ICCOnline - January 2010
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').
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.
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.
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".
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]
Social Darwinism: a reactionary ideology of capitalism [6]
Review of Chris Knight's "Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture [7]
[8][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]
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.
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.
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 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
<!-- bmi_SafeAddOnload(bmi_load,"bmi_orig_img",0);//-->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
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:
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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
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]
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/Wallace.jpg
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2010/1/creationism
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2009/04/darwin-and-the-descent-of-man
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2009/02/darwin-workers
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2009/02/attenborough-darwin
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2009/11/darwinism
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/2008/10/Chris-Knight
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/2009/137/pannekoek-darwinism-01
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/contribution-discussion
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/alfred-russel-wallace
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/evolution
[12] https://www.epoca-project.eu/index.php/
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/262/environment
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/climate-change
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/scientific-congress-climate-change-2009
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/greece
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/student-and-workers-struggles-greece
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/gpr
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/mir-hossein-mousavi
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/iranian-elections-and-protests
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/green-movement-iran
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2009/11/lotta1
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2010/01/lotta2
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/content/3131/party-and-its-relationship-class
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/040_ibrp_bluff_01.html
[26] mailto:[email protected]
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/italy
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/lotta-comunista
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/cervetto
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2010/lotta2
[31] http://www.it.internationalist.org
[32] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/charles-darwin
[33] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/science-vs-creationism
[34] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/2010TekelTurkey.jpg
[35] https://www.cnnturk.com/2009/turkiye/12/05/erdogana.tekel.iscilerinden.protesto/554272.0/
[36] https://www.evrensel.net/haber.php?haber_id=63999
[37] https://www.kizilbayrak.net/sinif-hareketi/haber/arsiv/2009/12/30/select/roeportaj/artikel/136/direnisteki-tek.html
[38] https://tr.internationalism.org/ekaonline-2000s/ekaonline-2009/tekel-iscisinden-seker-iscisine-mektup
[39] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/turkey
[40] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/erdogan
[41] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/kumlu
[42] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[43] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/tekel
[44] https://www.liberation.fr/monde/0101613901-pres-de-50-000-morts-en-haiti-selon-la-croix-rouge
[45] https://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/home/2010/01/s%C3%A9isme-en-ha%C3%AFti-les-causes.html
[46] https://www.bme.gouv.ht/alea%20sismique/Al%E9a%20et%20risque%20sismique%20en%20Ha%EFti%20VF.pdf
[47] https://www.presseurop.eu/fr/content/article/169931-bien-plus-quune-catastrophe-naturelle
[48] https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/13/our-role-in-haitis-plight
[49] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/south-and-central-america