide which is not only an act of despair but also a last cry of revolt against a system that has wiped the individual out. The fact that this revolt takes the form of self-destruction is, in the final count, only another expression of the nihilism invading the whole of capitalist society, itself on the road to self-destruction.

When the proletariat once again takes up its road of massive struggles, when solidarity returns to the proletariat's ranks, there will no longer be suicides at work.

Fabienne and Mg 1/3/10

Our comrade Jerry Grevin, a long-time militant of the ICC's US section, died suddenly of a heart attack on 11th February 2010. His early death is a tragic loss to our organization and to all those who knew him: his family has lost a loving and affectionate husband, father, and grandfather; his colleagues at the college where he taught have lost an esteemed co-worker; his fellow ICC militants, in his section and all over the world, have lost a much-liked and dedicated comrade.

Jerry Grevin was born in 1946, in Brooklyn, into a working-class family of second-generation Jewish immigrants. His parents were imbued with a critical spirit which led them first into, then out of the CPUSA. Jerry's father was deeply shocked by the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which he witnessed as a member of the US occupying forces at the end of World War II; although he never spoke of this experience, and his son only learnt of it much later, Jerry was convinced that this had deepened the anti-patriotic, anti-war spirit he inherited from his parents.

One of Jerry's finest qualities, which never left him, was his burning, unwavering indignation at all forms of injustice, oppression, and exploitation. From his earliest adulthood he took an energetic part in the great social causes of his time. He joined in organizing the mass demonstrations against segregation and racial inequality by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in the American South. This demanded no small measure of courage, since activists and demonstrators were routinely subjected to abuse, beatings, and even murder, and Jerry, as a Jew, was not only a fighter against racial prejudice but also an object of racial prejudice himself.1

For his generation, especially in the United States, the other vital issue of the day was opposition to the Vietnam War. Exiled to Montreal in Canada, Jerry was a moving spirit in one of the various committees set up as part of the "Second Underground Railroad"2 created to help deserters from the US Army escape from America and build new lives abroad. He undertook this activity, not as a pacifist, but with the conviction that resistance to the military order could and should be part of a wider class struggle against capitalism, taking part in a short-lived militant publication Worker and Soldier. Many years later, Jerry was able to gain access to a heavily censored copy of his FBI file: its thickness and detail - the file was regularly updated while he was a militant in the ICC - gave him no small satisfaction, and led to some caustic comments at the expense of those who think that police and intelligence services "don't bother" with today's small and "insignificant" groups of militants.

On his return to the United States in the 1970s, Jerry found work as a telephone engineer with one of the major phone companies. It was a turbulent time of class struggle, as the economic crisis began to bite, and Jerry was involved in workplace struggles both large and small, at the same time as he participated in a publication called Wildcat, urging direct action and put out by a small group of the same name. Although he was to become disenchanted with Wildcat's immediatism and lack of any broader, long-term political perspective - it was the search for just such a perspective that led him to join the ICC - his direct, shop-floor experience, coupled with his lively powers of observation and a comprehensive attitude towards the foibles and prejudices of his fellow workers, gave him a profound insight into the way that consciousness develops concretely within the working class. As a militant of ICC, his political arguments would often be illustrated by vivid images, drawn from his own experience.

One such described an incident in the American South, where his gang of New York telephone workers had been sent on a job. A black worker in the group was victimized by management for some alleged misdemeanor; the New Yorkers sprang to his defense, to the surprise of their Southern co-workers: "Why bother?" they asked, "he's only a nigger". To which one of the New Yorkers vigorously replied that color didn't matter, that workers were all workers together, and that they had to defend each other against the bosses. "Now the remarkable thing", Jerry would conclude, "is that this guy who was strongest in defense of the black worker, was known in the group as a racist who himself had moved to Long Island to avoid living in a black neighborhood. And that shows how class struggle and solidarity is the only real antidote to racism".

Another story he liked to tell concerned his first encounter with the ICC. To quote the words of one comrade's personal tribute "As I heard him say a million times, it was when he first met a militant of the ICC when he was, as he described himself, 'an immediatist and individualist youth' writing articles solo and distributing them, that it dawned on him that revolutionary passion without organization can be only a youthful, passing flame. That was when the ICC militant put the question to him, 'OK, you write and you are a marxist. but what do you do for the revolution?'. Jerry told this story often and said that the following night he could not sleep. But it was a sleepless night that brought tremendous fruit". Many would have been put off by the blunt comment he got from the ICC, but not Jerry. On the contrary, this story (which he told with amusement at his own state of mind at the time) reveals another facet of Jerry's character: his ability to accept the force of argument and to change his mind when he was convinced by different ideas - an invaluable quality in the political debate which is the lifeblood of a true proletarian political organization.

Jerry's contribution to the ICC has been inestimable. His knowledge of the workers' movement in America was encyclopedic; his ready pen and his lively vernacular brought this history alive for our readers in his many articles written for our press in the United States (Internationalism) and for the International Review. He also had a remarkable grasp of political life and the class struggle in the USA today, and his articles on current affairs, both for our press and in our internal bulletins have provided a much valued input to our understanding of the politics of the world's greatest imperialist power.

His contribution to the ICC's internal life and organizational integrity was equally important. For many years, he has been a pillar of our American section, a comrade who could always be relied upon to step into the breech when things got difficult. During the discouraging years of the 1990s when the whole world - but perhaps especially the United States - was awash in propaganda over the "victory of capitalism", Jerry never lost his conviction in the necessity and possibility of a communist revolution, he never stopped reaching out to those around him, to the section's rare new contacts. His loyalty to the organization and to his comrades was unshakable, all the more so because, as he put it himself, it was his participation in the ICC's international life that gave him courage and allowed him to "recharge his batteries".

On a more intimate note, Jerry was also an extraordinarily funny man, and a gifted storyteller. He could - he often did - keep an audience of friends or comrades laughing for hours at a time at tales most often drawn from his own observation of life. While his stories sometimes deployed a barbed wit at the expense of the bosses or the ruling class, it was striking that they were never cruel or unkind. On the contrary, they revealed his affection and sympathy for his fellow man, as well as an all too rare ability to laugh at his own weaknesses. This openness to others was doubtless one of the qualities that made Jerry such an effective (and appreciated) teacher - a profession that he came to late in life while already in his forties.

Our tribute to Jerry would be incomplete if we left unmentioned his passion for Zydeco music (a musical form that originated and is still played among the Louisiana creoles). The demon dancer from Brooklyn was known in Zydeco festivals all across the Louisiana back country, and Jerry took pride in the help he was able to offer some young and unknown bands to find venues and an audience in New York. That was Jerry through and through: enthusiastic and energetic in all he undertook, open and warmhearted towards others.

We feel Jerry's loss all the more keenly in that his last years were among his happiest. He was delighted to become the grandfather of an adored grandson. Politically, he saw the development of a new generation of contacts around the ICC's US section and threw himself into the work of correspondence and discussion with all his customary energy. His dedication bore fruit in the Days of Discussion held in New York only a few weeks before his death, which brought together young comrades from all across the USA, many of them meeting each other for the first time. Jerry was delighted at the outcome, and considered this meeting, with all the hopes for the future that it embodied, to be one of the crowning achievements of his militant activity. It is fitting then that we leave the final word to two young comrades, both of whom took part in the Days of Discussion: for JK "Jerry was a trusted comrade, and a warm friend... Jerry's knowledge of the history of the workers' movement in the US; the depth of his personal experience in the struggles of the 70s and 80s and his commitment to keeping the flame of left communism alive in the U.S. through the difficult time following the so-called 'death of communism' were unmatched". For J, "Jerry was something of a political mentor to me over the last year and a half. He was also a very dear friend. (...) He was always willing to talk and help younger comrades learn how to intervene and understand the historical lessons of the workers' movement. His memory will live on in all of us, in the ICC, and throughout the rest of the class struggle".

ICC

1In an infamous case in 1964, three young civil rights activists (James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner) were murdered by police officers and Ku Klux Klan members. Two of the activists were New York Jews.

2The name "Underground Railroad" was a reference to the 19th century network of safe houses and anti-slavery activists set up prior to the American Civil War to help run-away slaves escape to the American North and Canada.

We have recently, despite the cordon sanitaire imposed by the bourgeoisie and its supposed "means of information", learnt about your struggle to improve working conditions and wages, a struggle in which the crisis of capitalism can clearly be seen. The bourgeoisie throws us into poverty while they live off the blood and sweat we leave on their machines (which we also build, from raw materials which is also extracted at the cost of our lives). The bourgeoisie and its media have done all they can to stop us finding out about the struggle of our class at the international level. Here in Peru there has not even been the smallest report of the struggle you have been waging for a month; faced with this the class has to keep its eyes open, doing all we can to spread information about all our struggles, all our victories and also denouncing the opportunist union organisations and their bureaucratic bosses who play with our lives. We have to support each other across the world, since as the old saying goes "the emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves". We value and welcome your struggle, because it has animated you through your assemblies and the autonomous organisation that you have used in your struggle.

Here in Peru we are also part of the immense world-wide class and are suffering as you suffer in Turkey. Maybe we are exploited more or less than you, more openly or in a more hidden way, from one region to the other, but we can be sure we are all equally exploited, that we live in poverty at the cost of our labour. We are an international class, the class that creates the world's wealth. We therefore have no nationality but are united by our class interests. At the moment we do not have an international class party to represent us, therefore we in Peru can only send you, with these words couched in proletarian emotion, our solidarity, our sense of being united with you from here.

We want to reinforce our links: against the increased repression of the bourgeoisie we oppose our solidarity and self-confidence, and now more than ever this strike in Turkey has made us aware of our responsibility to group together on a class basis. We are not looking for alliances with the bourgeoisie. We are not going to fall for the lies that the unions in Turkey and throughout the world try to sell us, because they are enemies of the working class, an arm of the capitalist system to keep us from entering into direct struggles, to abort strikes and sit down at the bosses' table asking for charity, for the crumbs that belongs us, for bread that the proletariat made in the first place. We are not taken in by our supposed leaders and callers of strikes, stoppages and struggles. Despite our youth we can see that they are nothing but wolves in sheep's clothing who don't represent the working class but the ruling class. Therefore we trust in you, we trust in the struggle that you are carrying out against exploitation, for a better future, showing what we can achieve when united, stopping production and causing the representatives of the bourgeois state to tremble in their shoes.

Today we all have to be aware that it is not important whether firms are in the hands of private or state ownership; they represent the interests of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie. Despite the fact that Tekel is in the hands of the state the Tekel workers have always been exploited.  We know and re-affirm that the bourgeois state will never solve the problems of capitalism. The bourgeoisie is always telling us that the state is neutral, impartial; that it defends us; they say it is independent of social class, when it is nothing else than a bourgeois tool for ensuring the continuation of capitalist exploitation. The bourgeoisie talks through the mouth of the state. Therefore we salute you and are very enthusiastic to see that your struggle has destroyed this bourgeois illusion; your autonomous struggle shows what we must do at a world-wide level, to regain confidence in our own struggle as the working class and to win society's riches for ourselves. We know about shortages, the fight against the cold, tear gas, police repression, lack of job security and the other expressions of this bourgeois system. Your struggle is a burning light of hope for us, and we fully identify with you. So don't give up comrades! Your struggle has to overcome bourgeois confines, the road will be difficult, but our aims are justified: the state has to be pushed back by the strength that you have demonstrated. Your struggle is an example for the international proletariat.

These bourgeois parasites: how much do they think they will be able to exploit us? How much more of our blood do they think they can drain? How much longer do they think they can live off of us? Our struggle is historical, the class has thousands of experiences. Proletarian brothers: we must not miss this opportunity to draw lessons and apply them to our struggles. We must learn from history and understand that the world is made by us, and therefore belongs to us. The bourgeoisie want to repress you, to stop your struggle, and divide us through fear. They do the same here. How many are they? We are millions, our strength is the confidence that we have in each other. Our united fists raised against one point will make the earth shake and transform it.

We are happy to know that internationally our class has taken up again method of struggle inherent in it. We know comrades that you have joined together in assemblies where you debate and take decisions (there is no better way of discussing the action to take). We also know that our best friend "the strike" is present in your struggle. This is the historical weapon of the class and we have to try to spread it, calling on other sections of the exploited, as we know is happening on the railways and public sector. We are millions, the bourgeois are few. Nobody can stop us!

Your demands are completely just, we hope that they are won, that the struggle goes further, we insist that our class is the only one that can free humanity from the capitalist yoke and get rid of the burden of class society.

This first step is not only yours but part of an immense human tide with the same interests. Your struggle is our struggle; its victory, which we are confident in, will also be our triumph. The international proletariat (of which we are an expression) has its eyes on you, the unfolding of your struggles provides us with lessons, thus we hope that the proletariat's solidarity, organisation and autonomous struggle will take root.

Comrades we are all one, we all have to push forwards the struggle against capitalism. Our lives have already been turned in to commodities. What more can we lose? Only our chains! On the other hand we have everything to win. We are condemned to victory.

Down with the unions that negotiate away workers lives!

Long live the struggle of the international proletariat!

Forward with the struggle comrades!

Nucleo Proletario in Peru, 15/2/10

[email protected] [76]

Thanks to a contribution by a comrade on the 3rd Febrary on the comments section of our Spanish language site, we have learnt about the joint struggle of unemployed and shipyard workers in Vigo in Spain.

We want to thank the comrade for his contribution and to express our agreement with the conclusion that he draws "Only the united struggle of all the unemployed and workers, through joint assembles and demonstrations can we win victory. Greetings to the workers and unemployed of the navel dockyards in Vigo. And workers and unemployed of the world, take up the example of the Vigo shipyards: unity, solidarity, all together we can overcome the capitalist world". In the same way, another contribution to our comments section underlined that "the article on the struggle of the unemployed and workers of the Vigo naval shipyards are lessons we have to take up...workers and unemployed have united together in demonstrations that have stopped the whole shipyard. Take 5 minutes to read it and learn a lot more, greetings".

We have consulted the Europa Press news agency, El Faro de Vigo and La Voz de Galicia to find out more[1], and despite the limitations due to the lack of information about the workers' actions, we can conclude that our contributors are correct to call our attention to the struggles that are taking place in Vigo.

In Vigo there are 60,000 unemployed and in 2009 8000 jobs were lost in the engineering sector alone. Workers' indignation and concern faced with an increasingly difficult future is widespread. In the naval dockyards there have been lay-offs resulting from an agreement between the unions and bosses at Bolsa, which talks about the possibility of some posts in the future.

Those laid off at la Bolsa - some 700- have reacted angrily to the fact that they are to be replaced by foreign workers on temporary contacts with lower pay and terrible conditions. Thus, for example, according to a spokesman for the unemployed "there are workers sleeping in car parks in cars and they can only eat one sandwich a day".

This was the spark that lit the fuse of the struggle. The comrades have made it clear that these struggles are not against the contracted foreign workers. Thus, a spokesman insisted that "we don't have any problems with foreign workers being contracted as long as the Pontevedra agreement is kept to".

Despite this, the media immediately played the card that the workers are xenophobic. For example, El Faro de Vigo titled the article dealing with the struggle "Unemployed metal workers oppose the employment of foreigners" which is a scandalous lie since it is the same unemployed workers who have denounced the bosses' manoeuvre that "took on cheap labour in working conditions close to slavery".

The bourgeoisie is a Machiavellian and cynical class. It employs foreign workers at worse conditions than those born in the country. If the latter struggle against this practice, they are immediately accused of racism, xenophobia, "supporting the extreme right", nationalism etc. When in reality, the response of the workers is not against their class brothers but against them being shipped in under inferior working conditions which drive down everyone's working conditions. This was what we saw in Great Britain in the struggles of the construction workers on the oil refineries and power centres; the struggle concerned all workers, and the movement in the refineries and power stations began to confront nationalism. Likewise the struggle of the workers of the Sestao naval shipyards.

On the 3rd February, the unemployed went to the gate of the Barreras shipyard - the most important in the sector- with the intention of holding an assembly with the workers there. However, the gates were closed so they had to shout slogans, having brought a megaphone in order to explain their demands. In the end a majority of the workers left the yard and joined with the unemployed. According to the Europa Press "Five riot vans were deployed, armed with plastic bullets and riot shields; however eventually they had to retire to the Beiramar roundabout". The Europa Press piece continued "Finally the group formed by the unemployed and workers went off towards Bouza;, along the way they were joined by workers from others shipyards in the area -such as Cardama, Armon or Feire-As; work was stopped throughout the naval dockyards".

In this experience we have seen the expression of solidarity and unity between unemployed and employed comrades; common assemblies, street demonstrations used to make the struggle known to other workers; direct communication and contact with workers from other firms in order to win them over to the common struggle. As in Vigo in 2006, the workers took up the proletarian methods of struggle that have nothing to do with the corporatism and passivity of the unions.

On the 4th the struggle continued. At 10 in the morning, the unemployed assembled again outside the gate of Barreras. Again they united with their comrades inside the gates. Despite the presence of the riot police, they set off again in a demonstration. According to El Faro de Vigo, "yesterday's protest was watched by a strong police presence and there were tense moments, although finally there were no confrontations. The unemployed demonstrated in the area of the ship yards of Beiramar and Bouzas of Vigo, accompanied by workers from this sector, and promised to continue their mobilisation as long as the bosses do not join with them in solving the problems around the hiring of personnel".

We do not have any more news. However, we believe that these facts are significant of the militancy and consciousness of the workers, of the search for unity and solidarity faced with the blows dished out by Capital.

We want to draw the lessons from this movement and to express our active solidarity with those involved. The motivation for launching further struggles are not lacking: we have crossed the 4 million unemployed barrier; the government has announced the extension of the retirement age to 67, an increase in the time of paying contributions etc.

ICC 5/2/2010

[1] (see https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/vigo/2010/02/02/0003_8267541.htm# [78] y https://www.europapress.es/galicia/noticia-parados-naval-manifiestan-vigo-continuaran-movilizandose-arregle-problema-contratacion-20100203140943.html [79])

We have just received the "Appeal" published below from a group of comrades in Australia. The ICC supports this appeal wholeheartedly, and we urge our readers in Australasia or the region to contact the comrades at their mail address (given at the end of the Appeal). 

Comrades!

Today humanity faces the same ultimatum posed to it since the eve of the First World War, in the words of Rosa Luxemburg and Friedrich Engels before her - Socialism or Barbarism.

The world capitalist system has seen its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, with the working class taking the brunt of the blow, everywhere facing wage-freezes, job-cuts and worsening working conditions. The threat of global environmental catastrophe looks more possible than ever before. Bloody and brutal conflicts rage on around the globe - from Iraq to Afghanistan, Somalia to Sudan, Colombia to Mexico.

In contrast to these emanations of a moribund society we also see the germs of a new world - without exploitation or oppression, without poverty or scarcity, without wars or national borders - in the class struggle of the international working class.

The Communist Left has its origins in the Left currents of the Communist International which came into being as a proletarian response to its opportunist slidings when faced with the retreat of the international revolutionary wave in the 1920s. Whilst the Communist Left had expressions in many countries its most prominent representatives were to be found in Germany, The Netherlands, Italy and Russia. In the period of counter-revolution which opened at the end of the 1920s, it was the Communist Left which proved to be the most intransigent defenders of proletarian internationalism and the most rigorous in drawing up the balance sheet of the revolutionary wave.

Whilst sympathisers of the Communist Left do exist in Australia, at this point they do so only as individuals suffering largely from political isolation. In order to effectively intervene in the class struggle, it is necessary that revolutionaries organise themselves into a political organisation, founded on the basis of shared positions and principles.

However, at the present hour the immediate formation of such a group is not on the agenda in Australia. What is needed at present is the coming together of internationalists for discussion conducted with the goal of initiating and maintaining contact between comrades (particularly those who are geographically isolated) and collective political clarification of the positions which define the communist programme today.

Thus, we appeal for the initiation of organised discussions between all sympathisers of the Communist Left in Australia. It is proposed that the discussions are conducted under the name: ‘Internationalist Communist Affiliate Network'.

We propose the criteria for participation is agreement with the most elementary positions of left communism today:

• Imperialist war and national movements of all stripes have nothing to offer the working class but death and destruction. The working class must oppose all bourgeois camps. By calling on them to take the side of one or another faction, the bourgeoisie divide workers and lead them to massacre their class brothers and sisters.
• Parliament and bourgeois elections are a masquerade. Capitalist ‘democracy' does not differ at root from any form of capitalist dictatorship. Any call to participate in the parliamentary circus can only reinforce the lie that elections offer any real choice for the exploited.
• All unions are organs of the capitalist system and act in its service. The fundamental role of the unions is to police the working class and sabotage its struggles. In order to defend its immediate interests, and ultimately to make the revolution, the working class must struggle outside and against the unions.

All who may be interested in taking part are encouraged to write to [email protected] [83]. We also welcome any comments, questions and criticisms.

With fraternal communist greetings, Fabius, Jack, Max, Niccolo, Thomas
 

Capitalist barbarism at work

A huge hole in the parched red earth; dozens of bodies of men, women and children; a crowd weeping in grief. Horror has struck again in Nigeria. On the night of 6-7 March, several hundred people, all Christians, were massacred. These new atrocities took place in three villages in Plateau state, in the centre of Nigeria which stands between the south with its Christian majority and the north which has a majority of Muslims. While the corpses were still warm, different factions of the bourgeoisie were squabbling over how many people had died.

This new slaughter carried out by an extremist Muslim group called Boro Haram is just another in a series of killings over a number of years. Last January, over 300 people, mainly Muslims, were killed by Christians in Jos and its environs. Over the last 10 years, according to official figures, 10,000 people have been murdered in this way. And if you go back to Nigerian independence in 1960 you would have to count in millions. There is no doubt that there has been a real development of hatred within the Christian and Muslim populations, but a stark question is posed: who is really responsible for all these massacres? Who is permanently fanning the flames between the different communities? Who is arming and protecting the killers in both camps?

The bloody work of imperialism

Nigeria is by far the most heavily populated country in Africa. 130 million people live there and have been forced to try to survive in a situation of constant warfare. Between 1967 and 1970, there was a war which left two million dead. At the time, as today, this war was presented as a simple ethnic and religious conflict between the Muslim Hausas in the North and Christian Ibos in the South East. The latter tried to set up an independent state in the south by trying to separate the region of Biafra from the rest of Nigeria. At this time it was British imperialism which still had a major influence in the country despite its formal independence. By encouraging the Biafran secessionist movement, France was trying to weaken British influence in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Ivory Coast, under French control, served as a staging post for the arms being supplied to the Biafran rebels, while Gabon and its capital Libreville were used quite simply as a base for French military and political operations. These murderous policies have not stopped. French imperialism still hasn't succeeded in controlling Nigeria, which has become a focus for countering French influence in the whole of West Africa. France's policies go under the name of ‘Francafrique'. They involve countries like the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Benin, Burkina-Faso, Mali and Niger. They are based on intrigue, manipulation and murder. In the period 1993 to 1998, under the rule of Sani Abacha, France made spectacular inroads in Nigeria, pushing back the influence of Britain and the USA. But these powers did not remain inactive. The return to power of Oluseguen Obansanjo in 1999 enabled American imperialism to get its foot back in the door.

‘Francafrique' is still there

The new president of Nigeria presents himself as the number one mouthpiece of the US in West Africa. This allegiance won't last, because he will offer himself to the highest bidder, which will once again prove to be France. During his visit to Paris in 2005, where he met Jacques Chirac and came to get French help in annulling Nigeria's debt, this is what he said: "France can show leadership and courage in this matter by compensating a government which makes reforms, a government which to a large extent looks after the security of West Africa, a government which has shown courage in its struggle against corruption". An appeal which was readily listened to: the Club de Paris, under pressure from the French government, decided to cancel the debt.

Nigeria would not prove ungrateful and is now supporting France in its current involvement in the massacres in Togo, facilitated by Gnassingbe's coup d'Etat. In Nigeria, as in any other African country, not one of the big imperialist gangsters wants to give up its place to its direct competitors. After the massacres on 6-7 March, each of the imperialist predators present in Nigeria vied with each other to be the most hypocritical. The chief of French military diplomacy Bernard Kouchner, was not lagging behind: "France firmly condemns the serious violence against the village communities to the south of the town of Jos in Plateau state. I send my sincere condolences to the families and friends of the victims. I express France's support for the Nigerian authorities in their efforts to restore calm and bring the authors of this violence to justice". His US counterpart Hilary Clinton echoed him: "I appeal to Nigerians to come to the conference table and call on the authorities to bring the guilty to justice". Behind these honeyed words hides bitter competition between France and the USA. The northern region, under the weight of decomposition and poverty, is fertile soil for a Taliban type radicalisation, ie inhuman religious fanaticism; as for the south, the zone which possesses considerable oil resources (estimated to make up about 3% of the global total) will continue to be the theatre of ferocious economic and imperialist rivalries. The Nigerian population, like that of the rest Africa and much of the ‘third world', is the prey of capitalist barbarism.  

P & T 22/3/10

ICC

On March 2nd, despite all our objections, the tents were taken down by the union bosses and the street in front of the Turk-Is HQ was cleared with us being told we had to return home. 70 to 80 of us stayed in Ankara in order to discuss what we could do for the next three days. After these three days, 60 of us returned to our hometowns, and 20 of us including myself stayed for two more days, so although the Ankara struggle lasted for 78 days, we stayed for 83. We agreed that we had to work very hard in order to advance the struggle, and I too eventually returned to Adiyaman. As soon as I got back from Ankara, 40 of us went to visit our class brothers and sisters involved in the Cemen Tekstil strike in Gaziantep. The Tekel struggle was an example to the class. I was, as a Tekel worker, both proud and also thought that I thought we could do more for our class and that I had to contribute to our class. Although my economic situation did not allow it and despite the exhaustion of 83 days of struggle and other problems, I had to do more than I could to move the process further. What we had to do was to form a formal committee and take the process into our own hands. Even if we couldn't formalize it, we at least had to form it by keeping in contact with workers from all cities, since we were to return to Ankara on April 1st.

We have to go to everywhere we can and tell people about the Tekel struggle to its last detail. For this we have to form a committee and unite with the class. Our job is harder than it seems! We have deal with capital on the one hand, the government on the other and the trade-union bosses on the other hand. We all have to struggle in the best way. Even if our economical situation isn't good, even if we are physically tired, if we want victory, we have struggle, struggle, struggle!!!

Although I was away from my family for 83 days, I stayed at home only for a week. I went to Istanbul to tell people about the Tekel resistance without even having a chance to catch up with my wife and children. We had many meetings of the informal Tekel workers committee especially in Diyarbakir, Izmir, Hatay, and I participated in many meetings with fellow workers from the informal committee in Istanbul. We had meetings in the Mimar Sinan University, one in Sirinevler Teachers' Hostel, one in the Engineers' Union's building, we had discussions with pilots and other aircraft workers from the dissident Rainbow movement in Hava-Is [a trade union], and we met with law employees. We also met with the Istanbul chairman of the Peace and Democracy Party and asked for Tekel workers to be given the chance to speak on the Newroz holiday. The meetings were all very warm. Our request from the PDP was accepted and they asked me to participate in the Newroz demonstrations as a speaker. Because I had to return to Adiyaman, I suggested a fellow worker from Istanbul as a speaker. While I was in Istanbul, I visited the struggling firemen, Sinter metal workers, Esenyurt municipality workers, Sabah newspaper and ATV television strikers on the last day the struggling workers from the Istanbul Water and Sewers Department (ISKI). For half a day, we talked with these workers how we can make the struggle grow bigger and also we told them about the Tekel struggle and discussed. What the ISKI workers told me first was that they started their struggle with the courage they got from the Tekel workers. Every demonstration I went to, every struggle I visited, this I heard, ‘We got courage from Tekel', in the week I spent in Istanbul, this made me feel the happiest. The time I spent in Istanbul was very fulfilling for me also. There were also bad things, of course, unfortunately a close relative of mine passed away but I still decided not to leave and stay the whole week as planned.
Speaking of bad things, in this period, 24 student class brothers and sisters were kicked out of their school (Mehmetcik High School) for supporting the Tekel struggle. Also, in Ankara, a class sister of ours from the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK), Aynur Camalan, was fired. When capital is attacking us workers like this, so ruthlessly, we have to unite against it. Thus we made two press announcements in Adiyaman and showed that our friends were not alone. We also had been preparing for the demonstration on April 1st. What the trade-union bosses wanted was to go to Ankara with 50 people from every city, with a total of one thousand. As the informal committee, we increased this number from 50 to 180 in Adiyaman alone, and I myself came to Ankara with ten other workers on March 31st. Despite all the announcements of the union to make the number limited to 50, we managed to help 180 workers come (with us covering the costs, not the union), because we were aware of how the trade-union wanted to manipulate like they did before. We had meetings with lots of mass organizations, associations and unions. We visited Aynur Camalan, the TUBITAK worker sister, who had lost her job.
On April 1st, we gathered in Kizilay [the centre of Ankara, the capital of Turkey] but we had to make a lot of effort to get to the street in front of Turk-Is, because 15 thousand policemen guarded the building. What were all these policemen doing in front of us and the trade-union? Now, we have to ask those who stand against us even when we talk about the union bosses, even when we say the unions should be questioned: if there is a 15 thousand-strong police barricade in front of us and the trade-union, why do the trade-unions exist? If you ask me, it is quite natural for the police to protect the union and the union bosses, because don't the union and the trade-unionists protect the government and capital? Don't the trade-unions exist only in order to keep the workers under control on behalf of capital?
On April 1st, despite everything, 35-40 of us managed to cross the barricade one by one and went to the street in front of Turk-Is. Our purpose was to have a certain majority and to manage for other friends of ours to get there, but we failed, unfortunately our majority couldn't deal with 15,000 policemen. The trade-union had declared previous that only 1000 of us would come to Ankara. As the informal committee, we managed to increase this number to 2300. 15,000 policemen were blocking the way of 2300 people. We gathered on Sakarya street. We were to at least spend the night there, with all those who came to support us. Within the day, we had been attacked twice by the police with pepper gas and police batons. Our purpose was of course to spend the night on the street in front of the Turk-Is HQ but when we came up against the police, we stayed in the Sakarya street, but during the night the trade-unionists silently and cunningly called for fellow workers to leave the area. We remained only as a certain minority. The trade-unionists called myself too several times and told me to leave the area but we did not heed to the call of the union bosses and stayed as a certain minority. When the supporters also left around 23:00, we had to leave as well.
There was to be a press announcement on April 2nd. When we were about to enter Sakarya street at about 9:00 in the morning, we were attacked by the police, who again used pepper gas and batons. An hour or so later, about a hundred of us managed to cross the barricade and had a sit-in. The police kept threatening us. We kept resisting. The police finally had to open the barricade and we managed to unite with the other group who had remained outside. We started marching towards Turk-Is but the union bosses did what they had to again, and made their press announcement 100 meter away from the Turk-Is HQ. No matter how we insisted, the union bosses resisted to going to the street in front of Turk-Is. The union and the police joining their hands, and some among us actually falling for what they stood for, we ended up not managing to go to where we wanted to go. There was an interesting point among the things the trade-unionists had said. They said we will come back on June 3rd and stay in front of Turk-Is for three nights. It is curious how we will manage to stay there for 3 nights, as we didn't even stay for a single night this time. Afterwards, the police had to first protect the trade-unionists from us and aid their escape, then we were left alone with the police. Regardless of the threats and the pressures of the police, we did not disperse and then we were once again attacked with pepper spray and batons and had to disperse. In the afternoon, we had a black wreath made by some flourists in order to condemn Turk-Is and the government, which we left in front of the Turk-Is building.
My dear class brothers and sisters, what we have to question is, if there are 15 thousand policemen barricaded in front of the trade-union and the worekrs, why do the trade-unions exist. I am calling on all my class brothers and sisters, that if we want victory we have to struggle together. We the Tekel workers have lit a spark, and we shall turn it into a massive fireball all together. In this sense, when I express my respect for all of you, I want to conclude my text with a poem:
The steam of the tea flies away while our lives are still fresh
Cloths get as long as roads, and only sorrow returns
A bown of rice, they say our food has landed on our homes
Yearnings become roads, roads, where does labour go
Hunger is for us, cold is for us, poverty is for us
They have called in fate, living with it is for us
Us who feed, us who hunger, us who are naked again
We have not written this fate, it is us who will break it yet again
We the Tekel workers say that even if our head hits the ground, still we shall leave an honorable future for our children.
A Tekel Worker from Adiyaman

This article is available as a leaflet to download and distribute in two versions: one for Britain [89] and one for the rest of the world [90]

In Greece, there is immense anger and the social situation is explosive. Right now the Greek state is raining blows on the working class. All generations, all sectors of the class are being hit hard. Workers in the private sector, in the public sector, the unemployed, pensioners, students working on temporary contracts... No one is being spared. The working class as a whole is threatened with dire poverty.

In the face of these attacks, the working class is beginning to react. In Greece, as elsewhere, it is coming out onto the streets, going on strike, showing that it is not prepared to put up with the sacrifices demanded by capitalism.

But for the moment, the struggle has not yet become really massive. The workers of Greece are going through a difficult period. What to do when all the media and all the politicians insist that there is no alternative but to pull in your belt and save the country from bankruptcy? How to stand up to the monster of the state? What methods of struggle are needed to establish a balance of force in favour of the exploited?

All these questions are faced not just by the workers of Greece, but by workers all over the world. There can be no illusion: the "Greek tragedy" is just a foretaste of what's waiting for the working class all over the planet. Thus "Greek style austerity packages" have already been officially announced in Portugal, Rumania, Japan and Spain (where the government has just cut public sector workers' pay by 5%!) In Britain, the new coalition government has only just started to reveal the extent of the cuts it's aiming to make. All these attacks, carried out simultaneously, show once again that the workers, whatever their nationality, are part of one and the same class which everywhere has the same interests and the same enemies. Capitalism forces the proletariat to endure the heavy chains of wage labour, but these same chains also link together the workers of all countries, across all frontiers.

In Greece, it's our class brothers and sisters who are under attack and who have begun to fight back. Their struggle is our struggle.  

Solidarity with the workers of Greece!
One class, one struggle!

We have to reject all the divisions the bourgeoisie tries to impose on us. Against the old principle of all ruling classes - "divide and rule" - we have to raise the rallying cry of the exploited: "workers of all countries, unite!"

In Europe, the different national bourgeoisies are trying to make us believe that it's all down to Greece that we are going to have to pull in our belts. The dishonesty of the people in charge of Greece, who have allowed the country to live on credit for decades and have fiddled the public accounts, they are the main cause of the "international crisis of confidence" in the euro. One after the other, governments are using this false pretext to explain the need to reduce deficits and bring in draconian austerity measures.

In Greece, all the official parties, with the Communist Party at the forefront, are whipping up nationalist feelings, blaming "foreign powers" for the attacks. "Down with the IMF and the European Union!" "Down with Germany!" - these are the slogans raised in the demonstrations by the left and the extreme left, doing their best to defend Greek national capitalism.

In the USA, if the stock markets are taking a dive, it's all down to the instability in the EU; if companies are closing down, it's a result of the weakness of the euro, which is a handicap for the dollar and US exports...

In short: each national bourgeoisie is accusing its neighbour and blackmailing the workers it exploits: "accept sacrifices, otherwise the country will be weakened, and our competitors will take advantage of us". In this way the ruling class is trying to inject us with nationalism, which is a dangerous poison for the class struggle.

This world of division into competing nations is not ours. The working class has nothing to gain from being chained up to the capital of the country it lives in. To accept sacrifices today in the name of "defending the national economy" is just a way of preparing the ground for further and harder sacrifices tomorrow.

If Greece is on the edge of the abyss; if Spain, Italy, Ireland and Portugal are close behind; if Britain, France, Germany, the US are also in deep trouble, it's because capitalism is a dying system. All countries are doomed to sink deeper and deeper into this mess. For the last 40 years the world economy has been in crisis. Recessions have succeeded each other one after the other. Only a desperate flight into debt has up till now enabled capitalism to achieve any degree of growth. But the result of this today is that households, companies, banks and states are now weighed down with debt. The bankruptcy of Greece is just a caricature of the general and historical bankruptcy of this system of exploitation.

The ruling class needs to divide us: we need solidarity!
The strength of the working class is its unity!

The austerity plans now being announced are a frontal, generalised attack on our living conditions. The only possible response is therefore a massive movement from the workers. It's impossible to respond to these attacks by fighting in your own corner, in your own factory, school or office, isolated and alone. Fighting back on a massive scale is a necessity. It's the only alternative to being crushed separately and reduced to poverty.

But what is being done by the trade unions, those official ‘specialists' of the struggle? They organise strikes in numerous workplaces... without ever trying to unite them. They actively encourage sectional divisions, especially between private and public sector workers. They march the workers out on sterile ‘days of action'. They are in fact specialists in dividing the working class. The unions are equally adept at instilling nationalism. One example: the most common slogan of the Greek trade unions since the middle of March has been "buy Greek!"

Following the trade unions always means following the road to division and defeat. Workers need to take the struggle into their own hands, by organising in general assemblies and deciding on the demands and slogans to raise, by electing delegates who can be recalled at any moment and by sending massive delegations to discuss with other groups of workers, in the nearest factories, offices, schools and hospitals, with the aim of encouraging them to join the movement.

Going outside the trade unions, daring to take control of the struggle, taking the step of going to see other sectors of workers... all that seems very difficult. This is one of the obstacles to the development of the struggle today: the working class lacks confidence in itself. It is not yet aware of the enormous power it holds in its hands. For the moment, the violence of the attacks being mounted by capitalism, the brutality of the economic crisis, the proletariat's lack of self-confidence - all this tends to have a paralysing effect. The workers' response, even in Greece, is still well below what the gravity of the situation demands. And still the future belongs to the class struggle. Against the attacks, the only way forward is the development of increasingly massive movements.

Some people ask: "why wage such struggles? Where can they lead? Since capitalism is bankrupt, and no reform is really possible, doesn't that mean that there's no way out?" And indeed, inside this system of exploitation, there is no way out. But refusing to be treated like dogs and fighting back collectively means standing up for our dignity. It means realising that solidarity does exist in this world of competition and exploitation and that the working class is really capable of bringing this priceless human feeling to life. And then the possibility of another world can start to appear, a world without exploitation, nations or frontiers, a world made for human beings and not for profit. The working class can and must have confidence in itself. It alone is capable of building this new society and reconciling humanity with itself by taking what Marx called "the leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom".  

Capitalism is bankrupt, but another world is possible: communism!

This article is available as an article here [92] to download and distribute.

So, finally, the BA strike is on.

To judge from the media, you'd think the whole issue was something that goes on in the courts and in the top level negotiations between BA and union bosses.

First the courts issued an injunction against the strike- the latest in a series which have blocked even the most carefully organised official strikes, the most recent being the RMT strike a few weeks ago.  Then the Court of Appeal overturned the injunction.

Is this because the courts can really be on the side of the workers? No. Most likely it's because parts of the ruling class have realised that if you legally abolish even the appearance of a ‘right to strike', workers will have no alternative but to take matters into their own hands. The example of the unofficial oil refinery strikes, which spread so rapidly across the country, is very fresh in their memory.  

The truth is, however, that the ruling class have already made all effective strike action illegal. The law on ballots - aimed at preventing workers from taking decisions in mass meetings where they feel strongest and can launch struggles on the spot. The law on secondary action - aimed at preventing workers from going directly to workers from other categories and companies and asking them to join their fight.

These laws are often described as ‘Thatcher's anti-union laws'. In reality, Thatcher only carried on where the previous Labour government had left off; and the laws are really designed to increase the unions' grip over the workers, by outlawing all spontaneous, wildcat actions.

So now the BA workers are on strike. And there's no doubt that there is a strong will and determination on their part. Coming out on strike and losing pay at a time when many are struggling with rising living costs is not an easy decision to make. And the media, with their incessant campaigns about all the ‘inconvenience' caused by the strikes, are doing their best to make workers feel guilty and isolated. 

The problem is that the strike is taking place inside the cramped confines of the law and the union rule book, which are tailor-made to isolate workers even more.

The BA workers are not alone

Over the last decade and, especially since the September 11th attacks in New York, there has been a crisis in the airline industry. This has lead to the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, for example  a report in the eTurbo News website (posted 24th February) states "As the U.S. airline industry lost tens of billions of dollars over the past 10 years, it also lost a tremendous number of employees. Nearly one in every four U.S. airline jobs disappeared in the 10 years that ended Dec. 31, and the largest airlines were among the hardest hit, according to new data." As it says, the largest airlines have been the hardest hit leading to huge job losses, 'voluntary' redundancies, agreements for the suspension of pay, changing shift patterns and attacks on travel 'perks' for airline employees. And this was before the current debt crisis hit the world. We are now seeing the bankruptcy not just of the big financial institutions but of entire nation states: Greece is in the front line but the whole Eurozone is under threat, as is Britain itself. 

None of the election parties made any secret of the fact that they were preparing to make huge cuts to deal with Britain's debt. The new government has already set the ball rolling. The public sector will be hardest hit, but no workers' job is safe today.

So BA cabin crew are in the same situation as the entire working class. But the present strike is being limited even within BA - to the cabin crew, as if the thousands of other BA employees from pilots to baggage handlers and catering and cleaning staff - haven't also got their grievances against the company. And as if hundreds of thousands of other workers employed by other airlines aren't facing the same attacks on their conditions.

There's a crying need for solidarity, for workers raising common demands and fighting together. But experience has shown that they can only get this solidarity if they act on their own behalf. The best example in the airline industry was supplied by the baggage handlers in 2005, when they walked out in solidarity with Gate Gourmet workers who were being trampled on by management. No ballots, no separation between workers with different jobs or bosses.

This kind of solidarity is what workers need now, and it will mean ‘illegally' making decisions in mass meetings, ‘illegally' sending pickets and delegations to workers in other categories and asking them to join the struggle. The law is there to protect the bosses and their state. Workers' solidarity can only develop if we develop our own power against them.

WR, 25/5/10.

"Guayana is a powder-keg". This phrase is often repeated by the representatives of the bourgeoisie, the leaders of political parties and unions, whether they are members of the opposition or favourable to the Chavez government; this is how all of them talk about the struggles and mobilisations being carried out by the working class in Cuidad Guayana (also known as the ‘Iron Zone', a huge working class concentration in the state of Bolivar, Venezuela) - movements that express the profound discontent of the Venezuelan working class as a result of the repeated attacks on its living conditions."

What is that frightens the bourgeoisie and its union guard-dogs so much?

The region of Ciudad Guayana is one of the biggest working-class concentrations in the country, with more than 100,000 workers who work in the so-called "Basic Companies" that produce and process iron, steel and aluminium; including an important number of workers in small and medium size companies that supply the big companies.

The whole of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie knows that Guayana is an area to be reckoned with. Since the 1960's the Guayana proletariat has shown its will to fight; one of the more remarkable struggles took place at the end of the decade, when the workers of the SIDOR steel company (one of the biggest in Latin America) confronted the state forces and the main union at the time, the Confederación de Trabajadores de Venezuela (CTV). At that time, angry steel workers travelled the 380 miles from Guayana to Caracas to protest opposite the CTV headquarters, which were burnt by the strikers.

Chavez's government had a direct experience of the worker's courage in May 2001, when the SIDOR workers struck for 21 days due to the management's refusal to discuss the recently expired collective agreement[1].This forced the CTV and the steel union SUTISS[2] to join forces in order to prevent the strike spreading to other businesses in the region. So serious was the conflict that Chavez himself had to praise the strike's success to save face for the "workers' government".

From 2002 on, in Guayana as in the rest of the country, the proletariat was more and more led into political traps by the CTV-controlled unions, who opposed Chavez, as well as by the pro-Chavez unions (with Trostkyist currents acting inside them), who were starting to grow stronger. In this way the bourgeoisie got some peace on the labour front, leading the proletariat onto a ground where its interests didn't lie, creating division among the workers and weakening  their class solidarity.

But in 2007, at the same time as the oil workers were coming into struggle, the Guayana proletariat took up the fight again: the Venezuelan proletariat was searching for its class identity, confronting its enemies with its own demands. In view of this increase in labour conflicts Chavez's government, with the union's support, ordered SIDOR's nationalisation in March 2008; this was greeted with great fanfare. Nevertheless the nationalisation trick failed to stifle the workers' discontent even if it slowed down the demonstrations for some months. The workers kept putting on pressure for the discussion of the collective agreement; the precarious workers of the small businesses linked to the steel company mobilised to demand being hired directly by the steel company. As the permanent workers started showing their solidarity towards the precarious ones, the government and the unions began to attack and weaken this movement. Even so retired SIDOR workers as well as workers in the aluminium, iron and electrical industries held several demonstrations in 2008, demanding outstanding wages among other things (see the article ‘The bourgeois state of Chavez attacks the steel workers', https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2008/apr/steel-struggles [94] )

But it was during 2009 that the struggle intensified:
- in July the aluminium workers started demonstrations that went on for a week: they demanded the payment of social benefits the workers are normally given in the middle of the year. The government suggested paying this in several parts; this enraged the workers who protested opposite the offices of the CVG (Corporación Venezolana de Guayana), which forced the government to divide the payment into two parts only;
- a few days later a SIDOR worker was killed in an industrial accident. That provoked a 24 hour strike in the steel plant: the workers demanded more investments for repairs because the accident happened as a result of a lack of maintenance in the system;
- that very month SIDOR workers started demonstrations in Guayana to demand payment from a profit-sharing scheme, a bonus the workers get in the middle of the year but which the company had failed to pay;
- in August in Ferrominera Orinoco (an iron extracting company), there was a strike that went on for 16 days in Ciudad Piar. The struggle was particularly strong in the San Isidro mine, where the workers remained firm on their demands for back payments and safety measures, all of them recent benefits achieved in the collective agreement. For 16 days the government and the management kept the strike "blacked out" A month later the general secretary of the Ferrominera union along with 10 workers was put under arrest;
- in October several workers and the CVG union leader were put under arrest too, while protesting opposite the Basic Companies Minister, Rodolfo Sanz, demanding the supply of work uniforms and other contractual claims;
- in December SIDOR workers went on an 8 hour strike because of the delay in the payment of the end-of-the-year bonuses; also the workers of the Basic Companies Carbonorca, Bauxilum and Alcasa protested because of the delay in payment of wages and bonuses;
- in 2009 the Ferrominara, Orinoco and Bauxilum co-op workers protested and so did the precarious employees of a company nationalised in 2009, Matesi.

Given that these mobilisations couldn't be stopped, either by the bureaucrats in government or by the unions, Chavez himself had to handle the issue: in March 2009 in Ciudad Piar he gave the Basic Company workers the stick, accusing them of pursuing "wealth" and "privileges", trying to sow discord between them and other workers and the population of the area in order to demoralise them, the same way he did with the oil workers in 2002[3]. Playing the fear card didn't work however, and the protests carried on, so he had to come back to Guayana two months later, this time "praising" the workers as a way of winning their support for the Socialist Guayana Plan which was supposed to take the local companies out of the crisis.

According to Chavez Venezuela is armoured against the crisis of capitalism. In fact the Venezuelan state is in a dangerous position because the fall in raw material prices after 2008 has limited national revenue and shown up a long-hidden reality: the Basic Companies are practically bankrupt and are a heavy burden on the state because of their low productivity, resulting from their obsolescence and lack of maintenance. The workers are made to pay the consequences of this of course: the state has refused to discuss the collective agreements on wages and bonuses, wage payments are delayed and the workers are even threatened with redundancies. As the bourgeoisie does at a global level, the crisis is used as a tool to attack workers' living standards and make their employment less secure. And since the end of 2009 rationing in electricity supply has been used to limit the production of iron and aluminium, putting pressure on part of the staff to take forced holidays and developing a situation of distress and insecurity among workers. Pushed by the workers' mobilisations the state has been forced to sign a number of collective agreements but delays in the paying of wages are common and are a frequent source of distress among workers.

It can be seen that capitalism's world crisis and its effects on Venezuela has become a factor that increases the workers' willingness to fight, since it cuts the state's income and therefore the national bourgeoisie's leeway, and they inevitably try to unload the crisis onto the workers' backs. The Guayana companies' unions, mostly pro-Chavez, are quickly losing credibility among the workers; the attempts to turn the local masses against the workers - using the Consejos Comunales (communal councils)- have failed, since the population is mainly made up of proletarian families whose survival depends on the workers, most of whom work precisely in the Basic Companies. Owing to the high working class concentration and the resistance shown by the workers, the bourgeoisie is not easily able to use the weapon of mass unemployment since it could be the fuel for upheavals and revolt among the population.

This situation has led to an impasse in the region: the bourgeoisie can't apply its plans in its own way and the proletariat, for the time being, hasn't got the force to impose itself against the state. This means that Guayana is a pressure cooker that could explode at any time.

The trap of worker's control

For Chavism and the Venezuelan bourgeoisie, Guayana has been a laboratory in its efforts to his wish to make employment more precarious. After having progressively weakened the working conditions of the oil workers, the bourgeoisie wants to do the same to the workers in the Iron Zone - workers which it sees as part of the "labour aristocracy" produced by the Social Democratic and Social Christian governments before Chavez.

In the middle of the last decade it was intended to make ALCASA (an aluminum producing plant and the first co-managed company) a model for the rest of the companies in the country. Actually the example it set was in the way it attacked the conditions of the aluminium workers, through the promotion of "socialist values", that is, work more and earn less; something like Stakhanovism, the "socialist emulation" promoted by the Stalinist bourgeoisie, whose main mouthpiece in Cuba was Che Guevara[4]. But workers in ALCASA didn't buy that, didn't accept worsening working conditions and reduced benefits, and co-management in the aluminium sector was a complete failure.

The government tried to do something similar with the "Socialist Gurayana Plan", based on "workers' control over production" through the "Consejos de Trabajadores" or "Workers' Councils", state institutions allegedly inspired by the Russian soviets of 1917.... Faced with the crisis in the basic industries, Chavism has taken on the Trotskyist slogan of "workers' control", which is very convenient for the bourgeoisie since it would lead the workers to accept the dterioration of their conditions with the excuse of "saving" the companies; thus, for example, the plan suggests the abolition of the "maximisation of profits at an individual level". Leading this project are the PSUV (Socialist Unified Party of Venezuela) and the companies' unions, all of them supporters of the Chavez project.

The Trotskyist unions, nowadays dissident Chavists, denounce this plan since it's not "genuine" workers' control and the state is still the boss. In this sense they serve to trick the workers into accepting the logic of defending the interests of the national capital, proposing that they should  save the companies through a true workers' control. In short, encouraging the workers to accept a form of self-exploitation where the bureaucrats are replaced by workers (preferably Trotskyist ones of course).

But the workers don't easily buy such fairy tales: after the Plan was approved last June they carried on the struggle for wage increases. This pushed the state to sign some collective agreements, while  the pro-government unions tried to divert workers' anger into a battle against the bureaucracy who, according to them, are the ones preventing "workers' participation"; they have even gone as far as supporting actions promoted by dissident unions to save their face in front of the workers. This context has been favourable to anti-Chavist union tendencies like the Trostkyist CCURA[5], who introduce themselves as equally critical of Chavism and the opposition.

Guayana's proletariat: a hard nut to crack

In view of the persistance of the workers in fighting for their demands, the government has attempted to criminalise the struggle: temporary arrests of workers, redundancy threats, even overt repression. These state actions, accompanied by union sabotage, led the protests to fall back at the beginning of 2010. Nevertheless in Guayana the atmosphere is of unresolved tension, an imposed calm that can explode any time.

The attacks of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie are leading the Guayana proletariat to take a stand on a class terrain, showing that it is not willing to sacrifice itself passively for the bourgeois project of "21st century socialism". It seems that with the acceleration of capitalism's crisis the proletariat is recovering its combativity.

The Guayana proletariat, like the whole of the working class, hasn't got any other option: either it carries on the fight against the attacks of capital (state or private) or capital will further impoverish workers and their families. The actions of the unions (those false friends of the workers but genuine defenders of national capital), corporatism, co-operativism, workers' control, co-management, all the schemes aimed at locking up the workers in "their " companies, all of them are factors that hinder the class struggle. The answer to these and other obstacles has been provided by the working class itself: the assemblies where grass-roots workers can express themselves; the spreading of struggles and the seach for class solidarity, not only in Guayana's companies but on a national, even international, level.

In Guayana the conditions are coming together for developing and strengthening solidarity between the workers and the population, since most of the inhabitants of the region have a relative in the  local companies. If Guayana's proletariat is able to keep the fight going in spite of the abuse from government, parties and unions, it will set an example to the rest of the workers in the country, and    create a link between its struggle and the movements of the global proletariat in Greece, Spain, France, Peru and other countries.

The task of the most politicised minorities in the class is to take part with all their strength in the process of resistance by the proletariat in Guyana and all around the country; their task is to denounce all the traps and obstacles on the path towards class consciousness. The proletariat of Guayana and Venezuela is not alone in its task, since its fight is part of a movement that is slowly emerging at a global level.

Internacionalismo, 06/03/2010

[1] At this time state capital had a minority paricipation in steel, the majority being in the hands of the private capital of the Tchint corporation

[2] Unified union of the steel industry, then controlled by a centre left party

[3] Chavez could not hide his anger at the workers at this point: "We are going to profit from this to clean up the enterprises of the CVG. If they threaten to stop work or they do stop work, I will deal with this myself! I have already been through the strike at Pàvsa....people who go on strike in a state enterprise are bothering the president of the republic" (Correo del Caroni, 7.3.2009).

[4] It's no accident that one of the government Missions is called ‘Che Guevara'. As it preaches on its website, it offers "an integral programme of training and qualification in the productive occupations, aimed at transforming the capitalist economic model into a socialist model" 

[5]  See the article in Internacialismo 58, ‘Correo del Lector: Los trabajadores inician la lucha, los sindicatos la sabotean' (‘Reader's letter: the workers enter into struggle, and the unions sabotage it')

https://es.internationalism.org/ismo/2000s/2010s/2010/58_E [95]

Recently the media has been talking about revolution and we have seen scenes of mass street protests and violence on our TV screens. In Kyrgyzstan, armed workers in the street kicked out the government. In Thailand, massive political protests by ‘Red Shirts' have been continuing for more than a month now. For communists it is important to ask what the nature of these movements is.

Firstly the movement in Kyrgyzstan, in April, certainly included large numbers of workers on the streets. In the months preceding the events there had been massive prices increases; gas for heating had risen 400% and electricity by 170%. All this in a country where the average monthly wage is only around $30-50. Events came to a head on April 6th with a massive protest in Tals, caused by another round of price increases in fuel and transport costs. These rises were directly caused by Russia's decision to impose new duties on energy exports to Kyrgyzstan on April 1st. Demonstrators stormed the government buildings, but they were later retaken by riot police.

The following day protests in the capital, Bishek, were attacked by police who disarmed them taking control of police vehicles and automatic weapons. The demonstrations grew, and the police responded with more violence. Protestors then drove two trucks at the gates of the Presidential White House, and the police responded by firing live ammunition, killing at least 41 protestors. Later in the day protestors stormed the palace, and the government was forced to flee.

A paper of the English ruling class, The Financial Times, quoted exiled opposition leader, Edil Baisalov as saying "What we are seeing is a classic popular uprising. This is a revolution, and it is bloody. ...This is what happens when you hold the lid on the cooking pot too tightly - it explodes".

It is clear that the government was overthrown. The question that communists have to answer is whether this was a revolution, or whether it was a struggle in which workers were used between different ruling class groups struggling to control the state.

For us, it is very clear that what has happened here is merely a change of bosses. Interestingly enough the recently ousted President Bakayev came to power just 5 years ago in the so-called "Tulip revolution", another ‘popular' movement. Although workers were the ones who actually overthrew the government, they weren't fighting for their own interests. There were no workers' councils, no workers organs' prepared to seize power. The workers were being used as foot soldiers by different factions of the bosses. Roza Otunbayeva, the acting head of the provisional government, was previously foreign minister of the government after the "Tulip revolution" It would be fair to say that nothing has changed but the faces of the leaders, and not even all of them.

Imperialist games

Added to this is the international dimension. Russia and the US, who have been in dispute for some time about US bases in Kyrgyzstan and the region as a whole, were quick to deny Russian involvement. Michael McFaul, a senior United States White House adviser on Russian affairs, was quick to state that the seizure of power by the Kyrgyz opposition was not anti-American in nature, and was not a Russian backed coup. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin himself denied any Russian involvement and said that the incident had personally caught him "off guard" and that "Neither Russia nor your humble servant nor Russian officials have anything to do with these events". Unfortunately for them, the new rulers of Kyrgyzstan don't have the same experience of playing political games. Omurbek Tekebayev, a leading figure in the new government gave the game away: "Russia played its role in ousting Bakiyev. You've seen the level of Russia's joy when they saw Bakiyev gone". Russia immediately recognized the new government, and Putin quickly rang Otunbayeva to ‘congratulate' her. On the 9th April, Almazbek Atambayev, deputy head of the new government, was in Moscow for ‘consultation' with unspecified Russian government officials, according to the official Russian state news agency.

Thailand: not a workers' movement

The events in Thailand also seem to be a struggle between different factions of the ruling class. The ‘Red Shirts', the nickname of the ‘National United Front of Democracy Against Dictatorship', is mostly a movement in support of the multi-billionaire, Thaksin Shinawatra, a former Prime Minister of Thailand in exile from Thailand due to corruption charges. The ‘Red Shirt' movement is basically one of the urban and rural poor, mobilised behind the new bourgeoisie, who are opposed to the ‘old' military and monarchist factions. It is not a movement of, or controlled by, the working class. The only workers' action during this period, a strike of 8,000 workers at the Camera maker Nikon, emerged completely independently of the ‘Red Shirt' movement.

And here lies the central point of our argument. These so-called ‘revolutions', like the ‘Green movement' in Iran recently, are not movements of the working class. Yes, there are many workers involved in them, and probably in the case of Kyrgyzstan a majority of the participants were workers, but they take part in these actions as individuals not as workers. The movement of the working class is one that can only be based upon class struggle of workers for their own interests, not cross-class alliances and populist movements. It is only within a massive movement of strikes that the working class can develop its own organs, mass meetings, strike committees and ultimately workers' councils, that can assert working class control over the movement, and develop a struggle for working class interests. Outside of this perspective is only the possibility of workers being used as cannon-fodder for different political factions. In Greece, perhaps, we can see the very start of the long slow development towards this process. In Kyrgyzstan, and Thailand, we only see workers getting shot down in the streets on behalf of those who want to be the new bosses.

Sabri, 1/5/10.

ANew Acceleration of Global Crises of Capitalism and Perspectivesfor the Development Class Struggle

ICC held a public meeting in New Delhi on 2 May 2010on the above subject. The meeting went on from 12.30 Hours to 17.30 Hrs and discussionsduring the meeting turned out quite lively. 

Discussion was divided in two parts:

1.       New acceleration of crises exemplified byeconomic collapse of Greece.

2.       The development of class struggle in theface of generalized attacks

A New Acceleration of Crises

ICC opened the meeting with a presentation focusedon the first part of the discussion. Presentation spoke of the open expressionsof this crisis: spiraling of budget deficit of Greece to 13.6%, its Debt to GDPratio to 115%, downgrading of Greece Government loans to the level of junk andrefusal by banks to give any loans to Greek state thus threatening its bankruptcy.Although events in Greecewere expression of a serious crisis, the reason they sent shock waves throughthe world bourgeoisie was not due to any concern for Greece. The reason for the fear ofthe world bourgeoisie lies in their knowledge that Greece is not exception. Othercountries in Europe are in the same or worsesituation. At 12%, Budget deficit of Britainis second highest in Europe, followed by Spainat 11.2% and Portugalat 9.3%.  Thus, far from being anexception, the bankruptcy that is staring Greece today is a curtain raiser forthe fate of many countries in the world.

These events denote a new, catastrophic accelerationof global capitalist crises that began in 2008.  The discussions saw the present acceleration asa continuation of the crises of 2008. In 2008 bourgeoisie was able to avoid collapseof global financial system by gigantic injection of the same medicine,mountains of new debts, which had caused these catastrophic explosions in thefirst place. That exercise did stave off a complete collapse of the financialsystem at the moment. But this effort of saving the system by more of the samedid not resolve the problems afflicting the global capitalist system.

While immediate background of threat ofbankruptcy of capitalist states is the shattering of the global financialsystem in 2008, its roots go back to the end of 1960's.  1968 is the year when the period ofreconstruction ushered by world war two came to an end and when a cycle ofinexorable permanent decline and collapse of capitalism began. Since then thebourgeoisie has met every cycle of crises of over production by creating moredebts to artificially stimulate the markets, try to overcome its immediateproblems and postpone the hour of reckoning. Over the last some decades, giventhe fact that real economy has continued to shrink, especially in advancedcapitalist countries, these debts have only been offset by newer and moregigantic debts, both private and state. Also, as the real economy declined andavenues for capital to earn profits by productive means disappeared,bourgeoisie has more and more turned to exotic, speculative methods to earnprofits, method that even the bourgeoisie now call gambling and casino economy.Although the states now blame banks, it is not only the banks that haveresorted to this gambling with trillions of dollars. Even manufacturingcompanies, unable to earn profits in their own businesses, resort to thesespeculations and bets.

The collapse of the financial sector thatoccurred in 2008 was result of the explosions of contradictions that had beengathering within capitalism since previous decades. This collapse came as thecrises of gigantic debt that could no longer be paid and that pulled down anddestroyed some of the greatest banks in the world. The world bourgeoisie wasable to avert complete collapse of its system by pumping trillions of dollarsinto banks and into the economy in general. This did not resolve anything forthe bourgeoisies. It only meant that the hour has been postponed and the logicthat had pulled down the banks in 2008 will soon apply to the states that havebeen building debts.

This is what is happening today. Manystates, even USA whosebudget deficit is 12.3%, are in same condition as Greece. Many have debts that arebigger than their GDP. These have to be paid. The capitalist ‘markets' believethat many of these debtor states can not really repay and they stopped lendingmore money to these states. This is what triggered the bankruptcy of Greece. Many Europeancountries are in the same boat. Their incomes are not enough even to sustaintheir current expenses what to talk of sparing money for repayment of debts.These states are therefore starting a new, brutal offensive against the workingclass. Greecehas declared reduction of wages and pensions of public sector workers by 25%and similar cuts in social wages. Other countries like Spain, Portugaland Britainare preparing the same.

A possibility was posed - the bourgeoisiewill possibly resort to nationalizations to overcome its crises. After all thishas served the bourgeoisie well in the past. Why not now?

Ensuing discussion tried to clarify why thisis not an option for bourgeoisie today. It cannot really help the bourgeoisieto improve the situation. In this context the discussion recalled the wholehistory of nationalizations and the conditions in which it served thebourgeoisie well. Discussion further recalled how and why, in the face ofworsening crises, the process of denationalization, began in 1980's. Today theconditions are such that nationalizations will not solve any problems for thebourgeoisies. 

Another question was posed. Why shouldworking class in Indiabother about Greece?After all Indian economy seems to be doing well. In response discussionrecalled the experience of 2008. When the global financial system collapsed,the bourgeoisie in Indiainitially showed nonchalance. The crises will not touch us, they said. Butsituation quickly changed, exports fell dramatically and whole sectors of theeconomy - auto, construction, cement, textiles, diamond exports, IT etc - justground to halt with millions of workers loosing their jobs. This was inaddition to the immense poverty and misery that is the lot of the working classin India.What 2008 proved was that Indian economy is tightly linked to global economy.Any storms in the world capitalist system can not but shake up the Indianeconomy. In 2008, Indian bourgeoisie also used the same medicine to get out ofthe crisis as the rest of global bourgeoisie - more debts, easing of moneysupply. As the present storms in the world capitalist system gather strength,it can not but shake up Indian economy and further accelerate attacks on theworking class in India.

In the context of worsening economicconditions of the working class in India, an intervention raised the questionof very high levels of unemployment in India that is destroying the future ofwhole generations of people. 

Development of Class Struggle

The briefpresentation initiating this discussion explained that today the working classis not defeated. It has already been developing its struggles everywhere in theworld. Also, there is a tendency for these struggles to be more and moresimultaneous. Different parts of the class in same geographic areas arestruggling at more or less the same time thus opening up the possibility ofextension and development of solidarity. This can also be seen in struggles inGurgaon last year.

At thesame time, bourgeoisie has now started open, brutal and generalised attacksagainst the working class in many countries in the world. This is alreadyforcing the working class to respond in a massive manner and will do the samein the coming period. These have the potential of developing into massstruggles. The development of these struggles and their politicization providesworking class with an opportunity to develop its challenge to the capitalistsystem.

A long anddeep discussion developed on this. Several questions were posed and clarified:

1.     Is it given that this newacceleration of crises will give rise to massive struggles of the class?

2.     What has been stoppingthe class from developing a massive response so far?

3.     What is the role of therevolutionaries in all this?

4.     What should we do?

Thediscussion concluded that the present acceleration of crises opens a period ofimpoverishment and suffering for the working class. But it also provides anopportunity for the class to develop its class identity, its class unity, itsstruggles and its consciousness. It provides an opportunity for the class todevelop mass struggles that can open a challenge to the bourgeoisie. There isnothing predetermined about it but indications seems to point to a directionwhere all this may yet be realized.

Thediscussion tried to answer ‘what has stopped the class so far'. One point made duringthis discussion was on loss of historical continuity, loss of the profound learningand deepening of consciousness that the working class had gone throughprogressively from early 19th century up to the Russian revolution. Thiswas a great strength of the class in that period and allowed it to quicklyovercome major setbacks. This strength was lost when revolution in Russiadegenerated and was defeated in other countries. Stalinist counter-revolution thattriumphed in Russiawas able to burry these historical acquisitions and strengths of the class. Ofthe many other barriers today are: weight of trade unionism, myth of democracy,nationalism, ethnicism, weight of decomposition and every man for himself andnear totalitarian control of the bourgeois propaganda.

Adiscussion on the role of revolutionaries started by underlining two things:

-      Their indispensable role in the struggle of the workingclass for its self emancipation;

-      Ability of the class to develop its struggles in the faceof attacks of the bourgeoisies.

Whetherthe workers in Greece, in Portugal, in Spainor Britainwill be able to respond to the massive attacks of the bourgeoisie is notdetermined by the presence or absence of revolutionaries. If it were so, thenthe cause of the working class will be a lost one. It is the very nature of theworking class, its place in capitalist society that leads it to develop itsidentity, its unity and it's combat against the bourgeoisie. It is in theprocess of politcisation of its struggles, in their posing the question of thedestruction of capitalist society and construction of communist society thatthe role of revolutionaries becomes indispensable.

Answering thelast question - ‘what should we do', ICC explained that the best way tostrengthen the struggle of the working class today is by helping build andstrengthen revolutionary organizations. Comrades present could accelerate theireffort to clarify the communist positions, build solidarity with us, join theICC and help develop communist intervention in the working class so that questionof politicizations of the struggles of the working class and destruction ofcapitalism can be practically posed.

Jvn,  9th May 2010

As it became clear that David Cameron was going to become Prime Minister, Socialist Worker (11/5/10) published an online article that started "The open class enemy is poised to enter 10 Downing Street."

In continuity with its entire history the SWP again wheeled out the idea that a vote for Labour showed a basic class instinct.

It's true that when workers go to polling stations they often vote Labour. Take a look at the maps published at every election. The bits coloured red, showing where the Labour vote is (in Central Scotland, the North East, North West, Midlands, South Wales and London) are particular concentrations of the working class. Of all the papers only the Mirror and Daily Record consistently support Labour, yet nearly nine million people vote for the party.

What this shows is the strength of the illusions in the Labour Party, in the idea that it is somehow different from the other parties. The SWP say that "After the general election no party has a mandate to impose cuts." This is the opposite of the truth. All the main parties were committed to dealing with the deficit, and that means cuts, as much by Labour as the others. Blair, Brown and Darling paved the way for Cameron and Clegg every bit as much as Labour's Wilson, Callaghan and Healey in the 1970s started the attacks on the social wage and workers' living standards that were taken up by the Thatcher government in the 1980s.

Among the biggest difficulties for the working class in Britain is breaking from all the illusions in Labour. Yes, millions of workers vote Labour, but that's part of the problem, part of putting your confidence in others (who have a commitment to capitalism) rather than in the potential of the struggle of the working class.

The SWP says that "Labour held onto its core vote because its core vote hates the Tories." The problem here is that the whole idea of ‘Tories are toffs but Labour is different' is cultivated and nourished by the leftists. This election showed again that there is still a powerful idea that Labour has something to do with the working class. The truth is that Labour is the ‘disguised' enemy of the working class where the Tories are more transparent.

In Socialist Worker you can read "The truth is that the election showed the enduring strength of Labourism. In the end a substantial number of working people decided they could not stomach the threat of a Tory government. Many workers are only too well aware of Labour's failure. But they feared the Tories more and stuck to Labour rather than the party of the open class enemy." In reality all the capitalist parties have their role to play, but while Labour or LibDem can use a more radical language, and no doubt there are more Old Etonians in the Tory ranks, they are all capable of making the cuts that hit the working class. To think otherwise is to fall for the lies of the bourgeoisie.

Socialist Worker (10/4/10) declared that "Working class confidence and struggle matters more than elections, but who wins them, does matter. Governments can raise taxes on the rich or lower them. They can invest more money in hospitals or cut funding." It's quite right to point to the importance of struggles and developing confidence in the working class. But what can seriously undermine workers' struggles and consciousness are illusions in the capitalist economy and its state. Whether under a Tory/LibDem coalition, or under Labour, New or Old, capitalism is based on the exploitation of the working class and the capitalist state can only defend the interests of the ruling bourgeois class. Capitalism is based on the pursuit of profit, not the needs of the exploited.

For more than ninety years Labour hasn't been a party of ‘failure' but an integral part of the political apparatus of capitalism in Britain. Spreading illusions in the Labour Party only backs up the dominant ideas of the ruling class. For the working class what's most important is developing an understanding of what workers' self-organisation is capable of, and seeing the full extent of its enemies.   Car 12/5/10

They are appealing for money to help in this struggle. We want to stress that they are not asking for money to feed themselves during a strike. Although this type of solidarity can be important, very often it never gets to the actual strikers involved, and even if it does, it can do little to alleviate suffering amongst the tens of thousands of families affected by a big strike. What they are asking for is money to enable them to organize activities necessary for the struggle. Turkey is a very big country (traveling across it is like traveling from London to Warsaw), and TEKEL, for example, is a company with workers all across the country. Traveling to meetings costs money as does organizing things such as leafleting, fly-postering, and public meetings, and money is something which workers after a long struggle in one of the poorest countries in Europe lack.

Don't be put off if you can't afford much. Remember that Turkey is one of the poorest countries in Europe, and that even a little money can go a long way, for example the price of a packet of cigarettes and a beer in Europe can be enough to send a worker to a meeting in another city.

You can use the Paypal button at the side of the web site to send money directly to the Platform of Struggling Workers.

To learn more about the Tekel workers' struggle, read our news and articles covering the strike [43] .

In the first article we published on the Tekel struggle [61] , we gave an account of the developments until January 20th. In this article, we will continue from where we left off, and try to give an account of what went on from the erection of the Tekel workers' camp in the centre of Ankara to March 2nd, when the workers left Ankara.  What will be told is the story of the entire working class. We owe our warm thanks to the Tekel workers for making the writing of this article possible by explaining to us what they went through, their experiences and thoughts and for making it possible for these experiences to lighten the way both for the future developments in the Tekel struggle and for the future struggles of our class.

We concluded our first article by highlighting the efforts of the workers to form a committee. Since the beginning of the struggle to January 20th, there had been four or five attempts to form a committee, and there were as many attempts in the process that followed. On the other hand, it wasn't possible for these committees to start functioning. At the moment, there exists a group of militant workers from every city, regularly in touch and constantly discussing how to move the struggle forward. However this group has not yet managed to become a formal committee recognized by the workers. 

One of the first problems we can highlight while attempting to explain the reasons for this situation is the lack of communication among the workers. The workers are actually together always, and discussing constantly. On the other hand, they have not been able to establish an organ, like a mass assembly, that would allow them to come together and discuss all together in an organized manner. As we will try to explain later in the article, the fact that workers from each city setup their own tents and spent most of their time in these tents also contributed to this problem. It could be said that this separation blocked communication. A more important general problem was that a majority of the workers for the most part did not want to establish an alternative to the trade-union, or hesitated to do so. Lots of trade-unionists were respected for the sole reason that they were trade-unionists. Their words were preferred to those of determined, militant, leading workers. This led to a very serious problem of workers failing to stand behind their own decisions. The psychological dependence of the workers on the trade-union officials prevented the emergence of workers' committees outside the trade-unions.

What a worker comrade from Adıyaman told us confirms this observation: "Had the issues been discussed in the tents, and had each tent sent a few people, the committee would have been formed by itself. In such a situation, no one could have opposed it. It would have been impossible. We tried to put this question forward, but did it a bit from above, like people who believed this was necessary coming together. The lack of communication was a big problem, for example there should have been a communications tent when the tents were setup. Had we done that, the committee too would have been built around it."

The workers in general are openly expressing their lack of trust towards the trade-union, but their hesitations are preventing an alternative to the trade-union from arising. While this seems to be a contradictory situation, it does actually show that the trade-union still has a serious influence over the workers. The workers, even though they don't trust the union, still keep clinging to it and keep thinking they can make their voice heard using it.

As for the trade-union officials, they are, unsurprisingly, very disturbed even by the mention of the word committee. They are well aware of the fact that if a committee comes into being, they would lose control, and the mass of workers would not be in their hands anymore. Yet this is not a settled issue for the workers. The attempts to form the committee continue, despite the problems the workers have been having, and despite how troubling this is for the union officials.

If we get back to how the events developed, on January 14th, nearly all Tekel workers and their families from nearly every city with a Tekel factory had gathered in Ankara for a three-day continuous sit in. The workers made fires to keep warm during the nights. On the third day, there was heavy rain. The workers had to put up nylon covers over the streets they were sleeping in. This was how the establishment of the workers' tent city in the middle of Ankara came into being. The setting up of the tents was a very spontaneous development, as in many other aspects of the struggle. Actually, the workers had requested a struggle tent to be set up in front of the Turk-Is headquarters; this was one of the demands which developed with the initial efforts to form a committee, but the union had prevented this from happening then. The tents were set up eventually, but because the weather conditions made them necessary. The nylon pulled to cover the street quickly started looking like tents, and soon workers from all the different cities were setting up their tents. After the tents were built, the trade-union gave its support. The reason for the tents to be separated according the cities the workers came from was because the workers wanted to prevent undercover policemen or provocateurs from infiltrating the tents and preventing a possible dispersal by making everyone control the other from the city they came from. Due to the cold, more nylon sheets were brought. Because the fires they had made outside produced a lot of soot and smoke, workers had to bring in stoves. Eventually, there was a living, breathing tent city in the middle of Ankara.

There had been a mass demonstration of the Tekel workers and lots of supporters from different cities on January 17th, following the sit-in. Tekel workers, aware that they could only win by spreading the struggle, had been pushing the union confederation Turk-Is to declare a general strike. The workers, following Turk-Is chairman Mustafa Kumlu's speech which did not even mention a general strike, had first occupied the platform where the trade-unionists were addressing the over hundred thousand demonstrators, and then had occupied the Turk-Is headquarters. This lead to Mustafa Türkel, the chairman of Tek-Gida Is, the union Tekel workers are in, distancing himself from Kumlu and complaining about how isolated he is within Turk-Is, and how the other trade-unions within the confederation as well the other confederations did not give any support.

A three-day hunger strike was to follow this demonstration according to the schedule. Following the three-day hunger strike, an all out one was to begin. Despite the fact that they thought a hunger strike was the last road to take, they were saying that in this situation, their dead bodies would be worth more than their lives, that the pay their families would receive if they died would be higher than the wages they are condemned to. This was not an extreme idea developed by one person. This was the possible response anyone who was worried about the workers going on hunger strike would get from the workers. On the other hand, while what the workers said on this was a solid fact, this argument did not manage to negate the idea that a hunger strike wasn't the right way to go. On January 19th a hunger strike with a number limited number of participants, 140, began.

In the following days, Turk-Is and the leftist trade-union confederations, KESK and DISK, announced their joint plan of action. A decision to start work an hour late on the 22nd was taken, and a plan to organize daily support visit and protests was put forward. On the 21st, Turk-Is, KESK, DISK as well as the more right wing Kamu-Sen, Memur-Sen and Hak-Is confederations came together and announced that if the government did not solve the issue by the 26th, they would use ‘the power coming from production', and announce the date of the solidarity strike they would organize. Prime Minister Erdogan invited Turk-Is chairman Kumlu to have a meeting the same day. After the meeting, the government commissioned Mehmet Simsek, the Minister of Finance to come up with a new solution. Simsek was none other than the man who had said "If our government has made a mistake, it was being too compassionate towards our workers who will lose their jobs due to privatization". He now said that after coming up with the new solution, he wanted to meet the Turk-Is delegation again. This process was to take five days. In the face of this uncertain situation, and taking into consideration the suggestions of the doctors, the workers halted the hunger strike which had been going on for three days. On the 26th, the negative response from the government came. The series of negotiations was to continue until the 1st of February. This was, in many ways a policy of stalling. In the end the government did not replace 4-C[1], but did make certain improvements to it. The maximum working time, which had been increased to 11 months previously, now better paid, seniority compensation was given and so was 22 days of holiday rights. The workers responded saying "We do not want 4-C wearing make-up".

As the negotiations did not produce a result, the hunger strikes started again on February 2nd. The six trade-union confederations, Türk-Is, Hak-Is, DISK, Memur-Sen, Kamu-Sen and KESK, came together again, and declared "a general strike in which they would use their power coming from production". This decision, of course, was not taken due to the initiatives of the trade-unions themselves, but as a result of the pressure coming from the workers. The workers had demonstrated how determined they were about pushing for a general strike on the January 17th demonstration, occupying both the platform and the Turk-Is headquarters. There also had been efforts to tear down the doors of the building. The workers had called for Kumlu's resignation for three hours, and Mustafa Turkel had been forced to make a speech very critical of Turk-Is, calling on the other trade-unions to take a decision in favour of a general strike. The decision of the trade-unions was thus very clearly a result of the pressure coming from the base.  The trade-unions had done their best to stall the workers with the negotiations. Now, finally they the confederations had to declare the general strike.

Following this decision, Erdogan, after saying that the workers' demonstrations had "exceeded their purpose", said: "Well, excuse us. We did the maximum of what had to be done. This has turned into an open campaign against the government, rather than asking for more rights. We are consignees. We are consignees of the money of the new-born orphans" and added that the salaries of the Tekel workers had been paid, and the seniority compensation was now in their bank accounts, and that if they applied in a month's time they could start working accordingly to the "temporary personnel" laws, in other words under 4-C. The time to apply to start working under 4-C conditions was thus shortened. This was a veiled threat of unemployment against the workers. Not that Erdogan hesitated to make open threats either. After declaring the workers demonstration in front of Turk-Is to be illegal and after defining it as an occupation, he said "We are going to test our patience till the end of the month. Afterwards, we will take whatever the legal steps are (...) Because this event has turned into an open abuse by ideological groups and extremists. Look at their banners. Look at their slogans. They are using a shameless and impudent tone targeting myself and my party. The workers are being used." The governor of Ankara, Kemal Onal decided to jump on the bandwagon as a result of these statements. He himself made a threat: right before the general solidarity action organized on behalf of the TEKEL workers, he declared it to be illegal for workers and public servants working under enterprises. Charges were to be pressed against all who were to participate. 

On the other hand, the fact that the trade-unions had declared a general strike did not mean they were not to take the meaning out of the general strike and build a barrier against it. Lots of pro-government trade-unions within the Turk-Is confederation opposed the decision of the general strike. Pro-government confederations Memur-Sen and Hak-Is decided not to participate at the last minute. As for Turk-Is in general, they decided only to participate in the demonstrations in Ankara on the level of trade-union officials and representatives. Hence the bases will to participate was blocked, and workers from different sectors and cities were prevented from coming together. There were perhaps 30,000-40,000 in the demonstration that day, but this number could have been well over 100,000. The trade-unions tried to limit the number. Participation in the strike from the other trade-unions wasn't near the desired levels either. Although not generalized in regards to the whole class, the Tekel workers participation was about 90% so near 9,000 of the 10,857 employees. There were demonstrations in support of the TEKEL workers on the same day in other cities.

This was no real general strike. It was too limited, too insufficient. The power of the general strike comes from the threat of halting life itself using the power of production the workers have. Yet on the 4th of February, it was not really even possible for someone who wasn't notified of the strike by the trade-unions to realize that there actually was a strike going on. This was at least partially admitted even by some confederation chairmen. Sami Evren, the chairman of KESK, said "The movement started by the Tekel workers turned into a great solidarity all around Turkey. It was socialized. This is the success of the movement, but there were successes and failures to use the power coming from production in some places. There were insufficiencies here, this has to be acknowledged." The chairman of DISK, Suleyman Celebi, said "There have been ‘not going to work' actions in 81 cities. It is true that these actions in Istanbul and Ankara were below the expected, but it can't be said that this affects the general success of the solidarity action".

On same day, the government took some counter-steps. The new law on the employment of "temporary personnel", 4-C, was published in the Official Newspaper. The number of 4-C employees to be taken was announced as 36,215 for the year 2010. Tekel was included in the law. This law not only abolished the workers' right to get paid from unemployment insurance for eight months, but also aimed at making the workers work for very low pay under the threat of unemployment. On February 16th, Tek Gida-Is pressed charges against the one month time limit of applying for 4-C. If the law was cancelled, the Tekel workers would be able to get their unemployment compensation for eight months, which is double the minimum wage, and could apply for 4-C at the end of this period. The main direction, which until February 4th was pushing for the general strike, now was waiting for the decision of the courts.

What kept the workers going until February 4th was the effort to push the confederations into declaring the general strike, thus expanding the struggle. The fact that these expectations weren't realized, that there wasn't a real general strike, changed the course of the struggle. Now the focus was the one month period imposed on applications for 4-C. The legal process taking prominence is, in general, something that takes place as the struggle weakens. The example in Tekel was no exception. The role of the trade-union, both in weakening the struggle and in making the legal process the point of focus, cannot be underestimated. To express it bluntly, the workers had become a problem for them. The best way, they thought, was to send them home, take the process down the legal road and be done with it, and that was what they worked towards. This process of waiting, for the workers anyway, also meant taking a risk. They were, after all, threatened with unemployment and pushed to 4-C, but there also was a period for all this. They would lose the option to apply for 4-C in a month. As for the trade-unionists, while they mostly couldn't defend the 4-C openly, they were saying things like "We can neither tell you to apply nor not to apply".  It was rumoured that some trade-unionists were even saying "Applying for the 4-C is the most logical thing to do". Of course they couldn't dare to say these things while the militant workers were nearby, as they knew this would result in the militant workers arguing vigilantly against them, and them ending up having to run away.

The issue that dominated the following days was the seniority compensation of workers being deposited into their bank accounts, and the question of whether the workers used them or not. Erdogan said: "The workers got their compensation, those who remained there are not workers". However, the struggling workers had decided not to withdraw their compensation since doing that would in a way mean accepting 4-C. However, because some had debts, there were automatic deductions from their bank accounts. This made it appear as if the workers were using their compensations but the important thing was the trick the government was pulling on the workers. What happened was the following: the government, through the Ministry of Finance, gave an order to the Vakif Bank General Administration to open a new account on behalf of the workers. The bank, without informing the workers, cut 25 TL from each worker, and transferred the compensation to that account, so it would appear the workers used their compensations. After this came out, the trade-union filed yet another law suit regarding this issue.

The workers started a three day hunger strike on February 2nd. The hunger strike was over on February 5th. However the day the hunger strike was over, 100 Tekel workers launched an all-out hunger strike. The chairman of Tek Gida-Is, Mustafa Turkel, announced that the all-out hunger strike was over on February 11th. He also called on 16 workers who continued the hunger strike despite the trade unions decision to stop it. Afterwards, he directly repeated his call to the hunger striking workers, but got the response from a determined hunger striker that they were going to continue their hunger strike by their own will. The same militant worker was called outside by another worker who claimed that he wanted to talk to him. There, the militant hunger striker was told to stop the hunger strike, and attacked. The worker who attacked him was someone known to have defended the union against other fellow workers before and was said to be an unbalanced element. Since we do not have any detailed information about this event, we are not making any claims here about the possible connections of the attacker. It might or might not be the trade-union management who made this worker attack the hunger striking comrade. However, regardless of whether he was recruited by the trade-union management to silence this dissident hunger striker, or did it to suck up to the trade-unionists, either directly or indirectly the trade-union is responsible for this. Because if any worker can attack a fellow worker who is on a hunger strike in order to suck up to the union, the reason for this is that the trade-union bureaucracy has interests separate from and opposed to those of the workers, and this would mean that he attempted to suck up to the trade-unionists by serving their interests. This example openly shows that while the main issue for the struggling workers is the question of how we can win the struggle, the trade unions are chasing completely alien bureaucratic interests and political agendas. This situation, far from being surprising, is important in being a striking example of the counter-revolutionary nature of contemporary trade-unions. 

In any case, following this event, the negotiations with Erdogan continued. Following a compromise not being reached as a result of these negotiations, Hak-Is withdrew from acting jointly with the other confederations. On February 12nd, Turk-Is, Kamu-Sen, KESK and DISK came together again. In this meeting, it was decided to continue the negotiations with the government, to file a lawsuit to get 4-C cancelled and for the local organizations of the confederations to come to Ankara and stay with the Tekel workers in front of Turk-Is over night on February 20th. On the 16th, the confederations announced their joint action plan: on February 18th, banners saying "The struggle of the Tekel workers is our struggle" and "No to unregulated and unsafe work" were to be put up in all union offices of the four confederations; on February 19th, there were to be sit-ins and press announcements in all cities and on the 20th there would be a solidarity demonstration in Ankara. Those coming from out of town would gather in Kolej square, march to Sakarya square and stay with the Tekel workers all night. 

Tekel workers from Adana made the following call for the demonstration on February 20th, emphasizing the importance of the expansion of the struggle: "We want everyone who is against this bad order in Turkey to support our movement. This is no longer just about us. This is about the majority, the oppressed. Hopefully we will win. We have lit a fire, and the public has to continue from here. This is our future, the future of our children we are dealing with, the future of the working class in Turkey. We have led, it is up to them to finish. We shall not leave here without getting what we deserve, but the public has to wake up and support us, with their families, kids and all, with everyone". 

On February 11th, Tek Gida-Is declared an end to the hunger strike, but 16 workers continued. On February 12th, a worker was hospitalized, and five more workers joined the hunger strike as a result. These workers ended their hunger strike, declaring that they had ‘finished the hunger strike based on their own will, and would not hesitate to start again if they deem it necessary'. 

The solidarity demonstration did take place on February 20th, with the participation of the trade-unions, political parties and mass organizations. Workers from the Balnak logistics company who had lost their job around the same time the Tekel struggle started were also present. As planned, all gathered in Kolej square in the morning and marched to Sakarya square. Sakarya square was full of demonstrators. It had turned into a carnival, and the demonstrators had changed the look of the place completely. On the other hand, generally the workers were still in their tents, while the demonstrators were in the square. There was always a circulation in between these two very close locations, but the separation remained. Later in the night, people were tired, and the streets were full of demonstrators sleeping on pieces of cardboard. The next day, people gathered and the demonstration was finished with a press announcement. Afterwards, those from out of town started returning. This demonstration was important in that gave a morale boost to the Tekel workers, and in that it expressed class solidarity. However, due to the decision of the trade-unions to only send representatives and officials the number of workers coming from other sectors was low, however most Tekel workers who weren't in Ankara at the time gathered in the city. Despite all these negative aspects, having support meant a lot to the workers. Workers in the tents we visited through the night in general felt positively about the demonstration and said that it gave them morale.

On February 23rd, the four confederations gathered again. They took a decision to organize another general strike on May 26th in case the government did not take a step back. Scheduling a general strike three months later was nothing less than openly mocking the workers. The decision was on the internet before it was announced. Those who read it informed each other, those who couldn't believe what they heard went to check it themselves. No one wanted to believe the news. The branch representatives hadn't been informed of the decision, and were saying that the news was false, and were reacting strongly to those who asked about it. Following the announcement, workers gathered started shouting slogans against Turk-Is and Kumlu. At this critical moment, Turkel showed his true nature openly. To the workers he shouted "If you keep shouting Kumlu resign, then I will resign". The workers did not really have much of a problem with that!

Mustafa Turkel, the chairman of Tek Gida-Is, resigned from the position of General Secretary he held within the Turk-Is confederacy on February 24th. He announced that he was to make the necessary explanation about his reasons for resignation on March 2nd. This was also the last possible date for the workers to apply for 4-C according to the government, and also the date the government had threatened to attack the workers in order to destroy the tent city. Turkel did not see the need to explain why he resigned to the workers. By not making an explanation, he was openly undermining the Tekel workers struggle which had been going on for more than two months. Why would someone who resigned refuse to explain why he resigned? What did it mean, disappearing in an atmosphere in which the government was threatening the workers both with unemployment and with an attack? Would it be an exaggeration to say that he was waiting for March 2nd to be over, for the waters to be clear again? 

These uncertain situations, naturally lead to confusions about Turkel's resignation. He could have resigned because the workers had called for Kumlu's resignation, but also he could have resigned because he had no support within Turk-Is. The workers were considering both possibilities. A Tekel worker from Adıyaman was evaluating the situation like this: "This can be interpreted in two ways. If it happened the way the press presented it, if the chairman of Tek Gida-Is resigned as a reaction against the workers, I think this is wrong. He can't have such a luxury. No one has the right to sabotage this process. We have been struggling for 71 days. There surely will be those among 12 thousand workers who can't control their nerves, and who react. On the other hand, Turkel resigned from his position as the General Secretary of Turk-Is, not from his position as the chairman of Tek Gida-Is. I think this resignation can also be a reaction against the decisions taken by the confederations yesterday. If that is the case, if it is a reaction against Turk-Is or the other confederations saying ‘you are leaving us alone', then we would embrace our chairman with all our hearts. I don't want to think he resigned as a reaction against the workers, as it was presented by the press. I want to think it as a reaction against the Turk-Is administration. I don't think the reactions shown against him by a few fellows represent the general feeling. He wouldn't resign because of the "Turkel resign" slogans shouted by a few. There could be other reasons. From the beginning, our reaction was directed towards Kumlu, for his close relationship with the government and his lack of sincerity. But we believed in Turkel from the start. We should wait for the chairman's explanation." A Tekel worker from Istanbul evaluated the situation like this: "We are a family. There may be discussions among us. If he resigned because of the workers reactions, he didn't do the right thing. If he did it as a reaction to the Turk-Is administration, he was right. If it was done because of the workers' reaction, it was nothing but an excuse for running away. It is not right for him to leave the workers and run away. But the struggle will continue regardless of whether he is in or out. Actually, he has been threatening us for 71 days every day, like a husband threatens a wife. But we remained patient, undivided. Now, such a reaction against the workers is, to me, an excuse for running away, if of course he resigned because of it. It is not right to say "I won't play anymore" like a kid. As workers all we want is for them to do their trade-union duties and not to scold us. It was very natural for us to react against the decisions of the confederations, and I do think it included all the workers, that it was the common reaction of all the workers. Workers' meetings were to be held in the morning. Yet it was said that Turkel had an urgent meeting, and that the workers' meetings were to be postponed until the afternoon. Sometime later his resignation was announced. Where did Turkel go, who did he talk to, what happened in this meeting, we do not know." Turkel had previously said that he was against the reaction the workers gave against Kumlu, and that he would resign in case such incident happened again. Trade-unionists thought that Türkel's resignation was because of the workers reaction. As a result of this, Mustafa Akyurek, the General Secretary for Education of Tek Gida-ıs declared that the claims of Turkel's decisions being due to his disagreements with the Turk-Is administration were false, and the decision to resign was taken because of the reactions Turkel got from the workers.  

On the 23rd of February, thirteen workers in a mine in Balikesir died because of a firedamp explosion. This was the third workplace murder which had happened due to insecure working conditions since 2006. Before the thirteen workers who died on the 23rd, seventeen had been killed in the previous explosion, and three had been killed in the explosion before than. The Tekel workers who heard about this felt a great pain. Their deceased class brothers had already been subjected to insecure working conditions. Now they were the ones who the government tried to subject to the same conditions. It was impossible not to feel this class anger and pain. A worker from Adiyaman explains what happened like this: "To feel that the deceased were of us, to show solidarity. There was 100% participation. Everyone felt it, that pain. We prepared banners, black ribbons, we made a press announcement. It was very important for class solidarity". The miners were commemorated during the now regular and daily night-time demonstration with torches, and there was a minute of silence in the honour of the deceased miners. The slogan "long live class solidarity" became the voice of the day.

The next morning, on the 25th, the workers woke up to yet another bad news. A fellow Tekel worker, Hamdullah Uysal, had been killed in Ankara in a traffic accident.

Hamdullah Uysal, born in Amasya, had been working as a Tekel worker in Samsun. He was 39 years old, and had two kids, one of them disabled. He had participated in the hunger strikes. Tekel workers had experienced other losses during the struggle, some had mothers or fathers, and some had children who passed away, but this was the first time a Tekel worker had passed away during the struggle. Hamdullah Uysal was a militant worker who had been involved with the struggle from the beginning. He had been in Ankara from the start of the struggle, and had returned to his hometown only twice. Workers regarded him as a class war martyr. The way the accident had happened also resulted in class anger among the workers. Uysal had been hit by a jeep driven by a drunk driver at 5:30 in the morning, while going to morning prayer. There was anger towards that person and the class he represented. The workers were referring to the murderer as a "some rich guy with a jeep".

Because the workers saw Uysal as a martyr of the struggle, and because they felt that the tent city in front of Turk-Is was like a home to all of them, they wanted to bring his funeral to the tent city, have a ceremony there and then send Uysal home. They talked to Uysal's wife, who said: "The street in front of the Turk-Is building was like a home to him, the tent in front of Turk-Is is his home, he would have wanted this. Have the ceremony in front of Turk-Is and then send him home".

Thus, 400-500 workers went to the Forensic Office in Kecioren, where Uysal's body had been taken to. Actually everyone wanted to go there, but the workers decided to limit the number in order to not to leave the tents alone, since the government kept spitting out threats about destroying the tents. The workers feared the government could attack and tear down the tents as soon as they left Sakarya square. Thus some had to remain, and wait in front of Turk-Is for the body to be brought there.

The Tekel workers who went to the Forensics Office attempted take the body. They had to wait for hours, and were told that Uysal's brother and uncle would come to pick up his body. In the end, a relative of Uysal who himself was a Tekel worker came, but the body wasn't given to him either. Eventually an "uncle" emerged, who claimed to be Uysal's aunts husband. The Forensics Office declared that the body was to be given to him. Workers who knew that bodies are only given to first degree relatives did not buy this "uncle" story. In fact, they suspected that the "uncle" could be an undercover cop, and voiced them. Their suspicions were confirmed when this "uncle" eventually had to admit that he indeed was an undercover cop. Thus, the workers started pushing to get the body again. The police did not allow it again. They waited for hours and also tried their best to call the Uysal family, but to no avail. Finally Hamdullah Uysal's family arrived, and the Ankara Police and the Governorship immediately put them under pressure. The Ankara Police who stopped them on the road were trying to force the family to sign a document accepting that the body would be taken to Uysal's home without a ceremony in Ankara. The pressures continued in the Forensics Office as well. Finally the family had to give in and agree to taking the body home without having a ceremony in Ankara. 

In the meanwhile, the workers waiting in front of the Forensics Office were told that they would be given the body. Thus the workers got into the ambulance carrying Uysal's body. However a group who realized that the ambulances were going a different way than they should immediately got out and blocked the road. Other workers followed. Workers stopped the ambulance from moving en masse. As a result the police came and went in-between the workers who remained in the back and those in front of the ambulance in order to stop it. The workers who remained in the back tried to help the ones in front of the ambulance, but the police attacked them with tear-gas and dispersed them, and then formed a second barricade. Then the police attacked the smaller group blocking the path of the ambulance and took all of them out. They did not want to let go of these workers. The larger group of workers however managed to gather again and started trying to unite with their fellow workers. This didn't happen in the end though, and the police ended up managing to take the ambulance away by attacking the workers ferociously.  

In the meanwhile, the workers who had been waiting in front of Turk-Is tried to go to Mithat Pasha Street and leave flowers where he died; but the police prevented them. They also dispersed the workers who gathered in Sakarya Square in order to help their fellow workers in the Forensic Office. In the face of the police barricade on the Mithat Pasha Street, the workers were shouting "You are afraid of our dead". Slogans such as "Tayyip the murderer" and "Murderous AKP shall answer to the workers" were also shouted. Despite all the efforts of the police, a group of workers did manage to leave flowers on the place Hamdullah Uysal was killed.

The workers returning from the Forensics Office went directly to Mithat Pasha Street. The Police formed yet another barricade in order to prevent the workers from crossing the street en masse. The workers managed to break through the barricade however, and started a sit in on the street. Workers in front of Turk-Is also started coming. Together, they had a 20-25 minutes long sit-in, shouting slogans in memory of Hamdullah Uysal. Police surrounded the workers during this demonstration. Eventually the workers ended the sit-in and went back to the tent city.

The union did not take a stance on the side of the workers during all this. It was absent when the police attacked the workers in front of the Forensics Office. When the workers in front of Turk-Is wanted to go to help their fellow workers, the trade-unionists only tried to calm them down and make them return to their tents.

Hamdullah Uysal's death showed once more how scared the forces of the order were of the workers. The Police and the Governorship had tried their best to prevent the workers from bidding their farewell to their deceased fellow worker, but in the end it was a vain effort. The workers managing to break through the police barricade and having a sit-in on the street where Uysal died, blocking all the traffic on the street, even if for only 20-25 minutes, was perhaps the best farewell the Tekel workers could bid to their deceased fellow worker.

Uysal's death had upset the Tekel workers greatly, but it also helped the Tekel workers who were still in their hometowns understand how serious the whole thing was. One of the things Hamdullah Uysal left us, was his call for the expansion of the struggle to the rest of the class: "Here, everything gained by the working class will become a compass for the working class movements of tomorrow and after tomorrow. Join our struggle, save your future."

The following day, 25 Tekel workers went to the AKP Ankara headquarters. The Tekel workers who entered the building wanted to put up a banner with a picture of Hamdullah Uysal on it. After this, private security forces as well as the police attacked the workers in the building. This however triggered the group of workers gathered outside, who wanted to go inside also. They, however, were attacked outside also, and lots of workers were wounded in this attack. 19 workers were taken into custody. Slogans "Murderous AKP, Tayyip the murderer" were shouted and the workers explained how the government was responsible for Hamdullah Uysal's death. Those who were left behind blocked the police vehicles taking the workers taken into custody, shouting "Everywhere is Tekel, struggle everywhere", "Suppression can't daunt us". Nevertheless unfortunately they didn't manage to prevent their fellow workers from being taken away.

After the news about some workers being taken into custody came out, a group of woman workers from the Izmir tent went to the police headquarters. Those taken into custody were not recorded, with the excuse of there being repairs in the building. A group of workers who were in front of Turk-Is put pressure for the union to send its lawyers. The event had taken place outside trade-union initiative and the union wanted to part in this, but as a result of workers pressures, they ended up having to go to the police headquarters with their lawyers. The following day, workers waited in front of the courthouse from 10:00 to 21:00 when their fellow workers were released. The workers remained in custody for approximately 40 hours. 15 workers were released that afternoon. Four, who were charged with "damaging public property and disobeying a police officer", had a trial and were released the same night. They returned to the tent city with their fellow workers and supporters who had been waiting for them.

On March 1st, the court decided in favour of the lawsuit brought against the one month period for application to 4-C for the Tekel workers. The workers celebrated the decision. While the militant workers had been trying to warn the others about how this would not be a victory 3-4 days in advance, their warnings were not effective. This false feeling of victory was to sabotage the workers' united stance the next day. 

On March 2nd, Mustafa Turkel announced that the Ankara demonstrations were over and called for the tents to be taken down, with a return scheduled for April 1st. This divided the workers into those who opposed the union's decision to end the struggle and those who didn't. Those who opposed shouted slogans like "The tents are our honour. We won't let you touch our honour". The other responded with shouting "Turkel is our honour". Those who opposed the union's decision and supported it were now pitted against each other, with those who opposed the union in the minority. Some tents were taken down even before Turkel's speech was over. No time was left for the workers to have a general discussion. Thus the workers who opposed the union's decision talked and discussed among each other and decided to act around a strategy. The union was trying to pit the workers who opposed the decision and those in favour against each other, and isolate the workers who opposed it, trying to push them out of the process. The union had the intention of pushing the trouble-making workers out of April 1st, isolating them from the other workers, and take the rest of the workers completely under their control. The militant workers however did not fall into the union's trap, and in order to prevent being pitted against their fellow workers, they stopped resisting the union decision. Those who opposed the decision to take the tents down had a majority in the Adiyaman, Izmir, Istanbul and Diyarbakir tents. They went along with the decision after discussing among each other.

Actually the union had started working towards taking the tents down well in advance; they had been making propaganda in this direction for about 20 days. The trade-union representatives had been making speeches in the tents, trying to convince people to take them down. The day the workers were waiting in front of the courthouse for their fellow workers in custody, the union had made branch meetings, and had put forward the idea of taking down the tents. All this work had paid off for the union when the decision was finally announced; it was supported by the majority. One of the worker comrades we talked to before the tents were taken down, when we asked whether he expected a police attack, had responded to us pointing out that there won't be any need for an attack, since the union is taking care of that anyway. This by itself showed how openly the union and the government cooperated, but the union unfortunately seemed as if on the side of the workers to lots of people, it was backstabbing so to speak. Among happy and sad workers following the abolishment of the tent city were angry ones. One worker we spoke to had summarized the situation by saying everything starts with the trade-union messing things up and ends with it also.

The Tekel struggle was like a scream ending the silence of the working class in Turkey since the early to mid 90s. The struggle had also put forward a completely new method. The formation of a tent city, with struggling workers living there 24 hours was something completely new. As we pointed out at the beginning of the article, this had positive aspects. It enabled workers to develop self-control among each other. On the other hand, it also had negative effects. After a while, the tents led to some languor. This languor imprisoned most of the workers inside the tents. The problem of the lack of communication emerged. Still with both its positive and negative aspects, the tents were an expression of the struggle, and had turned into a symbol of it also.

The end of the tent city did not mean a month's break to the struggle for the militant workers. A group of workers, made up of a few from every city, decided to stay in contact and coordinate the continuation of the struggle in the cities within the month. Organizing the return to Ankara on April 1st, keeping the issue warm and visiting workers from other struggles made up the strategy the militant workers agreed on following the end of the tent city. While the taking down of the tents seemed like the defeat of the struggle, the fact that the militant Tekel workers have started to work towards uniting existing struggles and spreading the struggle to the rest of the class may result in very important developments not only for the Tekel workers but for all class struggles in Turkey in general. 

Sude, May 31st, 2010.

[1] "What is this 4-C then? This practice was actually a ‘blessing' put forward by the Turkish state when the number of workers who were to lose their jobs due to privatisations increased. It includes, aside from a serious pay-cut, public workers being shifted to different sectors within the state under horrible conditions. The worst of the conditions introduced by the 4-C policy is that it gives the bosses of the state an absolute power over the workers. Thus, the wage, which is determined by the state and is already a massive pay-cut for the workers, is merely a maximum price. It can be reduced by the state enterprise managers arbitrarily. Also, working hours are completely abolished for those who are to work under the 4-C conditions and the bosses of the state enterprises gain the right to arbitrarily make the workers stay at work for as long as they want, until the workers "finish the task assigned to them". The workers get no money whatsoever in return for this "extra" work after regular public employees' working hours or during holidays. Under this policy, the bosses have the power to fire the workers arbitrarily, without being obliged to pay them any compensation. Besides, the period workers can work in a year is between three months and ten months, nothing being paid to the workers in the months they aren't asked to work and the duration of their work again being arbitrarily determined by the bosses. Despite this, the workers are forbidden to find a second job even if they are not working at a certain period. The social security payments of the workers are not made anymore under the 4-C policy, and all health benefits are taken away." https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2010/01/tekel-turkey [61]

The jailing of two gay men in Malawi for the crime of marrying each other (though the two were subsequently released) has brought the plight of gay men and women in Africa to the surface. Gay sex is illegal in 36 African countries and can carry heavy penalties; in Uganda a Christian fundamentalist MP is attempting to introduce a law prescribing the death penalty for ‘repeat offenses'. In areas under Sharia law, as in parts of Nigeria, the penalty is already death by stoning. In Zimbabwe two gay rights activists were arrested and tortured with Robert Mugabe, as usual, accusing the ‘west' of introducing this "sub-animal" practice, into the African continent, with the firm recommendation that Africans should "leave this sort of thing to the whites". In South Africa, although the state does not outlaw gay sex, social attitudes often seem to be just as inflexible, and many lesbians have suffered assault and ‘corrective rape': "Eudy Simelane, who played for the South African women's football team and lived openly as a lesbian, was gang-raped and stabbed 25 times; at least 20 other lesbians have been killed over the past five years" [1]

While Mugabe and many other African politicians and religious leaders claim that homosexuality is an alien import, it is equally facile to see this extreme homophobia as an expression of African backwardness. Let us recall that ‘sodomy' was illegal in Britain until the 1960s and is still illegal in some American states; that gay people have been viciously persecuted in Stalinist regimes, including Cuba, and that perhaps 15,000 gay people were murdered in concentration camps by the Nazis. Homosexual acts are illegal in over 70 countries worldwide and gay people have been systematically targeted by Islamic murder gangs in countries like Iraq.

So homophobia is a rather more universal problem. In fact, there is evidence that the brutal homophobia being expressed in Africa today is the real alien import.

"The researcher EE Evans-Pritchard described how until the early 20th-century, male Azande warriors in the northern Congo routinely married male youths who functioned as temporary wives...Similar customs were reported among the Tsonga people of South Africa. Among the Maale people of southern Ethiopia, some males dressed as women and performed what were considered female tasks - including having sexual relations with men. Among the Fon in Benin and the Naman in south-eastern Africa, homosexual relations were accepted among adolescents and not infrequently lasted throughout the life of the pair. The Nyakyusa in Tanzania, similarly, tolerated young men having sex with young men.

It was when the colonists arrived, as the Belgian writer Rudi Bleys has noted, that African tolerance of same-sex activity became used to justify the "barbarity" of a culture and the necessity of the European's "civilising" mission. "Homophobia was put into law under colonialisation," Tendi says. "In fact, homophobia is more colonial than the practice of homosexuality in Africa. The laws being used to prosecute homosexuals today are old colonial laws. They have simply never been repealed." (here the Guardian article mentioned above is quoting from research by Blessing-Miles Tendi, a Zimbabwean-born researcher in African politics at the University of Oxford).

The same could be said about tribal societies outside Africa - for example the phenomenon of the ‘berdache' or ‘two spirited' in North America, men and women who took on characteristics of the opposite sex and often engaged in same-sex marriage. These figures were not only accepted but were often seen as vehicles of spiritual power. Other researchers have argued that while homosexual activity is often found in tribal societies, people with an exclusively homosexual identity are less common. In any case, without making any premature generalisations, it is likely that the rise of private property and the elimination of the vestiges of primitive communism saw not only the growing oppression of women, as Engels argued in his Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, but also an increasing taboo on homosexual relationships.

Decomposition of capitalist society in Africa, and how the bourgeoisie makes use of it

If there is nothing particularly African about homophobia, it is true to say that the general effects of the decomposition of capitalist society - increasingly senseless wars, the descent of social life into an unending battle between murderous gangs - have hit the continent with particular severity. This is because it has for so long been prey to the plunder of the global imperialist powers, and its weakly developed economic structures have been so vulnerable to the storms of the world crisis of capitalism. ‘Failed states' like Somalia, Sudan and Zimbabwe  offer a terrifying foretaste of what lies in store for humanity if capitalism's decay is allowed to continue unchecked. Given the catastrophic state of numerous African countries, it is inevitable that there should be such a persistence and even renaissance of religious ideologies which appear to offer some explanation and alternative to the apocalyptic conditions facing millions of people. Fundamentalist Islam and Christianity, both of which institutionalise homophobia, exert a growing influence all over the continent.

But this is not a purely automatic process. Particular factions of the ruling class encourage these ideologies as a way of cementing their own power, or creating false divisions which prevent those they exploit from seeing their real enemy. In Nigeria, for example, there have been many bloody pogroms between Christians and Muslims, fratricidal massacres in which the poor and the exploited are encouraged to blame their own class brothers and sisters for the real, material misery they face in their daily lives. Whipping up suspicion and hatred against gay people offers the ruling class a very convenient scapegoat that can easily be used to strengthen the hand of state repression. The new legislation being considered in Uganda advocates draconian penalties not only for homosexual activities but also for people who fail to report the homosexual activities of others to the state!

Christianity and Islam were of course ‘alien imports' in Africa in the first place, ideologies that justified the colonial empires that established their rule in different parts of the continent. This form of colonisation continues today: the current wave of homophobia in Christian countries is actively encouraged by certain US missionary groups who, as elsewhere, serve as an unofficial arm of American imperialism.

The answer to oppression is not bourgeois democracy, but class struggle

Some of the gay activists being persecuted in Africa have argued that the new crackdown on gay people is the state's response to the fact that they are becoming more visible, less willing to hide their sexuality; a response also to the increasingly open activity of gay rights' groups. This may well be the case; but the question is, how will the frightening situation confronting gay people in Africa be improved? It is obviously necessary to denounce the repressive laws and physical attacks against gay people. Nevertheless, the limitations of organising to achieve ‘rights' for gay people, guaranteed by legislation, are shown by the situation in South Africa. On paper gay people there have rights, in reality they are subject to assault and persecution. As with religious and ethnic pogroms, pogroms against gay people are the product of a social situation where society is shaken by crisis, but where the working class is not yet strong enough to develop its own alternative - a massive movement which integrates the struggles against all forms of oppression into the fight against the key problem of capitalist exploitation. Such a movement could only be directly counter-posed to capitalist ‘democracy' as much as to capitalist ‘dictatorship', which are just two sides of the same coin. We are still far removed from a movement of this kind, but its seeds are certainly germinating in Africa as elsewhere in the current resistance struggles of workers, of the unemployed, of township residents; and those who already see the need for these struggles to take on revolutionary, political goals have the task of arguing that they can only advance in this direction by challenging and overcoming all forms of division in their ranks, whether ethnic, religious or sexual. 

Amos 1/6/10 

Appendix: the workers' movement and the struggle against homophobia

Homophobia has deep roots, and the workers' movement, including its most advanced elements, has not been free from it. In Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, a magnificent broadside against the historical oppression of women, Engels himself presents homosexual activity in the ancient world as a pure product of decadence: "but this degradation of the women [Engels is referring to prostitution in ancient Greece] was avenged on the men and degraded them also till they fell into the abominable practice of sodomy and degraded alike their gods with the myth of Ganymede." Some of Engels' private views, expressed in correspondence with Marx, are even more obviously influenced by the dominant ideology[2].

Nevertheless, the workers' movement has consistently stood against laws repressing homosexuality. In the late 19th century, while countries like France had already, in the wake of their bourgeois revolutions, abolished such laws, Germany and Britain still retained them. Representatives of German social democracy such as Lassalle, Bebel and Bernstein all spoke in favour of abolishing these laws and any interference by the state in the private lives of its citizens. Bernstein, responding to the furor created by the trial of Oscar Wilde in Britain, wrote a series of articles on the question in Neue Zeit in 1895, using the historical method to show the relative character of sexual mores and challenging the notion that homosexuality was ‘unnatural'. However, he still tended to present homosexuality as an ‘illness' or a ‘pathology' that could perhaps be cured by the appropriate therapy.

The Bolsheviks in Russia continued the tradition of opposition to laws that repress different expressions of sexuality. All such laws were abolished in the immediate aftermath of the October revolution. However, with the Stalinist counter-revolution, with its cult of motherhood for the socialist fatherland, there was a flagrant regression and homosexuality was again subject to brutal punishment.

Since the onset of the counter-revolution in the 1920s, there appears to have been very little elaboration of marxist theory on the question of homosexuality, aside from the ‘negative' critique of the separatist and legalist campaigns and the ‘identity politics' that appeared from the end of the 60s onwards.

Contribution of psychoanalysis

However, the development of psychoanalysis at the beginning of the 20th century provides a theoretical basis for questioning the idea of homosexuality as a kind of illness. In a 1935 letter to a woman who asked Freud if he could cure her son of homosexuality, he wrote:

"I gather from your letter that your son is a homosexual. I am most impressed by the fact that you do not mention this term yourself in your information about him. May I question you why you avoid it? Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them. (Plato [102], Michelangelo [103], Leonardo da Vinci [104], etc). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime -and a cruelty, too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis [105].

By asking me if I can help [your son], you mean, I suppose, if I can abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality take its place. The answer is, in a general way we cannot promise to achieve it. In a certain number of cases we succeed in developing the blighted germs of heterosexual tendencies, which are present in every homosexual; in the majority of cases it is no more possible. It is a question of the quality and the age of the individual. The result of treatment cannot be predicted.

What analysis can do for your son runs in a different line. If he is unhappy, neurotic, torn by conflicts, inhibited in his social life, analysis may bring him harmony, peace of mind, full efficiency, whether he remains homosexual or gets changed".

In fact, Freud's theoretical premises go further than the conclusion enunciated in this letter, where he defines homosexuality as a product of a "a certain arrest of sexual development". Throughout his work, Freud consistently posits an original bisexuality (sometimes referred to as the "polymorphous perversity" of the infant human being) which is then channeled in a particular direction through the process of repression - the origins of which lie in social relations conditioned by the struggle against scarcity.  That would imply that heterosexuality as generally expressed in the context of present-day society is, no less than homosexuality, a product of arrested development. In any case, the debate about what a truly liberated human sexuality would be like in a society no longer dominated by exploitation and the day to day struggle for survival remains to be pursued by the revolutionary movement.

[1] www.theguardian.com/world/2010/may/22/malawian-gay-couple-jailed-14-years [106]

[2] See in particular Engels to Marx, June 22, 1869 where he comments on a book by a ‘gay rights' activist of the time, Karl Heinz Ulrichs

The Chinese proletariat is showing signs of militancy and combativity on its own class terrain, against the Communist Party of China and the state unions. Unfortunately, the Western trade unionists and leftist activists are taking notice. Similar to the Polish workers struggles' of 1980-1981, the Chinese workers erupted into self-organized strikes and protests against the company, outside of and against the official All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). Starting in May 2010, workers at parts plants for Honda went on a 2 week strike in Guangdong province. Workers elected their own representatives from among themselves at general assemblies (one of their demands was that all workers be given time off to attend these assemblies during every shift).

Labor Notes, the central magazine for the business union reformers, rank-and-file unionists and their leftist activist allies, wrote a front page piece concerning the Honda workers. The title of the article, ‘Do Spreading Auto Strikes Mean Hope for a Workers' Movement in China? [108]' shows the excitement at the prospect of a spreading 'independent' unionism. The article early on makes a startling confession:  "...the ACFTU in practice has worked in line with the government and employers to enforce labor discipline and mediate labor-management conflicts to keep production running smoothly."  However, if we believe Labor Notes' supporters, this characterization only applies to business unions in the West and state unions in the so-called 'socialist' countries and other authoritarian regimes -- not the rank-and-file, 'independent' unions. Labor Notes goes on to say, "The peaceful resolution of the Honda strikes may invite the opportunity to establish a real collective bargaining system in China."  To union reformers and 'independent' unionists, the goal of working class militancy and self-organized organs (general assemblies, worker-delegates, strike committees) is the establishment of an 'independent' union to represent them, the purpose of class struggle is to get better economic conditions within the 'independent' union system.

The last sentence of the article speaks to the future hopes of the rank-and-filers:  "International labor allies should take cheer."  The history of the Polish proletariat is one of nostalgia for all manner of union leftists, anarcho-syndicalists and revolutionary syndicalists. For the working class it is full of lessons [109]. The Polish Solidarnosc union was founded after the workers established class organs: strike committees, general assemblies, worker-delegates. The environment of statified unions led the workers to reject the official unions, but the mystification of 'independent' and 'free' unions was very strong, leading to the founding of Solidarnosc. With the rise of Solidarnosc, the 'independent' and 'free' union, the workers militancy was funneled into the union struggle. The influence of the class organs declined. Given the similar statified unions that exist in China as in Poland, it isn't beyond imagining that pressure from Western unionists, leftist activists and Chinese democratization advocates could grow the strength of the 'independent' and 'free' union mystification among the Chinese proletariat. Despite this, the self-organization and the struggle on their own class terrain by the Chinese workers should be recognized as a very positive development.

Hough, 7/17/10.

"The English Defence League's summer of protests to target Muslim communities is to continue with a demonstration against a ‘super mosque', even though the development is no longer going ahead. The far-right group will return to Dudley next Saturday to demonstrate against the abandoned mosque and community centre project." (Guardian 9/7/10).  This is the latest in a line of planned and actual protests by the EDL which has resulted in a degree of publicity in the national media.

The Guardian newspaper has also recently undertaken some investigations into the rise of the English Defence League (EDL). The organisation was formed in June 2009 in Luton and has organised demonstrations and protests in various large cities, several of which have ended in violent clashes with anti-fascist counter demonstrators and / or groups of Muslim youths. In the wake of the crushing general election defeat of the British National Party which, again, is going through an internal faction fight, the EDL has served to recruit people who are discontented with the main parties' stance on issues such as immigration and the preservation of an 'English identity'.

In the report it states that "Undercover footage shot by the Guardian reveals the English Defence League, which has staged a number of violent protests in towns and cities across the country this year, is planning to ‘hit' Bradford and the London borough of Tower Hamlets as it intensifies its street protests. Senior figures in the coalition government were briefed on the threat posed by EDL marches this week. Tomorrow up to 2,000 EDL supporters are expected to descend on Newcastle for its latest protest. MPs said the group's decision to target some of the UK's most prominent Muslim communities was a blatant attempt to provoke mayhem and disorder ‘ (Guardian, 28/5/10)

There are several points of interest here. First of all, the EDL seems to represent a return 'to the streets' by the far right. This was a common sight in the 1970s and 80s by groups such as the National Front (NF). This tends to help create a 'pogrom' kind of atmosphere, which emboldens individuals and groups to further action, such as the recent attacks in Belfast, especially against people of Romanian origin and attacks against Gypsies in Italy. The response to this tends to be a counter resurgence in anti-fascist groupings intent on 'fighting fascism' and supporting the victims.

There is a need for the working class to defend itself against racist attacks, as one component of all the attacks reigning down on it. Following the attacks on Romanians in Belfast, there were practical efforts made to guard potential victims' homes by local residents acting together with some politicised elements, students and so on. In a higher stage of the class struggle it would be possible to develop a more organised and massive defence of working class or immigrant neighbourhoods from pogromist attacks, as we saw for example in the great strikes of 1905 in Russia, or in the opposition of the London dockers to Moseley's planned march through the Jewish East End in 1936. But anti-fascist fronts drown out class solidarity in what is, fundamentally, a defence of the democratic system. There are two elements to this. The first is the desire to 'confront' right wing elements be it at demonstrations or particular events. Such  'exemplary' actions by individuals and small groups tends to act as a substitute for real class solidarity, which is based on widening the collective struggle.

Secondly, there are strong connections between the radical left of the state - organisations such as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and some trade unions - and the anti-fascist fronts. Again, these tend to act either as fronts for recruiting (mainly) younger workers worried by the fascists or enrolling workers into broader coalitions which aim to provide 'radical opposition' within the framework of capitalism.

The leftists' anti-fascist fronts are based on the idea that fascism is the number one danger to the working class. But it wasn't the BNP or EDL that have been breaking down people's doors at 3am, or locking up women and children in detention centres where they suffer traumas and abuse, but the democratically elected Labour Party, which used the issue of immigration as and how it suited its needs. Phil Woolas, the last Labour immigration minister said: "This is a deliberate attempt by the EDL at division and provocation, to try and push young Muslims into the hands of extremists, in order to perpetuate the divide. It is dangerous." But the Labour Party has certainly driven many more young Muslims into the hands of the jihadists with its war policies  in Iraq and Afghanistan and its increasingly repressive arsenal of laws aimed at ‘fighting terrorism' at home.  The fundamental problem with anti-fascism is that it aims to convince us that we should ally with ‘democratic' bourgeois parties who are no less our enemy than the fascists.  

Graham 29/6/10

Since the summer of 2007, the United States federal government has extended benefits under the Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) program to unprecedented levels amidst the most serious unemployment crisis the nation has experienced since the great depression of the 1930s. As a result of the collapse of the housing bubble in 2007 and subsequent Wall Street meltdown the following year, official unemployment in the United States has stubbornly hovered around 10 percent.[1]

Under current provisions of the emergency extension, unemployed workers in states with the highest unemployment levels are eligible for up to 99 weeks of benefits, including their regular state benefits, EUC and separate Extended Benefits program. During both the late Bush administration and the new Obama presidency, ensuring federal funding for extended unemployment benefits was considered the cornerstone of economic recovery and stimulus in a broad Keynesian policy of attempting to prop up consumer demand through government spending. As any good Keynesian would tell you, unemployment benefits are among the best stimulus tools available, as unemployed workers generally spend their benefits right away in the local economy rather than stashing them away as savings. From the middle of 2007 to about midway through 2009, the American bourgeoisie was more or less united, across partisan lines, on extending unemployment benefits as an appropriate measure to respond to an economy all regarded as in deep recession. The goal of this policy was to prop up consumer demand and convince an increasingly frightened and cynical public that the state cares about workers who were unfortunate enough to lose their jobs due to the malfeasance of the banks and “irresponsible homeowners.”

Fast forward to the summer of 2010: Official unemployment has barely dropped at 9.5 percent[2], the average length of unemployment is now a stunning 34 weeks (more than the 26 weeks of unemployment benefits available under regular state programs) and hundreds of thousands of workers have already exhausted all the benefits for which they are eligible under the federal extensions, leading to the coining of a new term on the unemployment internet message boards—the “99 weeker.”[3] However, now—unlike the previous two years—the political consensus for further unemployment extensions in Washington has evaporated. For the last six months, Democrats and Republicans have been going at one another over the twin threats of the national debt and a possible double dip recession, using the plight of the unemployed and the further extension of unemployment benefits as ideological clubs.

According to the Republican line, the unprecedented extension of unemployment benefits has only served to subsidize unemployment by giving the long term unemployed an incentive to veg out and skip looking for work, at the same time that it has contributed to a swelling national debt that threatens the long term health of the national economy. Meanwhile, Democrats berate the cruelty of their Republican foes who want to turn their back on the nation’s unemployed by cutting off their benefit checks, simultaneously threatening economic recovery by stifling consumer spending, ultimately risking a new round of home foreclosures—leading to a double dip recession.

This debate has played itself out in high drama several times over the past sixth months in the U.S. Senate, with that body only agreeing to a series of last minute compromise emergency benefit extensions just as previous extensions were set to expire threatening to cut off the flow of unemployment benefit checks. However, this pattern has now come to a screeching halt with Republicans putting up a supposedly principled fight to filibuster any further benefit extensions citing their concerns about the spiraling national deficit. Since June 2nd, workers have been unable to advance to any new tiers of unemployed benefits as Republican Senators have stubbornly refused to approve any new extensions that aren’t “paid for.” As this article goes to press, the Senate has just rejected a series of bills that would have extended unemployment benefits until November and has now gone home for the July 4th recess without approving any extensions.[4] As a result of the Senate’s inaction, the National Employment Law Project (NELP) now estimates that 3.2 million unemployed workers will see their benefits cut off over the next month. [5]

So what is behind this abrupt change in policy for the American bourgeoisie? How should unemployed workers—and indeed the entire working class given that in the midst of this crisis even those of us with a job could be without it at a moment’s notice—interpret the debate over the unemployment benefits extension that has seemingly pitted Democrats against Republicans over the last several months? Are Democrats really looking out for us against the cruel heartless Republicans? Is the rhetoric about the national debt just political posturing and an ideological ploy to convince workers to accept “inevitable austerity”?

Debt crisis fuels austerity plans

The Republican Party’s actions—and certainly its rhetoric—in blocking the further extension of unemployment benefits do reveal that in fact the Grand Old Party now regroups some of the most ideologically driven right-wing factions of the bourgeoisie. Under the influence of the Tea Party, the Republican party has become home to all types of right-wing ideologues who really seem to believe their own rhetoric about the unemployed being lazy free loaders, and who would—if they had their way—abolish whatever remains of American state capitalism’s social “safety net” immediately, regardless of the effects on the wider economy and society. For these Republicans—and their Tea Party allies—unemployment insurance is nothing more than an unfair subsidy to the lazy and inept paid for out of the tax proceeds extracted from hard working Americans, most notably the small businessmen that supposedly form the backbone of American society in their idyllic vision of the shopkeeper’s utopia.[6]

The fact that American politics is capable of producing a bourgeois faction with considerable sway within one of the two major political parties, operating with such an ideological view of the world, is clear evidence of the accelerating decomposition of the American state, in which important factions of the bourgeoisie have simply lost the capacity to strategize in the interests of the national capital itself, but instead take their orders from naked ideologues and demagogues concerned only with short-term partisan interest. In the short to medium term, the Republican Party’s action in blocking the further extension of unemployment benefits compromises the position of the national state to address the immediate needs of the total national capital to prop up demand, shore up local economies and ward off the danger of a double dip recession.[7] Moreover, in acting to cut off the benefits of so many unemployed workers in one fell swoop at the national level, the Republicans’ actions threaten to alienate an entire swathe of workers who have now been introduced to the brutality of the American state in the most direct way possible: the immediate cutting off of the measly unemployment benefit checks that have so far just barely kept them and their families from foreclosure, eviction, bankruptcy and even homelessness. [8]

Nevertheless, despite the apparent short-term inanity of the Republican position on unemployment benefit extensions—and while we can debate whether their concern over the growing national deficit is genuine or merely staged for short term partisan goals—the underlying debt problem is in fact very real for the American bourgeoisie. A growing consensus is in fact emerging among the entire bourgeoisie that the national debt cannot be allowed to continue to grow out of control and that national austerity is in the offing. It is in this context that even some Democrats have started to come around to the Republican position on unemployment extensions: they are just too costly.[9] Let us workers not forget that it was actually a Democrat—Senator Ben Nelson from Nebraska—who cast the deciding ‘No’ vote on the latest extension bill, ensuring that over 3 million of our unemployed brethren will lose benefits in the weeks ahead, baring a dramatic change of course following the July 4th recess.[10] Moreover, on the eve of the latest vote on the extension, the Majority leader in the House of Representatives, Steny Hoyer of Maryland, gave a foreboding address to the Third Way—a supposedly centrist Washington think-tank—laying out the growing consensus of concern about the spiraling national debt, which he said would make further extensions of unemployment benefits difficult, if not impossible.

At the end of the day, workers must recognize the simple fact that, regardless of ideological and partisan commitments, the bourgeoisie is in the last instance always driven by the cold hard logic of the state and capital. With the failure of the ‘expansionist’ policies to jolt-start a sustained recovery, and with the debt-crisis in Europe threatening to destabilize the whole capitalist system, this logic at the present juncture more and more dictates austerity over Keynesianism[11]. Simply put, whether it is run by Democrats or Republicans, the state cannot continue to extend unemployment benefits forever. Whether they cut us off after Tier 4, Tier 5 or Tier 8,[12] the state will eventually have to respond to the dictates of capital and phase out further benefit extensions for long-term unemployed workers. Whether gradually, or in one fell swoop—if the most retrograde factions of the Republican Party have their way—millions of our working class brothers and sisters will face the reality of being permanently sidelined from the official labor market and forced to make a living through other means.

Workers Must Reject Calls to Defend the State

Whatever the motivations of the Republican Party, its rhetoric over the last several months—egged on by conservative talk radio, Fox News and Tea Party activists—has clearly been designed to drive a wedge between workers who still have jobs and the unemployed. They want to paint the unemployed as lazy freeloaders who do not really want to work and who just want to live on the government dole—in other words, off of the labor of other workers extracted as taxes. As frightening, and as completely wrong, as this ideology is, workers must not fall for the opposite side of the coin as Democrats execute the classic ideological division of labor by painting the state as the generous provider of benefits that helps the unfortunate through tough economic times. This side of the ideological coin is clearly designed to trap workers behind a defense of the state as the protector of the values of social solidarity, epitomized by unemployment insurance.

Workers must be clear about this unemployment insurance system that the bourgeois left want us to defend. Unemployment insurance in the United States was never meant to be permanent. In “non-emergency” conditions regular state benefits only last for 26 weeks. Moreover, only a fraction of unemployed workers actually meet the very strict eligibility requirements to qualify for unemployment benefits, which generally hinges on complex monetary formulae designed to establish a workers’ “long-term connection” to the labor market. Most unemployed workers receive no benefits whatsoever. In addition, even unemployed workers who may be technically eligible for benefits are often denied on dubious grounds and lose subsequent appeal hearings, which they do not understand and in which the rules of a court of law apply. And for those who do qualify for benefits? They generally receive only fraction of their pay while they were working—amounts that often do not even allow recipients to keep their heads above water anyway.  Is this the epitome of social solidarity? Hardly! Is this system an overly generous subsidy that gives workers an incentive to milk the dole? Not even close!  In the minutiae of its eligibility and procedural rules and the paltry benefits it provides, the capitalist state’s unemployment insurance system is revealed for what it really is: an arbitrary, bureaucratic monstrosity designed to pacify the working class at the least cost possible for the state and employers.

Workers must not fall for either side of the bourgeois ideological coin when it comes to the debate regarding the extension of unemployment benefits. Those of us who are lucky enough to remain employed in the midst of this unprecedented crisis must not be baited into attacking our class brothers and sisters who have been forced to utilize the unemployment insurance system to eek out a subsistence living. On the other side, unemployed workers must not fall for the trap of looking to the state for our salvation. We waste our time when we stay up late at night watching C-SPAN[13], following the progress of each unemployment insurance extension bill as it winds its way through the tortured halls of Congress. We dilute our real class anger when we allow ourselves to be mobilized behind email and telephone campaigns to Congressional offices, imploring members of Congress to extend benefits just one more time.  All this will do is increase our anxiety and demoralize us even more when the eventual final cut-off comes. We must recognize that our struggle, if it is to be successful, must confront the state, rather than beg for the pittances bourgeois legalism might or might not grant. How much longer will we accept seeing our lives, our very well-being reduced to a pawn in a cruel, calculated, heartless political game between bourgeois factions, all with the same ultimate prerogative to enact austerity?

Only the path of class struggle on our own class terrain, through our autonomous class organs can unite the employed and unemployed and challenge the very society which produces the want, poverty, anxiety and desperation which currently grips our class. While the bourgeoisie will seek to divide the working class amongst itself, the increasingly harsh and full-frontal attacks on living and working conditions by the state will provide the fertile ground for struggles to develop where workers will be able to express their solidarity with the unemployed and rediscover their historic class identity. Only the road of struggle can provide the antidote to despair.

--Henk

07/02/2010

Here we are publishing a letter from a sympathiser in South Africa which gives his impressions of the massive hype surrounding the World Cup

Feel it. It is here!

So goes the catch-phase/cum call to party and spend beamed to every South African TV for the past three weeks. The message is clear - enjoy this celebration of football and show the world what a capable, multicultural, and business-friendly butterfly the old, divided apartheid caterpillar has become. Nevermind if the metaphor doesn't really work (since when was a caterpillar divided?), this insect metaphor was employed by none other than Desmond Tutu himself at the Cup's opening ceremony.

 For my money, from a footballing perspective, this has been a great World Cup. After a lack-lustre and stale beginning featuring a kill-yourself-with-a-rusty-croissant 0-0 draw between Uruguay and France (more on this below), we've seen the dwarf collective (i.e. Messi and Maradona aka Argentina) play some exquisite stuff, Brazil dance to an intriguing new tune (a catchy fusion of Samba and Nazi marching band) and England get their just desserts. By the way, some people might blame the lack of FIFA qualified coaches in England, or the overly busy Premier League season, or the advancing years of key players. I prefer to disregard most of my anthropological training and blame it on the mainstream of English psychology, which, brutalized and bored by two centuries of industrialization and manically tidy front rooms, is left with brute force and conformity (which paradoxically is manifested as individualistic selfishness) as its only means of expression. I'm sure some nit-picking naysayer will find holes in this sophisticated theory.

To get back to my main point. The World Cup South Africa 2010, is, beyond the playing field, in almost every aspect a horrific spectre of contemporary capitalism kitted and booted with the FIFA stamp of approval. I was lucky and unfortunate enough to go to the above -mentioned Uruguay-France draw. The Greenpoint Stadium itself is spectacular - an exquisite example of an industrial kind of craftsmanship put together by workers earning what would be considered a pittance in the ‘developed' world.  And this in a city where supermarket food prices often outstrip those of London and Paris.

Looking around the stadium, I saw advertisements for all the key FIFA-approved companies: Budweiser (whose beer Monty Python would have said was like ‘having sex in a canoe'), McDonalds, Visa, Coca-Cola...the usual suspects. Even the grounds of ‘ethical business' which would benefit ‘Africa' upon which this World Cup was supposedly built has in quick measure proven to be a bold-faced lie. Of course, even if local/African companies were given advertising space in the stadium, this would have only benefited a certain bourgeois minority. But the way in which international gigantabusiness, led by FIFA, has so blatantly gone back on its promise of an African World Cup, for the benefit of ‘the people', just shows up the real purpose of the Cup and capitalism in general: to make lots and lots of money for a small number of people.  

Shuffling out of the stadium, rusty croissant in hand, I noticed the huge number of police shepherding the Budweiser-filled crowds. Putting this down to the usual high security of South African life, I thought nothing more of it. Later on, speaking with people who work within the stadium and reading The Mail and Guardian I discovered that the overload of Old Bill was down to a security guard strike. Having been promised R300-400 for a 12 hour shift, security guards had refused to work for their actual pay of R190 for the same shift. The Local Organising Committee and FIFA share joint responsibility for stadium security and yet neither were willing to fork out a decent wage for those people taking the job on. In the end, the South African state has had to pay for police to take over the security guards' positions, at rates double the R300-400 originally promised. Given that FIFA will make something like $2,500,000,000 from the World Cup, security guards are justifiably aggrieved. However, incidents like this should not really be seen as ‘unfair play' on the behalf of FIFA, as suggested by some quarters (see for example www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/hosts-see-red-as-world-cup-bill-soars-ndash-but-fifa-is-163-1-7bn-in-black-1994958.html [118]). Rather, this is simply business as usual in a country and a world which is supremely unequal and by definition unfair. If the rules of the game itself favour the rich and powerful, FIFA is simply playing the game well. This is the same game that the many many South African businesses which exploit cheap black and ‘coloured' labour thrive upon.

I believe people are aghast (though probably not surprised) by the huge financial loss the World Cup is turning out to be. The by now common criticisms of FIFA are intermingled with a national mood of patriotism and African pride which is sweeping the nation. These latter phenomena do not come in for criticism. South African flags adorn bars, restaurants, cars, billboards. This may be fine and well for those of us lucky enough to hang out in fancy bars, side-by-side with our equally well-fed and drunk German friends. Such patriotic fervour takes on a different complexion in those parts of the country where people compete for homes, for extremely low-paying jobs, and where xenophobic violence saw some 40,000 people chased out of their homes just two years ago. In these places, rumours abound that when the World Cup is over, foreigners - poor Zimbabweans, Mozambiquans (i.e. probably not those expounding the harmlessness of patriotism in Cape Town's chic cafes) will be kicked out once and for all. Whether these rumours express real intentions, and whether or not these intentions turn into actions, it is clear that patriotism serves more than to sell South African-made products. The most exploited of society identify themselves with the nation, an imagined unifying force which gives them rights to homes, to benefits, to work above those who happen to have been born outside of the borders which history and politics have arbitrarily drawn up. Of course, the reality is far more complicated - when the attacks of 2008 were still happening, many township residents came out to publicly denounce the xenophobia, to welcome their neighbours back to their homes.

To return to where I started, the rainbow nation is, for the majority of the population, anything but a beautiful, multicultural butterfly. I am not a pessimist - I don't think that humanity can ever be entirely lost or defeated, and I do think that a world human community is possible. I think that South Africa is a beautiful, fucked up place and that people should be angry at multi million and billionaire capitalists and national ruling elites selling them division, exploitation, and poverty dressed up as unity, opportunity and wealth.

JWS 1/7/10

On 31 May, Israeli troops raided a flotilla of ships, backed by Turkey to bring ‘humanitarian aid' to the Gaza strip, which is being strangled slowly by Israel's blockade. The results were extremely shocking: marines from one of the best equipped and most highly trained armies in the world killed a number of unarmed members of the flotilla, most of them Turks. The Israeli authorities, as cynical as ever, claimed that they acted in self-defence against militants armed with iron bars and Swiss army knives....

There has been a whole polemic about the real number of victims, with many witnesses saying that there were more than the nine killed and sixty injured (many of them still in Israeli prisons) originally claimed, and that some of the wounded were thrown overboard. But whatever the actual numbers, the violence of the Israeli army was totally out of proportion to the real ‘threat' posed by the convoy.

To justify this raid, Benyamin Netanyahu declared that Israeli soldiers "were mobbed, they were clubbed, they were beaten, stabbed, there was even a report of gunfire. And our soldiers had to defend themselves, defend their lives, or they would have been killed". At the same time he claims that "We want to move as quickly as possible towards direct discussions because the kind of problems we have with the Palestinians can be resolved peacefully if we sit down together round the table". Such statements are pitiful and the State of Israel is making itself look ridiculous in front of the entire ‘international community'.

Meanwhile, continuing in this brazen manner, the head of Gaza District Coordination office, colonel Moshe Levi, said: "The flotilla is provocative, the humanitarian situation there is good: there is no lack of humanitarian products in the Gaza Strip". Levi claimed that access is denied only to products that could help the terrorist activities of Hamas.

The Palestinian population, hostage to war

1.5 million people live in the 378 square km of the Gaza strip. They are forced to wash and cook in used, soiled water, often to drink it as well; they are subjected to regular bombardments by the Israeli army, which tests its drones and its most up-to-date weapons on the area.[1] The rubbish bins are so full that, in what passes for schools in the area, children are being taught how to recycle rubbish into toys - to reduce the amount of rubbish piling up everywhere, to keep the kids occupied and to help them earn a few pennies in the local economy.

Whether in Gaza or the West Bank, the soil and the sub-soil and thus underwater springs are heavily polluted. First of all because waste water is not being treated, and secondly because of the residues of thousands of tons of phosphorus bombs and low-grade uranium and about thirty other kinds of toxic heavy metals which Israel has been raining down for years. The bodies of the victims of the offensive on Gaza in January 2009 showed high levels of uranium, zinc, mercury, cobalt and other carcinogenetic products. For many years, agricultural production has been irreversibly contaminated as have the few trees the army has not burned down with white phosphorus. All this has given rise to numerous cancers, renal problems and deformed births. This is the dramatic humanitarian situation facing those who live in Palestine. They are hostage to all the warring cliques that have fought over the region for decades. Expecting each day to be worse than the one before, anger is growing among a generation of young people who have only known the Israeli occupation. For many of them, a favourite ‘pastime', for lack of any other perspective, is to throw stones at Israeli troops or enlist as suicide bombers for the terrorist groups.

Turkish imperialism fans the flames

What happened on 31 May was a new episode in a war that has been going on for over fifty years, not only between Israelis and Palestinians, but also and above all between the various powers, large or small, who have an interest in the region or in supporting this or that faction.

The main organisation behind the flotilla was the IHH, an Islamist charity that is very well implanted in Turkey in the districts controlled by the AKP, the Islamist party that has been in power since 2002; and the Turkish state provided its services to the IHH to equip the flotilla. The IHH is an organisation close to Hamas. It even has an office in Gaza and has organised other convoys to the Palestinian territories.

Thus, this ‘humanitarian convoy' was also acting in a provocative manner and it was receiving a lot of media publicity. Israel was thus faced with a dilemma; either let the boats pass through and thus concede a victory to the Islamists of Hamas, or intervene by force and assert its will to maintain complete control over the Gaza strip. For the Israeli government, this was to be an exemplary show of force. But its net result was to further isolate the Israeli state on the international stage. It all ended up very badly for the credibility not only of Israel but also its main backer, the USA.

The USA's diminishing political credit, especially in the Arab world, was dealt another blow by this fiasco. It was only able to come out with a feeble protest against the actions of its principal ally in the region. As for the vision of a pro-American Greater Middle East from North Africa to Pakistan, as dreamed up by George Bush, who saw himself as some kind of latter-day Lawrence of Arabia, all this has simply melted away.

The Turkish state has played a preponderant role in this affair. To all intents and purposes it organised the ‘humanitarian initiative' of the flotilla, and following the raid we have had some very aggressive speeches and threats from Ankara. Prime Minister Erdogan said that "the actions of Israel should not go unpunished. The international community must act". More recently, Turkey has threatened to cut off diplomatic relations with Israel. Turkey is of course pretending to be helping the Palestinians, but its present stance is dictated entirely by its own imperialist interests.

Up till recently, Turkey was one of Israel's rare allies in the Muslim world. Today it is presenting itself as leader of the war chorus against Zionism. It is doing this because it wants to play a more important role in the Middle East as the loss of US authority pushes the lesser states to seek a new place in the games of imperialism.

The Iran-Syria axis, which has been an important source of support to Hizbollah and Hamas, is now being joined by Turkey - a Turkey that is looking with growing disfavour on the idea of independence for Iraqi Kurdistan[2] and on US support for the Iraqi Kurds, as well as for the Iranian Kurds. To rein in the imperialist ambitions of Ankara, the US is also giving greater latitude to the Turkish Kurds, especially those closest to the east of Anatolia, whom Turkey has been trying very hard to subdue. The USA's current policy is creating a rapprochement between Turkey, Syria and Iran, all the more because these three countries have been kept out of any decision-making with regard to Iraq, whether we are talking about the invasion in 2003 or the management of the crisis there today and in the future. What's more, joining up with this axis gives Turkey a shot of oxygen in the face of the European Union's reluctance to accept its request to become a member.[3]   

The Middle East, a vultures' nest

To this new axis must be added Russia, which has been only too willing to offer its services to counter the big US bully. Russia has played a key role in the decision of these three states to intensify cooperation, open their borders and liberalise trade among themselves. Ankara and Moscow have also abolished the need for visas between their countries. A Turk can now enter Russia without any formalities, something he cannot do either in the US or the EU, even though Turkey is a member of NATO and a candidate for the EU. Moscow is also acting as a go-between for Hamas and Fatah, and, better still, is selling them RPG missiles and S-300s which can be used to pierce Israeli tanks (they will also be sold to Iran for use against any future American bombardments). The Russian companies Rosatom and Atomstroyexport have just completed a civil nuclear power station in Iran (at Bushehr) and are discussing the construction of new ones. They are also going to build a 20 billion dollar plant in Turkey. Stroitansgaz and Gazprom are going to ensure the transport of Syrian gas towards Lebanon, now that Beirut has been prevented by Israel from exploiting its important offshore oil reserves.[4] But Russia has above all consolidated its military position by establishing a new naval base in Syria. This will allow it to re-establish a presence in the Mediterranean which it lost in the wake of the collapse of the USSR.  

Threats against Iran

The US retreat from Iraq is not finished, while the war in Afghanistan goes on and on, and has spread to Pakistan. Iran today is more and more in the US' line of fire. As one failure follows another and both Israel and the US become more isolated, history is accelerating. Things that seemed unlikely a year or so ago are now becoming more tangible. Two weeks after the attack on the IHH flotilla, there has been no attenuation of warlike tensions, despite Israel's pledge to ease the blockade of humanitarian goods bound for Gaza. Far from it: 12 US warships are heading for the Persian Gulf via the Suez Canal, while several Israeli nuclear submarines capable of hitting any target in Iran are making for the same destination. For the moment these are just gestures aimed at backing up Obama's speechifying against Tehran. But the international context is such that we cannot exclude the possibility of things slipping out of control, or even a more ‘planned' episode which would equally be a product of capitalism's delirious slide towards war.

Wilma 28/6/10

[1] The weapons, especially drones like the Heron, which Israel has been selling to the European Union or the USA for the war in Afghanistan, or those which were used in the war between Georgia and Abkhazia in 2008, are advertised as having been "war tested", i.e. in the occupied territories

[2]. What's more, at the economic and even at the military level, Israel is now taking on the role of champion of Iraqi Kurdistan, thus making it a direct rival of Turkey.

[3]. The attack on the flotilla also meant that the second summit of the Union for the Mediterranean, so dear to the French president, was postponed until November. Among other things this Union advocates Israel being integrated into the task of keeping the peace in the Mediterranean. The first summit was completely undermined by the Israeli attack on Gaza. The French right is certainly one of the stupidest in the world.

[4] The ‘energy war' is taking on an increasingly dramatic tone around the question of Iran and this is forcing Washington to make further mistakes. Tehran has signed an agreement with Pakistan, worth 7 billion dollars, launching the construction of a gas pipeline from Iran to Pakistan. This project goes back 17 years but has so far been blocked by the US. Despite this, 900 of the 1500 km of the pipeline have been completed, going from the South Pars gas field to the frontier with Pakistan, which is going to build the remaining 700 km. This energy corridor will, from 2014, bring 22 million cubic metres of gas from Iran to Pakistan. China is also ready to import Iranian gas. The China Petroleum Corporation has signed an agreement with Iran worth five billion dollars to develop the South Pars gas field. For Iran this is a strategically important project: the country possesses the second biggest reserves of natural gas after Russia, and they are largely waiting to be exploited. With this energy corridor to the east, Iran could get round the sanctions being demanded by the US. It does however have a weak spot: its biggest gas field, the South Pars, is offshore, situated in the Persian Gulf. It is thus vulnerable to a naval blockade, which the US could impose by calling on the sanctions agreed by the UN Security Council.     

The following article by James Connolly was sent to the Left Communist group forum on www.revleft.com [125] by a comrade in the US who has begun posting under the name Stagger Lee. We suggested that it could be published on our website and asked him to write a short introduction, and also asked him about his political ‘history'. He provided both and we found the personal history worthy of publishing as well, so it appears here in an appendix with the author's permission. 

Introduction

This article by the Irish socialist James Connolly (1868 - 1916) was first published in The Workers' Republic in 1899. It lays out the marxist, hence internationalist, case for proletarian liberation. In this piece, Connolly presents the slogans of national "liberation", then juxtaposes them with a short remark highlighting the shortfalls of nationalism as a path for working class liberation. He shows how romantic calls of "freedom" in the context of nationalism have no class character nor can they ever. Connolly ends with a call for unity, not as a nation, but as a class. He calls not for the liberation of the Irish bourgeoisie, but for the working class. Workers have no country, but one struggle. Connolly's words ring as true today as it did then.

James Connolly, The Workers' Republic, 1899

Appendix: one individual's journey towards left communism

My interest in politics began shortly after 9/11, where I was a hardline neo-conservative who thought the United States should go around the world bringing freedom to countries that need it. A few years later, I watched an 8 hour video lecture by 2004 Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik about the U.S. Constitution, which turned me towards right wing libertarianism. I held consistent libertarian views for a good while until I found out that my sister was feeding my nephews with welfare and collecting unemployment. She was doing her best everyday to find a job, she went to school, and certainly not lazy. Libertarianism provided a veil that explained the crimes in the world without having to experience it. Libertarianism, unlike socialism, is a simple, pleasant sounding ideology that tells you what you want to hear.

When basic reality hit me that social ills were, shockingly, social and not individual failings, I was your typical American liberal. I soon found out about this Senator we have in this country called Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a "democratic socialist." Now I still regarded socialism as meaning everybody gets paid the same wage, government owns all the businesses, Stalin etc. I learned that nearly every country except the United States has a significant political party affiliated with the Socialist International. My (quick) revulsion at the weakness of American liberals to support single payer health care and other social reforms pushed me to democratic socialism.

My conversion to communism was pretty much by accident. In high school I chose to check out from the school library a biography on Leon Trotsky. The sole reason I did so was A. His facial hair B. Cool name and C. I wanted my teachers to freak out. Totally superficial reasons, but I still read it. I learned what socialism and communism actually are, a basic understanding of class society, and the rejection of reformism as a method to bring about socialism. I didn't consider myself a marxist yet because I still didn't know what it was, but I considered myself a communist. I was also an avid reader of Noam Chomsky, and he mentioned the Spanish Civil War as an example of "anarchism in action", so I decided to read up on it. The Spanish Revolution and the anarchist's story was so enthralling and inspirational, I became an anarchist. This is when I truly started reading leftist texts, by Kropotkin, Malatesta, Berkman, Goldman etc. Due to this I held typical anarchist misconceptions about what marxism is. I began reading about the debates between Bakunin and Marx, and instead of strengthening my anarchism, I tended to relate more with Marx. I chose to learn more about marxism, namely the critique of political economy, historical materialism and class theory. I then considered myself an "anarcho-marxist": someone who hailed from the anarchist tradition but held a marxian conception of society and history.

Many things happened at once that made me be attracted to Left Communism. One, I was a big supporter of Palestinian "liberation." I guess I had some sort of epiphany and realized that people have been fighting for Palestinian "liberation" for almost 50 years with absolutely no positive results. Imperialists arm the Israelis, but the Fatah party is under the auspices of imperialists as well, not to mention the outright reactionary character of Hamas.

I read the ICC's article about the state in the dictatorship of the proletariat, what it is and what it isn't. It cast aside my anarchist knee-jerk reaction against the word "state" by clearing up misconceptions and filling in blanks that I didn't consider. It made sense, and even more convincing was the analysis not based on the moralism that most critiques of the state are based on.

I read left communist literature about national liberation and it made a lot of sense to me, and put the ideas that I had floating around in my head in writing and in an organized manner.

I restarted my study about the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik party, and Vladimir Lenin. My old rejection of the Revolution evaporated when I actually learned the facts. I realized the necessity for a vanguard party, not to lead or substitute the class, but to uphold a consistent proletarian position amongst the class. My old hatred of Lenin as a "corrupter" of socialism went away as well. There are many things he got wrong, and anybody who has any concern for socialism ought to level criticism against anyone when it is justified (something Lenin did frequently). There are also many things he was right about, and he was no doubt a true revolutionary to his dying day. Removing my biases allowed me to identify with ideas I would have irrationally rejected earlier.

I am a marxist, a communist, and an internationalist. The solution to our ills is world wide revolution. Workers don't have a country, but we do have each other. There is one struggle - the class struggle, and this struggle unites us together. Long live internationalism!

Stagger Lee 7/10

While the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico has become the biggest environmental pollution in the history of one of the most developed countries, the USA, and while it has made the consequences of the failure to protect the environment apparent, the pollution of the environment in a gigantic scale has almost become part of daily life in Nigeria. "In fact, more oil is spilled from the delta's network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP [130]'s Deepwater Horizon rig last month." (The Guardian, 30/05/10).

Daily oil slicks with disastrous consequences

In the wetlands of the Niger delta, which with a size of 20,000 square kilometres is the biggest of its kind in Africa, oil companies extract on average 2 million barrels oil every day. Nigeria is the seventh biggest oil exporting country of the world and one of the main suppliers of the USA. Because of its low sulphur contents the product of this African oil producing country is very much in demand. Around 95% of the income of the country stems from the oil production in the southern region. Most of the 7,000km of pipelines that link the 1,000 pumping stations in the 300 onshore-oil-sites in the Niger delta, were built in the 1950s and 60s. Between 1976 and 2001 some 6,800 oil leaks were reported. In 2009 alone, over 2,000 leaks from oil drilling and, above all, from pipelines, were registered. Each year some 300 leaks of some kind occur. About 50% of the oil leaks occur because of corroded pipelines and tanks, approximately 30% because of 'sabotage' and 20% during regular operations. The scale of pollution is unbelievable. The national authority (NOSDRA) in charge of the investigation and cleaning of oil pollution says that between 1976 and 1997 more than 2.4 million barrels of oil contaminated the natural environment.

Independent oil experts and environmental organisations assume that during the last 50 years between 9 and 13 million barrels of oil were spilled into the environment, ending up in the mangrove forests and swamps of the densely populated Niger delta instead of pipelines and tankers. This corresponds to more oil than leaked during the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 into the shores of Alaska.  Fields and the tributaries of the river are chronically polluted. There are areas where the ground water has become black, and others where the sky has been dark for years due to the burning of the petroleum and natural gasses emitted during oil production. Respiratory diseases, skin rashes and eye diseases are widespread amongst the local population. They are attributed to dioxin and other carcinogenic agents, which are emitted during fires close to the soil.

The damage to both humans and the environment is very high in the delta. Innumerable river courses, mangrove forests, fertile cropland and waters formerly rich in fish have been heavily damaged or destroyed. Overland pipelines cross villages or often run in front of houses, so that the residents of the houses have to climb over them to reach their homes. The oil trickles into the ground water or forms lakes as big as football pitches. In many cases the drinking water is poisoned and vegetation destroyed. Life expectancy has fallen to 46 years for women and 45 years for men

With reserves of 6.5bn cubic meters, Nigeria is the seventh biggest producer of natural gas. According to the State run oil company NNPC every year 23 billion cubic meters, or 40% of the gas extracted in Nigeria is burnt-off; sometimes the entire quantity of gas that is generated during oil production is burnt-off. During this process a lot of methane gas is generated, which is one of the main causes of the green house effect and 64 times more dangerous than CO2 for global warming.

Which explanation for the hell in the Niger delta?

How is it possible that a country so rich in raw materials has created possibly the worst polluted eco-system on earth? Why is it that the existence of such large amounts of precious raw materials does not lead to prosperity but instead to the strangulation of nature and to a living hell for human beings?

"In 1958 oil was discovered in Nigeria above all in the Niger delta near Port Harcourt. Particularly large amounts were discovered in Ogoni land, in the north-eastern Niger delta. Ever since oil has counted for about 90% of the export income of the country. Often it is estimated that in this area some 900 million barrels of oil have been extracted (...). It is estimated that since 1960 the oil income amounted to 600 billion dollars, and yet 70% of the Nigerians have an income of less than one dollar a day. (...) 35% live in extreme poverty."

Enrichment through oil for the ruling class, poverty and diseases for the oppressed

Life expectancy in Nigeria, where at least half of the population has no access to drinking water, has been falling during the past two generations to just over 40 years. The local population in the Niger delta or near the pipelines and oil drilling stations is ruined. The people have not gained anything from the oil riches, on the contrary. Driven into poverty, tormented by terrible diseases due to pollution, many people are forced to tap the oil pipelines every day - putting their lives at risk. At the same time in the background of increasing poverty, more and more people are driven into the fold of armed gangs, which kidnap employees of the oil companies and hold them for blackmail or ransom and sow terror in daily life.

Despite the gigantic oil revenues of more than $300bn that have fallen into the hands of the Nigerian state, no significant industrial zones have arisen, nor has any solid infrastructure been developed. After an initial 50/50 division between the foreign oil companies (Shell, which initially held a monopoly position, later Gulf, Mobil and Texaco) and the ruling Nigerian class, around half of the oil revenues were usurped by foreign capital. Nigerian rulers, and above all the army, snatched the lion's share of the revenues, without investing money in the development of production, so there is no industry worth mentioning. Nigeria has been prevented from becoming a competitive industrial power. A similar situation exists in several other oil producing countries, whose oil resources were plundered for decades (e.g. Venezuela, Iran) and where no modern, competitive industry has arisen. The local population has never benefited from the oil riches; instead more and more people have been driven into migration. After the collapse of the oil prices in the early 1980s Nigerian oil revenues fell from $26bn in 1980 to $5bn in 1986. The response of the Nigerian government was to kick out migrant workers from the neighbouring countries. Some 700,000 Ghanaians were forced out and in 1985 a quarter of a million people were expelled.

Within the country several factors drove people into migration. Desertification, environmental pollution, pauperisation all spurred a rural exodus and drove people into migration abroad. Nigerians form a large part of the African refugees living in Europe and the USA.

Thus the country has not become an industrial power but a cemetery for nature and a hell for most of the people. How can we explain the contrast between wealth and poverty, between the potential and reality?

The country in the grip of war and militarism

Some claim that the whole calamity is due to the corruption and incapacity of the army. If the army was not corruptible, bribable and so ‘selfish', the whole country would be better off. Indeed the influence and the weight of the army since the discovery of oil have increased tremendously. But the development of Nigeria results from much stronger forces in society than the mere parasitic life of the military.

Barely 10 years after the beginning of the oil exploitation in 1958 the land was ravaged in a disastrous war from July 1967 to January 1970.

The Nigerian State - an artificial national construct with a religious-ethnic mosaic - in the context of militarism

As with many other African countries, Nigeria is an artificial nation constructed by the former colonial power, in this case Britain. Nigeria, which in October 1960 gained independence from Britain, counted some 60 million inhabitants with about  300 different ethnic and cultural groups. In many other parts of the former British empire, Britain governed through the practice of  "divide and rule" (e.g. on the Indian subcontinent through the partition of India and Pakistan/Bangladesh that led to war a short time later). In Nigeria too it sought, to maintain a fragile equilibrium between the most important ethnic-religious groups on the one hand, while, on the other, it exploited divisions to set them against each other. The new African rulers inherited and continued these practices after independence in October 1960. Ever since, the struggle for power and a balancing of the interests and positions of the respective groups has dominated daily life in the multiethnic state. The different ethnic groups were coexisting and fighting with each other, while the religious divides were mainly between Christians (most of them living in the south) and Muslims (mostly living in the north). After the end of colonial rule there was no ‘united' national ruling class that could have acted in a unified manner for the defence of the interests of a ‘united' country and the country was split into many regions, where the local rulers depended on a specific source of income, such as a particular agricultural product, and the interests of regional groups (who often belong to an ethnic and/or religious group) collided. In short, the country was a fragile construct with a number of ethnic, religious and regional provincial chiefs and it was only a question of time before this formation was shaken and torn apart.

In the mid 1960s ethnic tensions had sharpened so much that in 1966 ferocious pogroms against the Christian Ibo, who lived in the Muslim dominated north, were perpetrated. Some 30,000 of the 13 million Ibo lost their lives, which provoked a wave of 1.8 million refugees from the North towards the South-East. On May 30th 1967, with the support of civilian political forces of the South-East, parts of the army declared the south-eastern region of Nigeria to be an independent state - Biafra. The Nigerian government, with the support of Britain, the USA and the Soviet Union opposed this split with all its force. More than two million people lost their lives in the fighting or starved to death.

But the cancer of militarism stretched far beyond the fighting over Biafra, because since then violence and marauding gangs have become a daily phenomenon that is not limited to Nigeria but constantly ravages the neighbouring states of the Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Congo etc.

Instead of equipping the local population with energy and capital for investment in infrastructure and oil production sites, the exploitation of oil has led not only to a disaster for the environment and to a spiral of misery for most of the people in the region, but has also stimulated the rapacious appetite of other vultures, which in turn take the local population as hostage. In the meantime ‘rebel movements' have also arisen. "The biggest rebel movement (Mend - Movement for the emancipation of the Niger delta) after the first military clashes proclaimed ‘total war' and the ‘general mobilisation of all men in fighting age'. This made it easier for the army to consider the entire civilian population as enemies. And Mend has announced it will block all water ways, in order to strangulate Nigerian oil exports. [In 2009] oil production has fallen to 1.2 million barrels a day, compared to 2.17 million barrels in 2007." (www.counterpunch.org/watts08122009.html [131]).

Nigeria could produce 2.6 million barrels a day. But in reality only around 2 million barrels are produced. At least 600,000 barrels are lost due to political turmoil and other problems. The UN-Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that in Nigeria every year some 55 million barrels of oil are stolen. This helps to feed a shadow economy upon which many high-ranking officers and politicians thrive. Now armed gangs are waging a war against the oil multi-nationals and against their own government.  The rebels destroy oil installations, attack company headquarters, and destroy businesses linked with petrodollars. 10,000 highly radicalised fighters have swollen their ranks. Attacks, hostage taking and acts of sabotage have made large areas of the oil production zone inaccessible - and the oil production of Nigeria has fallen behind that of Angola. Moreover, in this region pirates spread terror, much as on the shores of Somalia. "America tries to protect the oil. Along the Nigerian coast US-troops train African special troops who are supposed to prevent an extension of the struggles. The ‘war against terror' has also reached the oil producing country Nigeria." (www.3sat.de/page/?source=/boerse/magazin/94491/index.html [132])

This is what daily life in the seventh biggest oil producing country of the planet looks like. The population suffers not only from environmental pollution but is repeatedly taken hostage by marauding soldiers and the by the police, who regularly extort money. This decomposing state drives more and more people into flight. Militarism and war are becoming an increasing plague. Since 1988 the OPEC states have spent 18% of their state budgets or about 6% of their GNP for military purposes. According to SIPRI in recent years military expenditure has doubled.

Even if the situation has not yet deteriorated as far as in Somalia, all the elements exist which could turn Nigeria into a ‘failed-state'. The country, which gained independence more than half a century ago, and which is always gnawed by pogroms between different groups, contains the risk of a ‘lebanisation' or ‘balkanisation', where it falls apart into hostile different groups that wear eachother down through endless fighting. Nigeria thus may join the chain of decomposing countries such as Sierra Leone, Congo, Somalia etc.

And the conclusions?

If we draw all these elements together - the incredible ecological destruction, the strangulation of the economy under the weight of militarism, the permanent threat of ethnic-religious pogroms, the pauperisation of the population and the extremely low life expectancy, and a nation state, in the grip of militarism and the opposing interests of different groups - we have to see the deeper explanation in the imprisonment of society within the capitalist mode of production. While the bourgeois media always report, sometimes very clearly, the almost apocalyptical, conditions, they never establish a link between the different elements. This task must be accomplished by revolutionaries. 

Dv.    21/6/10

The people who came to The Commune day school, "Beyond Resistance", were all keen to discuss revolutionary politics, and many interesting points were made, both in the presentations and the discussions. However, the points were often dispersed. In the discussion on the crisis, one of the three discussions during the first session, the very important point that the present crisis is the result of the developments from the crisis in the 1960s and 70s was made in one of the presentations, together with points on the way that class antagonism in capitalism has become more impersonal and on the defence of Marx against academic ‘marxism' amongst others. State capitalism was one of the themes of the discussion, with a range of views expressed, from the idea that it is a step towards socialism, to the position that it is a tendency expressing the growing barbarity of capitalism since the First World War. Someone from the "Wine and cheese appreciation society" criticised this as not a real discussion, since we first of all needed to clarify what we mean by various terms. And in fact the discussion showed just how difficult it is and just how far we have to go in order to have a real meeting of minds.

The discussion on "imperialism and the national question" later in the afternoon showed the difference in positions even more sharply. This was a very well attended meeting, with people standing and listening from the doorway, perhaps because one of the speakers, Tom, was from the Anarchist Federation which has written a pamphlet taking a clear position against national liberation, which is so dear to all the leftist groups. He began his presentation posing the question of whether, since we are discussing as communists, it progresses or impedes the development of class-consciousness. He went on to defend Rosa Luxemburg's position that imperialism is not the policy of this or that government but results from the relationships among them, something no nation can stand apart from. And he showed the way nationalism, even in conditions of occupation or colonialism, is a weakness that can only undermine the class struggle. Quite so.

The other presentations took the opposing view. Andy from the Columbia Solidarity Campaign denounced not only the superprofits of British corporations but also the labour aristocracy. This is a theory that tends to make workers here feel guilty for their wages because other workers earn less. And in Columbia he tells us they say "we are poor because you've taken our natural resources", encouraging the workers there to see the nation's resources as their own, and to identify workers over here with the British ruling class. A very clear example of Tom's point about the negative effect of nationalism on class-consciousness.

From The Commune, David Broder began by emphasising the question of hierarchies within the world working class, which seemed to be supporting Andy's points on the labour aristocracy. In the discussion, despite the fact that everyone wanted to oppose imperialism, diametrically opposed views were expressed. On the one hand there were the views that Luxemburg was reactionary to oppose Polish nationalism and that if Hezbollah are fighting Israel, however reactionary they are in other ways, they are objectively fighting imperialism and so must be supported. On the other hand, the ICC, for example, said you can't oppose imperialism by taking sides in imperialist war.

In the closing plenary session that followed, we were asked to think about "where next for communists?" The proposal was for a pluralist organisation, a new Communist League, to unite us for activity. Given the totally incompatible views that had just been expressed this was totally unrealistic. Internationalists can never unite with supporters of Hezbollah or any other nationalist organisation, because it is a fundamental principle of the working class. What we can do is continue the debate, as in the Midlands discussion forum or the class struggle forum in Manchester, where internationalists and those who want to discuss internationalist positions come together. Continuing the discussion doesn't prevent groups and individuals getting together for particular activities, in fact it is the only way to create the level of agreement and the level of trust needed. 

May 9/7/10

This is a translation of an article written by Rivoluzione Internazionale, the ICC's section in Italy, published in December 2009.

With the publication of Gomorra[1] and its distribution internationally, Roberto Saviano has become the symbol of the struggle against the Comorra and, more generally, against the Mafia, receiving warm support not only from the Italian and international media, but also from many people who, disgusted with a more and more fraudulent and hypocritical political class, have welcomed Saviano's denunciation of organised crime and, above all, its multiple links with the political and business world. Today, Saviano is much more than a "writer"; he's become above all a reference for many of the young who feel the need to react against all this rottenness, in particular the youth that are suffering from the constant economic and social degradation in the southern regions of Italy.

More recently, Saviano has also moved on to more general questions: denouncing the Iranian regime for killing demonstrators, the Castro regime for getting rid of an embarrassing homosexual writer, or the Stalinist regime and its Gulag, and othersl[2]. He has become the promoter of an Appeal[3] to the President of the Italian Council (Berlusconi) for the withdrawal of the "short procedures" law[4], an appeal which has amassed a hundred thousand signatures.

The facts exposed by Saviano in his writings and interventions are certainly true, as is the picture he paints of corruption, criminality and oppression. It's also true, from a personal point of view, that he is paying very dearly for his denunciations, above all those in the book Gomorra, which has obliged him to lead a life worse than a prisoner. It's for that reason that we respect Saviano because we consider him an honest person, even if we think that he's mistaken about the remedy he suggests for fighting against the ambient rottenness.

Saviano's view

For Saviano, the Mafia is fundamentally a virulent parasite which, from the south of Italy, has invaded and gripped the democratic state through the corruption of politicians and businessmen, thus succeeding in infiltrating and influencing the fate of entire regions and even national politics. For him this is possible because, on the one hand, the political class and the state underestimates the danger of this pathogenic agent: "Whereas politics is not interested in the Mafia, the latter is interested in politics and systematically co-opts itself to it"[5]. This is in part down to the principle of "Omerta" in which the southern population is complicit, playing a role of passive spectators through "fear" or "self-preservation", "without thinking, nor demanding a change in their own territory (...) Omerta is not so much keeping your mouth shut, but above all not wanting to know, not wanting to understand, take a position or take part. Here's the new Omerta"[6] .

With such a vision, it follows that the way to vanquish this evil and return dignity to the nation and the southern populations is denunciation and the mobilisation of the population so that it collaborates with the forces of order to point out and denounce the Mafiosi and their dirty work: "The denunciation of murderers could be the sole means to redeem the humanity of people still at ease in the dehumanisation by which they are constrained and with which they seem comfortable"[7]. In fact, according to Saviano, "we must all take account of the fact that neither the media, nor the magistrates alone, will be up to provoking the least change until it is demanded and supported by the majority of citizens"[8].

Is the Mafia really a foreign body to the democratic state?

Many people, without doubt, have discovered frightening and unimaginable facts in the book Gomorra  .However, the great majority don't know (because it doesn't figure in the history books) that states, including the Italian state, have very often utilised the Mafia for all sorts of dirty work both domestically and at the international level. Things that these states couldn't do in their own names but which were decisive in setting up policies and strategies that were of the highest importance for the bourgeoisie. Here are a few examples:

• When the United States entered the war in 1941, it recognised the strategic importance of the Mafia. On the home front, the American state had to avoid the creation of a pro-Mussolini front within immigrants from Italy. Moreover, the Mafia, which controlled among other things the dockers' and transport unions, key sectors for the provision of arms, became an irreplaceable interlocutor of the American state. The US Navy asked Washington for the authorisation to negotiate with the Mafia and with its capo Lucky Luciano, who was in prison - an authorisation that Roosevelt was quick to grant[9]. Further, the Mafia engaged its unions in the war effort by controlling the workers with a steely grip.
• In 1943, the landing of troops in Italy was achieved thanks to an agreement with the local Mafia who prepared the ground following the guidance of the Italian-American Mafia capo Luciano. The latter, who was condemned to 50 years in a US prison, was set free in reward for this contribution and left for Naples where he organised the contraband in goods and drugs. Two others also profited from this "help":  the local Sicilian boss Don Calogero Vizzini - later to be "elected" mayor of Villalba - and Vito Genovese, right-hand man of Lucky Luciano, who went on to become the reliable ally of C. Poletti (American military governor of all of occupied Italy) and then, once returning to the United States, became the main Mafia boss after the war.
• On May 1st 1947, the gang run by Salvatore Giuliano fired on a crowd of unarmed workers, peasants, women and children at Portella near Ginestra, close to Palermo, to end their struggles against the big landowners and halt the advance of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the region, which was unappreciated by the United States. Giuliano was killed in 1950 by his lieutenant Pisciotta who, in his turn, was poisoned in prison after making statements on the links between Giuliano, the Mafia and Scelba, the Minister of the Interior in the new Italian Democratic Republic.
• In 1948, the United States wanted its faithful ally, the Christian Democrats (DC), who won the elections, to control the fundamentally strategic bastion of Italy against the Russian bloc. While the United States financed the Italian government, the Mafia, above all the Cosa Nostra, actively engaged in the financing and campaigning of the DC, giving it its voting "orders".
• In the years following this, Gladio and the P2 Lodge, parallel structures controlled by Nato and the CIA with the complicity of the Italian secret services, maintained the links with the Mafia at different levels. This system was at the origins of numerous attacks which, from the 1960s to the 90s,  played a key role in Italian politics, relating both to social conflicts[10] and to the choices within the Italian bourgeoisie on imperialist rivalries.

None of these elements[11] can lead us to think that the Mafia is typically Italian or southern, nor a foreign body on the democratic system, but, on the contrary, it is an integral and functional  part of it, in Italy but also in the United States, China, Japan, Russia and more generally in all the countries of eastern Europe. One can understand that the power gained and developed by the Mafia in Italy for example, is not only the result of an economic power based on illicit business and the considerable numbers of easily bribed politicians and bosses in Italy, but is above all the result of quite precise imperialist policies and the immunity of those that benefit from them (with the exception of some arrests in order to save the face of democracy and legality) in return for precious services given, services  which will continue to be rendered to the dominant class.

Why is the Saviano's view wrong?

To return to Saviano, his view can be summed up thus: there are the good and the wicked, honest and dishonest and there is a state, which even if its functions badly, assures, despite everything, civilisation and democracy. In his eyes, there is thus a rotten part of society which can only be eliminated by getting behind and supporting this democratic state and, on the other hand, an amorphous and brutalised mass whose sole objective is not to have any more problems than it has already.

We find this same way of thinking in Saviano's intervention in the programme Che tempo che fa of November 11 2009, where, regarding oppression suffered in Iran, Chile or in the old USSR, etc., he implicitly brings out radical differences between totalitarian oppressor states and democracy, where one isn't killed or put away for one's ideas.

Saviano relates, with just indignation, the story of two young women killed by the Iranian state simply for protesting in the street and expressing their will to live in a freer society. But where's the difference in these murders and the ones ordered by Carlo Giuliani at the G8 in Genoa in 2001, or numerous massacres of workers committed by the democratic Italian state during demonstrations and strikes - this state born out of the Resistance and whose constitution pretends that Italy is a Republic based on the workers[12]? What's the difference between the atrocities of the Stalinist Soviet state and the non-communist ones that Saviano alludes to? The extermination of a quarter million human lives at Dresden in February 1945, and the 200,000 plus people dying in agony in the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima the 6th and 9th of August 1945?

And why does "our" democratic state send troops into combat in Afghanistan and Iraq to serve the interests of the major powers, even if that means death and misery for thousands of people, as was the case in Serbia and Kosovo, where the Italian air force was in the first wave of bombings?

The basic error of Saviano's arguments is considering things from an individual, or sum of individuals, point of view, outside of the social, economic and political circumstances in which they live, in a historically determined epoch. The context we live in is one of a capitalist society which is based upon exploitation and the domination of one class over the great majority of humanity. The economic motor of this society is profit and pitiless competition in each capitalist country and, above all, between the nation states. The state, its laws and its forces of order are the instruments that each national bourgeoisie provides itself with in order to maintain its domination over society and to defend its economic, political and military interests in the face of international competition. In such a society the lives of human beings are not at the centre of concern; there's no space in this system for the needs of humanity and when we talk of needs we are talking just as much about economic needs as those of which Saviano talks: "liberty... justice, the dignity of man and I also add the right to good health"[13].

Abuse, oppression, physical and moral violence, corruption, the absence of ethics and morality and criminal fraud are not the prerogative of such and such individual, clique or power, but are an integral part of the very nature of the capitalist system.

If, today, the countryside finds itself poisoned by tons of toxic waste coming from the industries of the north and buried by the Camorra, it's not because of a particular dose of immorality in those responsible for these enterprises, but because they are constrained to obey the law of capitalist profit and thus use the cheapest method in order to get rid of toxic waste. If, for decades, the Italian political apparatus has used the Mafia, its killings and lies, it's not because these politicians are a "bad lot", but because it corresponds to the interests of the state, a state which openly reverts to these practices when they are necessary.

Whether totalitarian or democratic, the fundamentals and the substance are the same. Democracy is only the instrument better adapted to make this state of things accepted, thanks to the illusion that if the citizens ask the government for a better society it will listen.

Thus, appeals to denounce the killers, to ask the state to enforce the elimination of the Mafia and corruption, appeals to the high-ups in the state to "defend the law" will never work, but on the contrary, have become a means to spread the illusion that it will be possible to live better inside this system.

The sole means to rid ourselves of all this rottenness is to get rid of capitalism. That cannot be realised through the mass indifference of the citizens but, on the contrary, through the social class whose interests are diametrically opposed to those of the dominant class and which really has nothing to lose: the proletariat.

Eva (10.12.2009).

[1] Gommora; In the empire of the Camorra by Roberto Saviano (2007). This book, which has been translated into numerous languages, tells of the grip of this criminal organisation on the economy of the Naples region and its catastrophic consequences on the environment.  A film has been made based on it. The Camorra is the name of the Neapolitan Mafia. Gomorrah, as Sodom, was a town in the Bible known for its extreme corruption. Saviano makes the parallel between these two names.

[2] The TV programme RA13 Che tempo che fa, 11th November 2009.

[3] http//www.repubblica.itspeciale/2009/firma-lappello-di-saviano/index.html [138]

[4]  one the judicial procedures cooked-up with a Berlusconi sauce.

[5] "La camorra alla conquitsta dei partiti in Campania", la Repubblica, October 24.

[6] "Il filmato-shock sconvolge il mondo, i vicoli restano indifferent", La Repubblica, November 1st, in reference to a film on the assassination of a Mafiosi in Naples which circulated on the internet.

[7] "In cinqe minuti la banalita dell'inferno, ora sogno la rebellion del quartiere". La Rebubblica , October 30.

[8] "Siamo tutti casalesi" L'Expresso, October 7, written after the murder of immigrants by the Camorra at Castel Volturno, a province of Naples.

[9] For more elements on this, see our article "How the bourgeoisie organises: the lies of the democratic state" in International Review no. 77, III-1994.

[10] The bloody attack (16 dead and a hundred wounded) which took place in Milan on the Piazza Fontana is a product of this collusion.

[11] Documents on this subject are on the internet, for example: la storia dell'eroina (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Tq2My1(Gel&feature=related) [139], In Sicilia si gioca la Storia d'Italia (Mafia CIA Vaticano).

[12] Outside of the massacre already cited at Portella delle Ginstre, see "The Hot Autumn in Italy 1969, an episode of historic resurgence of the class struggle" in the International Review no. 140, January 2010.

[13] "Ecco perche non possiamo tacere", response to Minister Bondi, la Repubblica, 23rd November 2009.

Various comrades and groups have sent us information and comments on this struggle that took place recently. We are deeply grateful to them for their collaboration and encourage them to continue. We all know that the media is not neutral and shamelessly serves its masters, the state and capital, sometimes implementing a total black-out on workers' struggles - particularly those that show clear tendencies towards solidarity, self –organisation and militancy ..., and sometimes organising scandalous campaigns of slander as was seen recently during the Metro strike in Madrid. It is therefore of the utmost importance that the advanced minorities of the class rapidly communicate valuable information about workers' struggles to each other[1].

We are not talking about cheering ourselves up by only publicising the positive bits of struggle. The working class does not need pats on the back. We need truthful information and shouldn't be afraid of highlighting weaknesses, obstacles and problems.
Referring back to the struggles in Panama, we want to underline that despite the weaknesses and limitations that the workers' struggles still suffer from today, we are nonetheless seeing one very positive aspect: struggles are developing simultaneously in the so-called "rich" countries (Great Britain, Greece, France, China, Spain ...) and in the "poor" countries (Rumania, Panama, Bangladesh, India …). This is despite the fact that there are still huge obstacles to overcome for the unity of the international proletariat to be fully achieved in breaking down the barriers between workers in the “rich” and “poor” countries that the ruling class fully utilises for its own ends.

The strike erupted on July 1st in the banana growing province of Bocas de Toro, bordering Costa Rica. Workers were demanding unpaid wages on the one hand and, expressing their opposition to the problems posed to it by the new law proposed by the Martinelli government, Statute 30, which "limits the right to strike and collective bargaining, legalises the hiring of 'scabs' and grants the police immunity by giving it rights outside the Panamanian Constitution "[2]. This Statute 30 also has articles that cancel the automatic payment of union contributions by the bosses. It also includes repressive measures such as the legalisation of spying, with a decree of the Ministry of Public Security to legalise the figure of the "secret agent" who has a free hand to spy on and accuse anyone "engaged in activities that harm national security, State assets, social cohesion”, which means that anyone can be denounced.

The unrest that these measures caused led to more than 10,000 people demonstrating on June 29th in Panama City. But the combativity of the banana workers quickly reached the centre stage of the social situation. The strike spread quickly throughout the province. "From July 1st more than forty pickets blocked the twenty access points to Bocas de Toro, mobilising a huge popular support; and groups of indigenous people from all the estates in the area were quick to join the struggle begun by the banana workers' union, gathering at the barricades the workers had organised and in the occupation of the airport, which was completely shut down." The workers assembled at the entrance to the main city of the province, and then led a demonstration calling for everyone to join the struggle. These actions quickly found an echo in the solidarity of the population, clearly expressed in the demonstrations and daily support in the assemblies. Following some brutal police attacks, barricades were removed from both urban roads and rural pathways. Despite pressure from the authorities, parents decided against sending their children to school and, in the follow up, high school students expressed their solidarity with the struggle, completely shutting down the educational establishments.
"In addition to indigenous and neighbouring groups, the strike of banana workers quickly united the teachers and construction workers working on the extension of the Panama Canal, opposed to cuts in their wages and to some of the principal workers' leaders being sacked.  Students at the University of Panama also demonstrated, blocking the Transísmica Way in support of the struggle of the banana workers and against Statute 30, before also coming up against brutal repression that ended with the detention of 157 students from the College of Arts and Crafts who joined in blockading the Transísmica Way with students from the University of Panama."

The government unleashed a savage crackdown. It was particularly brutal in the town of Changuinola, at the centre of the strike in the banana plantations. According to various sources, there were six dead and hundreds wounded, shot by the anti-riot police ordered in by the President of the Republic. They used pellets that caused serious damage to the eyes of many protesters. According to one witness, "Children died in residential areas suffocated by the tear gas. They are victims of respiratory problems, according to the authorities who consequently do not consider them victims of police brutality", which would add to the number of dead. Another witness said that "the police went searching homes and hospitals for the injured to imprison them. With no warrants of any kind they carried out raids on the homes, and right up to the Presbytery they have carried out arrests. They have tortured, beaten up, intimidated and abused ...."

The unions workers stab the workers in the back

In the face of this brutal repression, the union leaders immediately offered the government an olive branch. Negotiations between government representatives and the union, Sitraibana[3] opened on the 11th. The union called for the resumption of work under the terms of an agreement whose only demand satisfied was the withdrawal of certain articles of as a whole Statute 30, which would have abolished the employers’ payments to the unions! The union was shameless in looking after its own specific interests and has disregarded the workers' demands and the violent attack that Statute 30 represented!

Some sectors of workers have opposed a return to work and remained on strike until July 14th, daily protests across the whole population were not quashed, and on July 18th there were demonstrations across the country as a sign of mourning for workers killed.
To calm the situation down, "Martinelli and Co have visited Bocas de Toro as if they were still on the election trail, offering gifts, with false promises and weak excuses without acknowledging the scale of government responsibility for the massacre of people. The media did not broadcast any more of the many demonstrations of popular protest against what was, without doubt, an affront to the dignity of the people."

In addition, the President organised a Commission of Inquiry, composed of government, employer, religious and trade union representatives, to "shed light on what happened in the province of Bocas de Toro between 5th and 13th July, 2010" and a 'Round Table' was set up to "examine the working conditions of workers in the banana plantations", which, as one of the messages we have received says "is a commission of me and me."

By combining the carrot and stick, fierce repression with displays of dialogue and parliamentary action, the Panamanian bourgeoisie appears to have emerged victorious from this conflict, having toughened and degraded working and living conditions and strengthened repression and the hand of the bosses. Some dissident unions promised a "general strike" without fixing a date.

Some lessons

Union control of the struggle led to the workers being served up with their hands and feet tied. Initially, the Sitraibana has shown itself to be combative and all the leftist organisations and unions cited it as a "model". This "radical" reputation allowed its leaders to make a 180º turn around and draw up an "agreement" with the government that demobilised the workers despite some resistance having been expressed. This shows us that workers, whether unionised or non-unionised, need to take collective control of their struggles by wresting it from the hands of the treacherous trade unions, and need massive assemblies open to others workers, in order to monitor the day to day developments of the struggle, the negotiations, the actions needed, etc.. These measures are vital so that the solidarity, camaraderie, collective strength, heroism and the consciousness that develop in the struggle are not wasted and lost, causing disillusionment and demoralisation.

The fact that the province of Bocas de Toro is one of the poorest areas of the country, inhabited by many indigenous oppressed and impoverished tribes, has been a heavy burden on the struggle and has contributed to it being led off course from a truly proletarian and autonomous struggle. The strike was the signal for a major wave of popular discontent. This is positive when the proletariat is able to channel this discontent onto its own class terrain against capital and the state. However, it is negative and weakens the proletariat as well as the emancipation of these social strata, if - as happened in this fight – it becomes an inter-classist mobilisation that emerges in favour of "restoring the democratic freedoms under attack by Statute 30" and "the implementation by central government of some investments in the neglected province" in order to give "recognition to the ancestral rights of the indigenous peoples".

When the struggle sinks into this populist quagmire, there is just ONE WINNER, CAPITAL. It never declares its real interests for what they are – its own selfish interests at the expense of the vast majority - but dresses them up in the false disguises of "the people" and "citizens", of "social rights" and other meaningless drivel. These deceptions take away the proletariat’s identity and class autonomy and thus succeed in disarming it and all the oppressed population along with it.
ICC (July 27, 2010)

---

Statement by the comrades of LECO, Costa Rica on the The Struggle of the banana workers in Bocas de Toro (Panama)

We want to salute and give our support to the struggle that the workers in Panama have recently developed. The unity of different sectors shows that workers recognise that their strength lies in unity; this struggle is an effort by the class to free itself from the framework of struggle of the unions and the organisations of the left of capital. The unions play the role of negotiators, as is the reason for their being, and the class are the victims of this. But this does not mean that the proletariat is defeated, it is taking up its international experience in order to know how to confront the bourgeoisie and its agents with accuracy. The unity in struggle that the workers of Panama have shown is being accompanied by a resurgence of solidarity on the part of the working class in relation to different struggles. For some time now atomisation has reigned. Although these efforts have been isolated, they are none the less important because they show the road that the struggle has to take.

Thus spreading these struggles will be a step forwards for the class, carrying different sectors such as the banana workers and students in Panama, workers in all sectors and all countries are carrying out the same struggle, with the same interests.

The banana workers

The banana workers are hit very hard by the most disgusting conditions of exploitation. Here in Costa Rica they are subjected to all kinds of pesticides even those illegal for cultivation, furthermore they have to work in dangerous working conditions the threat of being bitten by poisonous snakes, etc. It is the same for the pineapple workers. The attack on living conditions carried out by the bourgeoisie in Panama is the same as that carried out in the rest of the world, increasingly threatened by the crisis; faced with this the banana workers have carried out a struggle valuable for the whole class.

The unions and organisation of the Left compromised on all sides by Parliamentarism and capitalist democracy, have end up by burying the class efforts to develop its struggle. Thus, when there are no movements they call for strikes and demonstrations in order to be able to undermine general discontent, and when struggles try to spread beyond their sector they take control of it, the unions as much as the leftist groups call for calm, for democratic and pacifist solutions, that is to say the terrain of the bourgeois, from which these representatives gain the slice of the cake.

In Costa Rica has happened in Panama the negotiations in 2000 to end the struggle against the “electricity Combo” took place when the leads of the unions and left groups became part of the negotiating commission. Thus avoiding the class developing their own autonomous mechanisms of struggle, thus clearing the way for the police and their repression. A struggle that the unions initially wanted to carry out for their own ends, was put under pressure by the workers when they took to the streets demanding much more, calling on everyone to struggle. Many workers took part independently of the unions, the neighbourhoods were self-organised and there were confrontations with the police. The unions had to run to catch up in order to control the strikes and to bring democratic calm to the country again and to try and erase the consciousness of hundreds of thousands of workers and exploited who had supported the strikes, an achievement that this protest movement spread beyond sectoral interests.

Today all those leaders that supported the negotiation of the struggles through a commission and called for peace and democracy, are participating in bourgeois elections and looking for parliamentary and unions positions, aspiring to survive as part of this class, as a practical layer. The same story is repeated with the class efforts to develop struggles that really defend class interests, as with May 68. Therefore, we must unite our struggles, beyond boarders in order to be able to develop them, in order that workers can discuss and gain the experience of the whole class.

Enr, July 2010.

We are publishing a statement written by the comrades of the CREE (Coletivo Revolucionario Espartaquista Estudiantil) about the Madrid Metro workers’ strike at the end of June, in response to wage cuts and tax increases imposed by the local authority.

The CREE’s statement on the metro strike, we believe should encourage other comrades and proletarian collectives to discuss this question in order to prepare new struggles and find confidence in their own strength. There are two precisions that we want to make in order to help stimulate the discussion:

1.       The strength of a struggle does not necessarily reside in how radical the strike is, whether it paralyses production and services or not, but in its capacity to push forward the unity of the class through extension and solidarity, and the development of a balance of forces against the bourgeois state. In the present period, with the accumulation of unsold stocks, the stopping of production in this or that factory does not threaten the bourgeoisie, above all if it is not accompanied by class solidarity and unity. Public service strikes, as we have seen with the Madrid Metro strike, even if they totally paralyse services, can be turned against the workers if the struggle remains isolated. The refusal to maintain a minimum service in this struggle expressed the will to try and break out of the prison of legal and union rules aimed at imprisoning and isolating the struggles. Nevertheless the workers’ search to wage an effective struggle that had enough strength to impose their demands was undermined by the fixation on the demand about not respecting minimum services, on the call for the total strike (in isolation). Rather than being a strength this fixation was a weakness. A weakness that allowed the bourgeoisie's propaganda to set the rest of the proletariat and the population against the Metro workers in order to isolate them.

2.       Another thing that we need to clarify is that the comrades of the CREE call for a Proletarian United Front. Although we understand what the comrades mean by this - they are calling for the unity of the class - from our point of view the concept of the “United Front” traditionally refers to a unity that is constructed through agreements between organisations, in this case the unions. The unity of the working class in struggle however is the product of its solidarity, its class nature, where there are no divergent interests; while union unity is the product of machinations and negotiations in order to share out privileges, for the distribution of “posts” etc, and generally with the aim of impeding the building of a true unity through open assemblies and the revocable organs that arise from them.

ICC 16th August 2010

The Greek coffers received a far from negligible sum of billions of Euros from the IMF and European Central Bank a few months in order to palliate the fiscal crisis that this country developed at a time of heightened economic activity. It was not the most powerful, nor the most rich, nor the most noticeable of the countries of the European Union; but it was on the edge of bankruptcy and had to be saved in order to stop the Euro entering into a profound coma. From this moment, a castle of cards was constructed with trembling hands, as the other countries began to fall. The alarm was sounded in Hungary: it appeared to be suffocating. The Spanish state has been in the sights of the speculators, who had already been assaulting it for months. Italy has not been able to do anything about its hyper-indebtedness. We are in a new period of the crisis marked by the fiscal debt of different national states, overwhelmed by the payment of credits accumulated over many years and which they appear not to be able to pay. The capitalist state is running short of resources and now it is the working class (since it is “all our fault”) that is acting as the guarantor of its debts. The different austerity plans that are being developed throughout the planet follow the same logic.

In France on the 24th June more than 2 million people took to the streets to protest about the reforms initiated by the Sarkozy government through its Austerity Plan. On the 25th June in Italy hundreds of thousands mobilised against the proposed cuts in public spending, a wage freeze and pension reform. In Greece the 29th June another general strike began on the same day as negotiations commenced in Parliament on the necessity to impose new measures aimed at allowing the country to comply with the credit terms set by the IMF months before. On the same day, an assembly of Madrid metro workers called an all-out strike which did not agree to maintain the minimal service demanded by the Madrid municipality.

Overturning the Collective Agreement that had been legally in force until 2012, the Madrid local government imposed a 5% wage cut on the Metro workers, which was in line with that imposed by the Zapatero government on all civil servants (so much for the difference between the ‘Left’ and the right which so many talk about). Independently of whether the wage cut was large or small, the struggle arose, precisely, from the unilateral breaking of the Collective Agreement, which meant breaking the traditional collective negotiations over working conditions, and replacing it with case by case negotiations. When it was decided to call the strike, the Municipality tried to limit the strike by obliging the strikers to maintain 50% of the Metro services. The workers, in an act of unprecedented courage, took the decision in their assembly not to respect the demand for minimum service. On the 29th and 30th June Madrid was without a Metro. Although the Ministry of the Interior deployed thousands of police, the pickets were successful, despite the traps of the bosses and Madrid municipality, in ensuring that no trains ran.

Media harassment

 Today the only way that we can get close to reality is through the media. Thousands of people throughout Spain felt that this legitimate defense of the working class faced with a new “decree” that undermined its historical conquests was an aggression. The mass media unanimously condemned the evils of the “privileged” metro workers, in order to criminalise their demands in every way possible. In the first place, by ignoring the necessity to go into the causes of this social conflict in order to give a more complete and complex vision of the situation. The efforts made by Metro passengers to find other means of transport were given more prominence than the workers’ assemblies. The voices of the disgruntled passengers were more important than those of the discounted workers who were seeing their rights trampled on. It was not a question of the Collective Agreement, but the 5% pay cut which left the Madrid Metro workers looking inconsiderate and stamping their feet despite their privileged working conditions. There was no hesitation in trying to create divisions between workers in the private sector and those in the public. Endlessly they repeated that those in the public sector have to accept the same measures as the rest, that any struggle would be unjustified. These are the standards of the informationsociety. Their aim was to spread vile lies aimed at stopping this example spreading.

Secondly, there was no hesitation about manufacturing an image of the strike as absolutely uncontrolled, calling it a “wildcat”. Pretty soon however somebody informed the newsrooms that “wildcat” means the workers spreading a strike without (and often against) the unions. A strike is not a wildcat because it does not have minimum services. A strike is a mere hoax if there is a minimum services.

Recent developments

The campaign of harassment and wrecking by both the media and the different bourgeois organisations and parties spread demoralisation amongst the striking workers, leading to their submission to the pressure exerted by the government departments and media. This explains why the latest mobilisations have respected the unfair minimum services. The bosses did sit down at the negotiating table on the 10th July but there is still no agreement and 2000 disciplinary proceedings are in place due to breach of minimum service during the 29th and 30th June. The 5% pay cut has been reduced to 1.5%, but the reprimanded workers will stay reprimanded and the Collective Agreement will be a thing of the past.

What conclusions can we draw?

The Madrid workers strike was an example. An example for workers throughout Spain. The consciousness of class unity and solidarity were stronger than the symbols of the unions, allowing the creation of organs of collective struggle despite the confluence of conflicting tendencies. It reappropriated the method par excellence of workers' organisation: sovereign assemblies, germs of the future workers' councils; where the workers expressed themselves and took decisions, real organs of workers' democracy. It also directly confronted the attack on workers’ right to strike, going beyond maintaining a minimum service and expressing the real nature of a strike, which can only have an impact when economic activity or services are paralysed.

However, we have to be aware that the solidarity of the working class, the sin qua non for achieving workers' demands and confronting the isolation imposed by the forces of the bourgeoisie, was weak and insufficient. The absolute necessity to take to the streets and to combat the lies was of the utmost importance in this conflict, but this did not happen and, due to this, the strike was not able to gain the real support of the wider working class. If this weakness had been overcome, perhaps today we would be talking about the workers having a strong hand at the negotiating table or even something much bigger.

Just for the moment. Because there was not this support and solidarity strikes did not happen, the Metro workers were left feeling guilty and real criminals and soon bowed to the demand for minimum service which only served to stifle the protests and leave them with no impact. Due to this the movement lost strength and was not able to regain the initial conditions of the Collective Agreement. We can see that the movement in Madrid came to nothing, but we must not be discouraged. Madrid is only a small step in recovering the best traditions of workers' struggle in this new period of the resurgence of proletarian combativity. The United Workers' Front defended by the CREE has found expression in this struggle without the need to call for it. This encourages us to continue working because we are going in the right direction. Here we give our support to the workers of the Madrid Metro, who have given a first and very important lesson to the working class about how one day to confront the bourgeois social order.

Last spring, the 18th Congress of RI took place. This plenary assembly of the ICC’s section in France was a moment very rich in fraternal and warm debates in which other sections of the ICC and invited sympathisers took part.

The work of this Congress was centred on 4 main axes:

• the evolution of the world economic crisis
• its perspectives for the development of class struggle
• the present dynamic of the ICC’s contacts
• the link between Marxism and science.

Concerning the economic crisis, the report presented by the central organ of RI and the debate that followed underlined the present impasse into which the dominant class is driven and its incapacity to hold back the scourge of debt. Despite all its mystifying speeches on the so-called economic “recovery”, the world bourgeoisie has no other solution to reliance on debt that to continue with its policy of state debt. A debate developed, and must be pursued in the ICC, on the objective limits of debt.

The congress was homogeneous on the perspectives of the economic crisis: no return to any sort of period of prosperity is henceforth possible. The bourgeoisie’s margin of manoeuvre is extremely narrow and can only lead it to impose plans of draconian austerity everywhere.

Faced with the incapacity of the bourgeoisie to find any sort of remedy to the bankruptcy of its system, which is now hitting European states like a full-force gale (Greece, Portugal, Spain, etc.), the bourgeoisie can only effect one response: attack the conditions of the exploited class still more violently, as is the case in Greece.

These massive attacks are shown through an unprecedented aggravation of unemployment with job cuts in all sectors, a drastic lowering of wages, a growing precariousness in youth employment, the deepening attacks on retirement pensions, a dismantling of the welfare state, etc.

It is in the context of the plunge of the world economy into a more profound and insurmountable crisis that the confrontation between bourgeoisie and proletariat will sharpen.

The debate on the present dynamic of the class struggle and its perspectives for the next two years put forward the difficulties confronted by the working class of the western European countries, particularly France.

The fact that today workers’ struggles are not up to confronting the violence of the attacks gave rise to a very rich debate which allowed the Congress to better discern and analyse the causes of such a gap.

As the last ICC Congress proposed, the working class, despite its enormous discontent, is showing a hesitation to engage in massive struggles. This relative disorientation is due to the massive blows that it is suffering and which, in the first place, can only strengthen its hesitations to engage in the combat for the defence of its conditions of life.

Unemployment, and its fear of job losses, constitutes a factor of paralysis which can’t be overcome immediately and necessitates the proletariat progressively rediscovering its class identity and confidence in itself.

A process of maturation is thus indispensable for the appearance of massive struggles. This maturation is already expressed by workers’ struggles which have developed recently, notably those of workers of Tekel in Turkey which are particularly significant of the class struggle at the international level (see articles on Tekel in the ICC).

The debates of the Congress equally demonstrated the fact that the bourgeoisie of the industrialised countries, and notably the French bourgeoisie, fear an upsurge of these massive struggles. In France, the dominant class cannot allow the risk of a similar social situation which exploded in Greece following the austerity plan attempting to stem the bankruptcy of the state.

The Congress also developed a discussion on the difference between the mass strike and massive struggles. It showed that even if the perspective of the outburst of massive struggles is in front of us, that doesn’t at all mean that we are entering into a historic period of the mass strike, which necessitates a certain level of the politicisation of struggles.

The debate on the social situation in France unfolded in the framework of the analysis of the ICC on the dynamic of the class struggle at the international level, put forward at our last international congress.

The discussion underlined that the proletariat in France contains a long experience of struggle anchored in its collective memory: the Paris Commune, May 68 and, more recently, the struggle of youth against the CPE, which obliged the Villepan government to draw back.

The spectre of massive struggles haunts the bourgeoisie; a bourgeoisie weakened by the successive blunders of the more and more unpopular Sarkozy. That’s the reason why the dominant class is walking on eggshells: it is trying to hide the depth of the attacks as much as possible (notably on the retired) and counts on the unions to sabotage the explosions of discontent of the working class.

The Congress debates thus showed that the continuance of the attacks on the retired in France will constitute a very important test allowing an assessment of the rapport de forces between the classes.

The discussion also allowed us to better discern the present impact of the corralling of the working class by the unions. Although the workers are not yet near to getting out of the union grip and the union ideology in order to take their struggles in hand themselves, the debate brought out the existence, in the workers’ ranks, of few illusions on the role and effectiveness of the struggles advocated by the unions.

If, despite this disillusionment, the working class is not yet ready today to mobilise itself outside and against the unions, it’s essentially because of the difficulty of again finding confidence in its own strength.

The working class more and more feels the need to fight against the attacks of the government and the bosses, but doesn’t know how to struggle without going through the unions. This difficulty is linked to the strength of democratic ideology which weighs very heavily on the consciousness of the exploited class. The workers can’t conceive of massively mobilising themselves outside of the “legal” framework of the democratic state. The union question thus constitutes a major stake in the future dynamic towards massive class confrontations.

The work of the Congress also looked at the present dynamic of our milieu of contacts in France.

On the numbers of new contacts, we noted a certain gap between the countries of Western Europe and the zones of the periphery (Latin America notably).

The Congress wasn’t totally homogenous on drawing out an analysis on the causes of this and put this as an objective on the agendas of all the sections of the ICC.

In particular, an analysis was advanced that merits deeper reflection. Western Europe has been the theatre of two world wars and of the deepest counter-revolution in history with the bloody crushing of the revolution in Germany at the beginning of the 1920s. These tragic events provoked a profound trauma the after-effects of which still mark the proletariat of Western Europe today and this could explain the very strong weight of democratic illusions in this part of the world and, similarly, the distrust towards groups claiming links with the October revolution in Russia 1917. It’s also on this part of the planet that the anti-communist campaigns following the collapse of the eastern bloc and the Stalinist regimes had the greatest impact. Revolutionary organisations belonging to the Left Communist current thus aroused a certain mistrust.

Nevertheless, with the bankruptcy of capitalism becoming more and more evident, a growing number of elements looking for a historical perspective tend to turn towards such groups as the ICC. Thus in France, as in all the countries of Europe, we’ve noted a growth in the numbers of our contacts and sympathisers. And above all, we’ve seen a will to discuss and debate, to confront and clarify divergences in a fraternal and mutually confident ambience, including in our relations with groups and internationalist elements belonging to the anarchist currents (such as the CNT-AIT).

The Congresses’ work also developed a discussion on an orientation text prepared by the ICC’s central organ: “Marxism and Science”.

Following discussions we had around the Darwin anniversary, the ICC felt the need to take up the approach of the workers’ movement relating to the link between Marxism and the sciences.

Inasmuch as Marxism is, before everything, a scientific method of the analysis of social reality, the ICC has to develop its interest in the fundamentals of all scientific method.

Marxism is always interested in science, in its discoveries which are an integral part of the development of the productive forces of society.

The proletariat will only be able to construct a future communist society with the development of scientific research.

Obviously Marxists are not scientific specialists, and the debate at the Congress bore essentially on method. A certain number of divergences appeared, notably around the question of “what is a science?”. Similarly, there’s no official position, no homogeneity amongst us regarding the contributions of Freud to science. The discussion also shone some light on the particular interest that Marxists should bring to the science of man so as to understand better what “human nature” is.

These debates must be pursued within the ICC and towards the exterior.

To conclude, all the delegations of the ICC and the comrades invited to the Congress saluted its work, the richness of discussion and the fraternal climate in which they took place.

This fraternity was manifested not only in the debates themselves, but also through the organisation of a convivial soiree during which all the participants shared a moment of festive relaxation where solidarity and human warmth came together.

This mutual confidence and solidarity must continue to serve as a beacon to us in order to pursue our activity and combat for the unification of humanity and the construction of a new society without want, war and exploitation.

We know that the road is long and strewn with pitfalls, but our conviction of the impasse of capitalism and the confidence in our class which is the bearer of communism is unbreakable. It is this confidence in a future that bears the coming combats of the working class which constitutes the principal strength of the ICC.

Sofiane, 20th August 2010

We publish here an article written by a sympathiser, in response to a debate going on within the CPGB ("Communist Party of Great Britain") which has found expression in a series of articles about the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain on the 80th anniversary of its founding.

In his 1920 reply to Lenin's “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Hermann Gorter requested that readers excuse his frequent repetition of various points, but laments that this was necessary, seeing as the tactics of the “Lefts” were still unknown to the workers' of most countries. Unfortunately, 90 years on, it seems this is still the case. In recent weeks, there has been a noticeable upping of the tempo at which articles are produced in the pages of the Weekly Worker denouncing 'leftism', 'leftist purity', 'left sectarianism' and other related epithets, particularly in relation to the series on the formation of the original CPGB. This has reached something of a crescendo in a full article in issue 837 by Jack Conrad, “Lessons of Lenin's 'Left-Wing' Communism”, attacking this supposed 'leftist' trend. Understanding the CPGB (PCC) as a non-sectarian organisation which allows for the expression of a variety of viewpoints, I have undertaken to correct some of the misunderstandings on the part of Conrad on the tactics of Left-Communists, an exercise which I hope will also correct misunderstandings on the part of other comrades, and contribute to a more fruitful discussion of Communist tactics than some of the usual mudslinging which passes for 'discussion' in the anti-capitalist milieu, and which is unfortunately present in a large degree in the article by Conrad.

Before we begin, I would like to say that it is unfortunate that Conrad's article refers solely to Lenin's work on the subject. If the reader is to get a better and more balanced judgement of the debate in question, they will need to read the original articles and replies to Lenin's work by the Communist Left. In this connection I would like to suggest a couple of works which, in my opinion, go a good way towards expounding on the tactics of the Left. In general it is difficult to pin down works which satisfactorily sum up the positions of the entire Communist Left, as it is not a homogeneous tendency, but I would think I am not being too controversial in recommending Theses of the Abstentionist Faction of the Italian Socialist Party and The Lyons Theses as works representative of the Italian Left. On the side of the German-Dutch Communist Left, Anton Pannekoek's World Revolution and Communist Tactics is something of a classic, as is Hermann Gorter's Open Letter to Comrade Lenin, in which he responds to the arguments of LWC:AID.

I am willing to put the lack of references to the actual arguments of the Left down to a mere lapse on comrade Conrad's part, but I would like to suggest to him that in future it would be wise to refer to the arguments and works of opposing factions in the Communist movement, if he wishes to engage in constructive debate. As we go through replying to the various points made by Conrad's piece, I hope it will become clear the damage done to the overall argument by failing to make such references. We will begin with what I consider to be the main defect of the article, the lack of any clear conception of what it is arguing against.

What is the Communist Left? 

Throughout the article Conrad opens fire on targets as diverse as a faction in the CPGB which advocated abstaining form participating in the Labour leadership elections on the grounds that John McDonnell was not a candidate, to the Social-Revolutionaries and their advocacy of individual terrorism. Much like the Trotskyite slur of 'ultra-leftist', the 'leftist' category serves to lump together serious political tendencies with advocates of individualist and anti-Marxist tactics and the various aberrations of otherwise consistent centrists. It will be useful then to, in the first place, clarify exactly what the Communist Left is.

For Conrad, the essence of the Communist Left may be found in it's 'purity mania', the slogan of 'no compromises'. He gives us a wonderfully flattering description of us as petty-bourgeois driven to a frenzy by economic crises, or as young and inexperienced elements of the proletarian movement. We must commend Conrad on his commitment to Communist unity in this fashion. Nevertheless, it should come as no surprise that his argument is far from perfect.

In actual fact, the Communist Left is a historical movement consisting of those parts of the workers' movement which supported the Russian revolution and duly joined the Communist International, only to break with Comintern tactics after the 2nd/3rd congress' and be summarily expelled. It consists of differing and heterogeneous trends. For example, the Left in Italy was remarked to be 'more Leninist than Lenin', and supported Lenin's position on the trade unions and struggles against colonialism. On the question of participation in parliament, they considered the debate to be a purely tactical question. The German-Dutch left by contrast rejected the old trade unions and in time came to reject political party organisation altogether. Most modern Left-Communist organisations lean towards a synthesis of perspectives. It is bound historically by its acceptance of Marxist method and principle (such as centralism over federalism), while arguing for a principled break with social-democratic tradition. With this clarified, I cannot claim to speak on behalf of the entire Communist Left, either historically or in modern times, but nonetheless I can perhaps attempt to defend the Left from Conrad's rather confused onslaught.

Participation in Parliament

Conrad follows Lenin in basing his argument on the fact that certain facets of the October revolution have a universal significance. He says that it is mere first world arrogance that denies the relevance of the October revolution to determining our modern tactics. I consider this mistaken, especially with regards to the tactic of participating in parliament.

Russia had only had a parliamentary institution since 1905, and it met precisely four times before the revolution. It did not have time to become a recognised centre of political authority which could pose a challenge to the rule of the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' deputies. In Western Europe however, both in 1917 and even more so in the 20th century, we have, as Conrad himself notes, “a long, and more or less uninterrupted, history of bourgeois democracy”. The parliamentary-representative form of government has become a permanent feature of the political landscape, and a recognised source of legitimate political authority.

This does not mean, however, that people think that the parliamentary process is any kind of vehicle for change. In fact, people are becoming more and more apathetic, and voting turnouts are sliding downwards. This should not, in itself, be encouraged by Communists, as it represents mere apathy with political processes, and not an understanding that an alternative form of political administration is possible. Nonetheless, it would be profoundly mistaken for Communists to attempt to get people out voting and rekindling their faith in the electoral process. It is our job as Communists to show that the existing institutions do not provide a vehicle for real social change. To attempt to do this by going into those same organisations we wish to discredit and arguing within in them is nothing but the worst confusionism. 

'Artificial' forms of Labour Organisations

Conrad claims that the German-Dutch Left wanted workers' to abandon the apparently natural forms of labour organisation of the old trade union apparatus for a 'brand new and immaculate' form of organisation, which in reality was an entirely 'artificial'. A comparison is made with the  many futile modern projects to create a new 'labour' party, apparently Conrad thinks that an attempt to organise workers' outside and against the trade-union bureaucracy is in anyway comparable to Labourism, an ideology based on the upper levels of same said bureaucracy..

But what exactly does it mean to critique an organisation on the basis that it is 'artificial'? That it is not a product of spontaneous action by the workers perhaps? This is the only interpretation that I can think of. If this is so, then I think I would not be out of place in noting a 'subordination to spontaneity' in this thesis, perhaps even a somewhat 'slavish' one. Perhaps Conrad would do well to remember the 'profoundly true and important' words of Karl Kautsky to the effect that socialism itself was not a product of the proletariat but of the bourgeois intelligentsia, and that it was this strata that communicated the socialist idea to working-class militants who in their turn introduced socialist ideas into the class movement where conditions allowed. Should we reject socialism and Marxism because they are 'artificial' and not products of the 'pure' workers movement (as, I would add, some anti-communists have indeed attempted to do)? And remind me again who here is supposed to have the fetish for purity?

To begin with, the fact that the Arbeiter-Unionen movement was in any way artificial is false. The movement was born from the factory council movement which appeared during the last year of the war, and emerged “almost spontaneously, without any precise ideological definitions or attachments, during the summer of 1919.” What united them was a dissatisfaction with the existing trade-unions and the willingness to use militant tactics. The General Workers Union of Germany (Allgemeine Arbeiter Union Deutschlands or AAUD) had 80,000 members within a month of it's formation in 1920 and some have the number as high as 200,000 by the spring of 1921.

Having satisfied Conrad's infantile workerist purity fetish, perhaps we can move on to discuss the advantages of this new form of unionism from the standpoint of Marxist tactics. The first thing we should note is that, farm from being simply a more 'immaculate' form of the trade-union, the Arbeiter-Unionen represented a decisive break from the old craft and trade unionism in a number of ways. For starters, taking their inspiration in part from the American Industrial Workers' of the World, the AAUD was to be a class wideunion. However, this in itself does not necessarily differentiate the Arbeiter-Unionen form of unionism from traditional syndicalist unions, such as the Free Workers Union of Germany (Freie Arbeiter Union Deutschlands or FAUD), which were also arising at that time.

What really differentiated the Arbeiter-Unionen movement was it's concept of 'unitary organisation'.  This was a concept first theorised by Fritz Wollfheim in March 1917, and developed by the left-radical movement in Germany and Holland, the basic cornerstone of which was the conception of a single organisation combining the functions of party and trade-union. What this meant in practice is that although the Arbeiter-Unionen took on functions of traditional trade and craft unions, they were in actual fact revolutionary political organisations. The AAUD had a programme, according to which it's members were dedicated to the achievement of a classless society through the dictatorship of the proletariat. Early manifestations of the Arbeiter-Unionen movement also had such political objectives, for example, the Port and Shipyard Workers Union of Hamburg, as well as defending it's members immediate economic interests, had a political programme, one of the planks of which was solidarity with the Russian revolution. The Ruhr union had a similar program.

In contrast to the syndicalist unions, the Arbetier-Unionen were willing to affiliate with the Communist movement. The provisional statutes drawn up by the Bremen federation included solidarity with the Communist International. Contrast this fighting orientation with the spineless cosying up to the Prussian junker state by the yellow unions, which resulted in the union bureaucracy putting increasing pressure on the leaders of the SPD to engage in subversive politics, and manifested itself in the SPD's attempt to put a cap on mass political strikes for suffrage reform in Germany which occurred just before the war. Contrast it also with the political activity of modern trade-unions, which usually goes as far as tailing behind various single-issue campaigns, and the general lack of fighting spirit which caused the outlet Reuters to remark that “the most remarkable thing in this age of austerity is just how few strikes there have been and how weak and ineffective unions have proved... the crisis has laid bare a truth partially hidden during the boom years: Europe's unions are less powerful, less influential, and less relevant than they have been for decades.” Contrast it with May 68 in France where the unions put the cap on the strike, with the Italian Hot Autumn where workers drove the union representatives from strike meetings, with Solidarnosc in Poland which diffused the workers' committees and mass meetings and made deals with the Stalinist state apparatus, and with the pamphlets coming out in France in the wake of the current struggle criticising the union leadership for leading them to defeat.

The old trade-unions represent on the economic field what the labour and social-democratic parties represent in the political field. They represent the working-class within capitalist society and as members of that society. Although their early orientation may have been a fighting one, they have increasingly been drawn into the apparatus of the capitalist state. The Arbeiter-Unionen represents the working-class as a class with a historic interest in seizing power and dissolving their own status as proletarians, and in turn the whole of class society. 

This is not to say that there were not profound contradictions in the Arbeiter-Unionen movement. Since it was a political and not just an economic movement, the movement had various factions. These factions held together organically during the immediate revolutionary period after the war on the basis of mass action, but as the revolutionary energy of the masses began to recede, the AAUD crumbled and after 1923 almost all of it's former social weight was lost. Its commitment to 'mass action' and an anti-bureaucratic orientation which bordered on anarchism left it unable to maintain itself as a coherent organisation in a period which was no longer suitable to such action. But while it did exist its capacity as an organisation which was relevant to the class was immense. Its activity was frenzied, regularly publishing a dozen weeklies and pamphlets with print runs of up to 120,000 copies. Its role as a bridge between traditional forms of unionism and the factory councils of the future, and it's use as a pole of regroupment for militant workers outside and against the trade-unions mean that the Arbeiter-Unionen still serves as an important model in some respects for our present situation.

The Russian Left-Communists

Whilst discussing the various 'leftist infections' that occurred within the Bolshevik party, Conrad mentions the Left-Communist fraction, which included Bukharin and Radek, and which formed in 1918. Conrad claims that “signing the Brest-Litovsk treaty was the point at issue.” This is false. Signing Brest-Litovsk was a rallying point for the Left-Communists, but not the only point in issue. For the record, a good deal of Left-Communists would tend to agree with Lenin over Bukharin on the question of Brest-Litovsk. Here is the theoretical journal of the Italian Left, Bilan, for example:

“Of the two tendencies in the Bolshevik party who confronted each other at the time of Brest-Litovsk, Lenin's and Bukharin's, we think that it was the former who was more in line with the needs of the world revolution. The positions of the fraction led by Bukharin, according to which the function of the proletarian state was to liberate the workers of other countries through a ‘revolutionary war', are in contradiction with the very nature of the proletarian revolution and the historic role of the proletariat.”

But when we look at the program of the Left-Communists we find that certain other issues were on the agenda, such the rejection of labour discipline and the introduction of piecework, as well as agreements with the 'captains of industry', arguing that with this “rejection of active proletarian politics, the conquests of the workers' and peasants' revolution will start to coagulate into a system of state capitalism and petty bourgeois economic relations. 'The defence of the socialist fatherland' will then prove in actual fact to be defence of a petty bourgeois motherland subject to the influence of international capital.” Conrad obscures these important elements of the debate between the 1918 Left-Communists and Lenin by trying to whittle down the issues at hand to merely one of Lenin's sensible policy of the cheapest peace possible, and Bukharin's insane calls for a revolutionary war against Imperial Germany.

Labour Party Affiliation

Conrad informs us that Lenin advocated supporting the Labour party “like a rope supports a hanged man”. He then claims that this was the kind of support which the CPGB gave to Dianne Abbot in the Labour leadership election. In the first place the idea that this support was similar to what Lenin advocated is clearly absurd. The meaning of Lenin's phrase was that in power it would become clear that the Labour party leadership “are petty-bourgeois and treacherous by nature, and that their bankruptcy is inevitable”, and because of this clarity in the bankruptcy of the Labour party “it w[ould] be possible, with serious chances of success, to overthrow the government of the Hendersons at once”. This exposition first occurred clearly in 1924 when the Labour minority government threatened to use its emergency powers against striking transport workers, and it would be needless to recount how it has occurred in practically every Labour government since. But despite the presence of the 'Official Communist' party which the CPGB so dearly loves because of it's apparent relevance for the class, the latter certainly did not succeed in carrying out Lenin's expectations and overtaking the Labour party in terms of mass support.

In my humble opinion, the failure lies in the confusionist nature of the affiliation tactic. On the one hand, you have a Communist party which advocates voting for the Labour party, which therefore appears to support it, on the other hand you have this same Communist party trying to expose the  treachery of the Labour leadership. Excuse me if I am unable to comprehend the clearly quite profound and dialectically advanced reasoning behind this tactic, but to me it seems to be the most ridiculous and contradictory course of action, and I am sure it must have seemed that way to workers looking for an alternative to Labour treachery and finding only a Communist party which supported that same treachery, almost the same as building a second Labour party. I have no doubt that such an absurd course of action would produce a similar effect in the future.

The Bolshevisation of the Comintern

At the start of Conrad's article, he refers to LWC: AID as “a handbook of Bolshevism internationalised.” Although he does not intend it in this way, his language is unfortunately close to the rhetoric of the centrist gangsters who purged the Communist Left from their ranks. This may surprise some CPGB readers, as for the past few weeks we have been subjected to an onslaught of attacks on 'left sectarianism' on the part of elements like Pankhurst who formed the Communist Left in Britain. In Germany and Italy however, the Left was crucial to the formation of their respective communist parties, had a significant influence on tactics early on, and were expelled from the party by centrist leadership. Since Conrad's tactics mirror those of the Comintern expulsionists, I will end this article with a short recount of the processes by which the Left was expelled by the Communist International.

When the Communist Party of Italy was formed at the 1921 Livorno congress, as a fusion between the Abstentionist faction of the PSI and the group centred around L'Ordine Nuovo, the abstentionists comprised the majority of the new cadres, and Amadeo Bordiga was took the position of de facto leader of the party. At the fourth world congress of the Comintern however, Zinoviev demanded the PCI 'fuse' with the PSI seeing that Serrati had just expelled the reformists and declared allegiance to the International. Delegates were sent to arrange the fusion, but a rebellion against the fusion in the PSI ranks led by Pietro Nenni collapsed the negotiations. In February 1923, Bordiga was thrown into jail by Mussolini's thugs. Taking advantage of his incapacitation, the Comintern had him expelled from the leadership. This allowed Antonio Gramsci, Stalin's man through and through, to convince a slim majority of the Central Committee to vote for his position over the manifesto drafted by Bordiga while in jail, which called for freedom of discussion within the party. Bordiga still had support from the party rank and file, but as a committed centralist, instead of initiating a split, he stood his ground and argued his position within the International, one of the only ones who did against the Comintern's policy, made explicit at the fifth congress, of the 'Bolshevisation' of the western Communist parties.

In 1926 at the sixth enlarged executive of the Comintern, Bordiga asked whether “Comrade Stalin thinks the development of the Russian situation and the internal problems of the Russian Party are linked to the development of the international proletarian movement?”. For this crime of questioning Stalin's internationalist credentials, Bordiga's faction was expelled for “Trotskyism”. In his last political work of this period, a letter to Karl Korsch, he advises that the Left “still needs to receive further blows before passing to the open offensive”. Clearly the tactics of an unremitting sectarian.

In Germany, the first organised expression of the Communist Left was the International Socialists of Germany, whom Lenin praised for being the first to make a definitive break with Kautskyism:

“A very great defect in revolutionary Marxism in Germany as a whole is its lack of a compact illegal organisation that would systematically pursue its line and educate the masses in the spirit of the new tasks; such an organisation would also have to take a definite stand towards opportunism and Kautskyism... That the “International Socialists of Germany” (I.S.D.) group alone remains at its post is definitely clear to everybody.”

In November 1918 the ISD became the International Communists of Germany, and in December joined with the Spartacist League to form the KPD. The clear majority of the left can be seen from the fact that, despite opposition from Luxemburg and Liebknecht, the motion opposing participation in the upcoming national assembly elections was passed by a majority of three to one.

After Luxemburg's death, leadership of the KPD fell to a supposed 'Luxemburgist' Paul Levi, who quickly revealed himself as a centrist bureaucrat. At the Frankfurt congress in August 1919, Levi packed the congress with newspaper editors, secretaries and orators, allowing only one delegate per district, a move calculated to weaken the left which was in control of almost all the party's local organisations. The move failed however, because the extraneous elements invited by the central committee moved to the Left.

At the Heidelberg congress in October the Central Committee had another shot. It distorted the voting arrangements by giving each district one vote, regardless of size, and it put forward a motion to restore the Central Committee's right to vote, giving the CC eight extra votes in its favour. The Left was slandered as 'anarcho-syndicalists' because of the fact that their papers allowed a variety of perspectives, including elements which confused the Unionen with syndicalism. Finally, the Heidelberg theses were published, which ended by declaring that “Those members of the KPD who do not share these views concerning the nature, the organization and the activity of the party, or those who have opposed them orally or in writing, must be excluded from the party.”

Initially the KPD left thought there must have been a misunderstanding and tried to mend its split from the leadership. They attempted to negotiate with the Central Committee and asserted the rights of the opposition but were continually rebuffed. They sent delegates to the third KPD congress in February 1920 and proposed the amendment of the Heidelberg Theses, but the congress reiterated that those who did not accept the theses as they stood would be excluded.

After the expulsion of the majority Left current, as Gilles Dauvé reports, the KPD practically ceased to exist:

“The reports of the delegates to the Third Congress provided evidence of the party’s utter prostration. In Berlin, out of 8,000 members, only 500 supported the central committee; in Essen, 43 out of 2,000, etc. “After his experience in Rhineland-Westphalia, Brandler resigned himself to saying, ‘We no longer have a party at all’.””

It had as he notes, “been reduced to a mere skeleton financed by Moscow”. The left was excluded and the party practically destroyed for the sake of a facile 'unity' with the centrists in the USPD. Even in spite of it's exclusion, the KAPD still attempted, and briefly succeeded, to gain entry into the Communist International and argue its case.

By parading under the cover of “Bolshevism internationalised”, and writing slanderous articles which seek to combine disparate elements and canonise them en bloc as  “leftist puritans”, Conrad shows that despite his and the CPGB's calls for Marxist unity in a mass Communist party, the rhetoric does not quite match up to the sectarian practice, a sectarian practice derived, however unwittingly, from the practices of the Stalinised Comintern, and going back before that to the  liquidationist practices of the KPD under the 'Luxemburgist' leadership of Paul Levi. If Conrad is serious about his commitments, he must drop the bureaucratic centralism which is everywhere the calling card of centrism.

20% of the pumps are running dry and there are endless queues. So says one of the media outlets regarding the economic paralysis of the country. Workers are combative and determined while the President of the Republic bangs his fist on the table and threatens the “hooligans” with the worst reprisals. This strong image is about to make its way around the world.

The workers encamped in front of the refineries do so in the name of workers’ solidarity. If they have the courage to expose themselves to the blows of police repression and the discipline of their bosses (at the Grandpuits refinery in the Paris region, the bosses threatened to close the site once and for all and sack everyone) it’s because they’re conscious of struggling for a just cause which has overtaken them: against the retirement reforms which will hit us all and against the pensions of misery which comes out of them. They are fighting for their whole class.

The paralysis of the transport system provoked by the refinery blockades also shows that the working class runs everything on a daily basis. It’s the workers who produce wealth. In the final analysis, the capitalists are only parasites who live off our backs and take for themselves the fruits of our labour. And it’s enough for one sector, a strategic one to be sure, to stop working normally for the whole national economy to be affected.

But this weapon of the blockade is a double-edged sword.

Who is most inconvenienced by the blockades?

The blockades of the refineries have the aim of paralysing the economy in order to put pressure on capital. It’s true that there’s nothing dearer to the eyes of capital than to see the accounts of its profit margins. That being said, who is most inconvenienced by the oil shortages? Who suffers the greatest economic pressures: capital or labour? Concretely, the largest enterprises of the country (Carrefour, L’Oreal, Paribas, the Societe Generale, or Danone, etc. ) are not in any danger. They have the solid backing and support (including financial) of the state. On the other hand, the workers are suffering daily from the difficulties of finding fuel to get to work, the reprimands of their bosses for being late, etc. And those on rolling strikes for several weeks will have to prepare to tighten their belts for many long months to come.

“Disrupting the economy in order to put pressure on capital” is moreover a myth inherited from the 19th century. A hundred years ago, workers could block their factories and thus force the boss to give way. In fact, on the one hand, solidarity funds allowed the strikers to hold out, while on the other the boss saw his competitors profit from the situation by pinching his customers. The threat of bankruptcy was serious for the firm and, often, the workers were triumphant. Today the context is totally different. There can still be solidarity funds. Indeed, there are some in place for the refinery pickets. But the bosses, faced with a social movement, no longer roll over. They stand together with each other. And they even have their own “black” funds to face up to such a situation. The refinery workers thus do not confront “their” boss but CAPITAL and, above all, all the power of its state. The economic balance of force is no longer, as it was a century ago, in favour of strikers.

And this is not the only pitfall.

The danger of isolation and “unpopularity”

The rolling strike is not generally well-followed today, with only some sectors engaged in permanent struggle: transport (above all SNCF), the port and cleaning services of Marseille and the refineries. Thus isolated, the most combative workers take the risk of exhausting themselves or becoming demoralised faced with defeat and of being violently repressed. It’s for this reason that numerous workers across the board have had the reflex to go to the lines of the blockades and occupations in order to physically express their solidarity.

But there’s an even greater risk: of making this struggle “unpopular”. For the moment, the greater part of the working class and of the wider population supports the struggle against the retirement reforms. Since the first day of action on March 23, there’s been more and more proletarians (and even small traders, liberal professions, artisans and peasants) joining up with the movement. Its strength is really drawing in growing numbers: workers in the public sector and little by little joining up with the private sector, workers’ families (particularly the Saturday demonstrations), precarious workers and unemployed, then students and schoolchildren... The struggle against the retirement reforms has become for everyone a struggle against the degradations of our living conditions and against poverty.

But the paralysis of transport, by affecting precisely those who in the final analysis share this struggle, risks dividing and breaking this dynamic, of going against the necessary massive extension of the struggles. For the present, a great number of proletarians support the blockages but, if the situation persists, this tendency can only turn around.

Moreover, very concretely, the total paralysis of transport makes it impossible for a massive coming together on the days of demonstrations. Wouldn’t making trains run free for example facilitate the greatest number joining in and be a more efficient way to strengthen the movement?

Establish relations of political force

Are we saying that the blockades and occupations are not methods beneficial to the struggle? Evidently not. Simply put, these actions shouldn’t have the first aim of establishing an economic balance of force (because that would be ineffectual), but a political balance of force. Any actions must be animated by attempts to extend the struggle. Our strength is our massive unity and our solidarity in combat.

For example, at the time of the movement against the CPE in 2006, the strike of the universities began by blockades. The most conscious and combative of the students drew in a maximum of their comrades towards the General Assemblies where a considerable number of those who hadn’t understood the significance of the attacks of the government or the necessity to fight them were convinced by the debates and arguments.

The blockade or the occupation of an industrial site, an education establishment or an administration centre, also allows this coming together, allows debates where the most hesitant are convinced and drawn into the struggle. This is the dynamic of extension which alone strikes fear in the heart of the bourgeoisie. And, in the final account, beyond the role that an occupation of a factory or a blockade at a given moment of a strike can play, it is in the street that the workers, the retired and unemployed, workers’ families... will be able to meet up in massive numbers!

ICC, 22/10/10.

Despite the fact that they lost 3-0, it wasn’t only the Turkish national team that was embarrassed last Tuesday night. The first thing that was problematic was that at a match in Berlin, the Turkish supporters outnumbered the German ones, and the second was that throughout the match Turkish supporters booed German midfield star Mesut Özil every time he touched the ball.

The following day there was lots of comment in the German press about how Turks in Germany weren’t patriotic enough, and how they were failing to integrate into German society. It brings to mind English politician Norman Tebbit’s infamous ‘cricket test’ when he criticised immigrants from India and Pakistan for not supporting England in a cricket match.

Of course footballers play for other international sides than the country that their grandparents came from. People even play for countries that they weren’t born in, and as all Turkish supporters are aware Marco Aurélio Brito dos Prazeres is not particularly Turkish. The abuse from Turkish nationalists didn’t seem to effect Mesut Özil much as he put in a great performance and scored the second goal.

More serious than a football match, however, is what these sort of comments in the German press represent. German Chancellor, Angela Merkel felt driven to join in with the general condemnation of immigrants. Speaking to a meeting of members of her party she announced that “This [multicultural] approach has failed, utterly failed”, and that “the idea of people from different cultural backgrounds living happily side by side did not work.”

Of course when these people are talking about people from different cultures they don’t mean the Dutch, or the Belgians many of whom also live and work in Germany. What they mean is people from Islamic backgrounds, and particularly Turks and Arabs.

Nor is it Germany alone. The panic mongering in Germany is similar to that in other European countries. The newly elected right-wing Swedish member of parliament, Björn Söder, stated that “we'll be facing the same problem that Iran did in 1979. It can happen really fast.” Of course, he didn’t bother to mention that the Iranian population is 98% Muslim, and even the highest estimates of the number of Muslims in the Danish population put the number at 5%. Even assuming that every single Muslim in Sweden is some sort of Islamic fundamentalist, it is still quite hard to imagine so few people launching a rerun of the Iranian revolution.

The banning of the burqa in France is a similar issue. To read the international media, one would think that France was overrun by women covered in black. In reality there are about 1,000 women in the whole of France who wear a burqa. This ban in France follows the passing of a similar law in Belgium back in April, and similar bans are now being discussed in other European countries such as the UK, Spain and Italy, and have already been introduced in specific cities in Italy and Spain, such as Barcelona. The question this raises is why the political elites of Europe have suddenly found a passion for women’s’ rights, or whether it is not a question of women’s rights anyway but a question of demonising outsiders. UK Conservative MP Philip Hollobone puts it very clearly wearing a burqa is “offensive”, and “against the British way of life”.

What is happening here is not about women’s rights, but a racist campaign. Racism in Western European countries and the US is a lot more subtle than it was 40 years ago. Back in the 1960s during the period when mass immigration to Western Europe began, the British Conservative party could openly play the racist card. “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour” was a slogan that it used in one election. Nor was it just restricted to the political sphere. Immigrant workers looking to rent a flat were often confronted with the letters NBNI at the end of newspaper ads, which meant ‘No Blacks, No Irish’.

Such overt racism is no longer possible today. That doesn’t mean that racism has disappeared, but has just changed its face. Today it orchestrates its campaigns against immigrants and ethnic minorities by appealing to workers in a different way. Islamists are accused of trying to destroy democratic values, and take away women’s rights. These are the arguments used both in defence of imperialist interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan or when campaigning against the other at home. The racist right today paints a picture of a Europe on the point of being overwhelmed by Islam.

Of course if we look at the facts Europe is not being ‘overwhelmed’ by Muslims at all. If we take Germany as an example the number of Turkish immigrants into Germany last year was at its lowest level since 1983, asylum applications are about a sixth of what they were in the 90s, and last year saw more Turks returning to Turkey than going to live in Germany, so in fact the numbers are falling.

Why then are we seeing a re-emergence of this sort of campaign now. It is because of the ongoing economic crisis. At times like these politicians look for ‘outsiders’ to blame. It not only gathers support for the nation state, but also divides the working class, weakening it and helping employers to drive down wages, and ultimately this is at the root of this racist campaign.

DD

Introduction (ICC)

General Assemblies (GA) are the lifeblood of the struggle. This is where workers (from the private and public sectors, the unemployed, pensioners, students, children of working families etc.) can really take ownership of their struggles, decide collectively. This is the true place of workers' democracy. By being open to all, not limited by corporatism, the GA unites the various sectors of our class. It’s the place where the life of the struggle can be built and the struggles extended.

This is why unions concentrate all their efforts to sabotage them! The text below, produced by the CNT-AIT Gers ( https://sia32.lautre.net [160] ) explains succinctly what a truly autonomous GA in the hands of strikers must be, and details the various pitfalls to guard against.

What is a general assembly? (Text of the CNT AIT, Gers)

Definition

We call a general assembly the regular meeting, democratic and sovereign, of workers, regrouped as and when, without criteria, which can be varied (those belonging to a union, a confederation of unions, a social movement). At no point should these workers be prevented from being delegates: the principle of the GA is the vote by head count.

Typology

There are several types of GA:

• The GA of a single union
• The combined GA of several unions
• The GA of workers on strike

Moreover, it can be limited to a single profession or be ‘inter-professional’. [Regrouping those from many professions – trans.]

Functioning of the GA

• The GA is democratic, and therefore guarantees each a turn to speak, shared equally in terms of duration and discussion topics. This is guaranteed by a mandate given to the moderator.
• Speeches must also be consistent with an agenda, agreed at the beginning of the meeting, which does not include various decision points.
• The GA is sovereign, and decisions are made by a show of hands, without any overturning of decisions, according to the agenda.
• The GA meets regularly and keeps a record of its debates and decisions. The record is kept by a secretary appointed early in the meeting, who ensures the debates and decisions of the GA are made public. The GA gives the date and place of the next GA.

Threats to the GA

• Monopolisation of debate: The GA becomes un-democratic. The classic case is the shop-steward who takes the role of moderator, participates in discussions or responds systematically giving their opinions. A variation on this is a participant in the room who monopolises the floor or speaks too often.
• The handling of the debate: The agenda is not respected. When the debate is moving precisely towards direct action, or a motion to renew the strike, the agenda is changed in order to blur the clarity of discussion, and to confuse the whole point of a GA, which is to answer the question "What and how?"
• Lack of democracy within the GA: the vote is not respected. Violating the agenda, votes are taken several times on decisions already made. Often, manipulation occurs at the end of the meeting, to destroy its coherence and audacity.
• Neutralisation of the GA: there is no alternative to a GA, however rich. Often, a GA of striking workers is treated as a safety-valve for their anger, neutralising their revolt, transforming their militancy into a sterile talking-shop. Be on guard! In a GA, we have all the tools at hand to see if they are being monopolised, manipulated, and neutralised. In all cases, failure to denounce the above threats will undermine our activity, our words, and our decisions: in short, our very reason to go on strike!

"The emancipation of the workers will be the task of the workers themselves"

SIA 32 (Member of the CNT-AIT).

Nine months after the earthquake which ravaged Haiti, leaving hundreds of thousands dead[1], the shady practices of the ruling class seem to have no limit. Despite all the fine promises of financial aid, millions of victims are still stuck in overcrowded camps. There have been around 10,000 NGO personnel on the island, plus thousands of well-armed troops from different countries, not to mention all the reporters looking for scoops and the politicians seeking a bit of publicity. But despite all the hypocritical tears of the world’s leaders[2], very little has been done. This is a population of little real interest as a source of profit, although it is still subject to the worst kind of banditry on the ground. But while all the world specialists were announcing as early as April that the worst was still to come with the arrival of the rainy season in an already catastrophic sanitary situation – a combination guaranteed to bring epidemic diseases – the world bourgeoisie did no more than wait for the rain.

The endless laments of the ‘international community’ are at the moment a bit more discreet than the disgusting media show organised at the time of the earthquake. And for good reason! There would be a lot more explaining to do because it is now more obvious than ever that the bourgeoisie is directly responsible for this disaster.

Cholera is a disease linked to insalubrious living conditions, which is what the Haitians are living in. It is transmitted through a bacterium that lives in water contaminated by faecal matter. In a country where less than 3% of the ruins caused by the earthquake have been evacuated, you can imagine the state of the water supply that the population is forced to use. The reconstruction of this country requires material and financial means. They were promised by various bourgeoisies looking to boost their influence and find a few new markets but they have not been forthcoming: more than 70% of the loans that were announced have not actually been handed over.

Furthermore, the diffusion of the bacterium is also facilitated by the chaotic movement of the population and by the thousands of evictions by property owners impatient to get back the land now occupied by the camps.

The law of profit will always make the bourgeoisie a class of unscrupulous murderers.

V, November 2010.

 From the website of the Daily Mail (22/11/10):

Student militants to picket school gates over tuition fees
 “Student militants have joined forces with French communists to picket England’s secondary schools urging pupils as young as 15 to stage a walkout over university tuition fees.

Supporters of using ‘legitimate force’ to try to stop the rise in fees have been joined by members of the International Communist Current (ICC) to mobilise school children.

Activists want to leaflet schools across the country in the latest day of action, planned for Wednesday.

More than 20,000 young people have signed up to take part in a ‘national walkout’ on Wednesday. The majority are school pupils and further education students.

Campaign group Education Activist Network held a protest planning meeting on Saturday at Birkbeck College, London.

This was attended by at least one member of the ICC.

The ICC has a long tradition of direct action dating from the student protests in 1968 which paralysed France.

The EAN’s ringleader is Mark Bergfeld, 23, who has supported the use of ‘legitimate force’ to bring down the Government and called for ‘barricaded schools’.

Mr Bergfeld, who attends Essex University, said at Saturday’s meeting: ‘What you can do is, between now and the 24th, give out leaflets outside the schools so they know what we’re doing. Then on the day, they can join you.’

Also present were town hall and Health Service workers, school teachers and university lecturers”.

Our first response to this article in the Daily Mail was general hilarity. The second thought was 'no publicity is bad publicity'. But the third thought was: 'what’s behind this?'

The conspiracy-mongering of bourgeois journalism, which can never envisage a genuine movement of revolt from below, but must always trace it back to some devilishly cunning Moriaty spinning his webs in the shadows, has a long history, certainly going back to the days of Marx and the First International. The capitalist press habitually blamed the International Workingmen’s Association, to give it its actual title, for stirring up every act of resistance to the bourgeois order from the smallest local strike to the mighty Paris Commune of 1871. The International had a certain influence in those days, of course, but it was nothing compared to the inflated version conjured up by the servants of the ruling class.

We are a tiny group. We participate in the class struggle as best as our forces allow, and we have been active in a number of the discussions, meetings and demonstrations that are part of the present movement of the students against tuition fees and the abolition of EMA payments. We were indeed present at the EAN meeting described. We are proud to be an international organisation (which is different to being a purely French one, of course) and we can indeed trace our origins to the tremendous strike wave that shook France in May 1968.

But we make no pretence to being the organisers of the present movement – we don’t even see that as our role. There’s little point arguing this with the Daily Mail, however, because it’s irrelevant whether or not their hacks believe that they have really uncovered the secret power behind the current rebellion of working class youth in the UK.

The real aim of this and similar articles lies elsewhere. And there have indeed been a number of similar articles recently: anarchist groups like Solidarity Federation and the Anarchist Federation have been identified as the organisers of the occupation and trashing of Tory HQ on November 10, and after the same event a particularly vicious article was published in the Daily Telegraph which fingered a regular poster on the libcom internet forum, naming him and his father and again insinuating without any proof whatever that he was directly responsible for the damage done at Millbank.

‘Exposés’ of this kind are aimed at discrediting revolutionaries and revolutionary organisations, at making them sound as sinister and unattractive as possible, and ultimately at creating an atmosphere where they can be attacked directly by the forces of order. After all we advocate “legitimate force” and - hint hint – are prepared even to drag innocent schoolchildren into our evil schemes. And of course we are foreigners, so why should we even be allowed here?

The kettling of the 24 November London student demonstration was a blatant display of force aimed at intimidating a movement which the bourgeoisie is not yet certain that it can contain, not least because it is not obeying the usual rules of engagement which the trade unions and the left can normally be entrusted to impose. The insinuations against anarchists and communists are another expression of the same kind of reaction from the ruling class. They correspond to its need to block an emerging process of politicisation among young people – a politicisation which threatens to go well beyond the false opposition offered by the capitalist left.

No need to envisage a conspiracy here: these kinds of reaction are almost as ‘spontaneous’ to the ruling class as a demonstration organised on Facebook. But there is consciousness involved too: our rulers learn from what’s happened before and what’s happening elsewhere. They have in front of them the image of Greece and France, for example, where within the recent movements against austerity we saw small but visible minorities posing some very political questions: the self-organisation and extension of the struggles, and the future that capitalist society has in store for us. The students in Britain are also raising the issue of the future and the ruling class would rather that they weren't encouraged to see the possibility of becoming part of a movement leading in the direction of revolution.

WR, 27/11/10.

Read more: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1331892/Tuition-fee-militants-picket-school-gates.html#ixzz16OoPiMUH [164]

The toxic red sludge coming from the bauxite-aluminium plant close to the village of Aika[1], fouling the Danube and flooding the neighbouring water courses and the villages of Devecser and Kolontar (the worst affected), can only generate a feeling of dread. It is the most serious incident of pollution in Hungary’s history! Thousands of cubic metres of poisoned sludge have been released into the environment and the repeated televised pictures of a bucket attached to a rope being thrown into it every hour to take samples for chemical analysis only added to the feelings of unease.

However, beyond the spectacular images of the desolated countryside in the first televised reports, another reality, just as shocking but much less reported on, is evident outside of the official comments: the deaths this has already caused. The horror generated by the dozens of immediate victims (including a 14-month old girl), the people gone missing, the more than a hundred wounded, affected by serious injuries, is added to today by the many who are still undergoing real suffering. This corrosive red sludge, composed of heavy metals and mildly radioactive, induces deep burns and attacks the eyes. The chemical component of this infamous mixture turns out to be carcinogenic. Thousands of villagers have decided to flee their homes in order to avoid putting their health in peril.

All the human drama of this catastrophe has been intentionally drowned out in the few commentaries that journalists have given. As usual, the dominant class has minimised the disaster: “The risk of the pollution of the Danube by the toxic red mud has been eliminated”. This is the lamentable announcement of the Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban during a press conference in Sofia only a few days after the incident. Without turning a hair, he added that: “The Hungarian authorities are in control of the situation”[2]. At the same time, journalists were turning attention and reflection away from the tragic consequences of this incident, showing just spectacular images to frighten the population and thus avoiding any real explanation[3]. In any case, industrial accidents linked to “technological risks”[4] are “the price to pay”, the “inevitable price of progress”. In other words, the fact that there are victims must be accepted as a fatality. This is something “normal”!

We can only angrily and indignantly denounce this nauseous ideology and above all the attempt to hide what are effectively murders by an unscrupulous capitalist class. We can only firmly highlight the barbarity that obliges populations to live in a dangerous environment and then coldly displaces the villagers after the event as if they were battery hens, whereas they had been deliberately exposed to danger with a total contempt for their lives.

It was a long time ago that the seepage of the red sludge coming from the defective reservoir was discovered and that the risks of direct contamination of the neighbouring villages were known. The exposure of the population was an open secret among the local bosses and politicians! But because prevention is not a profitable activity, the bourgeoisie prefers to make economies and play Russian roulette with a part of the population. And they are still playing the same game!

The “experts”, the politicians, bosses and journalists know perfectly well that the industrial rim of the Danube is a gigantic open-air rubbish tip and that the unsafe, decrepit installations – due to lack of investment – along it, can only give rise to new, similar catastrophes. From the first seepages, they have done everything to minimise the impact of the disaster. Then, faced with the evidence, they have affected surprise at the conditions of this new catastrophe, pointing a finger at the past, “vestiges” inherited from the period of so-called “communism” in order to absolve their system and avoid responsibility[5].

If today the media has gone onto other things, if the event no longer makes the newspapers, the catastrophe and the sufferings are from finished!

This devastating event is neither natural nor the product of fate. It is a clear expression of the destructive madness generated by the frenetic search for profits. Exacerbated competition in a world where markets are reducing little by little obliges all industries and states to take more and more risks, to constantly cut back on safety measures in order to make economies. At the same time, natural resources are everywhere subject to a real pillage and are suffering accelerated destruction. The catastrophe in Hungary is already there. Not only is the Danube, the second-largest river in Europe polluted, but some water courses belonging to its hydrographical network have had their ecosystems completely destroyed. This is the case for the river Marcel (which flows into the Raab, a direct tributary of the Danube) where inert fish float on top of the rusty coloured water. It will be a long time, decades even, before life can return here; this is without counting the damage produced in all the surrounding land and in the percolating water and streams that eventually end up in the water table. More than a thousand contaminated hectares will henceforth affect agricultural activity and the food chain of this polluted space. In the long term what are the consequences of the dust from the dried-up sludge, because it turns out that as long as it stays liquid it is less dangerous?

Once again, the bourgeoisie displays its negligence and total contempt for human life. And not only is its instinct driven by its thirst for immediate profits, but its blindness is such that bit by bit it is sawing away at the branch on which it sits. Of course some bourgeois call on the rest of their class to slow down this collapse into catastrophe, but it’s a lost cause. The general logic of capitalism’s hunt for rapid profits, linked to the present decline of the economy as a whole and to the collapse of whole segments of it, can only sharpen the rapaciousness of industry and the financial sector as they seek to suck the marrow dry of those areas of the planet where a profit can still be made. In exploiting the proletariat worse than beasts the bosses turn their noses up at “too costly” safety measures. So they are doing away with them without reflecting for one second on the consequences for the rest of humanity.

WH (14th October)

The leaflet below was given out at the large meeting held at King's College on Monday 15th November, under the auspices of the left wing of the unions (Education Activists Network). We would welcome comments, criticisms, and above all, offers to distribute it or improve and update it in this period leading up to next week's Day of Action. A comrade from the ICC's section in Toulouse, which has been very active in the movement for struggle committees and assemblies,  was able to speak at the meeting; and despite a frontal attack on the French union strategies, was widely applauded. We will try to piece together more elements about this meeting.

For a long time, it has seemed that the working class in Britain has been stunned into silence by the brutality of the attacks being launched by the new government: forcing the disabled back to work, forcing the jobless to work for nothing, raising the pension age, savage spending cuts in the education sector, hundreds of thousands of jobs to go throughout the public sector, trebling of university tuition fees and scrapping Education Maintenance Allowance bonuses for 16-18 year old students...the list is endless. The workers’ struggles that have taken place recently – BA, tube, fire service - have all been kept in strict isolation.

But we are an international class and the crisis of this system is also international. In Greece, Spain, and most recently France there have been massive struggles against the new austerity drives. In France the reaction against the pension ‘reforms’ provided a focus for growing discontent throughout society, but especially among the youth.

The huge demonstration in London of 10 November showed that the same potential for resistance exists in the UK. The sheer size of the demo, the involvement of both students and education workers, the refusal to be limited to a tame march from A to B, all this expresses a widespread feeling that we cannot accept the logic behind the state’s assault on living conditions. The temporary occupation of Tory HQ was not the result of a conspiracy by a handful of anarchists but the product of a far wider anger, and the vast majority of students and workers supporting the demo refused to go along with the condemnation of this action by the NUS leadership and the media.

Many have said it: this demonstration was just the beginning. Already a second day of action and demonstration is being organised for the 24th November. For the moment such actions are being organised by the ‘official’ organisations like the NUS who have already shown that they are part of the forces of order. But that is no reason for not participating massively in the demonstrations. On the contrary, coming together in large numbers is the best basis for creating new forms of organisation that can express the real needs of the struggle.

Before such demonstrations or days of action, how do we move forward? We need to call for meetings and general assemblies in the universities, colleges and schools, open to all students and workers, both to build support for the demonstrations and discuss their aims.

The initiative by some comrades to form ‘radical student and worker blocs’ on the demonstrations should be supported – but wherever possible they should meet in advance to discuss exactly how they intend to express their independence from the official organisers.      

We need to learn from recent experiences in Greece – where occupations (including the occupation of union HQ) – were used to create a space where general assemblies could be held. And what was the experience in France? We saw an important minority of students and workers in many towns holding street assemblies not only at the end of the demos but on a regular basis while the movement was going forward.

We also need to be clear that in future the forces of order will not keep to the softly softly approach of 10 November. They will be tooled up and looking to provoke us into premature clashes to give them a pretext for displays of force– this has been a common tactic in France. The organisation of self-defence and solidarity against the forces of repression needs to come out of collective discussion and decision.

The struggle is not just in the education sector. The entire working class is under attack and the resistance needs to be spread consciously to both public and private sectors. Controlling our own struggles is the only way to extend them.

International Communist Current, 15/10/10.

The tour

The Discussions

What remains?

Below is a translation of the statement of a witness to the police repression meted out against students, youth and workers at a demonstration last month in Lyon, France against the pension “reform” and the attacks of the French ruling class. The French police have also picked up on their British counterpart’s tactic of “kettling”, particularly using it to prevent any collective reflection on the best means of struggle that is emerging in minorities of the working class fed up with being marched up and down and then sent home by the unions.

The British police were strongly criticised for their illegal kettling at the G20 protest and the killing of Ian Tomlinson. But following the overwhelming of the police (deliberately allowed or not) by demonstrators at Millbank on November 10, there was little doubt that the kettling tactic would be used again in the UK, especially after the activist wing of the NUS and other leftists had announced their intention of marching towards Lib Dem HQ on 24 November. And so the 24 November demo was led into the cynical trap laid for them a few hundred yards after leaving the meeting point at Trafalgar Square.

At Lyon, the violence of a handful of demonstrators was possibly manipulated by the police, but was anyway used by them to prevent any coming together and discussion between students and workers at the end of the demonstration. What the bourgeoisie fears above all is that students will join up with other elements of their class under similar attacks: young, old, employed or unemployed. It is these general assemblies, however much a minority they start off with, that can discuss how to take the struggle forward and that were so effective in avoiding police provocations and joining up with workers in the struggles against the CPE in France in 2006. It was precisely the growing threat of this unification that forced the French state to withdraw its immediate assault on students’ and young workers’ conditions.

Lyon, Tuesday October 19, another demonstration against the changes to retirement. More than 45,000 are present, including thousands of schoolchildren. The latter met up in the morning in front of schools and joined up with the main demonstration. The omnipresent police laid into any “outbursts” from the beginning from various points, outbursts that they largely helped to provoke through their aggressive presence.

In the Place Bellecour, right in the heart of Lyon, where a good part of the demonstrators had come and were still arriving, the forces of order were collecting in numbers. Some dozens of youths faced up to them. The police reacted immediately and violently in the middle of thousands of demonstrators; firing tear gas and with loaded flash-balls in hands. All the repressive forces were mobilised – cops, civil forces, GIPN... They used orange markers to stain the demonstrators. Police helicopters hovered overhead to take photographs and to report to and direct the forces below. River police were also posted on the Rhone. In sum all efforts were made to brutally attack the youngsters present and, at the same time, sabotage the end of the demonstration.

Confrontations lasted up to the evening and it wasn’t only with the youths. A number of demonstrators responded to this police provocation and physically prevented heavier attacks.

The question is immediately posed: why such a level of repression, such a disproportionate use of the police faced with this situation. Who profits from the crime?

Obviously, the ruling class didn’t “just let this happen”. In unleashing this deliberately provoked violence it wanted to send a clear message:

- To spread fear among the youth who wanted to join the struggle but did not want to suffer from such repression.

- To frighten parents, demonstrators or not, in an attempt to dissuade them from joining in with the next demonstration.

- To provoke the high school and university students already involved and turn their discontent onto the single issue of repression and physical conflict. And in this way to try to obscure all the lessons of the CPE in 2006 where, rightly, the youngsters refused to respond to police provocation.

-To pervert any questioning during this social movement against the retirement changes and fixate it on the “irresponsibility” of Sarkozy alone; to attempt to wipe out the basis of our anger faced with the crisis that the whole of capitalism imposes on us.

But the unleashing of such violence was aimed above all at preventing hundreds of workers and demonstrators, large numbers of whom remained at the end of the demonstration on the Place Bellecour, from meeting up, discussing, looking to the next stage of struggle and asking, collectively, how to struggle.

Up to this demonstration it had been the unions’ loudspeakers with their deafening noise which had contributed to preventing any real collective discussions or any real massive General Assemblies. All of the unions had openly blocked such gatherings since the beginning of the movement. But today, there have been dozens of arrests and of wounded amongst the young.

Make no mistake about this repression. This violence of the state is directly addressed to the whole of the working class! Order must reign! This is the clear message from the state.

- We must respond but not on the terrain dictated by the cops

- We must first of all affirm our complete solidarity with the school and university students who were attacked and beaten.

- We must then reflect on why this violence took place and directly discuss it in all the General Assemblies held in Lyon and elsewhere!

A direct witness of events at Lyon, 20/10/10.

The world economic crisis and the perspectives for the class struggle

The bookshop Gondolkodo Antikvàrium in Budapest has begun a series of public debates on the perspectives for the class struggle, and on 5th November invited the ICC to introduce a discussion on “The world economic crisis and the perspectives for the class struggle”.

Our presentation laid its main emphasis on:

• the extreme gravity of the crisis throughout the world, which demonstrates capitalism’s irremediable bankruptcy;

• the inexorable decline in the working class’ living conditions, and its growing pauperisation on every continent;

• the slow, uneven, but undeniable development of the workers’ struggle internationally;

• the main factors underlying the proletariat's difficulty in raising its struggle to the level demanded by the present historical situation, and especially its difficulty in rediscovering its class identity and asserting its own revolutionary perspective (as a result of the bourgeoisie's campaigns following the collapse of the Eastern bloc and its Stalinist regimes);

• the role played by the unions in sabotaging the workers' struggle, in Europe and everywhere else;

• the appearance of working class minorities in search of a revolutionary perspective, confronted with the increasingly obvious collapse of capitalism.

This was the first time that we have been able to take part in such a meeting in Hungary, and for most of those present it was also the first time that they had encountered the ICC. Almost inevitably, the meeting thus adopted the format of a "question and answer" session, with the participants trying to place and understand the ideas and analyses of the ICC and, more broadly, of the communist left. For our part, we greatly appreciated the opportunity offered us to understand better the current debates within the revolutionary milieu in Hungary, and the way in which political questions are posed there.

The discussion turned largely around the class struggle's revolutionary perspective, and in particular the following questions:

The proletarian revolution will pose the problem of the violent confrontation with the bourgeoisie. Does the ICC intervene in the armed forces (as Engels recommended) to draw them towards the proletariat's revolutionary struggle?

Our reply highlighted the following arguments:

Clearly, it will be impossible to overthrow capitalism without a disintegration of the forces of repression. But this can only happen in a period where the balance of forces between the bourgeoisie and the world proletariat is such that the workers are strong enough to seize power and open the perspective of communism for society as a whole. In such a situation, the soldiers, and even in some cases the police, will end up joining the strongest side. We referred to the way that Trotsky in 1917, called on the demoralised Cossacks not to turn against the revolution. We also pointed out that these days, in the world's main armies, the soldiers are not workers in uniform conscripted for war (as was the case during World War I), but essentially volunteers in a professional army. As a result, the aim of the forces of repression is to maintain the capitalist social order. Even if soldiers and policemen are wage-earners, they are not members of the working class: their labour power is put at the service of capital against the working class. Revolutionary organisations' purpose today is thus not so much to "convince" the forces of repression, as to develop their intervention so that the working class can assert its own perspective against the whole ruling class, against the bourgeois state and all its forces of repression, whose sole function is to uphold capitalist order.

Today we are faced with the very serious problem of capitalism's destruction of the environment. It is urgent to save the planet. But the working class is not mobilised around this question. It is reformist and only wants to improve its situation within the capitalist system. It has no revolutionary consciousness. Will we have the time to build communism before the planet is destroyed by an ecological catastrophe?

The ICC replied that the destruction of the ecosystem is indeed a real danger for the future of humanity. But we cannot go faster than events themselves will allow us, and the outcome of the proletarian struggle will be determined on a historical scale. The bourgeoisie itself is very concerned about the problem, but unable to respond to it.

Like the population as a whole, the proletariat is also worried about it, but – as with the question of war – the question of ecology is not a factor in the mobilisation of the workers' struggles. The proletariat today mobilises essentially on the basis of economic questions, of direct attacks on its living conditions. Only if it develops its struggle against poverty and exploitation will it be able to develop its consciousness to the point where it includes all the other questions (war, ecological destruction, and all the other scourges created by the capitalist mode of production) in its revolutionary struggle.

Other participants were critical of some aspects of our analysis. One comrade was unconvinced by the ICC's view of the present maturation in class consciousness, arguing that even if strikes take place today, the proletarian masses are passive and not revolutionary.

Another felt that the ICC's analysis of class consciousness is not materialist because it is not based on the final aim of the proletarian movement which is to socialise production.

In reply, we pointed to the important workers' struggles taking place in many countries today. The working masses can thus not be said to be passive in the face of capitalism's attacks. One example is the recent mobilisation of the proletariat in France against the reform of the pensions system, where more than three million proletarians (wage-earners of all kinds, casual workers, unemployed, university and school students) took part in massive street demonstrations. We also argued that revolutionaries need to have a historical view and a good deal of patience. The immensity of the task before us means that an international revolutionary movement will not appear overnight. We also think that it is important to avoid the idealist view that revolutionary consciousness can be introduced into the proletariat out of nothing, independently of the proletarian masses' material and subjective living conditions. The masses' revolutionary consciousness necessarily forms in a slow and uneven process, and can only develop on the basis of increasingly massive struggles against capitalism's attacks.

With regard to the argument that the proletariat's aim is the socialisation of production, we replied that the main thing is to break from the logic of the law of profit. The problem is not only whether appropriation is private or social, it is above all the aim of production and distribution: production for the satisfaction of human need, rather than the accumulation of exchange values, of money (whose corollary is poverty for growing numbers of proletarians).

Other participants asked how we view the aim and the organisation of production in communism.

Our reply was extremely brief on this point, due to lack of time, and was unable to go over all the issues involved in the ICC's analysis of the period of transition between capitalism and communism. We limited ourselves to the general statement that production in communism is devoted to the satisfaction of human needs, that it will put an end to the rule of the commodity and of profit. The production and distribution of goods for consumption must necessarily be centralised world wide.

Another participant declared that May 68 in France was a revolutionary movement because it involved the whole working class and the students. Factories and universities were occupied, there were massive demonstrations, strikers confronted the forces of repression, etc.

We replied that although May 68 was certainly the biggest strike in history, and although it opened up a new historical period in the class struggle, it was not a revolutionary movement. There were no workers' councils, and the question of power was a long way from being posed.

Finally, we were asked why the ICC has developed relations with an anarcho-syndicalist group like the CNT-AIT in France, despite its critical attitude towards syndicalism.

For the ICC, the essential criterion that today determines whether a group belongs to the proletarian camp, is internationalism. This is why we avoid adopting a sectarian attitude towards groups which do not share our position on anarcho-syndicalism. Our recent ties with the Toulouse group of the CNT-AIT (as distinct from the "CNT-Vignolles"1) spring from its clearly internationalist position and its fraternal attitude towards the ICC. We pointed out that there are other countries, like Russia, where the ICC also enjoys fraternal relations (whatever our disagreements) with groups belonging to the anarcho-syndicalist current.

This first public meeting organised by the bookshop G and introduced by the ICC was certainly rich and lively. Despite a certain scepticism that appeared in the debate, with regard to the proletariat's revolutionary potential, those participants who spoke all expressed their conviction that capitalism must give way to another social system: communism. All the interventions converged on this point: given the gravity of the world situation, the future lies in the hands of the working class.

The debate took place in a very fraternal and serious atmosphere, where everyone was able to express their point of view, their concerns and disagreements. This is all the more significant in a country where the working class still suffers from enormous difficulties in engaging the struggle against the attacks of capital, and remains strongly marked by nationalist ideology and the consequences of the collapse of Stalinism, particularly in the survival of reactionary ideologies, expressed in xenophobic attitudes towards ethnic minorities, or the violent outbreaks by far right groups.

To conclude, we would like to thank warmly both the bookshop Gondolkodo Antikvàrium for having taken the initiative of inviting us, and also the organisers of the meeting for the translations from English to Hungarian, which made it possible for all the participants to follow what we had to say, and ourselves to take an active part in the debate.

The fact that the ICC, thanks to this invitation, was able to put forward its analyses in public, in the Hungarian capital, is in our view a new expression of an underlying maturation in class consciousness, which is expressed today in the appearance around the world of political minorities and elements, trying to develops mutual ties to break their isolation and clarify their divergences as well as their points of agreement.

ICC, 8th November

In November and December 2010 protests against aspects of cuts in education showed that the imposition of austerity measures is meeting resistance in Britain. We are publishing here extracts from a longer internal report for the rest of the ICC, adapted for our public press. It's a contribution to the wide-ranging discussion that recent events have provoked. We intend to publish a separate text on the ICC's intervention in the movement in the near future.

“We want a future”

This slogan was chanted at one of the numerous demonstrations that spontaneously took place across Britain on 24 November. Tens of thousands of school children, sixth form and Further Education students (16-18 years old) and university students took to the streets to protest against the coalition government’s plans to cut the Education Maintenance Allowance - weekly payments of up to £30 for poorer FE students; to increase university fees from £3000 a year to up to £9000; to reduce funding for university teaching by 100% for the Humanities and up to 95% for the rest. A significant part of the younger generation believe they are being robbed of their future, and aren’t willing to accept this passively.

This generation, faced with the deepening crisis, is deeply aware of the need to gain academic or vocational qualifications by at least attending further education. They are also fully conscious of the alternative, becoming one of the 1,000,000 under 18 years without education, benefits or jobs that the system leaves literally with nothing (you cannot claim any benefits until you are 18), or low paid unskilled work. They have had this driven into their heads from a young age, and suddenly they are told they will not get money for support while at college, and if they get to university they will be faced with up to £50,000 worth of debt, which they will be paying back for decades.

The attack on the EMA is particularly important in this movement because it’s an essential part of the social wage for many working class families. It pays for travel to college, books, paper and food, or at least parts of it. Given the high cost of travel in the major cities and rural areas its loss will restrict access to further education for the poorest students. The younger students have seen this as an attack not only on them but their families and in many cases clearly see it as an attack on the working class. It is this attack that has led to the movement being so widespread in cities and towns across England. Older schoolchildren and FE students have taken to the streets where there are no universities. They have also mobilised because even when they don’t feel able to - or don't want to - go to university they need to go on to further education or they want their friends and family to be able to. These young proletarians have been at the vanguard of this movement.

The storm tide of growing workers’ discontent washes across Britain

Only a few weeks ago the British media was mocking the social struggle in France, as being typical of those 'hot blooded' Latins who take to the streets at a moment’s notice. At the same time they were extolling the 'common sense', pragmatism and passivity of the working class in Britain.

From The Independent, 21 October 2010.

On the 10 November the wave of protest by students which has been washing across the world since 2006, through France, Greece, Germany, the US, Puerto Rico, and Italy, crashed down upon the shores of the British Isles in a storm surge of militancy amongst the children of the working class. The spontaneous besieging of the Tory Party Headquarters during the first students' protest against the attacks on higher education lit a match to the powder keg of discontent that has been simmering for years. Spurred on by the practical example of the students’ refusal to be corralled into a pointless A to B demonstration and, instead, taking things into their own hands with the surrounding the Tory Party HQ, and completely indifferent to the enraged response of the ruling class and its media, there have been four weeks of demonstrations, occupations of schools, colleges and universities, and an increasingly open defiance of the repressive forces of the state.

A tide of working class militancy has ebbed and flowed across the country as schoolchildren and students have shown their capacity for self-organisation. In some schools pupils have called meetings to discuss the attacks; there have been examples of several schools coordinating their discussions and actions across cities; demonstrations have been called via Facebook; university occupations have opened up their discussions to anyone who wants to join in; they have broadcast their discussions via the internet and set up forums where people can send messages of solidarity or enter into discuss with them. In London some students went to striking tube workers’ pickets (who in return showed their solidarity at the last demonstration in London), while the occupiers of University College London made the payment of a 'living wage' [174] to the university cleaners one of their demands and won it.

These expressions of self-organisation have not been as widespread and clear as in the anti-CPE movement in France in 2006 but they certainly expressed the same dynamic towards the mass mobilisation of a generation of young workers to defend themselves.

The social question is alive and kicking

In the space of a month this explosion of militancy has gone from the besieging of the Tory Party HQ to around 30,000 school pupils, students and others opening defying the state's increasing use of repression in London on 9 December. On that occasion the demonstrators initially succeeded in outwitting the massive police presence to invade Parliament Square, which was meant to have been sealed and barricaded off (it is illegal to demonstrate outside the home of democracy, without police permission) in order to spare MPs from hearing the anger of their victims as they voted on these attacks. The MPs heard more than their voices: they heard police helicopters, vans, charges by mounted police, baton assaults and the resistance of the protesters as the police contained and beat them for hours for having the audacity to stand up for themselves.

The fury of the ruling class faced with this refusal to be subdued by its repression was expressed by its media. Live TV coverage and news programmes made no pretence at objectivity as these mouthpieces of the ruling class attacked the students, school children, their parents and others as they sought to defend themselves against a police force which, from some reports, had been told to make sure that those participating were terrorised into not wanting to demonstrate again. Only a couple of weeks before the main media channels had tried to hide the use of police horse charges against some on the 24 November demonstration; on the 9th they openly showed the police horses charging, sometimes up to 15 at a time into the crowd. They were also not so coy about showing police beating protesters and did not stint in their praise of these defenders of democracy. A count was kept of the number of injured police whilst injuries to demonstrators were mentioned as an afterthought, or as part of a plea for a less repressive democracy.

Away from Parliament Square the students, drawing on their previous experience of being contained by the police, broke up their demonstration into numerous smaller ones which went off in several directions. From various reports it would appear that these demonstrations were not met with much hostility and indeed were often greeted with applause from people on the pavement.

It was one of these break-away demonstrations that met up with Prince Charles and his wife on a night out. Their startled looks mirrored that of the ruling class: the plebs are revolting and we have not been able to control them.

The idea of there being some form of social peace in Britain has been bludgeoned to the ground along with those students and others who were wantonly beaten about the head by the state. More importantly many of those who have participated in this movement will have had their illusions in democracy battered. They have learnt that the only way to be heard is to stand up and defy the state, not to submit.

A blow to the ideological attacks of the new managing team

Following the 2010 General Election the British bourgeoisie hoped to use the coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats to maintain and strengthen the ideological attack on the working class:

• The coalition with the Lib Dems was meant to help soften the image of the Tories, to bury memories of Thatcher and the 1980's.
• The image of the Lib Dems was to be presented as a moderating counter-weight to the Tories.
• The formation of the coalition was supposed to show that politicians and thus the population can put differences to one side and unite in the common interest of the country.
• Austerity measures simply had to be accepted because there is nothing else to be done, but they would be implemented 'fairly'.
• There is nothing to be done but trust the politicians to sort things out.

 The events of the last few weeks have marked a serious challenge to the bourgeoisie's ability to keep up this ideological offensive. The fact that the first open display of mass struggle against this coalition was focused on Tory HQ and accompanied by furious chants of “Tory scum” by thousands who have never experienced a Tory government undermined any hope the bourgeoisie may have had of re-branding the Tories. The hatred of the working class for the Tories is so deep that it passes from generation to generation. As for the Lib Dems being a counter-balance, a force for moderation, that has been undermined by the fact that their leadership voted for these attacks after signing pledges before the election that they would not increase fees. In some ways the Lib Dem leadership is even more hated than the Tories. The students and school children expected it from the Tories but not from that nice Mr Clegg and kindly old Vince Cable, who had made such an effort to get the students to vote for them. It will be interesting to see the impact of recent revelations in the Telegraph, whose undercover reporters caught several Lib Dem MPs making unsympathetic comments about their coalition partners.

The government’s mantra that “we’re all in this together” is treated with nothing but widespread contempt. This movement has been animated by a deep, passionate hatred of the rich, who they see as being given billions of pounds in bonuses and tax dodges, while students and schoolchildren, along with the rest of the working class, are having their futures robbed from them. There is no hesitation by the vast majority of schoolchildren and FE students and many university students about seeing themselves as working class and these attacks as being on the working class.

The idea of 'fairness' has been mocked mercilessly. Schoolchildren will point to the fact that the rich get away with paying as little tax as possible whilst they are being told to sacrifice themselves.

Clearly, this rage against the rich is very important for the future development of a wider and more profound class consciousness. However, at the moment it is also been used as the main portal for the influx of bourgeois ideology into this movement. This primal anger, without a wider perspective concerning the nature of the system, is mixed with a sense of unfairness, that the rich should pay their share. More dangerously the Left is using the idea that these attacks are simply ideological, because, so they claim, the ruling class, could readily pay for further education and the EMA if only they taxed the rich effectively, if they only spend money on education and not war, and that this is what we should expect from the Tories. The power of these ideological illusions cannot be forgotten.

If at the moment these illusions are a weight on the movement, many of those participating in it do not hold many illusions in the Labour Party either. They remember that it was them who introduced fees in the first place. Also the Labour Party has not given the movement its backing, nor has it said it will scrap the increase in fees if it is elected.

The culmination of the movement so far, on 9 December, also posed the question of democracy very starkly. Up until then there had been a powerful belief that if they protested enough the government could back down, but the result of the vote showed that it was not able to do so. Not only did these illusions in the reasonableness of the bourgeoisie take a powerful blow: this happened at the same time as the forces of repression where literally beating them about the head. This has left those who participated and the rest of the working class with much to think about.

A major problem for the ruling class, a lack of political control over the movement

This movement confronted the ruling class with a huge challenge from the beginning: how to contain and politically control the movement? For a month the ruling class has been faced with a movement which none of its numerous political forces was able to fully contain and control:

• The National Union of Students (NUS), which organised the original protest on 10 November, and mobilised 50,000 students, lost its ability to act as the main student body when its leader Aaron Porter denounced the attack on the Tory Party HQ time and time again on news programmes. You had the ludicrous situation when he was denouncing the attack on Millbank as the working of a violent minority against a background of live TV coverage of thousands of students surrounding the building and the newsreader even saying to him, “how can you say that, when you look at these pictures?” After his performance the NUS lost any ability to even try to control the situation and its lower ranks had to go with the movement in order to maintain some form of credibility.
• The NUS has no influence amongst the schoolchildren and very little amongst many sixth form and FE colleges.
• The Labour Party could not control this movement because it had to denounce the attack on the Tory HQ and it had also introduced fees in the first place.
• As for the far left, none of the pseudo-revolutionary organisations in Britain has enough influence to control the movement. The Socialist Workers Party is probably the largest but its influence has waned over the last decade. The Socialist Party (the former Militant Tendency) has played a role through its militants in the universities and colleges but it has no overall national influence. To a large extent, the leftists have had to hide behind the main ‘activist’ networks, such as the Education Activists’ Network [175] (EAN) and the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC). They certainly had an influence on the movement, but it is significant that at the meetings of these networks there has been a strong reflection of the strength of the real movement – for example, in the fact that the organisers are often compelled to accept a free and open discussion, in contrast to the heavily stage-managed format of traditional leftist meetings. Some meetings called by leftists are even referred to as ‘assemblies’ (as in Brighton for example), again reflecting a real desire for new forms of self-organisation as well as expressing the leftists’ function of recuperation.

All this has left a situation where the NUS, and its various university organisations, have called three national demonstrations while knowing that their ability to control them was decreasing with each demonstration and the increasing confrontations with the police.

On the same days as these national demonstrations there have been numerous local demonstrations called by meetings of FE students, school children, individuals calling for demonstrations via Facebook, by coordinating bodies of schoolchildren such as the network that was set up in Oxford. Or, on the day, schools have spontaneously walked out: in one case 3 teenagers went around a school calling out the students and were followed by 800 others. In many case teachers tried to lock children in or the police threatened to arrest them for truancy. This led to an interesting situation where in large cities such as Manchester the main demonstration drew a few hundred whilst in smaller cities and towns such as Bury 1,200 school children demonstrated. In Brighton up to 2,000 students and children walked out on 24 November, This demonstration ended with 400 school pupils trying to storm the central police station where their friends had been taken when arrested.

The following quotes from The Guardian and Libcom.org give a sense of the spontaneous nature of this movement:

“Hundreds of teenagers poured out of Allerton Grange high school in Leeds just now to join the protest.

"The well-planned action has seen almost the whole school empty with carefully prepared banners picked up from prepared stores.

“The students are now marching to the nearby Roundhay high school in the hope of encouraging students there to join in. The two schools are high-achieving comprehensives in a largely prosperous part of Leeds. Both regularly win Oxbridge places.

“The students are chanting ‘they say cut back, we say fight back.’ Two 16-year-olds said that the focus was on the loss of the Educational Maintenance Allowance. One said: ‘without EMA I'll never be able to go to university. I want to follow my dream.’” (The Guardian [176])

“Bristol was possibly bigger than last week - if you go by Facebook, 700 or so more people had RSVPed (including Avon & Somerset Police). 2,000 was one report, it could have been more. A higher proportion of school & college students, including a kid in a balaclava who looked about 12. At least one school who had been locked in by teachers last week were out this week. As in Brighton, anarchists were handing out legal info / bust cards.

“There was heaps of energy - the march moved quickly in ever widening circles for over 3 straight hours, keeping out of the way of police & occasionally breaking through lines. (Though not the line guarding the M32.) This caused traffic chaos which in turn helped stop the police from being able to move their vans around to contain the demo.

“We went through Cabot Circus & the mall a few times & stopped for a quick break in the middle of the shopping area - I think partly on the assumption that it was a safe place to stop because they wouldn't want to kettle a rowdy crowd in the middle of a bunch of expensive shops.

“There was a brief attempt to get into a Vodafone shop. Police got pelted with mustard from the German Christmas markets. There were a couple of pretty half-arsed attempts to occupy the council house & the administrative centre of the University of Bristol. Snowballs were thrown at cops & at horses (who really don't like them).

“The march got kettled up in Bristol Uni at the end, though a good portion saw it coming & got out before it formed, more jumped out through hedges & some got out with a rope, as reported above.

“Police did cavalry style horse charges into a loose crowd outside the kettle - it really looked like someone could have been hurt. A couple of people were beaten by police around the edges of the kettle. There were 10 arrests, mostly towards the end when people were trying to break out of/avoid kettling, I think mostly of college students.” (Libcom.org [177], 30/11/10)

The information we have on how widespread and large these local demonstrations were is limited because much of the media have played down the involvement of school children. However, it is clear that an important minority of school children, sixth form and FE students have participated in such demonstrations and in many cases organised them themselves.

Here it is necessary to mention use of the internet and smartphones to this movement. The younger generation has made full use of their skills and knowledge of this media. Facebook has played an important role in coordinating struggles; Twitter has also allowed people to stay in contact; the occupiers of the University College of London also set up a Google map on 9 December which showed where the police were gathering in order that the protesters could avoid them. Also the internet has been used for posting photos and videos of the demonstrations, and of the police repression. For example, YouTube footage of the 24 November gave the lie to police denials that they had made mounted charges into the crowd, while a video of police manhandling a demonstrator in a wheelchair and dragging him across the road was accessed internationally

All of these expressions have meant that the main media outlets have been sidelined by many of those participating and they have made their own reports of what has been happening. The mainstream media distort information to the general population but this has encouraged the young to rely on their own sources of information and organisation.

The real difficulties the bourgeoisie have had in trying to deal with this movement is summed up in the plea by the head of the police in Bristol for someone to become the leader of the movement:

“Mr Jackson called for someone from the student body to come forward so they could better co-ordinate what he referred to as a ‘leaderless protest’” (local press quoted on Libcom).

The ruling class's only response: increasing repression

The last month has seen the ruling class escalating their use of repression as the movement has developed. With their political organs as yet unable to control the movement the state has had one main response; increasingly violent repression.

Some have compared the culminating confrontation between the police and students on 9 December to the Poll Tax riot of 1990. But this comparison misses the difference in historical context. The Poll Tax riot marked the end of a movement and took place at a time of a retreat in class consciousness. These recent confrontations between the movement and the police, which have taken place not only in London, but in other cities, are taking place at a time of international upsurge in struggles following five years of increasingly draconian attacks on the working class. Above all this is the first widespread movement in Britain mobilising tens of thousands of young proletarians and others since the resurgence of struggles in 2003.

This confrontation between the classes has not been posed so starkly in Britain since the mid 1980s and the miners’ and printers’ struggles. The bourgeoisie have spent the last quarter of a century boasting about its ability to bring about 'social peace' and very low levels of class struggle. In the last weeks the class war has been brought to the forefront of workers’ attention.

The siege and attack on the Tory Party HQ involved almost no violence against the police and only some breaking of windows. When someone threw a fire extinguisher from the roof of the building they were condemned by the crowd with cries of “Stop throwing shit!”

The small police presence was able to stop a mass invasion of the building. A couple of weeks later these same students would be facing repeated charges by mounted officers and baton charges by police in full riot gear.

The progression of the state's use of naked violence against what in many cases were schoolchildren shows their concern. The demonstration on 24 November witnessed the use by the police of kettling, basically trapping protesters into confined areas by blocking all the means of exit. This method had been used at the G20 demonstration in 2009 and had been criticized even by parts of the bourgeoisie as counter-productive because it fuelled anger. It was used more extensively on 30 November demonstration and finally on the 9th you had a systematic policy of the imposition of several kettles together, Around parliament it would appear the police had the central kettle on the Square with surrounding kettles, which meant that you could get out of one only to find yourself in another. This was demonstrated at the end of the demonstration by the police “releasing” those who had been trapped for hours outside Parliament; only to then kettle them on Westminster bridge for several more hours in the freezing cold and packed together like cattle in cattle trucks.

Along with the kettling there was an increasing use of violence. Before the 9 December demo there had been clashes between some of those trapped in the kettles and the police, as they desperately tried to escape; and there were incidents of police beating protesters, but this was generally hidden by the media. On the 9th however the media openly showed horses charging into the crowds, riot police batoning people etc, obviously all from the angle of the police 'protecting' themselves. But the message was very clear: if you protest you will face the full force of the state. The near hysterical news programmes made it clear that this was the police 'defending' the democratic right to 'protest peacefully', that the violence was due to a small minority etc. On the ground people were being told by the police that they were being so violent in order to discourage people attending future demonstrations.

It is clear that by the 9th some elements had come prepared to confront the police, but the vast majority had come to show their determination to express their anger at the attacks despite the increasing repression. The young protesters learnt very quickly not to allow themselves to be kettled at the beginning, as happened at the 24 November demonstration, and to get to Parliament Square. This they achieved, but then the police systematically kettled them and began to attack them. In many cases they were packed together making it very difficult to escape the police charges, so they had no choice but to fight back or else be trampled by horses [178] or beaten by the police. Even then many protesters were able to see beyond the immediate violence:

“We all go down together, horses looming above us, baton blows still coming down on our heads and shoulders. I am genuinely afraid that I might be about to die, and begin to thumb in my parents' mobile numbers on my phone to send them a message of love.

“On top of me, a pretty blonde seventeen-year-old is screaming, tears streaming down her battered face as she yells abuse at the police. The protesters begin to yell 'shame on you!', but even in the heat of battle, these young people quickly remember what's really at stake in this movement. 'We are fighting for your children!' they chant at the line of cops. 'We are fighting for your jobs!'” (New Statesman [179])

The videos and news coverage of these confrontations do show masked youths fighting the police, but the majority are unmasked and desperately trying to defend themselves.

Within this chaos the youth still displayed their vibrant spirit. Some, following the example of Italian students, had homemade riot shields which were in the shape of books, with Marx on the front, or with titles like Brave New World, Down and Out in Paris and London, and Adorno's Negative Dialectics. The latter apparently played a major role is dismounting a mounted policeman!

From The Really Open University [180]

It was clear the state was going to win such confrontations, but the long-term result of this repression is going to be extremely important. The idea of the state and the Coalition being somehow 'nice and fair' has gone out the window. In its place thousands of young and not so young people have experienced state violence or seen their friends and family members not only attacked but treated like criminals. The police constantly video demonstrations; even in small towns, they photograph participants - often openly doing so by going amongst those kettled and photographing them. A whole generation has seen that the state’s only response to their demand to be listened to is violence. The implications of this are still to be seen.

The prospects for wider confrontations

This movement has shown the first steps in the overcoming of the demoralisation inflicted upon the proletariat in Britain by the crushing of the miners, printers and others in the 1980s. A generation of young proletarians has stood up and been counted. Many older workers have looked on in admiration of this movement and feel a sense of ‘at long last we are fighting back’. The question of violence has taken on a new dimension. For years the media has presented the population, i.e. the working class, as passive. At the beginning of the movement, the media were able to find students willing to criticise the use of violence, but, after the confrontations of 9 December, Newsnight was unable to find one student willing to criticise the use of violence on their own side: instead the students asked the various reporters why don't you denounce the violence of the police? The state's attempts to present the austerity programme as 'fair' and equally shared throughout society have been exposed as fraudulent, and its only response to protest has been increasing violence and repression. The last month has left the working class with much to reflect upon.

While the passing of the law raising tuition fees on 9 December, and the onset of the Christmas holiday period, have inevitably produced a pause in the movement, many of the students have vowed to continue the movement in January. We are already seeing a radicalisation in the tone of the trade unions, for example in an article written by Len McCluskey, head of the main public sector union Unite, in the opinion section of The Guardian of 20 December [181] and summarised as the paper’s lead article:

“Britain's students have certainly put the trade union movement on the spot. Their mass protests against the tuition fees increase have refreshed the political parts a hundred debates, conferences and resolutions could not reach.... Trade unions need to reach out, too. Students have to know we are on their side. We must unequivocally condemn the behaviour of the police on the recent demonstrations. Kettling, batoning and mounted charges against teenagers have no place in our society.

“It is ironic that young people have been dismissed as apathetic and uninterested in politics – yet as soon as they turn out in numbers they are treated as the 'enemy within', in a way instantly familiar to those of us who spent the 1970s and 1980s on picket lines.

“And we should work closely with our communities bearing the brunt of the onslaught. That is why Unite has agreed to support the broad Coalition of Resistance established last month, which brings together unions and local anti-cuts campaigns from across the country.

“The TUC's demonstration on 26 March will be a critical landmark in developing our resistance, giving trade union members the confidence to take strike action in defence of jobs and services”.

The Guardian website for the same day also reports on the announcement by Unite and another big public sector union, the GMB, which they would be backing the next day of action called by the NCAFC and the EAN for 29 January.

Meanwhile RMT leader Bob Crow talks about the need for “Industrial action, civil disobedience and millions on the streets” to raise the profile of the Left and the unions, the better to assist in their attempt to recuperate any movement against austerity attacks.

The prospect looms for bigger and wider class confrontations. The bourgeoisie is now readying its union apparatus to take charge of the situation, but it is not guaranteed in advance that they will succeed.

WR, 23/12/10.