At the end of 1998 a pamphlet was brought out by an anarchist publishing house, entitled Council Communism and Autonomous Workers' Struggles. It was dedicated to Cajo Brendel, the last living representative of the German-Dutch left (1). As well as an interview, a bibliography, and several extracts from texts written by Brendel, the collection also contains a number of short extracts from 'basic texts of council communism' by Anton Pannekoek, Otto Ruhle, Hank Canne Meijer and Paul Mattick, as well as a short historical introduction on the origins of this curron on the origins of this current. Furthermore, this pamphlet is in continuity with a previous one published in 1990 by the same publishers, containing 'libertarian texts' by Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek and Henriette Roland Holst.

Behind an apparently benign interest in the council communist current, or in the 'councilist' personality Cajo Brendel, the real aim of these pamphlets can be seen clearly in the first words of the introduction:

"The history of anarchism contains a number of sometimes quite important splits with the marxists. There is at least one exception however. In the 1920s we saw the appearance of council communism as a response to Bolshevik state capitalism. Council communist positions developed in direct relation to the autonomous class struggle and the formation of workers' councils outside the state, party, or leaders. They seem to present important points of convergence with anarchism" .

Council communism is thus presented as a libertarian break with the marxist tradition. In fact, by means of the commentaries that appear throughout these collections, and of a skilful selection of the extracts which mix up the authors mentioned above with 'libertarians' like Lehning and Reeves, the following ideas are sold to the reader:

• council communism since Luxemburg and Pannekoek, in brief the whole of the German-Dutch left current, represents a radical break both with social democracy and with the Bolsheviks and their bourgeois revolution: ".. the authors mentioned underlined that the bases for the development and perfecting of a terrorist state dictatorship were already in place with the first Bolsheviks" (1990 pamphlet, p 99-100);
• like the anarchists, these authors glorified the autonomous struggle of the workers which is against any political party, any leaders or political control over society. They are thus part of a "common fund of libertarian thought which considers that socialism, democracy and liberty are indivisible" (ibid p 97);
• finally, the same traditions, faced with the bankruptcy of capitalism today, represent an alternative to "old responses which have shown themselves to be false", thanks to an 'anti-dogmatic' cocktail made up of Marx and Bakunin, 'libertarian' socialism and anarchist spontaneity (ibid p 104-5).

The German-Dutch left was an integral part of the international revolutionary movement

The central aim of this tendentious selection of short extracts, removed from their real context, is above all to convince the reader that these 'prophets' of council communism had made a total break with the rest of the 'old' revolutionary movement, particularly Lenin and the Bolsheviks. In fact nothing could be more false and it is no accident that the historical introduction, which brings in the combat against opportunism and reformism within the Second International, moves rapidly through the period of war and revolution at the beginning of the 20th century. The events of this period are clear witness to the fact that the militants of the German-Dutch left (such as Gorter, Pannekoek and Roland Holst) were, like the Bolsheviks, an integral part of the marxist wing of the workers' movement which was in the vanguard of the gigantic struggle waged by the working class and its political organisations in this period:

• in the struggle against the barbarism of war and the betrayal of the social-chauvinists in 1914. Faced with the unleashing of generalised imperialist war and the treason of the main socialand the treason of the main social democratic parties which voted for war credits and called for a 'Sacred Union' with their own bourgeoisies, the marxist left within these parties organised the resistance. From 1914 onwards the positions adopted by Gorter and Pannekoek went in exactly the same direction as the analyses developed by the Bolsheviks, in particular in the definition of the war as imperialist and in the proclamation of the death of the International and of the need for a new one. Very soon, the terrible sacrifices demanded of the workers provoked a wider resistance. In March 1915 Otto Ruhle and Karl Liebknecht voted against war credits in the Reichstag; in September 1915 the Zimmerwald conference took place, with the full support of Luxemburg, Gorter and Pannekoek, and attended by Roland Holst. Through its writings, through its struggle both in Holland and Germany and on the international level, the German-Dutch marxist left was, alongside the Bolsheviks, one of the first currents to engage in a merciless struggle against the opportunists and conciliators, to work actively towards the regroupment of revolutionary forces. Alongside figures like Lenin, Bukharin and Radek, Luxemburg, Pannekoek and Gorter drew out the practical implications of the situation in order to preon in order to prepare the revolutionary struggle ahead;

• in the struggle to extend the international revolutionary wave and to constitute the Communist International after 1917. The German-Dutch left unreservedly supported the revolutionary character of Soviet Russia and the internationalism of the Bolsheviks. The Dutch left in particular was foremost in introducing and propagating Lenin's conceptions in western Europe, via Herman Gorter's pamphlet The World Revolution, which appeared in 1918. Fully convinced of the international character of the revolutionary wave that began in Russia, the German-Dutch left took an active part in the insurrectionary movement in Germany and the rest of Europe, as well as in the constitution of the Communist International; "The world war and the revolution it has engendered have shown clearly that there is only one tendency in the workers' movement which is really leading the workers towards communism. Only the extreme left of the social democratic parties, the marxist fractions, the party of Lenin in Russia, of Bela Kun in Hungary, of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany, have found this path" (Gorter, The Victory of Marxism, 1920);

• in the resistance against the development of opportunism within the CI at the beginning of the 1920s. With the retreat in the revolutionary wave, which was marked in particular by the defeat of the insurrectionary movement in Germany between 1919 and 1923, and the resulting isolation of the Russian fortress, opportunist tendencies took root in the Russian Communist party and the International, along with a growing propensity to subordinate the policies of the CI to the interests of the Russian state. Against this process of degeneration, which was to end in the death of the CI as a proletarian instrument when it adopted the thesis of 'socialism in one country', a bitter resistance developed within the International, and then increasingly outside it as expulsions from the CI and its parties multiplied. Again, while the German-Dutch left undoubtedly played a leading role in this combat, as witness Gorter's Reply To Lenin, which was largely inspired by Pannekoek's World Revolution and Communist Tactics (1920), it was by no means the only current fighting against the degeneration. The whole marxist left, in Russia, Britain, Bulgaria and above Italy around Bordiga, tenaciously defended the acquisitaciously defended the acquisitions of the revolution.

In the 1930s and afterwards, these communist lefts continued their determined opposition to the triumphant Stalinist counter-revolution, seeking to keep alive the political lessons of the revolutionary struggle lessons about parliamentary and trade union tactics, the role of the party and its relationship with the councils. These tiny revolutionary minorities, working in an extremely difficult situation marked by the domination of Stalinism, fascism and democracy, held onto internationalist positions. This was particularly the case with the groups from the German-Dutch left tradition, like the Group of International Communists (GIC) around Canne Meijer, Paul Mattick's group in the US, or the Communistenbond Spartacus after the second world war (of which Brendel was a member). But once again this was in no way a specificity of the German-Dutch left because other proletarian currents also stayed loyal to internationalist positions, for example the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left in the 1930s or the Gauche Communiste de France at the end of the second world war.

Faced with all the attempts to divide the different marxist fractions of the workers' movement, to set them against each other, we insiset them against each other, we insist on their fundamental unity as an active part of the dynamic of the class struggle. Against the abstract and mechanical opposition put forward in extracts taken out of their context, we aim to re-state the real conditions in which polemics and debates took place in the workers' movement, i.e. within one single camp the camp of the proletariat and of communism, to which belonged both the marxist left within the Second International and all the left fractions of the CI which fought against the Stalinist counter-revolution and remained faithful to internationalist principles. This is the method that marxism has always tried to apply and it is in total contrast to the abstract and timeless approach of the anarchists.

The development of revolutionary marxism in opposition to anarchism

The attempt to connect these revolutionaries with anarchism can only be accomplished through an ahistorical conjuring trick. The real development of the class struggle reveals the absurdity of this 'anti-dogmatic' cocktail that mixes Marx with Bakunin.

The development of the Socialist parties and the creation of the Second International was an important step forward for the workers' movement. When reformism took an increasing hold over these parties, anarcho-syndicalism was certainly the expression of a proletarian reaction against it, but its attachment to the old ' revolution at any time' approach made it incapable of understanding the historic origins of the opportunist gangrene in the workers' movement, while its traditional opposition to 'politics' prevented it from defending the political organisations of the proletariat and encouraged illusions in a purely 'economic' revolution led by the unions, by-passing the necessity for the working class to take political power. During this period the really fruitful work of opposition to the development of opportunism within the workers' movement was carried out by the revolutionary left around Lenin, Luxemburg and Pannekoek, who remained loyal to the marxist tradition.

In this context, the outbreak of the first world war was more than ever a test of truth, not only for the right wing of social democracy which betrayed the working class, but also for a good number of anarchist organisations which, like Kropotkin and the French CGT, fell into 'anarcho-chauvinism'. As for those who opposed the war, like Monatte and Rosmer in France, they were only able to develop a consistent struggle against the war by linking up with the vigorous internationalist action of the marxistionalist action of the marxist left and by rallying to the Russian revolution.

Thus, in Holland, faced among other things with the anti-militarism tinged with pacifism of the current around the anarchist Domela Niewenhuis, the left intransigently defended internationalist positions against any idea of pacifism, insisting that the primary task of the SDP (the socialist left which has been excluded from the main social democratic party, the SDAP, in 1909) was the struggle for revolution (resolution proposed by Gorter in the name of the Bussum section at the Utrecht congress in June 1915): "If one day the workers have the power in their hands, they must defend it with arms in their hand as well" And in an article from De Tribune on 19 June 1915 Pannekoek underlined that "it is only as part of the general struggle against capitalism that the struggle against militarism can lead anywhere".

Finally, faced with the tragic degeneration of the Russian revolution and the emergence of the Stalinist nightmare, it wasn't anarchism that was able to explain what had happened and draw the lessons for the struggles of the future, but once again the marxist left: the Italian left around the review Bilan but also the German-Dutch left. And it did so by clearlytch left. And it did so by clearly demarcating itself from anarchism, in particular during the events in Spain which saw the anarchists openly offering their services to the bourgeois state. Far from providing a libertarian socialist cocktail, the GIC, like Bilan, showed throughout the war in Spain how this new ordeal by fire had led the anarchists into the camp of the bourgeoisie. The 'anti-statists' became government parties, "playing the same role in Spain that the left social democrats, the 'Independents' had played in Germany" (PIC no 12, organ of the GIC, 1937).

And in response to certain anarchists 'criticisms' of the actions of the CNT, the GIC underlined how much this was not a betrayal of anarchist principles but their logical outcome:

"the reproaches made by foreign anarchists that the CNT has betrayed its principles is not valid. The CNT could do nothing else with principles that are detached from reality; it had to join one or other of the forces present" (Rate-Korrepondenz no. 22, 1937).

What must be said is that leaving aside the fact that although this or that anarchist may have defended correct positions, and marxist groups may have made this or that error of analysis, what fundamentally distinguishes marxism from ally distinguishes marxism from anarchism is that the former is able to apply a historical and dynamic analysis which makes it possible to grasp the real movement of the proletarian struggle and to draw all its lessons, as opposed to the abstract, timeless and idealist principles of the anarchist approach.

A combat within the proletarian camp

Does this mean that there were no divergences between these great figures and organisations of the revolutionary movement? Of course not. Does it mean that there is nothing to criticise in the positions of the German-Dutch left? Again no.

The ICC has never avoided criticising the opportunist tendencies within council communism, particularly in its later forms (see 'The bankruptcy of councilism' in IR 37). Thus, it has shown how, under the terrible pressure of the counter-revolution, within the German-Dutch left more and more concessions were made on the political role of the proletarian party. Concretely this expressed itself in a retreat towards working in isolated circles and in the retrospective assimilation of the Bolshevism of 1917 with the Stalinism of 1927; concessions were also made to economism, reducing the revolutionary process to a question of forms of economic organisation for the workers, and of the management of the factories by these forms. The ICC has also never abstained from denouncing the patent opportunism of the group Daad en Gedachte which, by putting into question the importance of theoretical reflection as an instrument for defining the perspectives of the proletarian struggle, has sunk more and more into a total denial of the role of revolutionaries, and now is at risk of disappearing definitively into the void since it has suspended publication of its review.

But in order to deal with these ambiguities and opportunist tendencies, it is necessary to know who we are criticising and to understand our common political heritage. Because what unites us is a common class combat, an internationalist combat against all the forces of the bourgeoisie. Council communism is a current within the workers' movement. This is why we say 'hands off!' to all those who are seeking to recuperate the heritage of the German-Dutch left.

Jos

(1) On Cajo Brendel, see the article in WR 228 (and the rectification in this issue).

In the nineteenth century, when capitalism was still developing, creating the basis for a world economy and the possibility of communism, there were instances when revolutionaries such as Marx supported national struggles. For example, the struggle for an independent Poland was backed as a way of creating a check on Russian tsarist reaction. The struggle for German unificationtruggle for German unification and against the domination of Prussian militarism was also supported by marxists. Marx and Engels also supported the movement for Irish independence, seeing it as a way of weakening the power of what was then the dominant capitalist nation, Britain, and its use of the Irish question as a means of controlling its own proletariat.

The experience of the working class in the twentieth century, with the global dominance of decaying capitalism, has shown that 'national liberation' struggles are now fought only in the interests of what is now a reactionary capitalist class. The attempt to mobilise the working class behind nationalist slogans is nothing more than an attempt to get workers to die in the service of their class enemies.

Sinn Finn: reactionary from the start

The left pretend that there is no continuity between today's 'ministers of the crown' and the 'honourable' paramilitaries of the past. In Ireland there have been countless examples over the last hundred years of how nationalism, in all its guises, has been used against the working class.

Sinn Fein was founded in 1905.Its initial programme involved the retention of the monarch the retention of the monarchy, import controls to protect Irish capitalism, and opposition to higher wages for, or strikes by workers as they would harm the interests of businesses in Ireland. Its founder, Arthur Griffith, called for strikers involved in the Dublin Lockout of 1913 to be bayoneted. How could it be any other way when,

"Sinn Fein was heavily dependent upon shopkeepers, employers and large farmers for income and [later] Republican county councils for their rates." (Politics and Irish Life 1913-21: Provincial Experience of War and Revolution, David Fitzpatrick 1977)

The Easter Rising of 1916 would only have achieved its nationalist aims if it had gained the backing of German imperialism, which was sought, but did not materialise. As Trotsky said at the time "an 'independent' Ireland could exist only as an outpost of an imperialist state hostile to Britain" (Nashe Slovo 4th July 1916). This has been the fundamental reality behind the Irish national 'liberation' struggle ever since.

In 1919 the IRA was founded. This nationalist body started life while the working class had embarked on a wave of struggles (including Ireland) which profoundly expressed iich profoundly expressed its internationalist nature. There was a

"growing number of strikes, strikers and strike days that Ireland saw between 1917 and the slump which set in at the end of 1920." (The Politics of Illusion: A Political History of the IRA, Henry Patterson 1997).

These strikes were often accompanied "by well-organised picketing, sympathetic action and even active sabotage, and adopting the iconography of 1917, with red flags and even detachments of 'Red Guards'" (ibid) this helped to "strike fear into the heart of republicans" (Fitzpatrick op cit).

"Workers in Cork and Limerick took over some factories ... and set up 'Soviets', so-called in imitation of the Russian ones. These were crushed by local units of the IRA ... and ousted owners were handed back their plants at the points of IRA guns" (Revolutionary Perspectives first series, no.15)

In June 1920 the illegal Irish parliament Dail Eireann, set up by Sinn Fein, issued a proclamation against the class struggle, saying that it was "ill chosen for the stirring up of strife among our fellow countrymen&quotong our fellow countrymen". The secretary of the Dail wrote "the mind of the people was being diverted from the struggle for freedom by class war" (quoted in Ireland's Permanent Revolution Chris Bambery). Not surprisingly, workers' struggles come up against the interests of the bourgeoisie.

Sinn Fein: basis for all Irish bourgeois politics

If the early days of Sinn Fein and the IRA established them as part of the capitalist class and against the workers' struggle then nothing has happened subsequently to alter that. Over the years there have been many splits in Republicanism, but nothing that deviated from the defence of Irish capitalism.

For example, take Fianna Fail, the largest Irish political party since the early 1930s. In power for some 50 of the years since then, it has presided over a regime equally as repressive as that in Northern Ireland, and defended the economy with as rigourous austerity measures as any other bourgeoisie. Massive unemployment has only been avoided because of the massive extent of sustained emigration.

Fianna Fail was created by those Sinn Fein members that opposed the 1921 treaty that introduced the 1921 treaty that introduced the partition of Ireland. Among the most important Fianna Fail Prime Ministers were Eamon de Valera and Sean Lemass (serving 28 years between them), both veterans of the Easter Rising and the Civil War. As leaders of the 'liberated' 26 counties they were acting in continuity with their Sinn Fein origins.

The other, most obvious, example of a Sinn Fein split was Cumann Na nGaedheal, made up of those Sinn Fein members who supported the 1921 Treaty. They were the governing party from 1922 until 1932, and, subsequently, one of the main constituents, with the fascist Blueshirts, among others, of Fine Gael, which has, ever since, been Ireland's second largest political party.

Whether based on pro- or anti-treaty Sinn Fein members the two main political parties in Ireland share the same heritage. It could hardly be otherwise. For a small economy with its relatively powerful British neighbour, nationalism is bound to continue to be one of the main strands of the ideology of the Irish ruling class.

IRA: force for capital

Turning to the 'troubles' of the last 30 years, there has been no change in the nature of Republicanism. For example, in Republicanism. For example, in another split, in 1970, the Official IRA was portrayed as 'marxist', but 'reformist', while the Provisionals were 'Catholic', but 'revolutionary'. In fact they both retained programmes for Irish capitalism, two paragons of nationalism. The only practical difference lies in the propaganda they used to mobilise for the nationalist cause. It is true that the Officials were loyal to the Russian-dominated Eastern bloc, while the Provisionals were reliant on American support, but this was not initially important. The Officials were soon eclipsed and went through a number of transformations, while the Provisionals links with US imperialism were not to become important until the break up of the blocs after 1989.

On the estates dominated by either version of the IRA, any differences were irrelevant as their activities were indistinguishable from the loyalist paramilitaries. One of the most important functions of all the paramilitary forces over the last 30 years has been their actions as an auxiliary policing force, providing 'law and order', in the form of beatings, kneecappings, expulsions and executions. The protection rackets, drug-dealing and other businesses are common to all the paramilitaries. As for the 'protection' of the oppressed, in 1988 John Hume was able to point out that Republe to point out that Republicans had killed twice as many Irish Catholics as the security forces.

Hume has, in the past, called Sinn Fein 'Fascists'. For revolutionaries republicanism is a particular weapon of the capitalist class and stands condemned, not just for its indiscriminate terrorism, but as a pillar of the exploitation of workers, and opponents of the class struggle. The leftists who pretend that Sinn Fein or the IRA were ever anything else stand condemned as accomplices of nationalism.

Not only that. In the period since the break up of the American bloc, the US has tried its best to deal with signs of independence from its former allies. In the case of Britain there has been, for example, the backing of different sides in the conflicts in ex-Yugoslavia. Closer to home, the actions of Sinn Fein and the IRA over the last decade have been determined by the needs of US imperialism to put pressure on Britain. This has been more pronounced at some times than others. For example, during the final negotiations that preceded the Good Friday agreement the Sinn Fein delegation, as described in a speech by Martin McGuinness, was in constant, often hourly, contact with leading figures in the US administration, from the White House downwards. It was no surprise todownwards. It was no surprise to find the new Sinn Fein Minister of Education rushing off to the US to consult with Secretary of Education Richard Riley. "Riley spent most of the day with McGuinness, an unusual and very generous allocation of time" boasted Sinn Fein's An Phoblacht (20/1/00). Such contacts by Sinn Fein with leading figures in the American capitalist state have not just started because of the new Executive; they've been going on for years.

So, whether Republicans are bombing Canary Wharf or Manchester, or sitting round the table with leading unionists, they are still serving the same cause. In the case of Sinn Fein we are not just dealing with nationalism, but an arm of US imperialism. Revolutionaries oppose such forces in the same way that they stand against the loyalist terrorists that act in the interests of British imperialism. When the leftists pretend that somehow there can be, or was, in the twentieth century, an 'authentic' national 'liberation' struggle that can break away from the imperialist framework of global capitalism, they have the historical experience of the working class against them.

Tracey 26/01/00

SWPSWP echoes propaganda about 'peace process'

No treatment of the role of leftism in Britain would be complete without a few words on the largest group, the Socialist Workers Party. Their response to the new Executive was distinctive.

"The new Assembly in Northern Ireland has been welcomed by nearly everyone except a tiny minority of hardline Unionists gathered around Ian Paisley. Millions of people are hoping the new Assembly will mean the dawn of a new era of peace in Northern Ireland." (Socialist Worker 4/12/99).

'Millions' might be hopeful, but that's only because the capitalist media has put a lot of effort into trying to give the impression that there's the possibility of a "new era". Politicians of all colours have presented the new Executive as another step forward in the democratic process. However, the Unionists (who extend rather further than Paisley's gang) are fulfilling their familiar role as a potential fly in the ointment. If they should bring the Executive down no one will blame their backers, the British government, because the Unionists are well established as "hard line bigots" with their "obstacles to"obstacles to [the] peace process" (ibid).

Having shown their commitment to capitalist democracy (against the 'bigots') the SWP give it a left-wing twist. They criticise the fact that "Sinn Fein calls for cutting taxes on big corporations, so they match the low levels of Southern Ireland" (ibid). This is not much of a criticism, but it helps to establish the SWP as a left-wing voice, supposedly above 'communal politics'. In practice, they'll always find a faction of the bourgeoisie that they want workers to support. They always say 'vote Labour' at elections in Britain, for example. And they've never been shy of supporting Sinn Fein or the IRA when it suited them in the past. But when there is a "rejection of sectarianism and the desire for wider change among working class people" the SWP are there because it "opens up the possibility of the re-emergence of class politics." And wherever such a possibility exists, left-wingers like the SWP will be there to divert workers' struggles into trade union actions and campaigns which sabotage the development of the class struggle.

And what a victory it was. Who would have thought, even a year ago, that sixty thousand people would turn up to greet delegates of the World Trade Organisation. Who'd have thought that trade unionists would be marching with environmentalists people dressed as turtles marching with sacked steelworkers, the topless lesbian avengers mingling with farmers. Churchgoers with the anarchist black-block. The mass protests helped focus world-wide attention on what the WTO really stands for and it crumbled under the pressure. Forget all their talk about 'free trade', the WTO is nothing more than a nasty little organisation fighting for the rights of multinational organisations to dismantle every country's labour and environmental laws" SchNEWS website bulletin, 10.12.99

This vision of the Seattle events last December is common to many who see mobilisations of this kind like the June 18 'Carnival against Capitalism' in London or the various events timed to coincide witous events timed to coincide with the Seattle demonstration, including a protest against the privatisation of the tubes in London as a new and effective way of fighting against capitalism. We don't doubt that of many of those who take part in these actions are motivated by a sincere and increasingly widespread disgust with what capitalism is doing to this planet. But those who actually want to get rid of this system need to consider why this view is also being broadcast by the big guns of the bourgeois media. The latter have given enormous publicity to the events in Seattle (and London) and have unfailingly described them as a new form of anti-capitalism, either as a dangerously subversive movement or as a refreshing response of ordinary citizens and of small countries to the monster of 'globalisation', and furthermore, as a movement that can win significant victories even faced with the massive presence of the police. In short, it is time to sniff out the presence of a vast manipulation by the ruling class.

The mythology of globalisation

For a start, the theory of 'globalisation' is basically a product of the huge bourgeois campaigns about the 'death of communism' which followed the collapse of the eastern bloc at the end of the 80s. Essential to this theory is the idea tl to this theory is the idea that with the disappearance of the old 'Communist' bloc, capitalism has become a truly global system. Its more open ideologists those who were already singing the praises of liberalism and free trade in the 80s argued that now the last barriers to the free movement of capital had been removed, and with the generous assistance of the 'computer revolution' and the world-wide web the entire system could look forward to an unprecedented period of growth and prosperity.

The whole theory was deeply anti-marxist, not only because it made the usual false amalgam between Stalinism and communism, but also because it aimed to strike a blow against the marxist conception of the decadence of capitalism, which holds that capitalism is a system in historic decline and has been since the first world war. For marxism capitalism effectively became 'globalised' not at the end but at the beginning of the 20th century, and it was for this very reason that the system reached the end of its progressive function for mankind and became a giant barrier to further development, dragging humanity down in the coils of its mortal crisis. Capital has created a world economy, but because of its inherent contradictions, this can only be the basis for a really unified world through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

But just as the bourgeois drug of fascism engenders the equally bourgeois side-effect of anti-fascism, so globalisation ideology gives rise to a bourgeois anti-globalisation ideology. This latter points to the undoubted ravages of capitalism especially the accelerating destruction of the environment and the savage exploitation of workers in the poorest countries and then erects a wholly false alternative between, on the one hand, global corporations owing allegiance only to their own profit margins, and, on the other hand, the national rights of peoples and small countries (and even big ones). A radical version of this ideology is provided by the Schnews report mentioned at the beginning:

"We want a new millennium based on economic democracy, not economic totalitarianism. The future is possible for humans and other species only if the principles of competition, organised greed, commodification of all life, monoculture, monopolies and centralised corporate control of our daily lives enshrined in the WTO are replaced by the principles of protection of people and nature, the obligation of giving and sharing diversity, and the decentralisation and self-organisation enshrined in our diverse cultures and national constitutions" (Vandana Shiva).

The key to this statement isn't the parts that are true like how capitalism turns everything into commodities, goods for sale, but the part at the end about preserving "our national constitutions". This same commitment to defending the rights of the nation against unpatriotic international capitalism was emphasised by Clinton who said that he was in deep sympathy with the Seattle protesters, and by the US trade unions who shared his abiding concern about the vicious exploitation of children in the poorer countries as a pretext for advocating US trade embargoes on the products of such exploitation and thus protecting the American economy and American jobs. But it was also demonstrated by the French delegation at the WTO which distinguished itself with its anti-American rhetoric on issues such as GM foods and ecology, and by the French 'peasant leader' Jose Bove who was filmed by the French media promoting French cheese outside MacDonalds Seattle. This is bourgeois anti-globalisation in a nutshell.

The real reasons for the failure of the Seattle WTO conference

These apparently absurd contradictions are a perfect expression of the fact that while global capital is indeed a real power, it exists only as the al power, it exists only as the product of the clash between national economies, between what the Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin once described as the national "state capitalists trusts" which dominate the planet. The so-called 'multinationals' do not constitute another power standing over all the national economies in the final analysis these companies are merely a subordinate expression of the state capitalist and imperialist leviathans. Neither are the different countries divided into a protectionist camp and a free trade camp: those who advocate free trade for their own products abroad are the most fervent defenders of protectionism for their own domestic economies. And it's this ceaseless rivalry between the great national capitalist predators, not the protests on the Seattle streets, that is the real reason for the failure of the latest WTO talks.

In fact, from the beginning the WTO was itself a spawn of these very rivalries. Its predecessor, the GATT, created in 1947, had been an instrument of the USA, its function being to express and strengthen America's commercial domination of its imperialist bloc through preferential customs duties. After the break-up of the Russian bloc it was the European states, now striving to escape US hegemony, which took the initiative of replacing the GATT with a more 'flexible' and morT with a more 'flexible' and more 'equal' structure. This led to the formation of the WTO in 1994. What the 1999 WTO summit showed was the sharpening of the trade war between the USA and the European states: its failure to adopt new rules of functioning at this conference expressed the fact that the conflicts of interests it seeks to regulate are becoming more and more irreconcilable.

The only movement against capitalism is proletarian and communist

The bourgeoisie has every reason to hide the real reasons for the failure of the Seattle conference, because they show the impossibility of capitalism ever overcoming its anarchic and dismembered nature. At the same time, the exploiters in every country have a common interest in selling the idea that capitalism can be tamed or even threatened to the core by a 'movement' made up of any number of different classes, categories and causes in which the working class appears as just one pressure group among many, duly identified with the trade unions, a 'movement' which propagates the notion that national interests are somehow a more democratic and human alternative to the impersonal global power of capital. A real 'anti-capitalism' would have to turn this inverted logic right side up: moribund capitalism cannot be reformed or tamed, and it can only be threatened and overthrown by an international movement of the internationally exploited class, the proletariat, which has rediscovered its programme of constituting a world-wide communist society.

Amos

Exceptionally strong cyclones (250km per hour) on the Indian coast in October; flood rains in western Africa between July and October, and in Venezuela in December; drought in the Middle East and Australia; storms hitting western Europe in late December. The list of meteorological calamities in 1999 was endless and has to be added to all the others of the past few years (Hurricane Mitch in central America, floods in China and Bangla Desh, etc etc). The year 2000 has begun in the same way with cyclones and floods wreaking havoc in southern Africa. Hundreds of thousands of people have made homeless, in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and above all Mozambique.

The death toll has yet to be established, but in addition to the hundreds and perhaps thousands swept away by the floods, many more will die from the disease and malnutrition that follow. As usual it is the proletariat and the oppressed who pay the heaviest price for these ‘natural’ disasters, in deaths, injuries, and homes destroyed. The bourgeoisie limits itself to counting up the damage and pouring out crocodile tears. Just consider, for example, Britain’s contribution to the flood relief work in Mozambique. Its a drop iwork in Mozambique. Its a drop in the ocean compared to what the British government poured into the ‘humanitarian’ job of reducing Serbia to rubble.

Is all this unavoidable? The UN’s World Meteorological Organisation has for years been issuing warnings about the evolution of global climate. In France, after the December storms, the press was filled with popularised explanations about the greenhouse effect and global warming. The boldest journalists humbly begged our government’s - because we know how concerned they with the common good – to find new policies in order to reduce the build-up of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, CFCs, methane. It’s all a lot of noise for nothing: things just go on until the next catastrophe.

The total responsibility of irresponsible capitalism

We are not trying to deny the complexity of climatic phenomena: indeed, developing a better understanding and finding a clearer model for them is still one of the great scientific goals that humanity must strive for. We don’t claim to be able to offer the formal proof that there is a single connecting link between all these exceptional climatic events. Nevertheless it remainc events. Nevertheless it remains the case that:

• global warming is disturbingly real. Average temperatures have gone up by 0.7oC during the last hundred years. The last decade was the hottest not only of the century but also of the last millennium. After 1998, the hottest year ever recorded, 1999 remained very hot (it was the hottest in Britain for 341 years). At this rate, the temperature will have gone up by between 1.5 oC and 4.5 oC by 2100;
• these increases, however small they may seem, hide the considerable variations which reinforce the violence of storms and tempests of the El Nino type (the one in 97-98 left over 20,000 dead in Colombia);
• the arctic ice cap has thinned by 40% in 30 years, and is losing 37,000 square km per year. Icebergs measured in the Antarctic (up to 3,600 metres deep, making it possible to go back 420,000 years in time) show that the present concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane "have reached a level never previously encountered" (Jean-Robert Petit, CNRS, in Le Monde 10.6.99) and that these gases play a decisive role in climatic variations;
• the rapidly increant face="Arial">the rapidly increasing desertification of certain regions and the persistence of the ozone hole over the Antarctic are all convergent phenomena that we cannot go into any further here.

The natural catastrophes are thus not quite so ‘natural’ after all. For the first time in the history of humanity, man has been influencing the global evolution of climate at a stupefying pace. But the bourgeoisie does not want to know and above all it doesn’t want to give itself the means to know. It cannot afford to establish an irrefutable link between the destructive activities of capitalism (such as industrial pollution, but also the irrationality of transport in the megacities or the massive deforestation of the Amazon) and the climatic irregularities. But for over twenty years now the scientific community has been ringing the alarm bells about the greenhouse effect, the risks posed by the deforestation of the Amazon, etc.

At the most, the bourgeoisie will agree to take these links into account as one hypothesis in a debate of ideas, taking refuge in the argument that the scientists, in the present state of their knowledge, cannot pronounce categorically on the subject; furthermore they are rather fond of the thesis that global w of the thesis that global warming is the result of a climatic cycle that takes place on a very long term basis, i.e. longer than human history. This ‘alternative theory’ of long climatic cycles is however less credible given that following this logic, we are more likely to be heading towards a new ice age! Here we can see the irresponsibility and arrogance of a bourgeoisie which doesn’t have any ‘scientific certainty’.

But what the bourgeoisie is also trying to hide is the total responsibility of the capitalist system as regards the consequences of natural catastrophes. Whether we’re talking about storms, cyclones, floods, droughts or earthquakes, the frightful scale of material damage and loss of life derives entirely from the laws of capitalist profit: crazy rates of urbanisation (50% of the world’s population are squeezed into urban agglomerations); jerry-building of all kinds (as in Turkey where the housing hit by the earthquake turned out to have been constructed with cement that lacked enough sand); modification or destruction of natural hydraulic networks; deforestation leading to soil erosion and floods; uncontrolled demographic growth, etc. To this can be added the deficiency of the systems of prediction and aid (1).

It’s also true that capitalism doesn’t have to call on Mother Nature to provide catastrophes: it’s quite capable of producing them itself. In the space of a month, as well as the Erika, two other oil spillages have devastated coastal regions in Turkey and Brazil. Then there are the various nuclear accidents, from Three Mile Island in the US to Tokaimura in Japan via Chernobyl, the Seveso dioxin leak, numerous rail and air accidents, air pollution (causing among other things a considerable increase in allergic and infectious diseases), massive or gradual food poisoning resulting from the uncontrolled use of pesticides, herbicides, inappropriate animal feed, etc. Even in the industrialised countries, drinking tap water is becoming increasingly risky.

You could go on and on with this criminal indictment of the system. The basic point is that capitalism is totally incapable of avoiding these catastrophic scenarios. And this is because the phenomena of pollution or the various accidents are a pure product of the logic of a system based on profit at the expense of human lives.

Ecology: a reformist illusion

Those who are convinceace="Arial">Those who are convinced of the contrary have all sorts of ideas about reforming capitalism, which they label as ‘ultra-liberal’ or ‘globalised’ in order to hide the real nature of the system. The advocates of the ecological movement never stop calling on the different states – the ones who bear the main responsibility for pollution in all its forms – to become aware of the threat to the planet and to apply the resolutions adopted at the various international conferences on the environment.

This is the old reformist fairy tale about the ogre who becomes a vegetarian out of his love for children. These conferences are invariably forums where the competing capitalist states spout a lot of fine rhetoric about their concern for the planet while making absolutely sure that their own national interests come first. The bourgeoisie has yet to apply the measures voted at the Rio Convention in 1992. The conferences in Kyoto (1997), Buenos Aires (1998) and recently in Bonn (1999) merely provided the occasion for the settling of scores between the USA and the European Union over the ‘market’ of polluting emissions, over the national ceilings of emissions. But how could it be otherwise in the epoch of imperialism, of every man for himself, exacerbated by the mortal crisis of capated by the mortal crisis of capitalism?

Old tankers regularly spill their loads into the ocean. This is not a result of statistical laws, or even of ‘globalisation’, but of the laws of capitalism, which dictate that you have to exploit men and materials at the cheapest possible cost. The French state, which is happy to denounce Malta or Panama for getting around the law by sailing under different flags, is quiet about its own use of similar devises, such as the TAAF (Terres Australes et Antarctiques Francais) which enable it to get round its own legislation and carry on using floating wrecks like the Erika. The big industrial powers all use these tricks thanks to a mafia-like network of intermediaries.

The fuel being carried by the Erika was the scrapings of the bottom of the barrel, not for consumption in France according to its own rules. According to the Canard Enchaine of 5.1.00 it was going to be sold to power stations in Somalia or Ethiopia, contributing just a little more to the global pollution of the atmosphere. The French state and Total were perfectly well aware of this. The peripheral countries are in such a terrible mess that they more and more serve as dustbins for the big powers.

This shows up the hypocrisy of the measures announced by the Jospin government, typical of this class of gangsters whose concern for ecology was demonstrated by the bombing of Serbia. The much-vaunted ‘ecotax’ is a clear expression of capitalism’s total inability to fight against pollution: when it was finally authorised, it could be set against fines! And, in line with the Kyoto and Bonn conferences, the rich states can also buy their ‘quota’ of pollution form the poor ones, who anyway continue to pollute heavily because their technology is so obsolescent.

But what else can you expect from an economic system which from its very beginnings has crushed men and destroyed nature in the name of accumulating profit?

Capitalism: a story of ‘muck and blood’

Ecology is the ideology of a desperate petty bourgeoisie when it’s not a mere cover for the ruling class itself. Either way it is quite unable to understand the real source of what it sees as the ‘abuses’ of capitalism (2).

Marxism, the revolutionary theory of the only class which has a futthe only class which has a future to offer humanity, is alone able to understand capitalism in its historic dimension and not in the light of moral imperatives which either serve to perpetuate the myth of capitalism as eternal progress, or which fall into the nostalgia for the natural economies which preceded capitalism. In comparison to the latter, capitalism, in which all production is geared towards the market and in which accumulation for accumulation is the motor of economic activity, is an extraordinarily dynamic system which has developed the productive forces as never before, making it possible for mankind to go beyond it and live in a society of abundance. In its inexorable march forwards, capitalism always saw nature as a commodity to be used at will, as it did with men from its first period of primitive accumulation – as Marx put it in Capital, it came into the world "oozing muck and blood from its very pores".

And as Rosa Luxemburg added,

"it wasn’t only at its birth that capitalism ‘oozed muck and blood from its very pores’, but throughout its march across the world" (Accumulation of Capital). Everything operates as if "at the same time that mankind masters nature, man seems to become ensature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy…All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force" (Marx, Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Paper, April 1856).

The planet-wide domination of capitalism at the beginning of the 20th century and its entry into decadence with its procession of wars, famines, massacres and misery has only accentuated this tendency.

This has been an epoch in which

"all the capitalist nations are forced to compete with each other over a saturated world market; an epoch, therefore, of as permanent war economy, with a disproportionate growth of heavy industry; an epoch characterised by the irrational, wasteful duplication of industrial complexes in each national unit, by the desperate pillaging of national resources by each nation as it tries to survive in the pitiless rat-race of the world market. The consequences of all this for the environment are now becoming crystal clear; the intensification of ecological problems can be measured according to the different phases of capitalist decadence" (‘It’s c>" (‘It’s capitalism that’s poisoning the earth’, IR 63).

Capitalism’s further slide into its phase of decomposition in the last decade of the 20th century has only exacerbated these features.

We cannot have any illusion that capitalism and its ruling class will find any escape from the suicidal path it is now on. Only the working class, through the development of its struggles, can put forward the perspective of a society of harmony between man and his environment.

BTD

NOTES

(1) the Venezuelan president Chavez, who was warned on the eve of 16 December (the day of the catastrophe) of the critical situation in the state of Varga didn’t bother to raise a finger as he was more concerned with electoral preparations (see WR 231) .

(2) For a more developed analysis see ‘It’s capitalism that’s poisoning the earth’ in International Review 63

The Austrian Freedom Party is one of those populist parties which are emerging all over Europe in response to a general discontent. Fuelled by the crisis and social decomposition, their whole programme boils down to racist and xenophobic hysteria and the rejection of the traditional party machines. In Andalusia (against the Moroccans), in France with Le Pen, we h), in France with Le Pen, we have seen similar xenophobic mobilisations. In Austria this fear of being ‘swamped by foreigners’ has been reinforced by the projected opening up of western Europe to the eastern European countries. Similarly the rejection of the ‘establishment’ has been common to all the right wing parties in Europe, since this enables them to present themselves as a new tendency free from the sleaze and personal ambitions of the regular politicians. When you bear in mind that to be a state employee in Austria you have to hold the card of one or other of the two main parties, you can see easily why part of the population feels excluded by these big apparatuses which have shared power for over 30 years.

But none of this makes Haider, any more than Le Pen, a 'new Hitler'. What brought Hitler to power in the 1930s was not the popular pressure of the anti-semitic masses (as the bourgeoisie would like us to think) but the very real needs of German capital. Faced with a violent economic crisis, it was vital for the German bourgeoisie to organise the state in a disciplined manner around a single objective: war. Hitler had a programme for German capital. This involved the concentration of capital, the strengthening of the executive and a clear orientation towards building a war economy. This was a specr economy. This was a specific, original programme which represented a break with previous policies.

Haider’s Freedom Party doesn’t have a specific programme; you could say it doesn’t have a programme at all. Apart from the populist propaganda, once it arrived in power, it simply took up the programme of the Conservative Party, acting as a mere buttress for the latter. What’s more, this programme is no different from that of the previous coalition between the Conservatives and the Social Democrats, which governed the country up to the last elections. At the beginning of 2000 Austria unveiled its third ‘budget of rigour’. Before the last election all the parties were promising economic growth and an increase in public spending. In fact, even before the elections took place, the policies of the future government were already fixed, in continuity with that of its predecessors: it would adopt a policy of austerity, dictated by the European Union. The same European Union which has waxed so indignant about this new government and wants us to believe that its austerity programme is the result of its fascist tendencies, whereas it is only following the EU’s directives on attacking the working class.

By accepting the extreme right in its government, the Austrian stategovernment, the Austrian state knew quite well what it was doing. These populist parties, whose job is basically to rally those who are disgusted with the political process and channel their anger behind demagogic slogans, can be a certain inconvenience. The rise of their influence as opposition parties, nourished by social decomposition, can become an embarrassment for the normal operation of the bourgeois political game. This is exactly what happened with the National Front in France, or the MSI in Italy. In such situations, it becomes necessary to deflate these parties and render them a bit more reasonable.

The French bourgeoisie, having initially done everything it could to inflate the influence of the NF, then contrived to split it in two when it became too much of an encumbrance. The Austrian bourgeoisie, for its part, seems to be following the example of its Italian cousins, who chose to recycle the MSI by absorbing it into the Berlusconi government. Today the MSI has become a ‘presentable’ and better controlled right wing party. Tomorrow, having carried out policies no different from that of previous governments, the Freedom Party will also probably find its popularity has been eroded. In the meantime, Austrian social democracy will have had a rest-cure in opposition; having fought against the ‘fascistsagainst the ‘fascists’ it would have regained its lost virginity and this will help it to obscure the memory of its blows against the working class.

If the freedom party really was a fascist party, it wouldn’t be in power today. For a fascist party to come to power, the social conditions have to be in place. Fascism was the product of a particular historical situation which made it both possible and necessary. Thus, in the 1930s, it was because the world proletariat had been defeated (and not least in Germany where social democracy drowned the revolution in blood between 1918 and 1923), and because the crisis imposed the march towards a new world war, that fascism was called upon to take control. Today, the proletariat is not defeated, and thus, despite the crisis, world war is not on the agenda. Therefore the bourgeoisie has no need, and no possibility, to exert its dictatorship in the form of fascism. It has at its disposal a much more effective instrument in today’s conditions: democracy.

Chaining the proletariat to bourgeois democracy

Here lies the essential reason for all this barrage. If the bourgeoisie is working so hard to present the Freedom Party as a fascist menace, it’s because these events provide it with an ideal oppnts provide it with an ideal opportunity to stoke up it ideological campaigns about the defence of democracy, which are so necessary at a time when it is forced to hammer working class living conditions (1).

This campaign is in full continuity with all the others which, since the collapse of the eastern bloc, have called upon the workers to defend the democratic state against dictators of all kinds (the noise about Pinochet being one of the most recent examples).

In fact, while it can have different faces, capitalist rule is always a dictatorship. Today, in the countries of western Europe, it’s not fascist governments which are throwing the workers onto the dole and cutting wages. It’s not fascist states which are imposing work flexibility and making working conditions more and more dangerous and difficult.

In the present historical situation, which holds out the perspective of massive class confrontations, democracy is the best mask for the domination of capital. In the present strategy of the left in government in the central countries of capitalism, Haider is a godsend for the bourgeoisie. It uses him to increase the credit ratings of the left, which is presented as the best rampart against fascism, unlike the right which capitulates and even shaich capitulates and even shares government with it.

The workers must refuse to be caught up in the false alternative between fascism and democracy, which are only two sides of the same coin. Today the real historical alternative posed to the proletariat is more than ever socialism or barbarism, and by far the greater danger to the proletariat becoming conscious of this alternative is the mystification of democracy.

H 25.2.2000

(1) Apart from this campaign against the working class, the Haider affair is also being used as a tool of inter-imperialist rivalries, particularly by the French and American bourgeoisies. At a time when the German bourgeoisie is trying to expunge its past in order to develop its global power, its rivals can hardly fail to miss the opportunity to throw the memory of Nazism in its face again.

Contrast this slow penny-pinching response with the rush to give ‘humanitarian assistance’ to the population of Kosovo last spring. Although the repression of the Kosovans had been going on for some time under the eyes of the great powers, it was not until NATO decided to intervene in the situation that billions were spent that billions were spent - on reducing Serbia’s infrastructure to rubble. The war in Kosovo created a humanitarian disaster, forcing hundreds of thousands of refugees to flee the NATO bombing and resulting offensive and ethnic cleansing by the Serbian army. When it comes to spending money on war the bourgeoisie has no problems at all.

This was true with regards to Mozambique during its civil war which ended in 1992. The major imperialist powers backed one side or other, FRELIMO or RENAMO, in a vicious conflict that left many thousands dead. In an dark reminder of this war, the floods have churned up old minefields and scattered them across the land, creating further dangers for the flood victims when they come to rebuild their shattered lives.

During the last decade the number of wars in Africa has continued to grow. The war in the Congo is a stark example. Zimbabwe has sent 11,000 troops to prop up the Kabila regime even though its own economy faces collapse. "Inflation at over 60% hurts everybody...70% of the population are deemed to be living in dire poverty. The country is in the grip of a two-month fuel shortage [while] large quantities of Zimbabwe’s scarce fuel are going to the war in Congo..." (The Economist, 19/2/00). The country is on the verge of bankruptcy, i on the verge of bankruptcy, importing only what it can pay for in cash..

The floods that have hit Mozambique have affected its neighbour Zimbabwe as well. The Zimbabwe Air force allocated 3 helicopters to rescue flood victims while "Most of the 24 serviceable air force helicopters are on military service in the Congo" (Times, 1/3/00). The physical damage caused by the floods will inevitably further shatter the economy as well.

And let us not forget how the Blair government quietly decided to honour its agreement to supply Zimbabwe with the attack helicopters it requires to carry on with its intervention in Congo. This is no isolated breech of New Labour’s ‘ethical’ principles, because Labour’s ethics are precisely those of imperialism. Even ‘humanitarian’ and ‘development’ aid serves imperialist purposes, as shown by Clare Short, international development secretary, who invited Uganda, Rwanda, Colombia and Indonesia, among others, to a conference to review military spending: "Ms Short insists that her department will not necessarily be reducing the size of poorer nations’ armies. In the past she admits, ‘military expenditure was seen as bad ... something to be cut ruthlessly, without regard for the very real securgard for the very real security threats that countries might face.’" (The Guardian, 17.2.00).

What this boils down to is that as far as capitalism is concerned, the proper use of helicopters is not to save flood victims, but to defend your country’s ‘security’, ie, its ability to compete in the imperialist free for all.

Trevor

Last year, the humanitarian organisation ‘Medecins sans Frontiers’ (MSF) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Twenty years before, the illustrious pioneer of ‘non-governmental organisations’ (NGOs), Amnesty International, had already received this supreme distinction. When it hands out such rewards, the world bourgeoisie always recognises its most faithful servants, as can be seen from the long list of warmongers who have been converted into doves of peace, such as Begin and Sadat.

The NGOs were originally an ideological response of the western bloc to the eastern bloc, around the theme of the ‘rights of man’ which took off under the Carter presidency. Although some of them were set up before the 1970s, their success and expansion coincided with the beginning of the decline of the Stalinist bloc. They thus served as an ideological pillar of the western bloc against its eastern rival, and thus an essential pillar of imperialist war.

The first NGO to find a place in the strategy of the western bloc was Amnesty International (AI), an organisation founded in 1961. Paradion founded in 1961. Paradoxically it was built from the remains of the pacifist movements that had been animated, financed, and used throughout the 1960s by the different Stalinist parties, and in the service of the propaganda of the Russian bloc. AI was to become the model for other NGOs created in the ensuing decades: it claimed to be independent, it worked against arbitrary arrest and torture, it worked on behalf of political prisoners. It launched campaigns against torture and no doubt saved a few unfortunate people. But above all, in the 1980s, AI was to become an extremely important tool in President Reagan’s arms race, in the campaigns against the ‘Evil Empire’ in the east. Of course, AI also denounced the excesses of the western bloc and its annual reports would always be a slight irritant for the big western powers.

But this was only the necessary background to ensure the effectiveness of its main job, which was to point the finger at the eastern bloc (through the condemnation of repression and prison camps in the USSR, Poland, and Czechoslovakia). What came out of AI’s reports was always the idea that there are such things as countries where the law is respected, even though they are not perfect. Along with others, AI played the role of spreading the notion that the horrors of the on that the horrors of the world are the fault of ‘dictators’ of various kinds, and never of a decadent system whose mode of operation resides principally in the development of militarism and war.

An example of AI’s way of operating: the Bokassa affair. In the 1970s, as in other countries of its sphere of influence, France was directly implicated in the rise to power of Bokassa in the Central African Republic. Giscard’s France even paid for the farce of Bokassa’s coronation as ‘Emperor’. But Bokassa had too much of a tendency to mix up his personal interests with those of his sponsoring power. And he made an error in the way he dealt with the rebellious schoolchildren in his country. The repression of the revolt was bloody, as was his reign in general. France denied it, but its secret services organised the fall of the Emperor with the aid of the Central African Republic’s ambassador in France, who in turn informed AI. The campaign by this ‘non-governmental’ organisation justified an intervention by France, which sent in the paras to install a new president. AI’s campaign consisted in claiming that, thanks to its work, Africa had rid itself of a bloody dictator. In fact France had rid itself of one embarrassing clown and replaced him with another. The populaced him with another. The population, of course, gained nothing.

Denouncing repression, expressing solidarity with the oppressed, is a basic task for revolutionaries. And at the time we indeed denounced this African bourgeoisie which had ably imitated the brutality of its protectors. But the denunciations voiced by AI had a different aim: to enable France to get a grip in a strategic country, to deal with the dangers posed by a monster of its own making. AI cannot work in any other way. It reports on and exposes many of the world’s horrors. But even though this work is often done by people who are genuinely indignant about it, its net result is to provide an ideological cover for the ‘democratic’ powers, to justify their armed interventions.

From the so-called ‘humanisation’ of war to openly calling for war

While Amnesty International was mainly effective during the cold war, other NGOs, also posing as ‘independent’, have developed over the last couple of decades with the same aims. This is particularly the case with the NGOs which go by the label ‘sans frontiers’ (without frontiers).

The objective of these NGOs is, first of all, of these NGOs is, first of all, to ‘humanise’ war. The Red Cross already existed last century; its aim was to establish norms that would supposedly put limits to barbarism. Since its creation, the Red Cross always laid claim to ‘neutrality’. In fact, never in human history have so many ‘humanitarian’ conventions been signed and never has there been so much barbarism.

Pre-capitalist societies saw cruelty and bestiality in human relations as an ordeal to which the gods subjected mankind. The bourgeoisie see it as a fact of human nature, a fact of war. However, bourgeois law does establish this separation: war is a professional, political matter. The ‘punishment’ of the enemy must be separated from the act of war. The enemy must be treated with humanity. In fact, the more this separation has been made, the more barbarism and humanitarianism have complemented each other. This ‘complementary separation’ has reached the level of caricature with the NGOs, which, as their name suggests, claim not to be attached to any particular camp.

In order to prove their ‘independence’ these ‘humanitarian’ NGOs, like Medecins sans Frontiers have gone through their own ‘split’. It’s no accident that t146;. It’s no accident that the MSF originated in a split with the ‘neutral’ style of the Red Cross in the Biafran war in 1968. This was a very bloody war which set the federal Nigerian government against the Biafran separatists. This conflict did not correspond directly to the confrontation between the two blocs, since both America and Russia supported the unity of Nigeria. In fact it expressed an attempt by second rank powers to escape their protector’s grip. Biafra was firmly supported by Gaullist France, which was trying to establish its ‘independence’ from NATO, while at the same time putting a spanner in the works of its British ally. Biafra was also supported by China which was trying to play an ‘independent’ role in Africa. The MSF no doubt brought some aid to the suffering in Biafra, but they were there above all as an ideological expression of the French bourgeoisie in Africa. The population of Nigeria were dragged down into a real hell, and out of this misery we saw the birth of a new form of ‘humanitarianism’. Under the cover of autonomy and of emergency aid, this was a new ideological spearhead for imperialist war. Its gospel was ‘the right to intervene’, and the TV was the witness to its exploits.

At the end of the 1970s MSF made it quite clear that itSF made it quite clear that it was an instrument of the western bloc when it carried out the heavily symbolic operations around the Vietnamese refugees. In the same ‘boat for Vietnam’ there was the pro-western Aron and the Stalinist intellectual, recycled into a Maoist and re-recycled into a ‘humanitarian’, Jean Paul Sartre. In the 1980s, these ‘humanitarians without frontiers’ (a whole pack of organisations with similar names appeared during this time) provided precious ideological assistance to the American action against the Russians in Afghanistan. The brutes who now govern this country, the Taliban, have not been very grateful because they have kicked MSF out of the country.

‘Humanitarians’ in the service of militarism

The ideology of the ‘rights of man’ developed by the western bloc, and the more recent doctrine of ‘the right to humanitarian intervention’, which has been elaborated, among others by one of the most cynical of all bourgeois politicians, Francois Mitterand, were to become the pretext for all the imperialist interventions of the great powers after the fall of the Stalinist bloc. Whether with the UN or with NATO, with the USA on its own or with alliances (at least the facade of als (at least the facade of alliances), the great powers have based all their murderous interventions on the ideology of humanitarianism. Who better to support these actions than the NGOs who had already won their humanitarian spurs and demonstrated their ‘autonomy’?

The operations in Iraq carried out by the USA around the Kurds are a good example of this combination of humanitarianism and militarism. Operation ‘Provide Comfort’ in Kurdistan in 1991 reached the very summit of hypocrisy. Saddam Hussein had brutally repressed the Kurdish opposition, which had been led to believe at the end of the Gulf war that it would be supported by the great powers. The USA did a remake of the coup it had carried off the year before, reinforcing the ‘safety’ zones in the north of Iraq; the other powers followed in their footsteps; the humanitarian NGOs came out with their propaganda against the evil Saddam; and all this on the back of the Kurdish poor, who were forced to flee into the mountains. It was tragically symbolic: Saddam killed them by bombing them as they fled; the ‘humanitarian-military’ forces killed them by dropping aid packages on their heads.

Since then a regular feature of preparations for military intervention has been themilitary intervention has been the pressing demands placed on ‘democratic governments’ by the various humanitarian organisations. In this stage-show, the democratic powers, defenders of the ‘rights of man’, too slow in their reactions, intervene under the media pressure exerted by the NGOs, which are now the model of everything that is best in humanity. In reality, the NGOs, acting on behalf of the most aggressive militarism, are the petrels that announce the storms of war. This can even involve masquerades like operation ‘Restore Hope’ in Somalia, with the huge media coverage of the American intervention, with the sacks of rice donated by French schoolchildren, with the inevitable Kouchner (later to become administrator general of Kosovo) transporting these sacks in front of the cameras. All this ended up in a fiasco. Somalia is now forgotten.

Sometimes – and this is going to happen more and more often – the NGOs come into direct conflict with each other depending on the imperialist powers they serve. This was the case in Rwanda, where we could see the French bourgeoisie, which was directly responsible for the genocide, using the NGO humanitarians to ‘protect’ the populations from the war – in fact, to protect their own proteges, in other words, those who had orga other words, those who had organised the massacres. This operation was a caricature of ‘humanitarian militarism’, with the French legionnaires and the MSF standing side by side. Obviously the new masters of Rwanda, who are pro-American, weren’t duped about France’s intentions. Thus the US has launched a parallel humanitarian operation ‘Support Hope’. Humanitarianism has become an indispensable weapon of war.

It was in the war in ex-Yugoslavia that this complicity between the NGOs and the military forces was most evident.

The NGOs were directly involved in setting up all the military actions by the western powers in ex-Yugoslavia, as for example when the USA entered into the Bosnian conflict in 1993, which was preceded by a demand by the NGOs for the parachuting of food and medicine into eastern Bosnia. The NGOs were the ones who called loudest for the intervention of the great powers to help the two-and-a-half million people who had been displaced by the war; they provided the pretext for the deployment of the Franco-British Rapid Reaction Force in the spring of 1995, then of SFOR under the aegis of the UN. But it was above all in Kosovo that we saw an intense agitation by the NGOs, campaigning against Milosevic’s treatment of the Albanic’s treatment of the Albanian population. It was they in particular who drew the media’s attention to massacres like the one at Racak in January 1999, which was a key moment in the preparation of the NATO bombing of Serbia. The NGOs therefore actively participated in the lead-up to the NATO intervention in March 1999. The exodus of the Kosovo Albanians, which was the fault both of Milosevic’s soldiers and of the western powers and their allies in the KLA, was exploited to the hilt to justify the NATO action. This conflict was the most hideous expression of the way that ‘humanitarian’ sentiments are used to justify war. Did the action of the NGOs, and of the military powers, improve the lot of the refugees? What we can be sure of is that the sufferings of the Kosovo populations was used as an excuse for militarism.

To understand the role of the NGOs in the ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie, the best thing is to let them speak for themselves. The report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) on the NATO actions in ex-Yugoslavia is revealing: it says that the allies "violated the rights of war" (by killing civilians), but "they didn’t commit any war crimes" (Le Monde, 10.2.2000). All the Jesuitical cynicism of the humanitarians is in this report. An NGO s is in this report. An NGO like HRW can’t say "The allies did a really good job in killing 500 civilians". No, they "violated the rights of war". But, "they didn’t commit any war crimes".

It’s with this kind of reasoning that the NGOs attract honest people, people who pose questions. After all the NGOs denounce all abuses, wherever they come from, but, there are some abuses which are ‘understandable’, which fall into the category of ‘inevitable collateral damage’, which violate the rights of war; and then there are the ‘real war criminals’, genocidal tyrants like Milosevic. All the justifications for military action by the great powers in the last ten years have followed this kind of reasoning. The NGOs denounce injustice, come to the aid of the unfortunate, are vigilant against all abuses – the better to play their role of drumming up support for war. The current war in Chechnya is the latest episode in this devil’s dance. Here again we are hearing the NGOs and the humanitarians denouncing the crimes of the Russian army. But it’s not at the same volume as in Kosovo. Then the tone was triumphalist; now its an ‘impotent’ denunciation, because they know quite well that the western powers are lettin the western powers are letting Russia do its work; because the NGOs also have the role of dissipating energy in dead-end protests, in powerless despair.

Our aim here isn’t to point the finger at those who get drawn into these humanitarian adventures, often at considerable risk to themselves. Our aim is to denounce the real function of these organisations, which lead many people to say: ‘OK, they have their faults, but at least they’re doing something’. To which we say: what they do serves the interests of imperialism perfectly.

Kouchner wrote somewhere that "the great adventure of the 20th century was called marxism. The great adventure of the 21st century is beginning and it’s called the humanitarian movement". We say that if marxism ceases to be the great adventure of humanity in the 21st century, this will be the century of the triumph of humanitarian militarism – of the destruction of humanity.

Pto

The circus of the elections for London mayor and the Greater London Assembly has rumbled on for months. From the controversies over the choice of candidates by the Labour and Tory Party to the interventions of Malcolm McLaren as a candidate and Chris Evans with his £200,000 for Ken Livingstone, there has been a constant attempt to keep this innovation in local democracy in the news. Jeffrey Archer was originally selected because he was supposed to be some sort of ‘character’. His replacement, Stephen Norris, was more famous for his mistresses than his political standing. With the Labour Party the saga that finally lead to the election of Frank Dobson over Glenda Jackson (significantly an ex-film star) and Livingstone, and the subsequent decision of the latter to stand as an ‘independent’, was dragged out longer than even the worst soap opera would ever have dared.

But why?

Most people don’t know the name of their local parish, district or borough councillor, or even their MP. Yet for months, the whole country, 85% of which neither lives nor works in London, has been treated to the endless twists and d to the endless twists and turns of this particular local election - from the question of the candidates to the intricacies of how to finance the tube, and the history of the GLC.

The reason for all this attention is not because there is the possibility of a massive change in living or working conditions in the capital. Trains are not going to start running on time and stop being cancelled. Buses are still going to be caught in traffic jams. The wait in casualty departments will still be measured in hours, while wards and hospitals still face closure. There will still be people sleeping rough on the streets. Anything the new Mayor or GLA can change will be marginal, and, with the explicit commitment of all the candidates to business and the capitalist economy, the police and repression, it is clear that any changes will not be undertaken with any concern for the interests of the working class.

All the candidates have commented on the great wealth in London and implied that somehow this makes the problems faced in the capital capable of an easy solution. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is no way that capitalism would redirect any of its resources away from the pursuit of profits.

What has been happening with the t has been happening with the elections and all their build-up is a prolonged campaign for the ‘democratic process’ itself - the lie that somehow workers (or any part of the non-exploiting population) can have an effect on how capitalism runs our lives.

The revolutionary position

The understanding that communists have developed about capitalist democracy, its elections, councils and parliaments is based on the historic experience of the working class. In the Theses on bourgeois democracy and proletarian dictatorship presented by Lenin to the First Congress of the Communist International in March 1919 (see International Review 100 for the full text) this is clearly summarised. "All socialists have expressed the idea formulated with the greatest scientific precision by Marx and Engels, namely, that the most democratic bourgeois republic is no more than a machine for the suppression of the working class by the bourgeoisie, for the suppression of the working people by a handful of capitalists."

The specific attitude of communists toward parliament has changed since the nineteenth century because of "the change in the role of parliament itself. In the preceding rliament itself. In the preceding historical epoch parliament was an instrument of the developing capitalist system, and as such played a role that was in a certain sense progressive. In the modern conditions of unbridled imperialism parliament has become a weapon of falsehood, deception and violence, a place of enervating chatter" (The Communist Party and Parliament, presented to the Second Congress of the CI, August 1920). In 1871 Marx summarised the decision to be made in elections as "which member of the ruling class was to represent and repress the people in parliament" (The Civil War in France). In 1917 Lenin showed how the institution had continued to function: "parliament is given up to talk for the special purpose of fooling the ‘common people’" (State and Revolution).

In a word, capitalist democracy is a con-trick. The real power of the ruling class lies behind closed doors, in the boardrooms, in the corridors of Whitehall, in the armed forces. The job of capitalist ‘democracy’ is to try and convince us we have a stake in our own exploitation.

With the elections for the London mayor the ruling class is showing that it knows there are suspicions about what the Labour government has the Labour government has done, but telling us that there’s always the ballot box, the lie that we can change the way we live and work within capitalism.

Livingstone is no alternative

In every election there will usually be one party or candidate that pretends that they’re different, that they can be trusted, that they have the interests of workers at heart. In the GLA election the London Socialist Alliance claims to "speak up for the workers, the jobless, pensioners and students, and against the bankers, the bosses and the profiteers" (see our article on page 2 which shows how the LSA plays its part in the electoral charade). More importantly Ken Livingstone is being hyped as the man who really has Londoners’ interests at heart, with much being made of the myth of the GLC.

The first thing we should recall is that Livingstone has declared his support for "95%" of what the Labour government has done. When you look at the Labour record over the last three years, its attacks on working and living conditions, the decline in the social wage, the increase in the rate of exploitation, the strengthening of the state apparatus of repression, the military actions of British iitary actions of British imperialism against Iraq and Yugoslavia - then a 5% difference doesn’t amount to much.

As for Livingstone’s specific proposals for London, whether he’s proposing more private investment or strengthening the state, liaising with the police or helping business, he’s still defending the basic programme of the Labour Party.

What Livingstone has to offer that is ‘different’ is his past role as leader of the GLC from 1981-85, and the image of someone who opposed Thatcher. In practice, the GLC received a lot of publicity for getting into conflict with the Conservative government, as did other local councils including Lambeth, Liverpool and Sheffield. Although all these councils said they weren’t going to give in to Tory ratecapping and make cuts in services, or put up rates or rents, they all did in the end. However, that didn’t stop them insisting that workers should defend the local state against central government.

Nearly 20 years on Livingstone is trying to pull the same trick, trying to pretend that having him in office will mean some protection from the Labour government. It was a lie with the GLC under the Tories, and it’s a lie today. Both then 46;s a lie today. Both then and now Livingstone has played an invaluable role in providing a democratic cover for capitalist rule.

Workers cannot defend themselves by standing alone in a polling booth marking an ‘X’ or a ‘1-2-3’ on a piece of paper. The struggle of the working class means the holding of mass meetings, the election of recallable delegates, the sending of delegations to other groups of workers. It means discussion on how best to fight for workers’ interests. In London, as elsewhere, these interests can’t be separated from those of the rest of the working class. In a city where more than 300 languages are spoken, there are constant reminders that the struggle of the working class is, above all, international.

Car 31/03/00

Following on from J18 and Seattle, MayDay 2000 promises a global day of action against capitalism. From New York to Paris, from Auckland to London, thousands of people will be involved in actions aimed at protesting against the effects of capitalism. These events promise to build up a strong grass-roots movement for social change, a better environment and even an end to exploitation.

But can events such as MayDay 2000 really contribute to any radical social change? Can tactics like ‘guerilla gardening’, bike rides, co-operatives, or even ritualised riots in the financial centers really shake the power of the capitalist class?

Capitalism can destroy humanity

There is no doubt that if things stay as they are then humanity and the planet are doomed to destruction. This century has been the worst in history. Tens of millions have died in two World Wars and a long list of local conflicts. Famine and disease stalk the globe. Economic crises lay waste to whole regions ly waste to whole regions leaving poverty and unemployment in their wake. Inequality inreases every day. Environmental destruction reaches new depths. The capitalist system is rotting on its feet.

Its decomposition is tearing away at the social fabric, causing despair, hopelessness and an attitude of ‘every-man for himself’. There is no doubt then that the present system needs to be replaced if humanity is to survive into the next millenium.

Which social force can destroy capitalism?

For this to happen it is obvious that society will have to go through massive convulsions. The forces of the capitalist state will surely meet any radical social change with stiff resistance. They will defend their wealth and power with all the means of repression at their disposal.

Let no-one think that this change can be peaceful or take place through the ballot-box. But which social force is capable of leading the fight against the dictatorship of the rich and powerful? Which social force contains within it the perspective of a new society? An alliance of environmental groups, students, small farmers, t, students, small farmers, trade unions, anarchists, and any number of well-meaning individuals? No. Capitalism is the last class society in history, and it requires the action of a revolutionary social class to get rid of it.

The working class is the only revolutionary force

After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in ’89 the ruling class proclaimed the ‘death of communism’ and the definitive victory of capitalism. They shamelessly spread the greatest lie of the century - that the horrors of Stalinist state capitalism were the direct result of the October revolution, and that any future attempt to oppose capitalism was bound to end in the same nightmare. In effect they announced the death of their mortal enemy, the working class.

Since ’89 these lies and ideological campaigns have indeed caused much confusion within the working class and it has to some extent disappeared from the social scene. But it is not defeated. This is the class that in 1917 rose up to establish the power of the workers’ councils in Russia and forced the warring states to stop the First World War.

This is mall>This is the class that from the end of the ’60s, and until ’89, launched waves of struggles at the international level. This is the only class in society that produces real wealth, that stands at the point of production and is capable of crippling the capitalist economy.

Through its collective activity and struggles in the workplace and the streets it is the only class that can become conscious of itself as a social force and lead the struggle against capitalism.

Communism is the only alternative to capitalism

There can be no ‘anti-capitalism’ which is not at the same time for communism. It’s not enough to be ‘anti-capitalist’ if that means being ‘against the multinationals’ but in favour of more ‘responsible’ and ‘democratic’ behaviour on the part of the capitalist state, which remains the focus of capitalist power, despite all the talk of globalisation.

It’s not enough to be ‘anti-capitalist’ if that means appealing to nationalist prejudices against ‘foreign’ capitalism, as the unoreign’ capitalism, as the unions are currently doing in the Rover affair.

To get rid of capitalism you can’t reform the capitalist state; it has to be demolished. To get rid of the capitalist economy, you have to strike at its roots - the whole set-up of wage labour, the world market, nation states. You have to create a world-wide community where all production is geared towards human needs. You need, in short, to create communism. Only a world-wide working class revolution can do that.

The need for communist organisations

Throughout its history the working class has created political organisations to point the way towards the communist goal, from the three Internationals to the left fractions who fought the degeneration of the Communist Parties to the groups of the communist left that exist today.

The International Communist Current is part of this tradition which, throughout the terrible crises and wars of the 20th century, has remained loyal to the genuine programme of communism against those who have betrayed and crossed the class line.

We are convinced that it’s impossible to by-pass the left communist tradition if you want to have a meaningful discussion about capitalism and its alternative.

WR, 28/4/00.

The threatened massive redundancies at Rover would destroy up to 50,000 jobs in the West Midlands. The threat to cut car assembly at Dagenham (or even close it altogether) would cause similar devastation, on a smaller scale, in East London and Essex. Tens of thousands of workers face the misery of unemployment and poverty.

Neither Phoenix nor nationalisation can guarantee jobs

We cannot rely on the Phoenix bid. It is true that the Towers plan involves only about 2,000 redundancies at Longbrige and 8,000 in the supply industries, as opposed to the much larger numbers of jobs that will be lost if Rover had gone to Alchemy or is shut altogether. But no boss, new or old, private or state, can guarantee jobs, whatever improvements are made in productivity, whatever concessions are made on wages.

We cannot rely on the government to help private businesses keep Rover going. Tony Blair may have promised to work "night and day" but the DTI has made it clear they will not do any more than facilitate negotiation, and investigate the role of English Partnership in a leaseback schish Partnership in a leaseback scheme. They have made clear that they do not intend to bail out car production.

Calling for nationalisation, for the state to become the new boss, is not the answer, particularly when the government has made clear it will not put a lot of money in. Nationalisation has been used in the past, but it certainly didn't benefit workers. Every time Rover has changed hands (and name) there have been job losses and increases in productivity, but the 54,000 redundancies when Leyland was nationalised in 1975 were among the worst ever.

Nationalisation didn't prevent massive job losses in the coal and steel industries or on the railways.

None of these proposals, the Towers bid, government intervention or nationalisation, can overcome the overproduction in the car industry. Every year it is producing around 21 million more cars than it can sell, meaning that about 80 assembly plants are redundant world-wide. This is why it is not just Rover that is threatened, but also Dagenham, and Honda is cutting its production. It is not only the car industry that is hit by overproduction, but the whole world capitalist economy.

The problem is not that it is "easier toot that it is "easier to get rid of jobs here than anywhere else in Europe" as Bill Morris of the TGWU says. A low Euro and the EU Directive on Information and Consultation haven't prevented unemployment in France and Germany. When the unions say things like this they are trying to tie us up in nationalism, to get us to identify with British capitalists rather than our class brothers across the Channel, to wave the Union Jack instead of defending our interests as workers. Workers in all countries are being hit by the crisis. British, German, ‘native’, ‘immigrant’, all workers have the same interest – to defend ourselves against capitalism’s attacks on our living standards.

How not to fight back

The demonstration organised by the unions on April 1st showed that workers want to resist this attack on their jobs. But it was like the large demonstrations against pit closures in 1992, when even Tory MPs pretended to support the miners. And still the mines were closed. On 1st April it was not just workers who demonstrated behind the unions. Local businesses were also in evidence: for instance, the Evening Mail produced posters saying "Don't let Rover die", Union Jacks were given out. It ended up being given out. It ended up being a celebration of British industry instead of a defence of workers' interests.

Demonstrations can be a place to meet other workers - from other plants, from other industries, or unemployed - to discuss, share experiences and gain a sense of our strength as a class. But this is not why the unions call demonstrations – they do it as a safety valve for discontent. If it looks as though a demo may become a real meeting place for workers, the unions do their best to sabotage it. So the demonstration on 1st May, which could have brought workers from Longbridge and Dagenham together, and also many others showing their solidarity, was sabotaged by the unions. In contrast to the well publicised Mayday 2000 riot, there were no adverts for it, hardly anyone knew it was going on.

An occupation of Longbridge will not save jobs if the focus is to prevent the company moving the Mini production line. There were many occupations in the 1970s, such as at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, where the focus was to keep working and look for another boss. This caused the workers to become locked up in the yard, isolated from other workers who wanted to show solidarity. An occupation of Longbridge in the union framework of keeping the production line in place for a neroduction line in place for a new boss would have the same dangers today.

How can we fight back?

In order to fight back we have to understand the scale of the attack. Huge as the attack on car workers is today it is not the whole story. Many workers in other industries, especially manufacturing, are facing redundancy. Unemployed workers, single parents and disabled people are under attack through the 'New Deal'. Schools and hospitals are more and more inadequate to workers' needs. It is the whole working class that is under attack.

First of all we have to fight back as workers. Not as supporters of this or that industry - Rover was not broken up in 1998, but that didn't help the 2,500 workers made redundant. Not as 'British' people, or residents of Birmingham or Dagenham, alongside local shopkeepers. Not even as trade unionists, since the unions today support management not the workers.

Secondly, we must not let ourselves get locked up in Longbridge or Dagenham. In the factory earmarked for massive redundancies we are in a very weak position. But when workers get together across trade and industrial divisions we are strong.

Those workers who signed a petition for a mass meeting at Longbridge to discuss how to resist the attack had the right idea, getting together as workers. We cannot rely on the unions to organise workers' meetings - the TGWU binned the petition and refused the meeting. But we can and must get together and discuss, even if at first we can only do it on a small scale.

Workers outside Rover and Dagenham can show solidarity. When on the demonstrations it is important to discuss with each other as much as possible, break out of the isolation. And remember that the best solidarity of all is to defend your own interests, by struggling in your own workplaces, by taking up common demands with other workers. This will start to rebuild a movement which can change the balance of forces in favour of the working class.

The only future capitalism can offer is growing poverty, unemployment and collapse. But by recovering their identity and confidence as a class, workers can begin to offer a different future – a world communist society where production is geared towards human need and not the profits of capital.

International Communist Current, 6/5/00.

BMW’s decision to break up the Rover Group is a massive blow to the working class, with some 9,000 job losses expected at the Longbridge plant and up to 50,000 jobs to be lost throughout the region. Since BMW bought Rover in 1994 it has pumped in £3bn into the group, but the losses have only mounted, totalling £647m in 1998. In response the bosses announced more investment, measures to improve productivity and 2,500 redundancies. BMW also managed to squeeze a £1.5m pledge of support from the government, while the unions bent over backwards to successfully push through the deal. Sir Ken Jackson, of the AEEU, said at the time, "This excellent result puts Rover on course for success and the workforce on course for stability" and Roger Lyons, of the MSF, said "This is a vote of confidence in the future of the car industry and shows that partnership is now the central focus of British industrial relations." (BBC Online, 11/12/98). Far from defending the interests of the workers, the unions again revealed their real role as the servants of the bosses and the interests of capitalism.

Last year, Rover’s losses continued Rover’s losses continued to mount, up to a staggering £1m a day, and another 9,000 jobs were axed as further improvements in productivity were made. The European Union has blocked the government’s support package and sales have dropped 7%, hit by the high value of the pound. The owners of BMW began to get concerned as the ‘English Patient’ dragged down the group’s profits. They held secret talks to off-load Rover onto the Alchemy group. The Labour government must have been aware of these plans. Its anger and shock at the sale are a complete bluff. It knew the writing was on the wall for Rover and has stood aside, saying that it can’t stand in the way of ‘global forces’.

The problems at Rover are common to the whole of the manufacturing industry, symptoms of the broader world economic crisis and increased competition on the world market. Ford have announced 1,500 losses at Dagenham, which itself is earmarked for closure, as is the Halewood plant in Merseyside. Honda plan to halve car production at its Swindon plant. In the steel sector, Corus (the former British Steel) is considering further plant closures and massive job losses. Up to 6,000 jobs are under threat at Port Talbot and Llanwern. At Belfast’s Harland and Wolff yard almost 1,800 workers are working on redundan workers are working on redundancy notices due to expire in June. All this comes on top of the programme of pit closures in the ‘90s that saw 160,000 jobs destroyed and entire communities devastated.

Neither nationalism nor nationalisation

On hearing of the sale of Rover, the unions changed their tune with regards to BMW. The same union leaders, who during the last two years have eagerly organised over 11,500 redundancies, are now saying, "We are not going to keel over and accept 50,000 job losses that this sale could lead to" (Tony Woodley of MSF, BBC Online, 20/3/00). Union leaders and MPs have called for a nationalistic consumer boycott of BMW cars. This hides the fact that BMW workers in Germany are also under constant attack and have exactly the same interests as workers everywhere. The German engineering unions have just accepted a meagre two year pay deal of 3% for 2000 and 2.1% for 2001, leading one German economist to say that, "the employers were the clear winners" (Financial Times, 29/3/00). A boycott of BMW is not the way workers can resist the attacks upon them.

The leftists and the union shop stewards are more sophisticated. They reject the idea of a ated. They reject the idea of a boycott, and have taken a more ‘radical’ stance, calling for state intervention to rescue Rover, "We want Rover back in public ownership. We want re-nationalisation. BMW has still got massive assets in this country...The government should seize them now, without compensation" (Socialist Worker, 25/3/00). Although the SWP admit that re-nationalisation is no answer to over-production, they say that, "it could begin to challenge the power of the corporations which wreck workers’ lives everywhere" (ibid.). While it is true that the capitalist state intervenes in the economy every day, to think that state ownership could guarantee jobs and improve working conditions is mistaken. Workers in the NHS and education face increasing exploitation and are leaving in their thousands. When British Leyland was nationalised in 1975 54,000 workers were sacked. So much for job security!

Class struggle is the only way to defend ourselves

The union organised demonstration on 1st April attracted 80,000 people from all over the country, who are quite rightly angry and worried for the future of the region. But these demonstrations, like the one against the pit-closures in 1992, won’t push back then 1992, won’t push back the attacks on the working class. They are tightly controlled by the unions whose role is to keep discontent within the union prison. The leftist demands for the union leaders to call mass strikes will fall on deaf ears. They know this. When the anger of the workers reaches a certain point then strikes may well take place. But the unions will make sure the workers remain isolated in their own sector in demoralising, drawn out, dispersed actions as has happened on the London Underground and Connex. The role of the unions is to sabotage the class struggle, not to lead it!

Calls for factory occupations from the leftists are a trap as well. They are raised in order to attract workers who are losing faith in the unions and looking for an alternative to the Labour Party. The role of the leftists today is to divert discontent back into campaigns to put pressure on the union leaders and the government. The SWP also uses these campaigns to bolster the defence of capitalist democracy (see article on the LSA p.2). The SWP, and the other leftist outfits, are not socialists and represent the left-wing of capitalism and are, like the unions, the enemies of the working class.

Behind the leftist calls for nationalisation is the idea that it’s a stthe idea that it’s a step towards socialism. This is a lie. Socialism is the only perspective for the working class and humanity. But calls for nationalisation only tie the working class into the framework of capitalism and the nation.

The working class must begin to discuss amongst itself the best ways to take control of its struggles, to recognise its ‘false friends’ for what they are and reject them. Through the daily defence of basic living and working conditions, even if these struggles do not escape union control, workers can begin to regain their confidence, forge their identity as a social force, and gain political experience. Then the balance of class forces can begin to swing in their favour. This will take some time and there are no simple solutions. The working class is not defeated, and levels of class combativity are slowly but surely recovering internationally. The capitalist economic crisis will continue to worsen and the future holds many more attacks like those seen at Rover, but also the perspective of wider class conflicts.

WR (1/4/00)

In WR 231 and IR 100 we published a sticker distributed in Moscow by a group of internationalists opposing the war in Chechnya. In this issue we are publishing an article written by other proletarian elements elsewhere in Russia. Although we don’t agree with all its formulations, we warmly welcome this text as further proof that, despite the Russian bourgeoisie’s efforts to flatten all criticism of its bloody imperialist adventure in the Caucasus under a steamroller of nationalist hysteria, the voices of working class internationalism continue to make themselves heard. The comrades in Russia have asked us to ‘re-translate’ their own hand-written English translation and we apologise in advance for any misreadings and mistakes, especially where Russian names are concerned.

New imperialist war and proletarian class politics

The war in Chechnya is a war of aggression by Russian imperialism. Its goals are to re-establish Russian control over the Northern Caucasus with its links to oil reserves, and, by creating nationalist hysteria, to draw the Russian proletariat into the trap of national unity and so strengthen the bourgeois state in Russia. ourgeois state in Russia.

The terroristic, bandit-like actions of the Russian army and airforce have destroyed Chechen villages, murdered tens of thousands and forced hundreds of thousands of men and women to flee their homes. All attempts to portray these actions as being a response to terrorism and the Moscow explosions are false. They can only increase contempt for these cowardly gangsters and especially for the rapacious, patriotic Russian government which doesn’t even have the courage to rob openly without concocting some provocation. It’s enough to ask who profits from the explosions in Moscow, Buinaksk and Volgodonsk to know who their author was. How can nationalist terrorists profit from blowing up the houses of poor people in Russia? For the Russian bourgeoisie, on the other hand, huge profit can be made because they provide an ideal pretext for the new war in Chechnya. The atmosphere of nationalist panic removed all obstacles to unleashing the war in Chechnya.

It is a mistake to think the war was unleashed only by the Yeltsin regime, by the clique in the Kremlin, an idea common not only in the bourgeois opposition but also among people who see themselves as marxists (see the article by A Lokh, ‘Small victorious war’ in Workers’ous war’ in Workers’ Democracy no. 11, the paper of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers’ Party, linked to the Militant tendency in Britain). The main motivation for the war comes not just from the Yeltsin regime, although this clique does make large dividends from the war; it corresponds to the interests of the whole Russian bourgeoisie. This is illustrated by the fact that in contrast to the 1994-6 war, today all serious factions of the Russian bourgeoisie support the war – from the liberals to the fascists, and including the ‘Communists’ who are ever-faithful to the bourgeois fatherland. Even those like the bloc around Moscow’s mayor Lushkov are just annoyed by the fact that the ruling clique has outdone them in patriotic phrasemongering. They merely criticise this or that detail of the war, and they propose as an alternative a more ‘civilised’ version of the war, while calling for new repression against immigrants from Chechnya and the North Caucasus, against workers and small traders from elsewhere in the CIS.

The Russian bourgeoisie has economic and political interests in the war:

- to control the oil pipelines that pass through the North Caucasus, transporting oil from the world’s biggest oil reserves in the 6;s biggest oil reserves in the Caspian Sea and the South Caucasus; to preserve these pipelines from the encroachments of foreign competition;

- to create an orgy of nationalist hysteria, to lure workers away from the path of the class struggle and onto the path of national, inter-class unity, under the patronage of a state which pretends to be above classes; to use the war to sharpen repression against the workers’ movement and strengthen the bourgeois state, its army and police.

The class interests of the Russian bourgeoisie, dressed up as national interests, are at the origins of the war. And as long as the bourgeoisie stays in power, as long as the proletarians, united by the world party of proletarian revolution, have not overthrown capitalism, destroyed the bourgeois state, and established the international dictatorship of the proletariat, wars will be inevitable, and millions will continue to die for oil profits and the fat salaries of secret police generals.

Unlike the war of 1994-96, when there was in Chechnya a partisan movement of the petty bourgeois and proletarian masses, to a large extent uncontrolled by the Chechen bourgeoisie, in this new war only professional soldiers are taking paional soldiers are taking part. The lower classes of Chechen society are not participating in the war. The main reason for this is that bourgeois national liberation movements have lost their progressive character. At the end of the 20th century they are unable to provide any kind of sustainable improvement in the conditions of the masses; they are also incapable of creating independent, progressive bourgeois states. In the 1994-6 war, the lower classes of Chechnya attained an apparent victory – de facto independence for Chechnya. But all the real fruits of this victory went to the upper classes of Chechnya; independence turned out to be in their interests alone. The disillusionment of the lower classes with Chechen independence, at a time when there is no proletarian class movement in the world able to point the way out of this nationalist dead-end and towards the path of proletarian revolution, has led to demoralisation and apathy.

The position proletarian revolutionaries should take towards the Chechen war is the only possible one for revolutionaries towards inter-imperialist conflicts since 1914: revolutionary defeatism on both sides, the call to turn the imperialist war into a civil war, for Russian and Chechen soldiers to tuian and Chechen soldiers to turn their guns on their oppressors. Since the main enemy of the proletariat is the bourgeoisie of its own country, and since in imperialist conflicts the defeat of the strongest imperialism is more beneficial for the struggle of the proletariat, Russian proletarian revolutionaries must view the defeat of the Russian army as a lesser evil compared to its victory.

An appeal to turn the imperialist war into a civil war does not mean aiming at immediate success. The beginning of an imperialist war is always accompanied by a nationalist frenzy. But the longer the war lasts, the stronger will be the feeling of sobering up to all the tricks about the ‘national idea’; the greater will be the abyss between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The guns that replace butter won’t feed the hungry. The bourgeois state, whether it has Yeltsin, Zuganov, Putin or Primakov at its head is and will remain a servant of the masters and enemies of the oppressed. The current change from liberal policies to national-patriotic policies does not and cannot possibly give the proletariat anything but more bloodshed, tears and deprivation. With every new day of war all this will only get worse, provoking hatred, indignation and determination in the proletariat. 1914 was followed by 1917. The agwas followed by 1917. The aggressive war of predatory bourgeois gangs will be replaced by the only just and holy war – the war of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.

Capitalism brings war just like clouds bring thunderstorms. War is the final means for settling scores between the different bourgeois gangs that call themselves states, and for controlling the class on whose labour and deprivation the capitalist system is based – the proletariat. Only by organising itself into an independent class power, hostile towards all factions of the bourgeoisie, only by dethroning the power of capital and establishing its own worldwide dictatorship can the proletariat finally put an end to wars and their cause – capitalism. Capitalism is a criminal system that has destroyed tens of millions of people in the world wars and local wars of the 20th century, a system that hides its unstoppable, monstrous greed behind the sugar coated facade of ‘democracy’ and ‘humanism’.

The Labour government’s decision to intervene in Sierra Leone marks the largest mobilisation of British forces since the Gulf war in 1991. Under the cover of its ‘ethical foreign policy’, and in the name of ‘morality’, New Labour promise to rescue the innocent population from the terror of the marauding gangs high on drugs. The truth is that British imperialism’s role is not that of peace maker, but of actively fuelling the war in Sierra Leone. It is also flexing its muscles to show its imperialist rivals that it’s a force to be reckoned with on the international stage and in future conflicts.

Sierra Leone gained independence from Britain in 1961 and was relatively stable until the present civil war broke out in 1991. The African ‘peace-keeping’ force Ecomog, largely made up of Nigerian troops, failed to stop the war and in 1997 the Kabbah government was overthrown by the army general Koroma with the support of the RUF. The UN imposed an arms embargo but with the help of British mercenaries working for Sandline, who broke the arms embargo, the Nigerian forces drove the RUF from Freetown in 1998, committing many atrocities themselves. The Britishrocities themselves. The British government was ‘cleared’ of any involvement in the Sandline affair and forced Sandline to end their contracts with Kabbah.

But the facts show that British imperialism itself took up the baton and pumped military aid into the country to back its local pawn Kabbah, in order to maintain a firm foothold in this strategically important region of West Africa.

"More money, more aid per head of population and more political action has been directed at the former British colony than any other African country. The Labour Government has committed more than £65m since March 1998" (BBC Online, 11/5/00).

After the UN dropped its embargo on arms supplies to Kabbah’s forces, "Britain shipped £10m worth of weapons to Freetown last year. They included machine-guns with 2 million rounds of ammunition, more than 2,000 mortars, and 7,500 rifles" (Guardian, 25/5/00).

There have also been reports that the Marines and SAS have been training the Sierra Leone Army since 1998. This military aid strengthened the Kabbah regime to the point where its former enemies in the army rejoined its ranks and in July 1999its ranks and in July 1999, faced with the scaling down of the Nigerian forces, Kabbah signed a peace agreement with the RUF which brought them into the government. The Nigerian forces were decreased and the UN took control of the disarmament of the RUF.

Faced with the humiliating collapse of the UN mission, the British government decided once again to directly intervene and take advantage of this great opportunity. Tony Blair said that, "Whilst the days of being a global policeman are long gone, it does not mean you can’t show leadership and do what you can to help" (Guardian, 16/5/00).

The rapid deployment of the British troops and naval back-up has been seen as a great success for British imperialism. While certain parts of the British media have warned of the threat of ‘mission creep’, and that the politicians are being pushed around by the military commanders on the ground in Sierra Leone, the government was not surprised by the turn of events. Its ability to rapidly send advance troops by air and a naval task force of 4 ships, including an aircraft carrier, is an example of how Britain is trying to ‘punch above its weight’ and show its rivals that it is still a force to be reckoned with.

The government also intend this intervention to be a long term commitment with the aim being nothing short of the complete reconstruction of the state in Sierra Leone. Robin Cook has made it clear that, "Britain will not abandon its commitment to Sierra Leone" (Telegraph, 9/5/00).

In effect this means that as well as the military aid, "administratively, Britons have been seconded to most major government ministries in an attempt to establish a functioning state...Key positions are held by the British under a bureaucratic form of re-colonisation" (Telegraph, 21/5/00).

The poor need food, Britain gives them guns

British imperialism has once again made use of the ideology of ‘humanitarianism’ to justify its latest intervention. The scenes of mutilated children are indeed shocking but it is rarely explained in the media that many of the pro-government forces that Britain is backing have carried out and continue to carry out such atrocities. There has also been much use made of the ‘child soldiers’ which Britain says must be taken out of the conflict. This hypocrisy was fully exposed when it was revealed that ted when it was revealed that the British government had decided to give 10,000 rifles to the Sierra Leone Army at the end of May. The fact that these weapons have already fallen into the hands of child soldiers was brushed aside by British officials. Sierra Leone is one of the poorest countries on the planet with an adult life expectancy rate of just 36 years. This explains why there are an estimated 15,000 child soldiers in Sierra Leone – a large percentage of the adult population is already dead by the age of 40!

A French film director who went to Sierra Leone to make a film about the link between charity and politics was so sickened by the UN’s and Britain’s complicity in the atrocities carried out in the civil war that he documented this instead! The reviewer of this film said, "What passes for the UN in this part of the world...doesn’t just allow cold blooded murder, but actively takes part" (‘New World Order (Somewhere in Africa)’, Guardian, 25/5/00).

Imperialist rivalries in West Africa

For the moment those major powers with vested interests in West Africa - the US and France - have kept a certain distance from the chaos in Sierra Leone. But thiaos in Sierra Leone. But this doesn’t mean they aren’t watching the situation carefully. The US has sent its envoy Jesse Jackson to the region; in contrast to Britain’s vilification of the rebels, he compared the RUF leader Foday Sankoh to Nelson Mandela. The RUF has close links with Liberia which it uses as a conduit for the sale of diamonds in exchange for weapons. The president of Liberia, Charles Taylor, is supported by the US and the French, so they presumably aren’t too happy that Sankoh is being held by the British.

The US does have one other card to play. The BBC have reported that, "Because of the successful experience of the Nigerian-led Ecomog forces the US is discussing the possibility of financing the return of Nigerian battalions to the country to take on the RUF again." (BBC Online, 10/5/00). This would cause problems for the British who have muscled in on the terrain once held by the Nigerians.

The bourgeois media have always portrayed the civil war in Sierra Leone as a conflict about who controls the fabulous prize of the country’s diamond mines. The diamond trade is indeed a lucrative trade for whoever controls it, but it is not the basic cause of the war. When we covered the civil war in Liberia, Sierd the civil war in Liberia, Sierra Leone’s neighbour, in 1996 we pointed out that, "The war in Liberia, like the wars and civil conflicts ravaging Somalia, Sudan, Algeria, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola, Mozambique and elsewhere is a striking expression of the decomposition of capitalist society…The economic disaster then accelerates the social collapse, as different factions battle over diminishing spoils, and the whole of society right down to its children is sucked into a vortex of looting and gang massacres" (WR 195, June ’96).

The British bourgeoisie want us to believe that by propping up the ‘democratic’ government in Sierra Leone it can hold out against this tide, the historical collapse of the capitalist system. In reality Britain and the other major imperialist powers are doing the opposite, exacerbating the social collapse in Africa by arming its local clients and literally giving them ammunition to fight more wars.

Trevor 3/6/00.

In the USA, the country always cited as an example of unstoppable growth and of an economy which has almost ‘wiped out unemployment’, 18% of the population, around 36 million people, live below the poverty line. Insecure, part-time and underpaid jobs have become the norm and there has been a continuous fall in workers’ living standards for ten years. In Britain, the industrial heart of the economy is more and more diseased, as can be seen with the crises at Rover, Ford and Harland and Wolff. All the official blather about how the ‘Internet economy’ will create loads of alternative jobs can’t change this.

Obviously, our rulers don’t forget to supplement their claims about the ‘end of the crisis’ with a mention of the ‘inequalities’ that still unfortunately weigh on society, stemming perhaps from the excesses of ‘liberalism’ or ‘globalisation’, or from the wars and dictatorships that seem to be so hard to get rid of, especially in the world’s poorest regions, like Sierra Leone. But not to wor like Sierra Leone. But not to worry: we are regularly told that the solution to all this lies in the citizens of the world calling for more democracy, more ethical foreign policies, more restrictions on the World Trade Organisation, the cancellation of third world debt, etc etc. Amid all these noble causes the workers’ struggle against lay-offs, wage cuts or speed-ups is mentioned – if it is mentioned – as just one protest among many.

In this way, the ruling class, its state, its media, its humanitarian ideologues, do all they can to hide the central contradiction in this society, i.e. the fundamental conflict between capital and labour, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The struggle of the working class is replaced by a ‘citizens’ movement’ in which all different classes and interests are mixed up. The struggle against capitalism and its state is replaced by a form of protest that supports the state, that politely asks it to be more democratic in the face of the world’s injustices.

But there is a reason why the bourgeoisie spends so much time telling us that the class war is over, insisting that the working class has disappeared, or calling on it to dilute itself in the inter-classist mass of the ‘citizens’. The reason is that the ruling class is well aware that the greatest threat to the capt the greatest threat to the capitalist order is still posed by the working class when it struggles for its own interests.

Despite all the drivel about the ‘new economy’, ‘post-industrial society’, and the rest, not only does the working class still exist, but it remains the class which produces the essential of all social wealth. It’s the exploitation of workers’ labour power that generates capital. And since capitalism is in a state of advanced decay, it can only keep itself going by constantly driving down the living and working conditions of the working class. The absolutely inescapable contradiction between the survival of capitalism and the interests of the working class can only get deeper.

This contradiction is being expressed today through a gradual development of workers’ struggles. Even if these movements are still dispersed, even if they are normally controlled and defeated by the unions and the political forces of the left, they correspond to a growing discontent. In Germany, in Britain, in France, we have seen a number of such struggles. In the USA, the demonstrations by the New York transit workers in November-December 1999 (see Internationalism no. 111, the ICC’s paper in the USA) was a typical expression of the strengths and weaknesses of the working class today: on the one hand, a r today: on the one hand, a real militancy, a refusal to accept sacrifices without any reaction, a will to gather together and discuss the needs and methods of the struggle, and a certain distrust towards union manoeuvres; on the other hand, a lack of self-confidence, a lack of determination in overcoming the union obstacle, in coming out in open struggle and trying to organise its extension to other sectors.

The mobilisations in Norway at the beginning of May saw 88,000 workers in transport, building, food, hotels and ports come out on strike to defend wage levels as the left-wing government attacked social budgets. In this case, the bourgeoisie was well able to control the rising discontent, particularly through a division between a union hierarchy which signed an agreement with the government and a union base which, at first, challenged it, only to sign a new version slightly less unfavourable to the workers, but still a real attack. Nevertheless, what was significant about this movement is that, despite its much-vaunted oil reserves, the Norwegian bourgeoisie is still forced to attack the working class head on, provoking a real militancy in the class and the biggest strike movement since 1986.

The workers’ struggles we are seeing today are still a long way from forming a significant barrier to the attacks of the bourgeoisie. The failurs of the bourgeoisie. The failure of the Rover and Ford workers to react on their own class terrain to the threat of devastating factory closures underlines the current difficulties confronting the working class. But workers’ struggles are like the old mole; they prepare the ground for the outbreak of much more massive movements in the future. What’s at stake in the development of the class struggle is the capacity of the working class not only to defend itself, but also to become conscious of the force it represents in society, of its historic responsibility to overthrow capitalism and begin society anew.

The death in April of Tony Cliff, leading figure in the Socialist Workers Party, and, before that, the International Socialists (1962-76) and the Socialist Review Group (1950-62), was greeted with expressions of solidarity and criticism from his fellow Trotskyists. For the SWP it was an opportunity to declare that "his unique intellectual contribution was to describe, in the late 1940s, the Soviet Union as state capitalist, and therefore imperialist" (Paul Foot in the Guardian 11/4/00). In his autobiography Cliff says that he thought about the question for two months and then "One early morning I jumped out of bed" and told his wife "‘Russia is not a workers’ state but state capitalist’".

The class nature of the Russian state

Revolutionaries (a category which does not include Cliff) have developed an understanding of the nature of the state in Russia as an integral part of their defence of working class interests. As early as 1918 the Russian communist left were warning of the dangers of state capitalism. In the 1930s, while the degenerating Trotskyists used the idea of a ‘proletarian’ sof a ‘proletarian’ state as grounds for the unconditional defence of the USSR, other revolutionaries wrestled seriously with this fundamental issue. For the German and Dutch Left there was state capitalism, but a tendency to put into question the proletarian nature of the 1917 revolution. For the Treint group in France there was state capitalism, but they were going toward the idea that it was a new form of system, neither proletarian nor bourgeois. The comrades of the Italian Left were more cautious. They saw the state in Russia as proletarian, because of its origins in the revolution of 1917, but increasingly becoming part of international capitalism - as it was recognised by the US, and "Russia’s entry into the League of Nations immediately poses the question of Russia’s participation in one of the imperialist blocs for the next war" (Bilan no 2, December 1933). While the Italian Left grappled with the Russian question they were quite clear on the rejection of any defence of the USSR.

Russia’s participation in the Second World War settled the question. The ex-Trotskyists of the Revolutionare Kommunisten Deutschlands (RKD), for example, dropped their defence of the USSR and, influenced by Ciliga’s book The Russian Enigma, defined Russia as state capital defined Russia as state capitalist. G Munis broke from Trotskyism over the defence of any imperialist camp and denounced Russia as state capitalist. The majority of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left broke from "the great lie of the ‘proletarian nature’ of the Russian state and to show it for what it is, to reveal its counter-revolutionary, capitalist and imperialist nature and function. It is enough to note that the goal of production remains the extraction of surplus value, to affirm the capitalist character of the economy" (Bulletin International de Discussion no 6, June 1944).

Trotskyism’s defence of imperialist war

While revolutionaries in the Second World War took an internationalist position against both ‘democratic’ and ‘fascist’ camps, the Trotskyist movement defended Allied imperialism. In defending the imperialisms of the democracies and Stalinist Russia (and some Trotskyists in France and Belgium sided with German imperialism) they became part of capitalism’s political apparatus. Just as Social Democracy went over to capitalism during the First World War, so it was with the Trotskyists and the Second. Their activity ever since has been determined by the needs of the bourgeoisie.

This, then, is the context of Cliff’s ‘ground-breaking’ work in the late 1940s. Cliff arrived in Britain in September 1946. He joined the Revolutionary Communist Party, a Trotskyist organisation made up of the merger of a number of groups that had all shown their loyalty to British imperialism. They had all, for example, called for a Labour government during the war, a period when Labour was a major constituent of the coalition government, with a particular commitment to the repression of the struggles of the working class. Cliff and his various groups always defended Trotskyism’s participation in the war "It was not possible to simply call for the defeat of one’s ruling class ... It was necessary to defend democracy against fascism" (Socialist Review May 1995).

Cliff had come to Britain from Palestine via Paris. It was here that he had been briefed by the Trotskyist Fourth International on the latest discussions in the RCP. A majority, who had previously been ardent defenders of Russian imperialism, had come round to the idea that Russia was state capitalist. Cliff, as an orthodox defender of the ‘degenerated workers’ state’ idea apparently said "The Old Man [Trotsky] iot;The Old Man [Trotsky] is not yet cold in his grave and already they want to renege on his teachings. ... I will destroy them!" (Charlie van Gelderen in Socialist Outlook, May 2000). By some time in 1947 Cliff was saying that Russia was ‘state capitalist’ and the leadership of the RCP that it was a ‘Bonapartist workers state.’

The fact that these Trotskyists swapped positions is certainly a curiosity. It did not change the nature of their politics. Those who defended the ‘state capitalist’ line were expelled or resigned from the RCP. The RCP dissolved itself in 1949 to enter the Labour Party. The first meeting of Cliff’s Socialist Review Group was in 1950. It was also in the Labour Party. Before the 1951 General Election the membership was directed to get known "as the most energetic and anti-Tory Labour Party workers" (document quoted in a 1981 SWP ‘official’ history). Cliff’s groups remained part of the Labour Party until at least 1967. They have never subsequently deviated from their support for the Labour Party - all, of course, in the name of ‘anti-Toryism’.

The Trotskyist view of the Labour government of 1945-51 is ‘critical’ of its austerity regime, its re of its austerity regime, its repression and its constant military mobilisations in the interests of British imperialism. However, the nationalisation of several major industries is always seen as cause for celebration. In fact the intervention of the capitalist state in the face of the ravages of a economic crisis is the dominant tendency within decadent capitalism. Far from being something for workers to cheer, it is integral to the bourgeoisie’s organisation of its system. Regardless of the different Trotskyist ‘theories’ about Russia, they all defend state capitalism at home.

Danger of the SWP

The political history of Cliff’s tendency is little different from the rest of British Trotskyism. Throughout the Vietnam war it supported North Vietnamese capitalism, backed by Russian imperialism. In contrast to other leftists the IS supported Labour when it sent troops to Northern Ireland in 1969. In Afghanistan it defended the US-backed guerrillas against the Russian-backed government. In the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, in which more than half a million people died, the SWP took the side of Iran. However, they switched to defence of Iraqi capitalism during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Last year in ex-Yugoslavia they defended Serbian repression of ded Serbian repression of Kosovo. Yet, in the recent election for London mayor they called for a vote for Ken Livingstone, the keenest supporter for NATO’s bombing of Serbia. The fact that the SWP appears to be inconsistent in bestowing its favours is not important. Its basic loyalty will always be to British capitalism, particularly as a left cover for the Labour Party.

The one thing that marks the SWP out is its size; it’s far and away the biggest Trotskyist group in Britain. A lot of the reason for this can be put down to the SWP’s ‘theory’ of ‘state capitalism.’ During the whole period of the Cold War they were the most anti-Stalinist organisation, which fitted in with the dominant anti-Russian ideology in the West. With the collapse of the Russian-dominated eastern bloc they had their alibi waiting.

One of the reasons that the SWP is such a pernicious organisation is that it talks about ‘state capitalism’ - a key understanding of the working class - while providing a cover for the capitalist state. Tony Cliff has died, but, unfortunately, the SWP’s influence lives on.

Car

The surprise retreat of the Israeli army from southern Lebanon, which it had been occupying since March 1978, has modified the balance of imperialist forces in the Middle East.

The evolution of the balance of forces

For Israel, this retreat was unavoidable, even though it had actually been planned for 7 July. The occupation of southern Lebanon, which is strategically much less significant than the Golan Heights, had become a thorn in the side for the Israeli state. For months now the Israeli army had been under constant pressure from the pro-Iranian Shi’ite Hizbollah forces. This situation was aggravated by the increasing disintegration of the Christian-dominated Southern Lebanese Army, which was Israel’s only ally in the region. But at the same time the Israeli government has had to deal with the growing unpopularity of this war, which had more and more been seen as a dirty war and a total dead-end (1). This feeling is now quite widespread in the Israeli population, which has become more and more fed up with the useless sacrifice of its youth in almost daily ambushes (the situation is not unlike the involvement of the US in Vietnam 2ent of the US in Vietnam 25 years ago).

On the other hand, Israel’s retreat offers it a number of advantages. It will undoubtedly weaken the position of the Syrian bourgeoisie, which, a couple of weeks before losing its Supreme Leader Hafez-el-Assad to a heart attack, had already lost one of its principal cards in the Lebanon. This is because it had been Syria’s intention to use the Hizbollah guerrilla struggle against the Israeli army in southern Lebanon as a means of putting pressure on the forthcoming Israel-Syria talks about the Golan Heights.

Today, it’s Hizbollah which has the image of the great victor and ‘liberator’ of the populations of southern Lebanon, which it will now rule over in competition with the pro-Syrian Amal party. Freed from its confrontation with Israel and strengthened by its ‘victory’, Hizbollah may well start posing problems for its Syrian protector. In the longer term, Syria’s occupation of Lebanon could be put in question.

Thus, Israel’s retreat from the Lebanon is not the expression of any ‘new desire for peace’ on the part of this state. In capitalism, ‘acts of peace’ are simply a means by which the bourgeoisie defans by which the bourgeoisie defends its imperialist interests and prepares itself for new wars. Thus at the same moment that the Israeli army was withdrawing from Lebanon, the Hebrew state was hardening its stance towards the Palestinians. Israel’s refusal to free Palestinian prisoners has led to riots and disorders on the West Bank and the Gaza strip, reminiscent of the Intifada. This has given Israel the opportunity to suspend negotiations with Arafat’s ‘Palestinian Authority’ at a time when the talks were already getting bogged down over the status of Jerusalem and the question of Palestinian refugees, since Israel had refused to make any more concessions.

But Israel doesn’t have a monopoly on imperialist ambition and duplicity in this region. The French bourgeoisie is also up to its neck in it. Thus even before the decision to withdraw Israeli troops from Lebanon, the deterioration of the situation had obliged the UN Security Council to almost double the numbers of its FINUL force on the Israel-Syria border from 4500 to 8000. The redeployment of this force, which up to now has been made up of 9 contingents from countries of minor importance (except for France and Italy) expresses France’s aim to regain a real foothold in the Middle East. Not only will France now provide the biggwill France now provide the biggest portion of the new troops (increasing its contribution from 250 to 2000 men), it will also take most of FINUL’s positions of command. This strategy is fully in line with France’s efforts to return in force to the Middle East after being virtually ejected from the region ten years ago, when its ally Aoun was booted out of the Lebanon. Chirac also confirmed France’s desire to reassert its traditional influence over Lebanon and Syria (which were part of the French protectorate in the inter-war period) when he was the only leader of an important western state to attend Assad’s funeral. France is thus affirming itself as the direct imperialist rival to Uncle Sam in the Middle East.

British imperialism has long had an interest in this part of the world: Palestine after all was a British ‘protectorate’ and both in 1948, in Israel’s war of independence, and 1956, in the Suez crisis, Britain clashed with the US in attempting to defend its traditional role in the area. But it is also in competition with France in this region, which is one of the reasons why it generally aligns itself with the US over Middle East policy. For the moment Britain is maintaining a very quiet presence in the ‘peace process’, generally acting as Washington’s go-g as Washington’s go-between. But this does not mean it has renounced all efforts to have an independent influence in the current negotiations, as witness Robin Cook’s controversial tour of the area soon after the Blair government was elected.

As for the USA, its ‘peace policy’ is no less based on its own imperialist interests. What it is trying to enforce is a ‘Pax Americana’ which will allow it to pull all the regional protagonists under its umbrella, at a time when its hegemony over the Middle East is being questioned more and more openly, as has its overall world leadership since the disappearance of the imperialist blocs at the beginning of the 90s. This is why the US has been trying to re-launch the ‘peace process’ between Israel and the Palestinians and to take the initiative in the negotiations. This is a step towards restoring its control over Israeli policy, a process which began with the election of Barak instead of the less docile Netanyahu last year, despite the fragility of the new governing team and all the squabbling in the Knesset.

The USA has also been trying to renew its dialogue with Iran, via its support for the most ‘reformist’ factions of the Iranian bourgeoisie. The Americans know thatgeoisie. The Americans know that they have to move fast because they dispose of a reduced margin of manoeuvre in the region. This is why the White House is trying to profit from Syria’s current situation of fragility and weakness and increase the pressure on it, in the first place by re-launching the ‘peace process’ between Israel and the Palestinian micro-state. For Washington, the urgency is all the greater in that the victory of Hizbollah’s ‘fighting forces’ could cast discredit on the ‘moderate’ faction led by Arafat, and increase the popularity, in all the Arab countries, of cliques who are in favour of armed struggle against Israel. Madeleine Albright’s trip to the Middle East has been followed by an ‘official invitation’ to Arafat to come to Washington along with emissaries of Israel. At the same time, in the wake of the failure of Clinton’s talks with representatives of Hafez-el-Hassad in March last year, the US is getting ready to renew negotiations on the Golan with the heir to the Syrian leadership, Bachar-el-Hassad, as soon as he is invested.

The situation is as explosive as ever

In this context, future negotiations and promises of peace are just a snare. Today Israel and its most intransigay Israel and its most intransigent enemy, Hizbollah, which represents the most fanatical wing of pro-Iranian Muslim fundamentalism, are now facing each other directly. The only buffer is provided by the UN forces, and UN General Secretary Kofi Annan has expressed loud and clear his very justified concern that they will serve as a "punch ball" to be struck from all sides. The situation is guaranteed to sharpen the rivalries between all the local imperialist powers (Israel, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Egypt), with the bigger imperialist powers lurking in the background. Despite all the hypocritical speeches, this explosive region of the globe is not heading towards peace but towards further and more dangerous imperialist conflicts.

CBF´

(1) We should remember some of the massacres that resulted from previous ‘punitive expeditions’ by Israel in the Lebanon: Operation ‘Justice Done’ in July 1993, 132 deaths; Operation ‘Grapes of Wrath’ in April 1996, 175 deaths and 350 wounded.

The 58 young Chinese found dead in the back of a lorry at Dover are among 300 illegal immigrants found dead in similar circumstances world wide in the last two years. Fourteen others are known, by the forged documents they carried, to have been heading for Britain. These horrific deaths have stimulated politicians to decry the evil gangs who traffic in human beings, with scant regard for human life. What hypocrisy! For most of this year, both Labour government and Tory opposition, particularly Jack Straw, William Hague and Ann Widdecombe, have been competing to be toughest on ‘bogus asylum seekers’. So virulent has this campaign been that Nick Griffin of the openly racist British National Party, noted "government ministers play the race card in far cruder terms than we would ever use".

Suddenly Blair and co have noticed that people fleeing war, repression or poverty are victims and not just ‘bogus’ or ‘beggars’. However, they do not want anyone to recognise that they are victims of capitalism in decomposition, but put all the blame on the gangs who transport them. But most of all their hypocrisy is shown by the fact that they are still toughening up the measures to keep them out of the country.

Government attacks on refugees

The government has tightened up border controls since it came into power 3 years ago. Resources are put into detecting illegals at Kent ports, and X-ray detectors are proposed; lorry drivers are fined £2,000 for every one detected on board; increased policing of the Eurostar has been announced. Those who do get in and claim asylum are getting worse and worse treatment. No longer can they get income support, but a sum worth only 70% of this, some of which is in vouchers. They are being dispersed around the country, deprived of the necessary translation and community support, in appalling conditions in buildings identified as housing refugees, making them a sitting target for racist attacks. Applications are being processed more quickly; only one appeal is now allowed instead of two; and detention is being used to ensure that those denied asylum really do get kicked out of the country as quickly as possible. Both Tory and Labour are agreed that these ‘bogus’ asylum seekers should be put in detention centres to hold men, women and children - in other words, concentration camps.

It is no accident that immigration controls are being tightened up at this time as all the miser at this time as all the misery that drives people to flee their homes is worsening across the globe. The economic crisis leaves millions with no adequate means to support themselves - from Eastern Europe, following the collapse of the Russian bloc, to the Asian ‘tigers’ so badly hit in 1997 and 1998, to Africa where huge areas are simply left to rot. War and genocide is destroying the Balkans (ex-Yugoslavia) and large parts of Africa. These are the circumstances that led to an exponential increase in illegal immigrants being discovered at British ports from 61 in 1991, to 661 in 1996, to 16,000 last year (The Sunday Times, 25.6.00). Since the beginning of the twentieth century Britain, like all other great powers, has always responded to an increase in refugees by increasing border controls. The first immigration law was brought in 1905 to keep out ‘aliens’ fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. In 1938 new controls were brought in to keep out Jews and anyone else fleeing Nazi Germany. Jack Straw’s 1999 Asylum and Immigration Act simply follows this great British tradition. Clearly the state and the members of the government do not care one jot for the lives of refugees and others whose lives are being destroyed by capitalism, whatever outcry it makes when refugees die trying to get into the country.

Governments have not always been keen to keep immigrants out. In the 1950s they were encouraged to come here from the Commonwealth, particularly the Caribbean, to provide cheap labour for the post-war reconstruction. The difference between government policy then and now is not a question of left or right, racism or anti-racism, but quite simply the needs of national capital. When it needs labour, immigrants are allowed in; when it is in crisis, when there are huge numbers of refugees abroad and growing unemployment at home, they are a ‘menace’ to be controlled if not kept out at all costs.

Fairness and humanitarianism simply do not come into the government’s calculations. Any appeal to the government on these grounds or according to the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees simply covers this brutal reality of capitalism.

Labour and Tories use ‘asylum seekers’

Before the 58 people were found dead ‘asylum seekers’ had provided both government and opposition with a scapegoat for the problems faced by British capital. In a campaign vigorously supported by the tabloid press, immigrants have all become ‘bogus asylum seekers’, w45;bogus asylum seekers’, who have been blamed for inner city lawlessness because some are forced into begging; and for the soaring cost of supporting them which has risen ... to £900million, a tiny sum compared to that spent by Britain on imperialist adventures abroad. Finding a scapegoat is extremely important at the present time as the crisis is leading to greatly increased attacks on the working class, with massive redundancies as in the steel and car industries, and increased pressure on those at work (see ‘The reality of economic attacks’ on page 2).

The inevitable result of this campaign has been the doubling of serious and often murderous racist attacks, randomly targetting anyone who looks ‘foreign’. It is difficult to believe that our ruling class, with its spin doctors and focus groups to predict and manage the response to every change in propaganda and policy, did not expect and count on this increase in attacks. It is certainly something the government will gain from.

The increase in racist attacks, the increased activity of the far right, openly racist organisations, like the BNP, which are legitimised by government attacks on asylum seekers, also provides a cover for the government. For those not convinced by the scapegoating t convinced by the scapegoating of refugees and immigrants, another scapegoat is provided, the far right and racism. In the end, while the Labour government has played a decisive part in whipping up the racism, it gains from the involvement of left Labour MPs and its more leftist supporters in anti-racist campaigns. This was true in the 1970s with the growth of the National Front and the Anti-Nazi League. Similarly, Mitterand gained from the success of Le Pen in France in the 1980s.

Left cover for the government

The demonstration to ‘defend asylum seekers’ on 24th June was a clear example of the way the left and ‘anti-racist’ campaigns provide a left cover for the anti-immigration policies of the Labour government. First of all it counted the Labour MP, Tony Benn, as one of its organisers, alongside Socialist Worker and ‘civil rights’ and immigrant organisations. Similarly, the Asylum Rights Campaign meeting on 29th June announced Diane Abbott, another Labour MP, as its chair. This is followed up with a range of excuses that are constantly made for government attacks: "New Labour is bowing down to the Tories and stepping up its attacks on refugees" (Socialist Worker 17.6.00); "New Labour no doubt set out to make ‘old fashioned’ racism against blacks, Asians and others a thing of the past.." (Socialist Review June 2000) or "...a New Labour team that has learned nothing from the failures of past Labour governments." (Socialist Outlook June 2000). The reality is that the class that developed Machiavellianism does not choose well-meaning bunglers to run its state, but cynical manipulators who knew exactly what they were doing when they whipped up racism with the campaign against ‘bogus asylum seekers’. Just as the Trotskyist organisations which cynically told us to vote Labour ‘with no illusions’ three years ago knew exactly what sort of government they were supporting.

The slogans on the recent demonstration made no effort to challenge the government campaign’s division between ‘asylum seekers’ and ‘economic migrants’ but, instead, focussed exclusively on the issue of ‘asylum seekers’ and the Geneva Convention.

In other words, they fostered illusions in the British ‘democratic’ state and its Labour government.

For as long as capitalism exists people will be forced to migrate, to flee the imperialist conflagrations or to leave the areas devastated by the worst ravages of the economic crisis. At the same time the ruling class will use the deaths if its victims to strengthen repression and border controls. Such is the old-fashioned hypocrisy of ‘New’ Labour.

Alex

It seems that the crisis is over. At least that’s what the bourgeoisie and its media are telling us. Economic growth is charting an unlimited upward course and unemployment is about to be completely done away with. The ruling class, in short, has overcome the contradictions of its system and put an end to 30 years of crisis.

This happy outcome, we are told, is all down to a totally new phenomenon: the "new economy". The technology of the Internet and its generalised use by enterprises and individuals are creating a "technological revolution" comparable in scope to the industrial revolution of the 18th century. The explosion of the Net and all that goes with it (in particular the extremely rapid circulation of information and money around the world) is playing a similar role to that played by the railways in the 19th century; it can even be compared to the invention of the steam engine. As a result, the proletariat should rejoice and have confidence in the bright future that capitalism offers us.

Of course, all this is a vast lie. The bourgeoisie can talk to itself all it likes about how the Internet is a technical breakthrough on the level of the railways, but it won’t do away with the crisis. This is for the simple reason that it can in no way remove the real cause of the crisis: the overproduction of commodities and the growing difficulty in finding adequate outlets for them. The railways were only the source of a leap forward in the expansion of capitalism to the extent that they were one of the main instruments for the conquest of new markets in a period when the capitalist mode of production had not yet invaded the entire planet. Today capital has been a world system for a very long time and the markets are glutted, ie it is harder and harder to realise the surplus value extorted from wage labour.

For the last 30 years the open crisis has been wiping out whole swathes of what the bourgeoisie calls "the real economy", notably in the manufacturing industries, and has cast millions of workers onto the streets all over the world. This crisis can’t be explained by talking about some technological deficit. On the contrary it is the result of the fact that there is too much technology, too many commodities, too many productive forces for the relationuctive forces for the relations of capitalist production which have become too narrow to contain them.

A speculative bubble which is just one more expression of the crisis

To see through the fraud of the "new economy", you only have to look at the totally irrational flight into speculation that it has given rise to. Over the last two or three years, the explosion of new stock market shares specialising in "dot.com" projects, like those in NASDAQ in New York, has been presented as the proof that the "new economy" is about to replace the old. In fact, all this is just another addition to the huge speculative bubble which has nothing to do with real economic activity, and whose very existence is a classic expression of the crisis. The delirious stock exchange investment in dot.com enterprises of the last period is now already resulting in huge losses, which shows that all the talk about the new economy is just hot air. The fact that huge masses of finance capital are leaving the "old" economy, ie the one that actually produces means of production and consumption, and are flying towards companies that produce nothing and which exist for the sole purpose of speculation, is a striking confirmation of the impasse that capitaliion of the impasse that capitalism has reached. The billions of dollars invested in this sector represent no real social wealth and are artificially inflated; they also regularly go up in smoke, through "mini-crashes" of the kind we saw in the spring, when doubts begin to lay hold of the "new" investors.

All the different phenomena of the speculative bubble are simply expressions of the crisis, of the difficulty capitalists face in finding profitable investment opportunities in the sphere of production. The capital that is invested in all the dot.com enterprises is not really creating a "new economy" in the sense of a new process of capital accumulation with an enlarged production of commodities and with new markets to absorb them. All this investment is totally unproductive and seeks only to cream off surplus value that has already been created.

Behind the "new economy", new attacks on the working class

Certainly the Internet helps to circulate capital very quickly; certainly, for many enterprises taken in isolation, it can lead to a gain in productivity at the level of administration and distribution. But what it brings at this level is not very different from the el is not very different from the computerisation of enterprises in the 1980s, which resulted in thousands of lay-offs.

In this sense, the Internet is just a weapon in the intensification of the trade war in which each capital is caught up in a frenzied race, not to be first to grab new markets but to get its claws on its rivals’ markets. It’s as instruments of commerce, especially in the area of advertising and marketing, that the "new technologies" are making the bourgeoisie’s saliva flow. In the bitter trade war between the different capitals, he who is quickest to take control of the virtual shop-windows of the Web is he who has the best chance of eliminating his competitors.

In decadent capitalism technological progress only serves to aggravate overproduction and make the system’s contradictions even more explosive. This has been recognised by the bourgeoisie itself through the mouth of the boss of Cisco, a company that produces Internet equipment: he was boasting in the press of having suppressed 3000 jobs and said that companies that didn’t follow suit were bound to disappear.

The myth of the "new economy" is not only fuelled by the bourgeoisie’s need to by the bourgeoisie’s need to reassure itself about the good health of its system. It is also part of a discourse directed at the working class. What the bourgeoisie wants us to believe is that the price we have to pay for the "new economy" is the generalisation of flexibility, increasingly precarious conditions of employment, and lower and lower wages. In other words, in order to enter the promised land of prosperity, the working class will have to accept a profound deterioration in its living and working conditions. Above all it must give up fighting on its own class terrain, it must admit that there is no point trying to resist the logic of capitalist exploitation, because all that is just a rear-guard struggle that belongs to the obsolete world of the "old economy". And all this is accompanied by an insidious, permanent propaganda about the so-called "disappearance of the working class". With nauseating cheek the bourgeoisie even uses images of Marx and Lenin to concoct adverts extolling the glories of the "Internet revolution" - a revolution in which it’s no longer labour that produces wealth, but a stock-market casino that is accessible to all in a world without workers…

No! If anything is obsolete today, it’s certainly not labour: it’s capital, tnot labour: it’s capital, this capitalist system in utter decomposition, which is subjecting the whole of humanity to more and more poverty and barbarism. The future belongs to labour, which is the only producer of wealth and material goods. The future belongs to the class which works and whose struggle is the only force that can lead to the definitive overthrow of the domination of capital.

PE

The EU observer mission sent to watch the election in Zimbabwe were not happy about the "climate of fear" and that the "Zanu-PF leaders seemed to sanction the use of violence and intimidation". However, as the Movement for Democratic Change, lead by Morgan Tsvangirai, won 57 seats, despite being only able to safely campaign in 25 of the 120 at stake, political parties in Europe declared their satisfaction. In Britain, Labour, Tory and Liberal Democrat all appreciated the work of Tsvangirai, a leading trade unionist often called a ‘British puppet’ by Zanu-PF. Such accusations are based on the reality that he was in constant contact with the British government throughout the campaign, and all British coverage of the Zimbabwe election campaign was devoted to the denunciation of violence and the demonisation of Mugabe.

Looked at from the point of view of the working class revolutionaries have three essential points to make.

1. Zanu-PF has always been a force for capitalism and against the working class. Back in the early 80s, when everyone from Thatcher to the SWP was praising Mugabe, the ICC showed that Mugabe and the Zanu-PF government was installed with the backing of all the major imperialisms as a force for capitalist stability. The reason that Britain, the old colonial power, has turned against Mugabe is not because of the Zimbabwean state’s massacres of the 1980s, but because of Zimbabwe’s slide into chaos and the potential dangers it poses in the region. Mugabe’s favourite slogan was "Zimbabwe will never be a colony again". In practice, in a country like Zimbabwe, the big powers, using all the means at their disposal, not least the IMF, will do their best to ensure that the local state fits in with their imperialist needs.

Zanu-PF has tried to mobilise the black population outside the cities against white farmers. But, ultimately, whether the land is controlled by the state or divided into peasant small-holdings, it will not mean any improvement in the conditions of life in rural Zimbabwe.

2. Multi-party democracy in Zimbabwe expresses the dictatorship of capital just as much as the one-party state. All commentators, from right to left, have been overjoyed at the prospect of a more democratic Zimbabwe. In the words of the ANC: "the election process has underscored the fact that democracy is taking root not only in Zimbabwe but in the sub-region and, indeed, in the whole of Africa." It is appropriate that the ANC should make such remarks, because the democratic South African state has kept the working class in the same conditions, and opposed workers’ struggles just as much as its predecessor, the apartheid regime. All that has changed are some of the faces in parliament. In Zimbabwe, as in South Africa, the needs of capital remain the sole concern of the state. Democracy is used to disarm the working class, to try and make it identify with the very state which enforces capitalist exploitation.

The democratic campaign shows no sign of ending with the counting of votes. Various issues will be taken up: the MPs appointed directly by the President; the challenge to results in seats where there was a great deal of intimidation; the question of the ‘escape route’ for white farmers.

3. The MDC is a faction of the Zimbabwean ruling class, currently favoured by British imperialism. While criticising Zanu-PF, and the state of the economy it has presided over, the MDC has some modest proposals for Zimbabwean capitalism. "The MDC would cut the budget deficit and withdraw from the Congo war, creating a new economic climate and delivering new jobs" (Guardian 12/6/00). The withdrawal from the Congo is proposed on basic economic grounds: it costs the equivalent of $1m a day. The budget deficit at £2bn is some 15% of GDP and growing, debt servicing takes up half of national income, unemployment is at 55%, inflation is expected to reach 85% by the end of the year, and fuel and electricity rationing is imminent. And the problems facing Zimbabwe are not just ‘economic’. People in the country have one of the lowest rates of life expectancy in the world. Among the many health problems is the prevalence of HIV: a quarter of the population affected, 200 die every day of AIDS, current expenditure $1m a month.

The economic policy undertaken by any future government will be dependent on IMF or British assistance, and the conditions that go with it - much as Mugabe was until recently, when IMF aid was suspended. The MDC, backed by British imperialism, wants to persuade foreign governments that Zimbabwe can be a viable proposition for capital investment.

As a footnote, it is interesting to discover that a member of Socialist Worker’s sister organisation in Zimbabwe, Munyaradzi Gwisai, has become an MP after standing as an MDC candidate. With calls for nationalisations, price controls, subsidies on basic goods etc, there is the usual leftist appeal for the intervention of the capitalist state. Also wheeled out were slogans such as "Tax the rich to fund the poor" and "Forward to socialism" to give the illusion of defending working class interests. In reality the new MP shows complete loyalty to the capitalist state and its democracy.

The working class in Zimbabwe has shown its capacity for struggle, for example in the struggles in the public sector in 1996 and in January 1998 when troops were sent into Harare to crush the discontent (see WR 234). However, its inability to resist the recent orgy of bourgeois democracy, is a setback from which it can only re-emerge through independent class struggle.

Kelly 28/06/00

Globally there is a productive capacity to feed everyone, and yet 16 million people in the Horn of Africa face starvation. The effects of drought in parts of northern India have meant millions more facing the same prospect.

Whether explained by the effects of global warming or deforestation - both results of capitalist production - there have been devastating floods this year in a number of countries. In Mozambique hundreds died and 300,000 were forced to leave their homes. In Bhutan, Bangladesh and India, floods have caused the deaths of hundreds and at least 5 million homes have been destroyed. There have also been lethal floods over the past year in China, Brazil and Russia.

In 1998, when Hurricane Mitch hit central America, 10,000 died and 2 million were made homeless. Last year, when cyclone Orissa hit eastern India 10.000 died t eastern India 10.000 died or disappeared. The far more limited effects of hurricanes when they hit the east coast of the US show that they’re not inevitably catastrophic. In July in the Philippines heavy rains caused the collapse of huge mounds of rubbish in one of the shanty town areas of Quezon City. Hundreds died because poverty forces them to earn a ‘living’ by camping next to this toxic mountain and rummaging through it for scraps to sell. In Venezuela mudslides caused a similar disaster. In Nigeria 300 people died after an oil pipeline explosion: here again it was poverty which has led people to try to syphon off oil for sale on the black market. People don’t die just because it rains or there’s a strong wind, it’s because of the conditions they live in, and the desperate need to be near any available source of income or water. Christian Aid have estimated that within 20 years 75% of the world’s population (mostly in the poorest countries) will be at risk from drought or floods.

In the wake of such disasters, and also the experience of refugees from imperialist wars, comes disease - typically cholera, malaria or dengue fever. The possibility of epidemics is exacerbated by population movements, poor sanitation, water contamination and the disruption of an already poor infrastructure. In thedy poor infrastructure. In the case of Hurricane Mitch there was already a cholera epidemic in parts of the region when it struck. As for AIDS, the fact that 11 million people, 80% of those who have died, have come from Africa almost speaks for itself. A virus, like the wind or the rain, is neutral, but the conditions in which people subsist have an enormous weight in determining whether you live or die.

But it’s not just in the ‘underdeveloped world’ that the lethal nature of capitalist society takes its toll. The seriousness of ‘global warming’ has been emphasised by the appearance of a mile-wide stretch of water at the North Pole. In the summer a heatwave with previously unheard-of temperatures hit parts of the Middle East and the Balkans. In Rumania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Turkey and Greece dozens of people died. Certainly, the heat was exceptional - contributing to record numbers of forest fires across the region, and states of emergency declared in many parts of Greece, for example. But the reason the heatwave was fatal for so many is attributable to conditions in the cities, the extent of pollution and living in low-cost buildings erected with no consideration for the climate. Earthquakes in Turkey have also demonstrated the inadequacy of accommodation built on the cheap.

The US has also been affected by forest fires this summer - the worst for 50 years, with some 11 states in the west affected and 6 million acres destroyed. Even with 20,000 civilian and 2,000 military firefighters, with 150 aircraft, in an operation costing $15 million a day, there are some fires that they just can’t put out and are relying on the snow that will come later in the year. A particularly alarming demonstration of the potential for the damage to escalate occurred when fire raced through Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington. Hanford, a former site for the production of nuclear weapons, has the largest store of nuclear and hazardous waste in the US. The fires got dangerously close to stores of waste from plutonium production for nuclear weapons. An emergency was declared until the wind changed and the flames went in a different direction.

Above all, when you look at the state of the capitalist world, it is the proliferation of wars which shows the system’s fundamental nature. The wars in Angola, in the Congo (where half a dozen countries are involved), the wars between impoverished Ethiopia and Eritrea, in Sierra Leone and many other parts of Africa, in Afghanistan, Kashmir, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and across Asia (where both India and Pakistan now have nuclear weapstan now have nuclear weapons), in the Middle East, against the Kurds in several countries, in Chechnya and elsewhere in the Caucasus - these are just some of the multiplicity of current wars, places where ‘peace’ is only a pause between conflicts. The big powers, far from being neutral or ‘humanitarian’ forces, are often caught red-handed at the heart of the barbarity. In Iraq, over the last decade over 1.5 million have died as a result of the imposition of sanctions. Since December 1998 the US and Britain have continued to bomb Iraq on an almost daily basis. Britain alone has averaged 10 tonnes of bombs a week over that period. The results of the ‘humanitarian’ intervention in Kosovo are also plain to see: an economic and ecological calamity in ex-Yugoslavia and beyond, and no end to the mutual slaughter between ‘ethnic’ gangs, each one backed openly or secretly by the different occupying forces vying to impose their influence in the strategically important Balkans area.

A society falling apart

These, then are aspects of the current state of capitalist society. Capitalism does not just mean the buying and selling of commodities, but all the social relationships that flow from a system of production based on the exploitation of wage on the exploitation of wage labour. Once a factor of progress and unification of the world economy, capitalism has been historically obsolete since the early part of the 20th century. Its historical senility has been demonstrated by the replacement of the old business cycle of boom and bust with the devastating spiral of world economic crises and world wars that began in 1914.

After the period of reconstruction that began in 1945, capitalism plunged into a new global economic crisis at the end of the 1960s. This crisis has been deepening inexorably for decade after decade, posing once again the historical alternative between war or revolution. With the ruling class unable to impose its final solution, a mobilisation for world-wide inter-imperialist war, and the working class not yet able to mount a revolutionary offensive against capitalism, there is a social stalemate, which has pushed capitalism into a state of decomposition. It is this falling apart of capitalist society, this descent into chaos, that lies behind the increase in imperialist antagonisms, and the greater frequency and more debilitating effects of each successive disaster.

The state is the main enemy

Capitalism, therefore, has not just passed its sell-by date - the assed its sell-by date - the stench of its decomposition is becoming noxious. In this process the capitalist state acts as a force to try and maintain the rule of the exploiting class. It is the state which is at the centre of all economic, social and military questions.

In the name of ‘anti-capitalism’ and the ‘campaign against globalisation’, people all over the world, in Seattle last November, internationally on May Day and on September 24 in Prague, have been encouraged to protest against institutions such as the World Trade Organisation or the International Monetary Fund. These bodies undeniably have their place in the network of bodies in which the ruling class defend their system of exploitation and fight among themselves for the spoils. But the fundamental weapon of their domination remains the capitalist state. Supposedly ‘supranational’ bodies like the WTO or IMF function either as tools of the biggest capitalist states or as battle grounds for their rivalries.

In opposition to capitalist class rule there is only one potential force - the working class. And the power of the working class lies in its position at the heart of the capitalist system, as the class which creates the vast bulk of value in society. When workers strike they take away the labour power ey take away the labour power that capitalism depends on for its very existence. When workers struggle they immediately come up against the state power of the bourgeoisie. When workers discuss their struggles and how to take them forward there are the beginnings of an independent class consciousness. The campaign against ‘globalisation’ is a protest by a variety of different forces, with a range of different class interests - including some for whom ‘anti-capitalism’ really means support for the nation state and bourgeois democracy against ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘undemocratic’ bodies like the WTO. The working class, by contrast, has no country, no nation state to defend, and it is the only social force which has a direct interest in destroying the capitalist state, throwing down all borders and creating a world-wide human community. In this issue of WR there is an article on the mass strikes in Poland 20 years ago. Such struggles give a glimpse of the potential power of the working class. As an example it is still absolutely valid today, and for the future.

WR

Revolutionaries are anything but indifferent to the atrocious end of these young conscripts, trapped in a steel coffin at the bottom of the sea, just as they are not indifferent to the tragedies which are unfolding all over the planet, the massacres and famines, the death of refugees by drowning or asphyxiation, or all the other manifestations of the barbarity of dying capitalism. But they are also required to keep a cool head in order to understand the messages which the bourgeois media try to instil in the minds of the exploited, messages aimed at getting them to accept this barbarity. In particular, they have to denounce the attempt to convince the workers of the most advanced countries that they are in many ways lucky because "it’s much worse elsewhere, and above all in the former ‘socialist paradises’".

Here are just some of the messages they have broadcast this ages they have broadcast this time.

First message: "The Russian fleet constitutes a huge threat to the environment. This is further proof of the chaotic and criminal character of the ‘socialist’ regime which used to run Russia".

Quite so, but it’s not just the Russian navy that’s falling apart. The British navy has at least 11 nuclear submarines waiting to be decommissioned, rusting away in the Rosyth and Devonport dockyards. It must wish it could use the old method of decommissioning used in the 50s and 60s - that of scuttling them off the coast of Japan and leaving them to rot on the ocean floor! Indeed, the whole nuclear industry internationally has been one disaster after another, from Three Mile Island in the US, to Sellafield in Britain, to the recent accident in Tokaimura in Japan. There can be no greater testament to the destructive and wasteful nature of decadent capitalism than the use of nuclear technology.

However, these nuclear submarines, stuffed with radioactive materials and falling into decay, are just a caricature of a system which is incapable of averting catastrophes. Russia has indeed had its fair share of disasters, from Chernobyl to the recent fire in the Moscow TV tower, but the long-term damage to the but the long-term damage to the environment, in particular the greenhouse effect and the hole in the ozone layer, is largely down to the most advanced countries, beginning with the USA. We can see how concerned the advanced countries are about the effects of their military adventures on the Iraqi or Yugoslav populations who ‘benefited’ from their bombs and their low-grade uranium shells in 1991 and 1999. The NATO bombing of Yugoslav oil-refineries and chemical plants has left the river Danube as one of the most polluted in the world, constituting a menace to many other Eastern European countries.

Second message: "The inability of the Russian authorities to rescue the sailors trapped in the submarine shows how little they care for human life. It’s different over here".

To support this idea, there was much stress on the fact that it was Western divers who succeeded where the Russians failed – in entering the Kursk. On French television there was an interview with a French submariner who explained how he and his comrades would have been able to save themselves if the same accident had happened in their ship.

It’s true that the Russian authorities don’t care a jot about the lives of the young workers in uniform mobf the young workers in uniform mobilised to ‘defend the motherland’. The example of Chechnya illustrates this quite clearly. But they are by no means alone in this. After all, the British and Norwegian divers who went down there are not military men specialising in looking after the safety of the sailors of the war fleet, but employees of an enterprise which specialises in the maintenance of oil platforms, an enterprise which equips and trains them in the interests of profit. For their part, the French authorities didn’t express a great deal of compassion when in January 1968 and March 1970 the sinking of the submarines Minerva and Eurydice left a total of 108 dead.

Third message: "The Russian authorities have shown in this affair that they are having a hard time breaking with the methods of secrets and lies inherited from the ‘Communist’ period. It’s totally different in the truly democratic countries".

On British television there was an interview with a member the British rescue team who explained how they could have saved lives if it wasn’t for the delays caused by the secrecy of the Russian military. This takes the biscuit. The culture of secrecy is not at all exclusive to the Russian leadership or the former ‘Red Armyor the former ‘Red Army’. It won’t be until 2018 that the results of the inquiries into the above two French submarine disasters will be released! This secrecy is typical of all military institutions, whether they belong to ‘totalitarian’ or ‘democratic’ states. Do we have to be reminded of the flood of lies which washed over us at the time of the Gulf war in 1991? This was supposed to be a ‘clean war’ with its ‘surgical strikes’, but in fact this was a very dirty war in which thousands of Iraqi soldiers were buried alive, a war which experimented with weapons even more cruel than the gas used by Saddam against the Kurds. This time it was the turn of the NATO military to experiment on their own troops as well. The investigations into ‘Gulf War syndrome’ have also come up against military secrecy and so far the cause of the syndrome still remains a mystery.

On the question of military ‘accidents’ we give the floor to a NATO general following the bombing of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999: "For the cock-ups, we had a rather efficient tactic. Most often, we knew the exact causes and consequences of these errors. But in order to anaesthetise opinion, we said that we would carry out an inquiry and we only revealed the truth 15 days later, when they no lo15 days later, when they no longer interested anybody. Opinion can be worked upon like anything else" (Le Nouvel Observateur, 1/7/99). What the Russian authorities have shown is that they have a lot to learn from the leaders of the great democracies, who are specialists in the manipulation of public opinion.

The cynicism, cruelty and barbarity revealed by the Kursk affair are not the monopoly of the regime which presently governs Russia, which is indeed a worthy heir of the one which ran the USSR before 1990. They are characteristics of the whole of present-day capitalist society, a society in open decomposition, subject to growing chaos and posing an ever-greater threat to the survival of humanity. Fabienne.

After the announcement of increases in meat prices workers responded in many plants with spontaneous strikes. On July 1st the workers of Tczew near Gdansk and the Warsaw suburb of Ursus downed tools. At Ursus, general assemblies were held, a strike committee was elected and common demands were put forward. During the following days the strikes continued to spread: Warsaw, Lodz, Gdansk...

By making quick concessions through pay increases the government tried to prevent a further extension of the movement. In mid-July the workers of Lublin went on strike. Lublin is located on the railway line which links Russia to East Germany. In 1980 this was a vital supply line for the Russian troops in East Germany. The workers’ demands were: no repression against striking workers, withdrawal of theing workers, withdrawal of the police from the factories, wage increases and free elections of trade unions.

While in some places the workers resumed work, in other enterprises more workers joined the strikes. At the end of July the government hoped to extinguish the strikes by using the tactic of negotiating with the workers factory by factory. But on August 14th the movement was on the rise again: the tram drivers of Warsaw and the shipbuilders of Gdansk came out on strike. And in other towns many more workers joined the movement.

What made the workers strong ...

The workers had drawn the lessons of the struggles of 1970-71 and 1976. They saw that the official trade union apparatus was part of the stalinist state and always took sides with the government whenever the workers came forward with their demands. This is why it was vital that the workers in the mass strikes of 1980 took the initiatives themselves. They did not wait for any instructions from above, but came together and held meetings in order to decide themselves about the time and focus of their struggles. This could be seen clearest at Gdansk-Gdynia-Zopot, i.e. the industrial beltopot, i.e. the industrial belt on the Baltic Sea. At the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk alone, some 20,000 were employed.

Common demands were put forward at mass meetings. A strike committee was formed. At the beginning, economic demands were put into the foreground. The workers were determined: they did not want a repetition of the bloody crushing of the struggles as had happened in 1970 and 1976. In an industrial centre such as Gdansk-Gdynia-Zopot it was obvious that all the workers would have to unite in order to make the balance of forces tip in their favour. An inter-factory strike committee (MKS) was formed, which was composed of 400 members, two delegates for each factory. During the second half of August some 800-1000 delegates met. By forming an inter-factory strike committee the usual dispersal of forces was overcome.

Now the workers could face capital in a united way. Every day there were mass meetings at the Lenin shipyards. Loudspeakers were installed to allow the workers to follow the discussions of the strike committees and the negotiations with the government delegation. Shortly afterwards microphones were installed outside of the meeting room of the MKS, so that workers attending the mass meetings could directly intervene in the discussions of the MKS. In the evenings the delegates . In the evenings the delegates – mostly equipped with cassette recorders to record the debates – went back to their plants and presented the discussions and the situation to factory assemblies, giving back their mandate to the general assemblies.

This allowed for the largest number of workers to participate in the struggles. The delegates had to hand back their mandate, they were recallable at any time, and the general assemblies were always sovereign. All of these practices are in total opposition to the way unions function.

As soon as the workers from Gdansk-Gynia and Zopot joined, the movement spread to other cities. In order to sabotage contact between workers, the government cut the telephone lines on August 16th. The workers immediately threatened further extension of the movement, if the government did not re-establish phone lines immediately. The government gave in.

The general assembly of the workers decided to set up a workers’ militia. Previously consumption of alcohol was widespread with workers, it was collectively decided to prohibit alcohol consumption. Workers were aware that they needed a clear head to confront the governmentar head to confront the government.

A government delegation met the workers in order to negotiate. They met in front of the entire general assembly and not behind closed doors. The workers demanded a new composition of the government delegation because their leaders were only from the lower ranks. The government gave in.

When the government threatened the workers of Gdansk with repression, the railway workers of Lublin declared that if any of the workers in Gdansk were physically attacked or hurt in any way, they would paralyse the strategically important railway line between Russia and East Germany. The government grasped what was at stake. Its war machine would have been hit at a most sensitive spot – and during the Cold War this would have been fatal.

In almost all the major cities workers were mobilised. More than half a million workers, they were the only force in the country capable of confronting the government. What gave them their strength was:

• the rapid extension of the movement, rather than getting worn down in violent confrontations as had happened in 1970 and 1976,
• self-organisation, that is, workers taking the initiative themselves instead of counting on trade instead of counting on trade unions,
• holding mass meetings where they could unite their forces and exercise control over the movement, allowing for the biggest possible mass participation and negotiation with the government in front of all the workers.

The extension of the movement was the best weapon of solidarity – instead of only making declarations, the workers were going into the struggles themselves. This made it possible for a different balance of forces to develop. Since the workers struggled so massively, the government could not impose its repression. During the strikes in the summer, when the workers were confronting the government in a united manner head on, not a single worker got beaten up, let alone killed. The Polish bourgeoisie realised that it would have to weaken the workers from inside the movement.

The workers at Gdansk demanded that the concessions the government had granted to them would apply to workers in the rest of the country. They wanted to oppose any divisions and offered their solidarity to the other workers.

The working class acted as a central point of reference. Apart from other workers who went to Gdansk in order to establish a direct contact with the striking worontact with the striking workers, both farmers and students came to the factory gates in order to receive the strike bulletins and other information. The working class was the leading force in society.

The reaction of the bourgeoisie – isolation

The danger that the struggles in Poland constituted for the bourgeoisie could be seen in their reactions in the neighbouring countries.

The borders between Poland and East Germany, Czechoslovakia and the USSR were sealed off immediately. Previously Polish workers had travelled every day to East Germany, above all to Berlin, to go shopping (in Poland there were even fewer goods in the shops than in East Germany). But the bourgeoisie wanted to isolate the working class. Direct contact between the workers of different countries was to be prevented at all costs. And there was every reason to take such a measure! In the neighbouring Czech coal mining area of Ostrava the miners also went on strike – following the Polish example. In the Romanian mining districts, in Russian Togliattigrad the workers also followed the Polish road. Even if there were no direct strikes as a reaction to the Polish workers’ struggles, the workers in many countries in the west took up the slogans of their class be slogans of their class brothers and sisters in Poland. In Turin in September 1980 the workers shouted: "Let’s struggle as the Polish workers did".

Because of its scope and its methods the mass strikes in Poland had a massive impact on workers in other countries. Through their mass strikes the workers showed – as they had already done in 1953 in East Germany, in 1956 in Poland and Hungary, 1970 and 1976 in Poland again – that the so-called ‘socialist’ countries were in reality state capitalist governments, enemies of the working class. Despite the isolation imposed around the Polish borders, despite the Iron Curtain, the Polish working class, as soon as it took action, functioned as a massive pole of reference with a world wide impact. Precisely at the height of the cold war, during the war in Afghanistan, the workers in Poland sent an important signal: they opposed the arms race and the war economy by their class struggle. The question of the unification of the workers between East and West, even if it was not yet concretely posed, resurfaced as a perspective.

How the movement was sabotaged

The movement was able to develop such a strength because it spread quickly and because the workers themsel and because the workers themselves took the initiative. Extension beyond the confines of individual factories, general assemblies, revocability of delegates – all these measures contributed to their strength. While, in the beginning, there was no union influence in the movement, the members of the newly founded ‘free and independent’ trade union, ‘Solidarnosc’, soon started to hold back the movement.

Initially the negotiations took place in the open, but it was soon proposed that ‘experts’ were needed in order to work out the details with the government. Step by step the workers could no longer follow and participate in the negotiations. The loud speakers in the halls and in the ship yards, which transmitted the negotiations, no longer worked because of some ‘technical’ problems. Lech Walesa was crowned as leader of the new movement. Solidarnosc (1), the new enemy of the workers, had managed to infiltrate the movement and started its job of sabotage. Solidarnosc completely distorted the workers’ demands. Whereas initially economic and political demands were in the forefront, they now pushed for the recognition of the ‘free’ trade unions, with economic and political demands only to be second on the list. They followed the old tactics: defence of the trade unions, insteaence of the trade unions, instead of defence of the workers interests.

Previously workers in Poland had been clear that the official unions took sides with the state, but now many workers believed that the 10 million strong Solidarnosc was not corrupt and would defend their interests. The workers in Poland had not yet gone through the experience of the workers in the west in dealing with ‘free trade unions’.

Walesa promised that "we want to create a second Japan and establish prosperity for everyone" and many workers, due to their inexperience with the reality of capitalism in the west, had illusions in such a possibility. Solidarnosc, with Walesa at its head, quickly took over the role of playing the fireman for capitalism, trying to extinguish workers struggles. In autumn 1980, workers, protesting against the Gdansk agreement, went on strike again. They had seen that, with a ‘free’ trade union on their side, their material situation was getting even worse. Solidarnosc was already beginning to show its true face. Soon after the end of the mass strikes Lech Walesa was being flown around in an army helicopter, taken to striking workers to urge them to abandon their strikes: "We don’t need any more strikes because they push our country into acause they push our country into an abyss, we need calm".

From the very beginning Solidarnosc sabotaged the movement. Whenever possible it snatched away the initiative from the workers, prevented them from starting new strikes. In the summer of 1980 the mass strike movement could reach such proportions because the Polish bourgeoisie, as well as the stalinist regimes in the rest of Eastern Europe, were ill equipped politically for confronting the class other than with repression. This was unlike the west, where trade unions and bourgeois democracy play the role of a buffer. In the context of political backwardness in the capitalist class in Eastern Europe, and in the context of the Cold War, the Polish bourgeoisie was very suspicious of Solidarnosc. However, it was not their subjective feeling, but the objective role which Solidarnosc was to play against the workers, that was decisive. Thus, in 1981 there was a growing recognition in the stalinist government that Solidarnosc – albeit an ‘alien’ body in the stalinist set-up – could play a useful role.

The balance of forces was changing.

In December 1981 the Polish bourgeoisie could finally start repression against the workers. Solidarnosc had done its best to disarm the worone its best to disarm the workers politically – preparing their defeat. While, during the summer of 1980, the workers had not been attacked because of the self-initiative and the extension of the struggles, and because there was no union to disarm the workers, in December 1981 more than 1,200 workers were killed, and thousands of workers were imprisoned or driven into exile. This military repression took place following an intensive co-ordination between the ruling class in the East and the West.

After the strikes in 1980 the western bourgeoisie offered Solidarnosc all sorts of assistance, in order to strengthen them against the workers. Campaigns of ‘assistance for Poland’ were started, and cheap credits from the IMF were granted, in order to prevent the idea spreading that workers in the west could follow the Polish example. On Dec. 13th 1981, the day when repression was unleashed, the West German social-democratic Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and the arch-stalinist GDR leader Erich Honecker met outside Berlin and pretended not to know anything about what was going on. However, in reality, not only had they given their backing to repression, they had also passed on their own experience of confronting the working class to the ruting the working class to the ruling class in the East.

In the summer of 1980 it was not possible for revolutionaries to intervene within Poland due to the sealing off of the borders. But in September 1980 the ICC distributed an international leaflet in more than a dozen countries, which also circulated in Poland thanks to the help of some contacts. In our later interventions in Poland, the ICC always criticised the illusions of the Polish workers. As revolutionaries, we saw that our job was not to share the illusions of the workers, but to warn workers in Poland about their lack of experience in confronting ‘radical’ unions, telling them about the experience of the workers in the west. Even if our positions on the union question was not very popular in Poland, forcing us to ‘swim against the tide’, events proved us to be right.

One year later, in December 1981, Solidarnosc showed what a terrible defeat it had been able to impose on the workers. Subsequently, Lech Walesa became President of Poland. This was an expression of the confidence he enjoyed from the church and the western countries. He had already been an excellent defender of the interests of the Polish state in his capacity as leader of Solidarnosc.

The historical significance of the struggles

In the 20 years that have since passed, many of the workers who took part in the strike movement have retired, become unemployed or been forced into emigration. But their experience is of inestimable value for the whole working class. The ICC wrote in 1980 that "the struggles in Poland represent a great step forward in the world wide struggle of the proletariat, which is why these struggles are the most important for half a century." (Resolution on the Class Struggle, 4th Congress of the ICC, 1980, International Review 26). They were the highpoint of an international wave of struggles, the lessons of which we underlined in our report on the class struggle in 1999 at our 13th congress: "Historic events on this scale have long term consequences. The mass strike in Poland provided definitive proof that the class struggle is the only force that can compel the bourgeoisie to set aside its imperialist rivalries. In particular, it showed that the Russian bloc – historically condemned, by its weakened position, to be the ‘aggressor’ in any war – was incapable of respon– was incapable of responding to its growing economic crisis with a policy of military expansion. Clearly the workers of the Eastern bloc countries (and of Russia itself) were totally unreliable as cannon fodder in any future war for the glory of ‘socialism’. Thus the mass strike in Poland was a potent factor in the eventual implosion of the Russian imperialist bloc." (IR 99). David.

(1) Even if the foundation of a ‘free’ trade union can only be explained by the illusions and the lack of experience of the workers in Poland itself, there is no doubt that organised efforts by the KOR (a partially pro-western oppositional group) were only possible because of help from the west for the systematic construction of Solidarnosc. Despite the enmity between the two imperialist blocs, there was a unity against the working class.

In Britain, during the recent protests over taxes on petrol it was interesting to see how papers such as the Sun and Daily Mail became quite keen on the ‘direct action’ undertaken by hauliers, farmers, and cab drivers. When a man appeared on TV saying, "I’ve never been on a picket line before, mind you, I’ve driven through plenty", there was a hint as to why the right-wing press liked such ‘militancy’, and why Tory leader, William Hague saluted them as "fine, upstanding citizens."

Workers always foot the bill

As with any other social question, the fuel protests can only be understood in the framework of the struggle between different classes trying to defend their different interests. When it comes to the fuel blockade, the first idea to knock on the head is that those involved were ‘workers’ (an idea most notably put forward by the Sun). Although engaged in different parts of the economy, the one thing that the protesters had in common was that they did not depend on waged labour but were self-employed, the owners of small businesses, what marxists call the petit-bourgeoisie. They are not part of the ruling bourgeoisie, not part of the exploited proletariat, but also not capable of acting independently of the two main classes in capitalist society, except for impotent actions such as terrorism.

It has been well established that the oil companies made no effort to distribute petrol. This is despite their past records where they have made every effort to keep petrol stations supplied during any circumstances, particularly during workers’ struggles. The example of the miners’ strike of 1984-5 is the best known of many. In the present case the refinery bosses didn’t seek police help; they didn’t sue or press injunctions against anyone. On the contrary, the fuel protesters were actually allowed to use buildings in refineries to hold meetings. Such courtesy is, of course, never extended to workers in struggle!

The reason that the oil companies were happy for the protests to take place is that a reduction in duty on petrol would potentially be a boost for their profits, either through increases in sales at a lower price, or sales at the same price where a higher proportion goes to the oil company.

Fuel protests have taken place in many parts of Europe, regardless of the different levels of petrol tax. There have also been a variety of different responses by the different governments. Some have made concessions, some delayed taking action and some refused to acknowledge any demands. For workers it is important to recognise that there is no government response that can be in workers interests. Every government wants revenue. If it cuts one tax it will either have to find the funds elsewhere, or cut services somewhere. Either way it is the working class that will suffer, either through the loss of a state-funded service, or through a new tax arrangement that will fall on workers one way or another. It’s the same with oil prices. Small businesses might complain at their fuel costs, but increases always get passed onto the consumer, most of whom are workers. As with taxes, when prices fluctuate, it is always the working class, which has to play the bill, as capitalists, big or small, defend their interests.

The working class still exists

The fuel crisis has brought to the surface some real tensions between different parts of the bourgeoisie, but what they all have in common is the desire to mystify the working class.

In opposition to all the propaganda about the ‘fine upstanding’ protesters, some of the unions and the left have all but labelled them as agents of fascism. John Monks of the TUC gave the example of the truckers in Chile in 1973 who, as he saw it, had played their role in ushering in the Pinochet regime. The reason for such talk of ‘right wing plots’ is to try and get workers to rally round the Labour government and the British capitalist state. Bill Morris of the TGWU gave valid examples of collusion between fuel protesters and the oil companies, and then proceeded to complain that the police hadn’t done enough to break up blockades or prevent slow moving convoys. Again, here is the attempt to get workers to identify with the repressive capitalist state of their class enemies.

Also participating in the hymns of praise for the state have been the various leftist groups. Typically demanding that the oil companies be nationalised, so that the profits of the oil companies can be used for cheap, decent transport, they are asking workers to put their confidence in the capitalist state that is the central instrument of the ruling class’s domination.

What all the elements in the fuel protests campaign had in common was the way they attempted to convince the working class that it doesn’t exist. The farmers and hauliers were presented as heroic figures that could bring the country to a halt, and maybe even get cheaper petrol for everyone. The protests were put forward as though they were a real force, in comparison to the workers’ strikes in the past that had ‘never achieved anything’. The working class was asked to see itself as just a lot of consumers, who take their place in queues for petrol, as individuals alongside members of the petit-bourgeoisie and other social strata.

While the right champions the petit-bourgeoisie, as a way of hiding the role of the oil companies, the left champions the state, whether Bill Morris and its repressive arm, or the leftists and their proposals for an increased role for the state in the economy. While divided in their rhetoric, they are united in their concern that workers should never have a consciousness of their class position within capitalism, and that the working class can only advance its interests with a struggle that is independent of other classes. When workers fight they will find that hauliers will try to get through workers’ picket lines, and that the capitalist state has police and an army to defend the interests of the exploiters against the struggle of the working class.

Car, 25/09/00.

What is a marxist party like the German Communist Workers Party of the 1920s (the KAPD), a sympathising party of the Third International, doing on an anarchist family tree? "The positive legacy of the left/council communists must be their theoretical breakthroughs in their analysis of the Trade Unions and parliamentary democracy and in their understanding of the centrality of working class self-organisation in the revolutionary project." ('In the tradition, Part 1', Organise 52, Winter '99/'00)

We read this in a continuing history by an English anarchist group, the Anarchist Federation, which includes the Communist Left (1), amongst others, in an attempt to trace its roots. It may seem strange that anarchists, who, particularly over the last ten years, have been joining in the deafening media chorus that equates Stalinism with communism, and marxism with the gulag, are now finding marxists to identify with. But anarchist attempts to associate itself with marxism, or, claims to have married marxism with the eternal ideals of anarchism have been going on for the past 150 years of the workers movement. When Bakunin declared himself a disciple of Marx and the Ist International (before stabbing both in the back), he was not the last of an ignoble tradition.

More recently, with the current vogue for a ‘new revolutionary movement’, syntheses of anarchism and marxism are being proclaimed anew (see International Review 102 [32] ‘Is it possible to reconcile anarchism and marxism?’) Some might say that we left communists should be grateful for these anarchist compliments to our political ancestors, and encourage reconciliation between all those who are against the capitalist system.

Without wanting to seem bad mannered, we don’t believe it is possible to defend the political positions and activity of left communism within an anarchist perspective.

Without marxism left communism is impossible

Of course these anarchists don’t defend the left communists as part of the marxist tradition, within which the left communists saw and still see themselves. Nor do they defend all of the left communists (no mention is made of the Italian Communist Party led by the left around Amadeo Bordiga in the 1920s). They rather defend the minority of ‘good’ marxists against the majority of ‘bad’ ones: "The vast majority of marxists (social democrats, Leninists) have paid lip service to the motto of the First International." (Organise, 52).

In fact the conviction that communism is the self-liberation of the working class emerges with marxism, not with anarchism. While Marx and Engels and the Communist League were elaborating the historical and economic existence and objectives of the working class in the 1840s, one of the forefathers of anarchism, Max Stirner, would only recognise the self-liberation of the ego. Pierre Joseph Proudhon, another early figure of anarchism, counselled against strikes and political action by workers. While Bakunin declared himself for collective action and class struggle, his real level of adherence to the motto of the Ist International was limited as, in practice, he fostered a conspiracy of a hierarchical elite, and tried to destroy the International.

The AF follow in these illustrious footsteps, because, for them, in reality, the working class as a historic class with common political aims doesn’t exist, it is instead a vehicle along with others of the eternal principles of anarchism: "If we as Anarchist Communists still see the working class movement as decisive it is not because of its supposed capacities as an emancipatory class but because workers are those who produce the wealth and are at the heart of the mechanism of production of capital." How can the working class emancipate itself if it is not an ‘emancipatory class’: a class with brawn but no brain?

We can agree with AF that the anarchists have never betrayed the motto of the 1st International, because they only ever understood it as a code for the unlimited freedom of the individual. Loyalty to this abstraction poses no problem because it can never have any contact with reality. Kropotkin, the ‘anarcho-trenchist’, or the French anarchist CGT could support the proletarian slaughter in the First World War, the Spanish CNT could join a capitalist government in 1936, but the principles remain inviolate.

Anarchism can’t defend the left communist legacy

The political positions that the AF supposedly admire in the left communists therefore could only come from the marxist movement, its acquisitions and the lessons of its mistakes.

Dictatorship of the proletariat

The AF say that they prefer the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ to the dictatorship of the party. But, seeing as this fundamental understanding of the workers’ movement does not appear in the AF’s ‘Aims and Principles’ or in their ‘Manifesto for the Millennium’, it is reasonable to suppose that this is ‘lip service’ and that, in reality, they retain basic anarchist prejudices against this essential political action. The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is an expression that encapsulates the main objective of the working class on its road to liberation: the seizing of political power and the smashing of the old state machine and the political suppression of the bourgeoisie.

Substitutionism and parliamentarism

The KAPD made a critique of the substitutionist conception of the party. If they criticised ‘leadership politics’ it wasn’t out of anti-authoritarianism, but because at the time in the early 1920s this phrase meant the parliamentarism of the Social Democracy and the subjection of the membership and the workers to the opportunism of the parliamentary caucus. The KAPD were for the proletarian political party acting as a vanguard of the working class. Not in parliament: but in the workers’ councils. They argued that the historical conditions and the experience of the working class demanded a revision of the social democratic conception of the party, and a rejection of the fight for reforms through parliament that in an earlier time could strengthen the proletariat (which anarchists abstained from).

The anarchist objection to parliament and substitutionism is a moral and eternal one, related to their anxiety over ‘authority’, although in practice, as we will see below, anarchists have often fallen into electoralism. But they are also against any party, which includes the KAPD, that intends to be the vanguard of the working class.

But if, according to the AF, the working class is not ‘emancipatory’ by itself, then revolutionary consciousness must of necessity come from outside this class and act in its place. Anarchism is no stranger to substitutionism as the history of ‘propaganda by the deed’ demonstrates.

Trade unions

Nor have the AF based themselves on the theoretical breakthroughs of the KAPD on the unions. After stating that the unions can’t be revolutionary organs, the seventh AF principle of its ‘Aims and Principles’ reads: "....we do not argue for people to leave unions until they are made irrelevant by the revolutionary event. The union is a common point of departure for many workers. Rank and file initiatives may strengthen us in the battle for anarchist-communism. What’s important is that we organise ourselves collectively, arguing for workers to control struggles themselves."

The KAPD was implacably opposed to the existing unions (and called for workers to leave them) not because they were non-revolutionary, which was true in the 19th century, but because the decadence of capitalism had turned them into counter-revolutionary weapons of the state against working class struggle. The trade unions could say of AF’s ‘opposition’ to them: ‘who needs friends when you have ‘enemies’ like this?’.

Organisation

The theoretical coherence of left communism can only be defended by a coherent unified organisation. In contrast this is the anarchist view of organisation taken from a statement by the ACF (forerunner of the AF) in a dispute with others about prisoner support: "as a non-hierarchical federation of anarchist communists we work together in solidarity but we cannot order what our members do like a Leninist party would. So, if on the one hand an individual member wants to give unconditional support to a prisoner while another gives other prisoners higher priority or refuses to support a particular prisoner that is up to them....[x]’s fight for freedom ....and neither you nor we can compel them to say why. Freedom not to speak is as much a basic tenet of the free society as intimidation and coercion to tell all is of the police state." (Organise, 51).

On that basis a member of the ACF is free to state that they are not supporting. In other words every one does what they want. Not only that: everyone has the right not to justify it to their comrades. No solidarity can be constructed in such an organisation, no one can rely on anyone else: there are no obligatory rules that everyone voluntarily adheres to. The abstract principle of individual freedom is used against the collective solidarity that unity demands. The demand for transparency, without which real common action and clarity is impossible, is equated with the repression of the police state.

The only glue that can keep such an organisation together is that of friendship, which creates an informal hierarchy of its own and reduces the platform to window dressing.

Roots in leftism

AF’s real roots are not in left communism, or even partially in it, but in leftism, the radical wing of the capitalist left. They describe it themselves in an earlier history of the origins of their organisation. (Organise! No. 42, Spring 1996). They emerged from the debacle of the various anarchist communist organisations of the 1970s, who entered almost en masse into Trotskyist groups. In 1974 most of the Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists "ended up in the horrific authoritarian Healyite outfit, the Workers Revolutionary Party, whilst others joined IS (the precursor of the Socialist Workers Party)" (p17).

The remains of the ORA then formed the Anarchist Workers Association in 1975, but in 1977 an overtly leftist tendency expelled the others and reformed as the Libertarian Communist Group which later entered an electoral front with the Trotskyist International Marxist Group called Socialist Unity. The latter put forward the slogan: ‘Vote Labour, but Build a Socialist Alternative’. Eventually the LCG fused with another leftist group Big Flame in 1980, which dissolved when its members entered the Labour Party. The AF was formed from veterans of the ORA/AWA/LCG and a split from the SWP that produced the magazine ‘Virus’.

The degree to which the AF has broken with its leftist past can be measured by their position on the trade unions that is virtually indistinguishable from the typical leftist approach.

The degree to which it really adheres to left communist traditions, and the sincerity of its motives for claiming to do so, can be understood by its implacable hostility to left communist organisations. In the case of the ICC, for example, the ACF once wrote to us to say that we were not ‘welcome’ at their meetings. So while they claim that "theoretical diversity has been a strength in our movement" and "we believe debate is vital" (Beyond Resistance) (2), this does not include the threat of left communists intervening at their meetings.

Anarchism doesn’t have any independent history. Its eternal principles - liberty, equality, fraternity - originally borrowed from the bourgeoisie, recognise no historical context, and no grounding in the maturation of an historic class. It originally expresses the instability of the radical petit-bourgeoisie that looks uncertainly to an imaginary future, while harking back to a nostalgic golden age.

The history of the twentieth century shows that anarchism is quite capable of reconciling itself with the left wing of capital, but organically incapable of recognising the theoretical acquisitions of the workers’ movement that are defended by the marxists of the communist left. The AF tries to claim the KAPD as part of the heritage of anarchism. This attempt at misrepresenting the contribution of part of the communist left marks out the parasitism of the AF in relation to the revolutionary political organisations of the working class.

Como

Note

1) The term Communist Left comes from the 1920s when this trend was part of a larger movement: the Communist International. Today the rest of this movement has long since passed into the camp of capital, but the historical name remains to identify our current.

2) Beyond Resistance, a Revolutionary Manifesto for the Millennium. "The emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself.", whilst acting to negate it in practice. "Despite all manner of confusions, tactical dead-ends and betrayals, the revolutionary anarchists have remained loyal to it...[the KAPD] rejected the idea of ‘leadership politics’, called for the dictatorship of the proletariat, not the party, and opposed the idea of ‘injecting’ consciousness into the working class from the outside...." (Organise! No. 52)

The crisis of capitalism is making living conditions worse for virtually everyone, causing a great deal of anger among workers and other sections of the population. This growing discontent has been channelled into a number of protest demonstrations. In particular we have seen the ‘anti-capitalist’ demonstrations outside the World Economic Forum in Melbourne and the World Bank and IMF in Prague; the opposition protests against Milosevic in Serbia; and the blockades of oil refineries in Britain and various European countries.

These are the images of struggle presented to the working class for the 21st century. Socialist Worker, other Trotskyist organisations and some left wing Labour figures are particularly enthusiastic about the Prague anti-globalisation protests. But how do they measure up to the real needs of the class struggle in the coming period?

‘Anti-globalisation’: an ideology that serves national capitalism

The Melbourne and Prague protests, with their echo in cities around the world, claim to be internationalist and anti-capitalist. The rationale of these demonstrations is the myth of globalisation, which blames multinational companies and organisations such as the IMF for all the effects of the capitalist crisis today. The truth is that capitalism - which actually became a global system around a hundred years ago - is fundamentally based on competition between national units. The strongest economic powers, particularly the US, but also Japan and the most industrialised European states, are able to impose trade tariffs on imports and demand free trade for their exports, getting the best for themselves and pushing the worst effects of the crisis onto their weaker competitors. The IMF and WTO are among the forums in which this takes place, functioning either as tools of the most powerful capitalist states or as battle grounds for their rivalries.

To focus anger at the effects of capitalism onto the IMF, WTO and World Bank, or onto the multinational companies, inevitably means turning to the nation state for protection, in other words turning to the most important weapon of capitalist rule. For instance when Naomi Klein, author of ‘No Logo’ told the counter-summit in Prague "the directors of the IMF want governments to slash taxes, to privatise and to deregulate in the interests of the multinational corporations" (Socialist Worker 30 Sept) she was asking us to support national government and nationalised industry against foreign private capital. But all capitalist bosses, local or multinational, private or state, exploit the working class. And they all do so according to the conditions imposed by the world market.

Support for bourgeois democracy

Last November, the running battles with the police in Seattle were held up as the example of ‘anti-capitalist’ struggle. This time there has been much more concentration on the need for democracy.

The power of the multinationals and of the IMF and World Bank comes in for much criticism because these bodies are unelected. We even read denunciations of "corporate tyrannies" (Socialist Review October 2000).

The implication of this is that we should rely on our elected governments to protect us from these expressions of global capitalism. But government policy is based on the needs of national capital, not ‘public opinion’.

Democracy is also the main issue in the Serb opposition demonstrations for Milosevic to go, after Kostunica won the majority of votes in the election. After ten years of war and crisis the reasons for the discontent are obvious, but the situation of the working class in Serbia will not be determined by the removal of one man, but by the development of the world crisis and particularly of the imperialist conflicts in the Balkans.

In other words, whether in a ‘democracy’, like Britain, or an ‘authoritarian’ regime like Serbia, government policy cannot depend on ‘public opinion’ and the result of elections. In the sophisticated democracies the state has many means of manipulating public opinion through media, polls and focus groups in order not to leave the results of elections to chance. This is much more effective than Milosevic’s crude vote-rigging.

The issue of democracy is key to the integration of ‘anti-globalisation’ and ‘anti-capitalism’ into the service of the capitalist state. Tony Benn, is worried that "people who looked to the Labour and trade union movement for an alternative now find there is no alternative offered through the party system." He goes on to make globalisation an alibi for this: "The leaders of all parties have recognised that the power of international capital is so great that if you are going to be re-elected you have to come to terms with it." (Socialist Review October 2000). Anti-globalisation can revitalise the democratic mystification, for instance in the activities of Ralph Nader, a former consumer spokesman, in the current US elections, or the ‘Socialist Alliances’ of various leftist groups: "the protest movement must acquire an electoral dimension. That has begun to happen - with the Nader campaign in the US and Socialist Alliances in Britain" (Mike Marqusee of the London Socialist Alliance, Socialist Review October 2000).

The attempt to pull the working class into this campaign

The campaigns about globalisation and reviving democracy are also aimed at dissolving the working class into atomised citizens, divorced from their position as a class collectively exploited at the heart of production. This is where the working class is strongest, and where its struggles can never be eradicated. Even today, when the working class struggle is in an extremely difficult situation, the ruling class knows the imp ruling class knows the importance of developing campaigns that try to weaken that struggle.

It is making every effort to confuse the working class with campaigns about the various ‘popular protests’ going on, and where possible to associate workers to them.

The media thus portrayed the fuel blockades, really a protest by small bosses, as part of the tradition of British protest, mixing everything up from the peasants’ revolt to the miners’ strike (see p.3). Socialist Worker had already called on workers in Britain to follow the example set by the French fishermen.

Various leftist writers are portraying the struggle of the working class as some sort of appendage to the anti-globalisation protests, with Socialist Worker enthusing about support for the Prague demonstrations by a UNISON delegation and various local union branches. Workers’ Liberty explicitly wants campaigns "geared to specific workers’ struggles" and welcomes the American union federation, the AFL-CIO, jumping on the bandwagon (July 2000).

Yet despite all these attempts to tie the working class to these campaigns, ‘popular protests’ do not express the interests of the working class. They leave it on the side-lines, create confusion and decrease its confidence in itself and in its ability to struggle.

The working class can only become a real force when it stands up for its own independent interests, distinct from those of other classes. And this is the only way it can provide a perspective for all the social layers which are oppressed by capitalism, but which cannot wage an autonomous struggle against it.

Above all, the workers, who, as Marx said, have no country, can have no interest whatever in defending ‘our’ country’s national interests against a supposedly ‘supranational’ capitalism. On the contrary, the struggle against capitalism begins with the struggle against ‘our own’ bosses; it develops as a struggle for workers’ interests against the sacrifices demanded by the ‘national interest’; and it ends in the overthrow of the nation state and the creation of a world wide communist society.

WR, 30/9/00.

Following the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire at the end of the 19th century, the Middle East, the meeting point of two seas and crossroads of three continents, has ever since been the constant object of imperialist rivalries. In particular, the First World War led to the region being divided up between France and Britain, with Palestine becoming a British protectorate in 1916 and Syria and Lebanon falling under French control. Later on, the necessities of the Cold War and America’s grip over the Mediterranean led the US to support the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 (this also had the advantage of weakening Britain’s hold over the region). While backing Israel at all levels, the US also fought against Russia’s attempts to gain influence over the Arab states who were hostile to Israel. During this period there were three major Arab-Israeli wars: 1956, 1967 and 1973, and behind each one of them could be discerned the deadly competition between the eastern and western blocs.

With the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989, the perspective of a third world war contained in this competition gave way to a new imperialist dynamic characterised by a battle of each against all. The efforts of the US to counter-act this dynamic resulted in the huge demonstration of US power in 1991 - Operation Desert Storm - in the Gulf. The real target of this slaughter was not so much Iraq as the USA’s former great power allies, who were forced to line up behind Washington and rein in their independent ambitions. But this action was still not enough to hold back the dissolution of the old bloc discipline. America’s former lieutenants continued to advance their own interests through this or that local state or clique. The wars in ex-Yugoslavia demonstrated this and recent events in the Middle East also confirm it.

America’s difficulty in maintaining control of the situation

The Middle East ‘peace process’ has above all been the work of the US, which has every interest in presenting itself as the only possible mediator in the region. Certainly America has made real gains through this process, in particular in domesticating the PLO. Whereas the PLO was once an agent of the Russian bloc, Arafat’s new ‘Palestinian Authority’ was created essentially to act as an auxiliary force of repression for the Israeli army. But the Pax Americana was never quite completed, not least because both the Israeli and Palestinian bourgeoisies have more and more been following their own local interests at the expense of the USA. In Israel, Sharon’s role in provoking the conflict - and the fact that he was then offered a government post by the ‘peacemaker’ Barak - shows the increasing weight of openly pro-war factions, who are profiting from the growing feelings of isolation and encirclement within the country.

This situation is exacerbated by the scale of the ‘Intifada’, which has now spread to Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up 20% of the Israeli population. Meanwhile Arafat, also pushed by the more ‘radical’ wings of Palestinian nationalism, has been calling for the support of the Arab nations against Israel, as at the Arab summit of 22-23 October. But he has also been appealing to the European Union to make a more active intervention in the conflict. The patent failure of the US to bring about a ceasefire at the Paris conference (where Madeleine Albright had to run after Arafat to stop him walking out of the negotiations), then at the Sharm-el-Sheikh summit, demonstrate all the difficulties of the White House in keeping control of the situation.

The other powers are trying to take advantage of this situation to strengthen their own position. This is particularly the case with France, which is seeking to destabilise the US by using its traditional links with countries like Lebanon and by making numerous declarations aimed at gaining sympathy in the Arab countries. It supported the idea of an international inquiry into the events, which had been categorically rejected by Israel. Barak even accused France of supporting and encouraging the "Palestinian terrorists" at the Paris summit on October 5.

Naturally, all the imperialist powers present themselves as advocates of peace and reconciliation, but, in fact, their main aim is to slip banana skins under their rivals’ feet. Their intervention in the Middle East situation, far from bringing peace to the tortured populations, is a powerful accelerator of the slide towards even wider and more destructive wars.

CB/Amos

Once again, the Middle East is ablaze, although in truth there has been no real pause in bloody conflicts in this region for over fifty years.

Peace is not possible under capitalism. The ICC has always said this loud and clear. Thus, in October 1993, after the first ‘historic’ handshake between Arafat and Rabin, we wrote:

"there will never be peace in this society…the promises being made to us now in the Middle East will end up the same way as the ‘New World Order’ that the Gulf war was supposed to bring into being: with massacres like the ones in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Georgia, and all the rest" (Revolution Internationale, ICC paper in France, no. 227).

The media are telling us that all this violence is the result of religious fanaticism and the climate of mutual intolerance between two communities; the big powers, we are being led to believe, are doing all they can to bring about peace. What hypocrisy! Under capitalis hypocrisy! Under capitalism, peace is a lie and a fraud, in the Middle East as anywhere else. What the USA is after isn’t peace, but to preserve its imperialist domination over this region. The other big powers aren’t after peace, but the defence of their imperialist interests, which means challenging America’s positions. Once again, it’s the local populations, like in the Balkans or in Africa, who are being taken hostage by the settling of scores between different bourgeoisies. It’s they who are not only the first victims of these killings but are being enrolled into the monstrous machinery of war by the different imperialist and nationalist cliques, and these populations contain important fractions of the working class.

In the Middle East, a tragic lot has been reserved for millions of proletarians. Among these, the workers living in the occupied territories of the West Bank or the Gaza Strip have been subjected to particularly frightful conditions of exploitation in a region where unemployment stands at around 50%. To escape from hunger and keep their families alive, they have to work as migrant workers for derisory wages, and on top of this they are the first to fall victim to the guns of the Israeli soldiers, of the regular sealing off of the territories, of checkpoint controls which compel them to hang around for ages, so that in addition to long hours of travelling and labouring their working day often mounts up to 16 hours, and that’s if they don’t arrive too late to get paid at all. But they are also subjected to exploitation and repression by their own national bourgeoisie in the shape of the Palestinian Authority, which watches over their misery and above all uses them as cannon fodder. From the age of ten the children of these workers are as often as not dying a precocious death after being pulled into the street protests or the armed Palestinian gangs.

These proletarians have absolutely nothing to gain by being mobilised behind their national bourgeoisie for the creation of a Palestinian state that will keep them in the same conditions of ferocious exploitation and repression, and use them again and again as cannon fodder. The struggle for ‘national liberation’ or the ‘Arab cause’ is not their struggle. As for the Israeli proletarians, they must also reject the sacred union with their own bourgeoisie.

Despite the difficulties of this situation, the only way these proletarians can express class solidarity is to reject the capitalist war machine, to refuse to defend one nationalist camp against another. Instead of being led into the slaughter they need to fight tooth and nail for the defence of their living conditions wherever they can.

War has become decadent capitalism’s mode of life and the only future it can offer is one in which more and more regions and populations are plunged into bloody chaos and the barbarity of war. Capitalism has no other way out. Only the proletarian struggle – because it has no country to defend, and has to develop on an international scale – can lead to the abolition of the bourgeois framework of nations and frontiers. It alone can offer a solution to capitalism’s insurmountable contradictions and put an end to national conflicts.

But this perspective will only see the light of day if there is a decisive intervention by the proletariat in the central countries of capitalism. These fractions of the working class have the responsibility of showing the way forward for the proletariat of the whole world, by fighting against the economic attacks being rained on them by their own national bourgeoisies and governments. More than ever the future of humanity depends on the international development of the workers’ struggle.

ICC

In addition to its breadth, an extremely important feature of this movement was that many of the strikes broke out spontaneously, and in some cases there were signs of direct conflict between workers and the trade unions, whose job it is to control the working class on behalf of the capitalist state:

- many of the strikes began without going through the legal palaver of ballots and warnings;

- workers frequently left the confines of the factory or depot to demonstrate in the street and even call on other workers to join the struggle. This is how the urban t. This is how the urban transport strike spread outwards from Charleroi, an extension which encouraged other sectors to come out;

- workers began to raise demands that could be taken up by all categories. This was particularly the case with the demand for a 10,000 franc flat wage increase, which the Charleroi urban transport workers raised and which was then echoed by other sectors and in demonstrations, generally without union approval (for the transport workers and others this would have meant a 20% increase in wages);

- where the unions did call for actions, they were often surprised by the scale of the response. Thus on October 3rd they had envisaged a rally of union delegates in Brussels, but 20,000 workers turned up to march in the streets.

On a more limited scale, there were also cases where workers directly challenged the authority of the unions. At the STIB, the workers had taken up the demand for a 10,000 franc increase, but were dissatisfied by the unions’ handling of the negotiations, so they sent the union negotiators away and called for direct talks between the management and the strikers’ assembly. The unions refused to recognise the strike and the state had to respond with direct repression – judicial injunctions and police dispersal of pickets.

This was however only an embryo of workers’ self-organisation and overall the unions retained control of the movement. They used all their usual manoeuvres to keep the workers divided – emphasising sectional interests, differences between unions and between the French and Flemish speaking parts of the country. They also used another tactic which had the appearance of ‘unifying’ the movement but that in reality aimed at diluting it. In contrast to the unions in Britain, who mainly expressed support for the government against the fuel protesters, the Belgian unions tried to confuse the workers by calling on them to join the fuel protests which had taken place around the same time as the strike movement. They tried to get workers to focus on the demand for linking fuel costs to the price index, and sent them to join the hauliers’ blockades in a demonstration of ‘solidarity’. Not surprisingly, the media outside Belgium gave publicity to the fuel blockade and the workers’ participation in it, but passed in silence over the actual strike movement.

In the struggles of the ‘80s workers had begun to draw many lessons about the real role of the unions and the need to take charge of their own struggles. Many of these lessons have receded from the consciousness of the class as a result of the reflux of struggles that followed the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989. But the movement that has just taken place in Belgium reminds us that these lessons have not been totally lost. The working class everywhere is becoming more willing to fight openly against capitalism’s attacks, and it’s through the development of this resistance that workers will be able to become more conscious of the real aims and methods of their struggle.

Adam

We are publishing here a contribution from a comrade who describes it as "an attempt to clarify to myself why I broke with anarchism (or more specifically libertarian communism, having been a member of the Anarchist Federation)". We think that the text speaks for itself and will be very useful for many others who are currently seeking a way towards the clarity of communist positions.

Since the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989 it would seem that the world has at last changed for the better. We can now look forward to a positive future free from the ideology of the past. It is as if a new morality has been born. ‘Democracy’ has replaced ‘tyranny’ in the old ‘Communist’ states with ‘humanitarian aid’ taking the place of imperialism on an international level. Involvement in foreign wars is justifiable when those involved are labelled fascists or terrorists and there are ‘neutral’ non-government organisations (e.g. Medecins Sans Frontiers) to mop up afterwards. Even the economy has been changed and modified with the introduction of e-commerce. In fact it is claimed that the "technology of the Internet and its generalised use by enterprises and individuals" is &rises and individuals" is "creating a technological revolution comparable in scope to the industrial revolution of the 18th century" (World Revolution 236 p.1). Some have put so much faith in the importance of the Internet that "it is even being compared to the invention of the steam engine" (World Revolution 236 p.1). With all this ‘progress’ in only eleven years it is unsurprising that the bourgeoisie’s claims about the ‘death of Communism’ and the victory of capitalism appear completely justified. In fact anyone questioning the current apparent optimism would have to be mad, wouldn’t they?

The simple answer is no. For those who are seeking to look beyond the current gloss, in which cracks are already beginning to appear, there are many examples of the continuing bankruptcy of capitalism. Whether it’s the on-going imperialist wars, the increasing number of ‘natural’ disasters or the continued attacks on workers’ living standards, it’s clear, to some at least, that capitalism’s crisis is still with us. For a better description of the new century and what capitalism has in store for us we can turn to the words of Trotsky. This is how he described the start of the 20th century "Hatred and murder, famine and blood... It seems as if the new century, this gigantic newcomer, were bent at the very moment of its appearance to drive the optimist into absolute pessimism [...] - Death to Utopia! Death to faith! Death to love! Death to hope! thunders the twentieth century in salvoes of fire and in the rumbling of guns." (from an article on 'Optimism and pessimism', cited in Deutscher's The Prophet Armed). Sound familiar? Essentially we face the same choice faced by revolutionaries at the beginning of the last century: socialism or barbarism. Either we accept that communism is dead and there will be no new society, or we remain optimistic and accept that the opportunity to create a truly human society is not dead but remains alive in the international working class, the gravediggers of capitalism.

The ideas and questions put forward above (and those that will follow) don’t exist in a vacuum and unfortunately many would disagree with them. While this is unfortunate it is also boringly predictable as the majority of those who consider themselves revolutionaries disagree with each other about the problems posed by capitalism. Whether it’s how the working class will create the social revolution if indeed they think this is required (some even question the existence of the working class!) or how capitalism itself ‘works’, confusion reigns among what passes for the revolutionary ‘movement’. This in turn creates an enormous amount of confusion among those younger militants and those unfamiliar with the ‘maddening’ world of so-called ‘revolutionary’ groups, who are seeking a clear explanation of the current situation.

While the bourgeoisie’s campaign around the ‘death of Communism’ has added to this confusion, the collapse of the eastern bloc had an even more fundamental effect on the ‘leftists’ (those groups who despite claiming to be ‘revolutionary’ represent the left wing of the bourgeoisie). The remaining ‘Stalinist’ groups have either collapsed or are in a state of terminal inertia unable to break with an ideology which was the negation of communism. The last ten years has also seen the Trotskyists (in Britain at least) ‘visibly’ move to the centre, joining the bourgeoisie in the parliamentary circus while continuing with their usual tactics of tail-ending single issue campaigns, constantly calling for the unions to act, or for ‘democracy’ to be defended, while all the time espousing their revolutionary credentials. Even the bourgeoisie’s most reliable friend, Social Democracy, has moved further to the right (or perhaps ceased to exist in any real sense?), this being most obvious in Britain with the emergence of ‘New Labour’. All of this may go some way to explaining why the working class seems to have deserted the organisations that claimed to defend its interests, either for the ‘joys’ of the consumer society or the ‘safety’ of religion (1).

Anarchism on the other hand has benefited from the ‘death of Communism’, with anarchist ideas and ‘organisations’ becoming fashionable once again. From Seattle to Prague the black flag of ‘revolution’ may have been raised but the same old lie is repeated "Marx, Lenin, Stalin – all the same enemy" (International Review 102 p.22). Why do anarchists echo the lies of the bourgeoisie and support consciously or unconsciously their campaign that the bankruptcy of ‘soviet’ Russia highlights the bankruptcy of marxism (and by default any other idea that questions capitalism’s authority)? Firstly we must ask those who identify themselves as anarchists what they mean by the term. Do they "mean an anarchist like Proudhon?" (World Revolution 170 p.6) Or are they a primitivist, syndicalist or anarcho-capitalist? Rather than define itself "in relation to historic currents on the vital questions which have faced the working class at important moments" (World Revolution 170 p.6), anarchism is made up of a range of different and often contradictory ideas which leads to confusion rather than clarification.

This incoherence is a consequence of anarchism’s origins. While anarchism may have borrowed ideas from other schools of socialism, it differs from these (and in particular marxism) ultimately as it was based from its beginnings on ‘abstract eternal principles’ (2) like ‘individual freedom’ and ‘absolute liberty’ (due to the influence of petit-bourgeois ideology). This characterised Proudhon’s theory and activity and, with more disastrous effects, Bakunin’s relationship with the 1st International and his criticism of the ‘authoritarian’ Marx. These ideas are the bedrock of anarchist thought and can still be found at the heart of ‘programmes’ (for want of a better phrase) put forward by today’s anarchists (see the article on Anarchism and Marxism in the current issue of Direct Action produced by the Solidarity Federation for an example of this) whether or not they have tried to distance themselves from ‘classical’ anarchism. Ahistorical idealism is always preferred to a more rigorous historical materialism and therefore confusion reigns.

The effect of this confusion is an inability to defend political positions while being able to dodge answering the difficult questions which arise from this vacillation. The evidence for the betrayal of class positions by anarchists is all too clear in the history of the workers’ movement. The real tests for revolutionaries arise during times of war and revolution, and anarchists have been found wanting on both occasions. Kropotkin’s support, along with the syndicalist CGT for the imperialist war in 1914, the CNT’s role in the popular front government during the Spanish ‘civil war’, and the general confusion amongst anarchists over the October revolution in 1917 are perhaps the most obvious examples of this betrayal. These examples also show how close anarchism is to its supposed enemy' leftism. While anarchists may claim to be the most ‘radical’ alternative to capitalism, they often fall into the same traps as leftist organisations. This is evident in their support for single-issue campaigns and their on and off relationship with the trade unions. There are groups and individuals that find all of this a bit difficult to defend and look to groups like the ‘Friends of Durruti’ for examples of how anarchism has remained loyal to the working class. Surely the failure of the Friends of Durruti group to break free from anarchism and the CNT lead to its ultimate fate?

Other groups (e.g. in Britain the Anarchist Federation (AF) and Class War (CW), in France Gauche Communiste Libertaire), faced with anarchism’s betrayal, have tried to form a syntheses between anarchism and marxism, to create a ‘libertarian communism’. In practice this involves plucking out ‘acceptable’ (i.e. not ‘Leninist’ as that would be ‘authoritarian’ and therefore unacceptable) political currents (in the case of the AF, Dutch and German ‘left communists’ like Pannekoek and the KAPD) from their historical context and adopting them as their own. The most obvious problem with this approach is that it is ‘sloppy’ history. But more importantly this is a dishonest attempt to pass off the theoretical breakthroughs of the communist left (those groups and individuals who broke with the 3rd International) on for, example, trade unions and national liberation as having something in common with the anarchist tradition. The "conviction that communism is the self-liberation of the working class emerges with marxism not with anarchism" (World Revolution 238) and left communism can never be part of the anarchist tradition. If it were, surely Bordiga would be worthy of a mention? Perhworthy of a mention? Perhaps because of his commitment to the party he is unacceptable? Anarchism’s real commitment is to ‘self liberation’ its "eternal principles liberty, equality and fraternity", as mentioned above, "originally borrowed from the bourgeoisie" (World Revolution 238). It is these principles which guide anarchist theory and practice and why particularly in the form of ‘libertarian communism’ anarchism can only add to the confusion already in the workers’ movement following the collapse of the eastern bloc (3).

There is of course an alternative to all of this confusion and this alternative has been hinted at above. Marxism and the organisations it has created (the first three Internationals and, in particular, those ‘left communists’ who broke from the decaying 3rd International) offer a clear and coherent explanation of capitalism in crisis, communist organisation and the history of the workers’ movement. It would be foolish to pretend that communists are infallible. Marxism is not a religion to be passed down to enlightened members of the class. That said it is the ability of communists, using marxism as a tool, to learn from their mistakes and through discussion to build on theoretical ‘lessons’ that differentiates them from the anarchists. The best examples of this are the left communists like, for example, Bordiga or the Bilan group, who were able to identify the capitalist nature of Soviet Russia while remaining in the tradition of the October revolution. This is a political current which has never deserted the working class and always stuck to its internationalist principles whatever the consequence. This leads us to the conclusion that communism unlike anarchism is not a utopian dream but a living movement and perhaps the only perspective for humanity (4).

So what’s to be done? Firstly we must combat the ‘greatest lie of the 20th century’ that the collapse of the eastern bloc lead to the death of communism. The current ‘anti-capitalist’ demonstrations prove that many are not happy with capitalism in terminal crisis and are looking for an alternative. Unfortunately most of these protests have concentrated on the spectre of globalisation and in particular the IMF and WTO. This identification with one aspect of capitalism (capitalism became a global system a very long time ago) has meant that many of the protesters find themselves turning to the nation state and its ‘democratic systems’ for protection (the role of the US unions in the demonstrations in Seattle is an example of this), rather than realising that it is these national units not ‘multinationals’ that call the shots on the world money markets. The IMF and WTO act as forums for each nation, large or small, to fight it out with their competitors. Revolutionaries have nothing to gain by defending national interests. The fight begins with the battle against our own bosses and develops as workers begin to control their own struggles until eventually we are at a position where we can overthrow the state. This battle can only be won by the working class not by an ‘alliance’ of well-meaning do-gooders (e.g. greens, Christians, environmentalists) who represent the left wing of capitalism. The task for those revolutionaries who have not deserted the communist project or the working class (i.e. the communist left) is to intervene in this movement (especially with younger militants) and fight bourgeois mystification at every level. The working class has not gone away and neither has capitalism’s crisis. The ‘death of communism’ was an attempt at finally destroying the working class, which failed. The small but growing number of strikes (including an increasing number of wildcat and ‘unofficial’ ones ) proves this. The ultimate task is clear – Workers of all countries, Unite! Capitalism is dying, long live the communist revolution!

R (September/October 2000)

1). Perhaps the most alarming example of this is the growth in popularity, particularly among the young, of Islam and in particular the suggestion that it is a ‘revolutionary’ alternative to capitalism. Superstition and ‘tradition’ offer the working class nothing and revolutionaries must fight this return to medievalism.

2). While I realise that this statement doesn’t go very far in explaining all the differences between anarchism and marxism it does highlight the ‘moralism’ which is at the heart of all anarchist currents. The purpose of this ‘essay’ was to clarify to myself why I had broken from anarchism, not to provide an in-depth thesis. For a more detailed analysis of the argument see ‘Anarchism or Communism?’ in International Review 79 or the articles on anarchism in International Review 102, both of which I found useful when forced to re-evaluate my ideas.

3). Again I realise that this is not the whole story. What about organisation, substitutionism or dead-end activism? As I said above this ‘essay’ is an attempt to clarify to myself why I broke with anarchism (or more specifically libertarian communism having been a member of the AF) and I feel it is the commitment to ‘self liberation’ (which breeds an unhealthy moralism) which influences the rest of anarchist theory. The article in World Revolution 238 which deals with the AF points out the theoretical problems faced by an organisation trying to force two opposing ideas together. When this is tried the only outcome is incoherence. The other main problem is the question of organisation. Federalism is preferred because it avoids the ‘authoritarianism’ of the party. In reality an unofficial hierarchy of friends is created which has all the elements of the most undemocratic organisations while pretending to be ‘free’ and ‘democratic’. This effectively stifles debate and allows for only the most basic agreement on political positions. This perhaps explains why Anarchists prefer dead-end activism to more rigorous debate.

4). Once again I realise this is only a brief explanation. Any issue of World Revolution, International Review, Revolutionary Perspectives, Internationalist Communist or Communist Left will expand on these ideas.

The farce around the election of the US president has allowed the rulers of Europe, increasingly anxious to assert their independence from the US, to mount a campaign about how much more efficient ‘our’ dgn about how much more efficient ‘our’ democratic institutions are over here. It’s true that the election stalemate has been a real embarrassment for the US ruling class, and the comrades of our US section analyse the reasons for the mess in the article below. But the article also shows that there are in any case no fundamental differences between Gore and Bush. And this applies to ‘democratic’ elections everywhere. However they are managed, parliamentary elections are always used against the consciousness of the working class. ‘Democracy’ is a mask hiding the real dictatorship of capitalism, and workers can only fight against this dictatorship by struggling for their own interests as a class.

At the time of writing, the outcome of the presidential electoral circus is still unknown. The electoral stalemate was clearly an unplanned accident for the US ruling class, a tremendous embarrassment creating a confusing political dilemma. The political strategy of the bourgeoisie going into the election appeared to reaffirm a commitment to maintain the left, the Democratic Party, in power in the White House. No significant domestic political, economic or imperialist factors existed to call into question the continuation of the strategy of the left in power, which has worked so effectively since 1992 for the effectively since 1992 for the bourgeoisie, not only in the US, but internationally (See International Review 98, ‘Why are the left parties in government in the majority of European countries today?’, 3rd quarter 1999). This strategy permitted the bourgeoisie to use the Clinton administration to maintain a continuous implementation of austerity and the dismantling of the New Deal welfare state, to intervene frequently and effectively on the military level around the world under the ideological cover of ‘humanitarianism’, and to maintain the disorientation of the working class. At the same time, the ruling class was able to revamp and strengthen the union apparatus in order to confront future working class struggles.

If there were no conjunctural factors pressuring the bourgeoisie to abandon the left in power strategy, neither was there any necessity to resort to an alternation in power to revitalize the democratic mystification. The left has only been in power for eight years, and the Republicans have controlled congress and a majority of state governorships, so there was no monopolizing of political power for an overly long period of time to wear out the democratic mystification. After all, the right had held power for 12 years under Reagan/Bush, and was removed from office not to revitalize demfice not to revitalize democracy, but rather because of imperialist preoccupations, following Bush’s indecisiveness to intervene in the Balkans and consequent squandering of American imperialist advantage built up by the Gulf War in 1991.

Consequently, a Gore victory seemed most sensible for the bourgeoisie. As we noted in Internationalism 114, at the same time, to protect themselves against an ‘accident’ the bourgeoisie installed the younger Bush as the candidate of the Republicans on the right. Despite all the campaign rhetoric, and despite their different party affiliations, both Gore and Bush adhere to the same, identical faction of the bourgeoisie, with no significant divergences on imperialist policy, and essentially identical positions on all significant domestic policy questions. Whoever won, the bourgeoisie was assured that basically the same orientation on domestic and international policy would be pursued.

The bourgeoisie tries to counter ‘voter apathy’

The campaign was manipulated to generate interest and enthusiasm in the election, to present it as ‘close’ in order to bolster participation by largely apathetic electorate, to rrgely apathetic electorate, to rejuvenate the electoral mystification. The propaganda stressed over and over that the campaign was too close to call, that every vote would count, etc. etc. The polls portrayed Gore as trailing even until the very eve of the election, prodding working class and liberal voters to come out to the poll to prevent the triumph of the right.

So, what happened? In large measure the strategy prevailed. Despite being portrayed as trailing in all but one of the national polls by three to five points, Gore won the popular vote, achieving 49% of the vote, a greater percentage than the vastly more popular Clinton received in 1992 or 1996. In fact, Gore received more actual votes than Reagan did in his landslide victories over Carter and Mondale, respectively in 1980 and 1984. The political accident that threw the electoral circus into turmoil was due to two factors. First, the loose cannon actions of the Green Party candidate, Ralph Nader. Second, the fact that for the first time since 1888, indeed for the first time in the epoch of capitalist decadence, the results in the popular vote were contradicted by the results in the anachronistic Electoral College, which appeared to give the election victory to the candidate who came in second place.

The Nader Factor

Unlike the Perot campaigns of ’92 and ’96, which were designed to siphon off votes from the Republicans and facilitate the victory of the left in those elections, the Nader candidacy was not designed to impact on the current election. The script called for the Green Party to develop a political presence so that it might prepare to play a crucial role in the future as a means to control radicalized workers and petty bourgeois elements, as the crisis deepens and working class discontent becomes more pronounced. In this sense the Nader campaign was designed as a electoral reference point for the Seattle-type anti-globalisation movement, as well as traditional environmentalists and ‘progressives’. The immediate goal was to achieve 5% in the popular vote, which would qualify the Greens for federal campaign funds in the future. However, Nader made a deal with the established environmental groups and the Democratic Party that he would not seek to alter the result of the election, and promised not to campaign in states where it might affect the outcome. For whatever reason – some of his critics in the left of the Democratic party and the environmental movement charge egomania – Nader reneged on this agreement Nader reneged on this agreement and concentrated his campaign in key battleground states that were crucial to a Gore victory. These states were also most receptive to Nader’s ‘progressive message’ attacking big business. Realizing that Nader was poised to threaten the Gore victory, about two weeks before the election the environmentalists and the left of the Democratic Party began an all-out campaign against Nader for reneging on the deal, urging him to withdraw from the election, and calling upon his supporters not to ‘waste’ their votes and help elect Bush. The New York Times joined this campaign, denouncing Nader for ‘electoral mischief’, and TV journalists joined the chorus as well. This campaign was in sharp contrast to the situation with Perot, who never received such criticism and was never asked to withdraw in ’92 and ’96 – precisely because his campaign was designed to affect the election results in the Clinton races.

Even though the bourgeoisie was successful in scaring off more than fifty percent of the people who were supposedly intending to vote for Nader, and achieved a Gore victory in the popular vote, the Green party candidate managed to screw up the Electoral College vote on the state level in at least three states: New Hampshire, Oregon and the all Hampshire, Oregon and the all important Florida, with its 25 electoral votes. For example, in Florida, where Bush had a 1,700 vote margin on election day (before the first recount which brought him down to 330), Nader got 96,000 votes. While undoubtedly a good number of the voters who cast ballots for Nader were people who were so alienated from the mainstream parties that they probably wouldn’t have participated in the election had Nader not been a candidate, if only 3 percent of the 96,000 had voted for Gore, Bush would have been easily defeated on election day.

The anachronistic Electoral College

The unforeseen accident that produced a situation in which the electoral vote did not match the popular vote was caused by Nader’s reneging on the deal, and aggravated by the Electoral College, an anachronistic, anti-democratic - even by bourgeois standards - historical relic created in 1787 as a check against ‘popular passions’. In today’s conditions this institution is weighted disproportionately in favor of rural, small population states, and it was these states that Bush won heavily.

The bourgeoisie’s strategy provided protection against an vided protection against an accidental defeat at the polls, but not against a contradictory and indecisive result at the polls. For the American bourgeoisie, no matter how much they pay homage to the wisdom of the Founding Fathers and the constitution they created over 200 years ago, an election in which the guy who lost the election is declared the winner is a tremendous political embarrassment and liability. All the rhetoric about the ‘will of the people’ and ‘the people decide’ rings empty. Despite the fact that the dominant faction of the bourgeoisie could certainly live with either Gore or Bush as president with no problem, each of the candidates, and their entourages, genuinely want to be president, and this has led to never-ending political soap opera since election day. All the bickering, posturing and rancor by the two candidates camps is in complete contrast to the normal unifying, mutual support and coming together that normally marks the conclusion an American electoral circuses.

The goal of the current recount, and the legal challenges by the Gore staff, is designed not simply to satisfy Gore’s real personal ambitions, but also to produce an election result in Florida so that the final Electoral College results will coincide with the popular vote, though the final outcome is stillugh the final outcome is still in doubt. The ruling class is trying to put the best ‘spin’ possible on the current situation, stressing how this election proves that every vote counts, and that the melodrama we are witnessing is a simply a stupendous civics lesson for the American public. But in reality both sides expose the pettiness and corruption of the highly touted American electoral political system, in which each side is shamelessly trying to cheat and manipulate the vote counts in their favor. Senior ‘statesmen’ in both parties, including former presidents Carter and Ford, are already pushing for a resolution that will somehow salvage the authority and legitimacy of the presidency and American democracy following the settlement of the current stalemate.

Indeed, the current squabbling in no way threatens the stability of American society. Whatever jitters there are on Wall Street have been there for over a year and are not caused by the inconclusive election. The working class is not engaged in open struggle, and the imperialist strategy of American imperialism is not in question. In this sense the so-called ‘sharp political division’ in the American electorate couldn’t come at a better time for the bourgeoisie, even if it is unplanned. While having the left in opposition m having the left in opposition might create certain problems for the ruling class in terms of justifying overseas military interventions, or in potentially provoking oppositional actions by the unions and the Jesse Jackson/Ted Kennedy wing of the Democrats, the situation will not be insurmountable.

Once the election is decided the bourgeoisie will try to foster reconciliation, and a strongly divided Congress and White House will somehow find the statesmanlike wherewithal to rise above partisan divisiveness to continue to attack the standard of living of the working class, and begin to repair the tarnished image of the democratic mystification.

Internationalism, ICC section in the US, 11/18/00.

Day after day, the list of the dead and wounded, in Israel and the occupied territories, grows longer.

In a region which has already been through five out-and-out wars since the end of the second world slaughter (not counting all the ‘peacetime’ military operations), a new war is hatching, without being officially started, and has already killed hundreds of people, especially children and young people.

Officially, everyone talks about ‘peace’ – the Israeli leaders, the leaders of the Palestinian Authority, and all the governments of the developed countries, whether European or American.

In fact, despite all the conferences that have succeeded each other since last summer (Camp David in July, Paris on October 4, Sharm-el-Sheikh later on that month) the situation has got worse and worse: stone-throwing, bomb attacks, Israelis lynched by Palestinians, the use of live bullets by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian demonstrators, attacks on civilians populations by rockets, shells and helicopters.

Depending on which country we live in, or on which country we live in, or the political colour of the government, we are being called on to side with one camp or another in this conflict:

"Defend Israel against the threat of all these fanatical Arabs who surround the country"

"Support the just cause of the Palestinians against Israeli atrocities".

But no one is posing the real question: where are the interests of the working class in all this, whether Jewish or Arab, whether in Israel or Palestine, or in other countries?

The Middle East: war without end

The 20th century has been a century of wars, the most atrocious wars in human history, and not one of them has served the interests of the workers. It’s always the workers who are called upon to go and kill each other in their millions for the interests of their exploiters, under the banner of ‘defending the country’, or fighting for ‘civilisation’, ‘democracy’, or even the ‘socialist fatherland’ (which is how certain people described the USSR of Stalin and the gulag).

And after these terrible wars, particularly after the second world war, those who lived through them were again asked to make new sacrifices to reconstruct the national (i.e. capitalist) economy.

Today there is a new war in the Middle East, even if it hasn’t been officially declared.

On both sides, the ruling cliques call on the workers to ‘defend the country’ whether Jewish or Palestinian. The Jewish workers, who in Israel are exploited by Jewish capitalists, the Palestinian workers who are exploited by Jewish capitalists or Arab capitalists (and often more ferociously by the latter than by the Jewish capitalists because in the Palestinian enterprises, working rights are no different from what they were in the old Ottoman empire).

The Jewish workers have already paid a heavy tribute to the war madness of the bourgeoisie during the course of the five wars they have been through since 1948. As soon as they were taken out of the concentration camps and the ghettos of a Europe ravaged by world war, the grandparents of those who today wear the uniform of the Israeli defence Forces were dragged into the war between Israel and the Arab countries. Then their parents paid the blood-price in the wars of 67, 73 and 82. These soldiers are not frightful brutes who think of nothing but killing Palestinian children. They are young conscripts, most of them workers, constantly bombarded with propaganda about the ‘barbarity’ of the Arabs and yet many of them full of doubt and disgust at being forced to act as cops.

The Palestinian workers have already paid the blood-price. Kicked out of their homes in a war that their leaders wanted, they have spent the major part of their lives in refugee camps, enrolled into the various Palestinian militias (Fatah, PFLP, Hamas, etc). Frequently they have suffered the worst massacres not at the hand of the Israeli army but of the armies of the countries where they were in exile, like Jordan and Lebanon. In September 1970 (Black September), King Hussein exterminated them en masse, to the point where some of them had to flee to Israel to escape death. In September 1982 it was the Arab militias (albeit Christian, and allied to Israel) who butchered them in the Sabra and Chatila camps in Lebanon.

Nationalism and religion: poison for the exploited

Today, in the name of ‘Palestine’, they want to once again mobilise Arab workers against the Israelis, the majority of whom are workers, just as the latter are being asked to get themselves killed for the defence of the ‘Promised Land’, Eretz Yisroael.

Both sides are being drenched with nationalist propaganda, which seeks to turn human beings into ravening beasts. The Israeli and Arab bourgeoisies have been aggravating these nationalist feelings for more than half a century. Both Israeli and Arab workers are told that they must defend the land of their ancestors. With the first, a systematic militarisation of society has been developed alongside a siege mentality in order to make everyone into good soldiers. With the second, the idea has been that if they can settle accounts with Israel, they will ‘get their land back’. And in order to achieve this, the leaders of the Arab countries have kept them for decades in concentration camps, subjecting them to intolerable living conditions and preventing them from integrating themselves into the ‘host’ country.

Nationalism is one of the worst ideologies that the bourgeoisie has ever invented. It makes it possible for the ruling class to hide the antagonisms between exploiters and the exploited, to rally them all behind the same flag, to get the exploited to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their exploiters.

And to cap it all, this war is also being fuelled by the poison of religious propaganda, which leads to the development of the most irrational forms of fanaticism. The Jews are called upon to defend the Wailing Wall, the remains of Solomon’s Temple. The Muslims are told to give their lives for the Mosque of Omar and the holy places of Islam. What is happening today in Israel and Palestine clearly confirms what revolutionaries said last century: religion is the opium of the people. Its aim is to console the exploited and the oppressed. Those whose lives on earth is a hell are told that they will be happy after their deaths as long as they know how to find salvation. And the road to salvation passes through sacrifice, submission, and offering your life for the ‘holy war’

The fact that, at the beginning of the 21st century, ideologies and superstitions that go back to antiquity or the Middle Ages are still being stirred up in abundance in order to get human beings to sacrifice their lives says a great deal about the depth of the barbarism stalking the Middle East and many other parts of the world.

The great powers are responsible for the war

As for the ‘developed’ countries, the ‘great democracies’ of Europe and the USA, which are today so keen to announce their compassion for the suffering of the people in the Middle East, their revolting hypocrisy deserves to be denounced from beginning to end.

It is the leaders of these same powers which have created the infernal situation facing the exploited of this region.

It was the European bourgeoisies, particularly the English bourgeoisie with its Balfour declaration in 1917, which, with its policy of divide and rule, permitted the formation of a "Jewish Homeland" in Palestine, opening the door to the chauvinist utopia of Zionism. It was the same bourgeoisies who, at the end of the second world war, arranged for the transportation to Palestine of hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees and concentration camp victims. This made sure that all these refugees were kept well away from their countries. It was the same bourgeoisies, first the British and the French, then the American, who armed the state of Israel to the teeth in order to make it the spearhead of the western bloc in the region during the cold war. The USSR, on the other hand, poured weapons into its Arab allies. Without these big ‘patrons’, the wars of 1956, 67, 73 and 82 wouldn’t have been able to take place.

With the collapse of the eastern bloc we were promised a new era of peace. This lie was immediately exposed by the Gulf war in 1991. But after that, illusions about peace were spread far and wide by the politicians and the media. It was the period of the Madrid conference of October 91 and the ‘Oslo accords’ signed at the White House in September 1993.

But there can be no peace in capitalism. This was demonstrated by the horrible massacres going on in Yugoslavia at the same moment. As for the Middle East, peace meant a ‘Pax Americana’, a still more powerful presence of the US in the region. This is something that the other bourgeoisies did not want at a time when the disappearance of the ‘Soviet’ threat was leading them to affirm their own imperialist ambitions.

Today all the bourgeoisies claim they want peace. What they really want is to get their foot in the door, or strengthen further their position in the Middle East, one of the most coveted regions of the world because of its economic and strategic importance.

To end war, you have to end capitalism

This is why, in the conflict between Israel and Palestine, we find the US backing Israel while other powers, such as France (as we saw at the Paris meeting in October) are lining up behind the Palestinians.

Even after the disappearance of the USSR, the great powers are there to throw oil on the fire, as they have been doing in Yugoslavia over the past 10 years.

This is also why the workers of these countries, the ‘great democracies’, whose leaders talk about nothing but ‘peace’ and ‘human rights’, must refuse to take sides with either camp. Above all they must refuse to be taken in by the speeches of those parties which claim to be part of the working class – the parties of the left and the extreme left, who are calling on workers to show their ‘solidarity with the Palestinian masses’, to support their ‘right to a homeland’. A Palestinian homeland will never be anything but a bourgeois state in the service of the exploiters, oppressing the same Palestinian masses with its police and its prisons. The solidarity of the workers of the most advanced capitalist countries does not go out to the ‘Palestinians’ or to the ‘Israelis’, among whom you will find both exploiters and exploited. It goes out to the workers and the unemployed of Israel and of Palestine, who have their own struggles against their exploiters despite the constant brainwashing they are subjected to, as it goes out to the workers of all other countries. And showing solidarity certainly doesn’t consist in encouraging their nationalist illusions.

This solidarity means above all developing their own struggle against their own bourgeoisies, against the capitalist system which is responsible for all wars.

In the Middle East as in many other regions of the world ravaged by war today, there is no ‘lasting peace’ possible under capitalism. Even if the present crisis is not leading to an open war, even if the different protagonists arrive at some temporary truce, this region will remain a powderkeg ready to explode.

Peace can only be won when tha">Peace can only be won when the working class overthrows capitalism on a world scale. And the working class can only move in that direction by developing its struggles on its own class terrain, against the increasingly brutal economic attacks demanded by the insurmountable crisis of the system.

Against nationalism, against the wars our exploiters want to drag us into:

WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

November 2000

What’s happening to the ‘economic boom’, led by the US and the internet, that we have heard so much about recently? Dot com companies are going to the wall, prestigious US banks are wobbling, manufacturing – especially the car industry – is slowing down, and there are fears of a return both of recession and inflation in the world’s biggest economy. For the ideologues of the ruling class, these are just temporary blips in an otherwise healthy world economy. But as we argue in this article, they are in fact pointers to the real state of the capitalist world economy, and a warning of savage attacks on the living standards of the working class, which have in any case continued to worsen throughout this period of phoney boom.

Since the end of the 1960s, when capitalism once again entered into an open crisis of overproduction, the ruling class has seized on any subsequent period of growth – even if each growth – even if each one is shorter than the last, and is followed by phases of ever more devastating recessions – to fuel its ideological campaigns about capitalism’s new-found prosperity. And there is no doubt that it has had some success in masking the real degradation of the economic situation over the past 30 years.

But haven’t things really changed since the recession at the beginning of the 90s? Hasn’t capitalism in this period shown that it can still be a factor of progress? Certainly the USA has just been through nine years of positive growth, without any interruption. This hasn’t been seen since the Second World War. The European powers have also registered growth since 1994. As for the ‘Asian crisis’ of 1997-8, it didn’t have the devastating effects on the world economy that were at first feared. Could that have been a crisis of growth rather than a sign of the system’s insurmountable contradictions? What’s more, isn’t capitalism proving that it regenerates itself through the development of new technologies? And finally, doesn’t the present fall in unemployment in the industrialised countries constitute definite proof that we really have entered a period of prosperity?

All these supposed expressions of capitalist prosperity are based on indicators created by the bourgeoisie itself. If we are to take them into account, we have to place them in their proper context – in other words, after examining the real evolution of social conditions.

What has been the real situation of the working class during the 90s?

In the 19th century, while showing that the contradictions of capitalism had no ultimate solution, marxists also showed that this system of exploitation was capable of playing a progressive role for humanity. It was able to accomplish a considerable development of the productive forces and of the working class, on the basis of a real prosperity.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, revolutionaries have been pointing to a new reality, one which the bourgeoisie has constantly tried to hide: the decline of the capitalist mode of production, which among other things has been characterised by a deterioration in working class living conditions and a tendency to exclude a growing mass of proletarians from the process of production. The reappearance of the open crisis of overproduction at the end of the tion at the end of the 1960s (1) is an illustration of this tendency since it has brought about a major regression in the situation of the working class in the industrialised countries, notably in the form of massive unemployment and the development of absolute pauperisation. Its consequences have been even more dramatic in the so-called third world countries, where a huge mass of people live without work in the most inhuman conditions. And it was the aggravation of this crisis which was at the root of the collapse of the Stalinist regimes as well. Finally, the economic impasse has seen its destructive effects considerably amplified by the headlong rush of the different states into wars and environmental destruction. In sum, the economic crisis is at the core of an unprecedented social crisis which threatens the very existence of humanity.

The ‘years of growth’ over the past decade are in no way an exception to this dramatic picture (2), since they have been accompanied by an aggravation of the situation at all levels: proliferation of wars and ecological catastrophes, the intensification of poverty all around the world, including for the working class of the central countries of capitalism.

As for the diminution2>As for the diminution of unemployment which the bourgeoisie has boasted about so much, this has been brought about by statistical manipulation on the one hand, and by the explosion of part-time and short-term work on the other. Although the number of such precarious jobs created has been higher than the number of stable jobs suppressed, the overall balance sheet in terms of workers’ living standards has been largely negative. This situation is illustrated in particular by the fact that, in the USA, more and more people with jobs can’t afford to house themselves.

What has been the reality of growth in the 90s?

The crisis is above all a crisis of overproduction, the result of a lack of solvent markets to absorb capitalism’s production. In their efforts to palliate this problem, from the end of the 60s (as during the 1930s), the different states have created an artificial market by running up massive debts. And since this remedy is no real solution, every time that economic activity starts to stumble, the system has had to pile up even greater debts, which on the world level have now reached astronomical proportions. These are debts which can never be repaid and which constitute an ever-increasing threat to the stability of the worhe stability of the world economy.

If, despite all the contradictions assailing capitalism, the crisis has only deepened at a relatively slow rhythm, this is because the most powerful states have done everything in their power to postpone its effects at the centre of the system – and debt has been the main instrument for achieving this. The policy of the ruling class has been aimed in particular at preventing sudden accelerations of the crisis from provoking large-scale workers’ reactions to massive and brutal attacks. Such reactions could lead to the working class developing an understanding of the necessity to do away with this system. But while the bourgeoisie can influence the pace of the crisis, it can’t stop it from getting deeper. Even during so-called phases of growth, the crisis has been getting worse and worse, as can be seen for example from the process of industrial desertification which hit the central countries of Europe and the USA during the 80s; or again by the savage amputation of the productive apparatus in certain countries on the periphery of capitalism, including some of the most industrialised ones, such as Korea, in the second half of the 90s.

In fact the indicators used by the bindicators used by the bourgeoisie are a deception. For example, when it measures growth, it throws in all sorts of unproductive expenses, as well as those which do produce wealth, but which have to a large extent been paid for through debts that will never be reimbursed.

When capitalism is no longer able to hide its contradictions

At the time of the ‘Asian crisis’ in 1997-8 we were told that it was basically the result of the irresponsibility of certain sectors of the bourgeoisie who had run up ‘shady’ debts; debts that had no chance of being repaid. To avoid the bankruptcy of countries which were unable to repay their debts to the big industrial powers, huge salvage plans amounting to billions of dollars had to be set in motion. In fact, here once again, this explanation was distorted for propaganda purposes, so that it could appear that the collapse of certain Asian countries, which resulted in millions of redundancies, was caused not by the crisis of capitalism but the bad management of a few greedy and irresponsible leaders and bosses. Today reality is putting paid to all these lies, in the shape of two significant events. The first is the financial crisis in Argentina and Turkey. The first country had been touted as a model whi touted as a model which conformed in every respect to the rules for managing capital laid down by the IMF. And yet we have recently seen new salvage plan brought into effect to prevent Argentina from going bankrupt, a plan consisting of new debts and new attacks on working class living conditions. The scenario is very similar in Turkey. The second is the ‘discovery’ of dubious debts contracted in the US itself. If growth there comes to a halt, we are now being told that it’s the European banks which will pay the heaviest. The USA is not going to go through a purge like certain Asian countries did three years ago. But it still shows that American economy, like that of all the big powers, is not as healthy as the bourgeoisie has been claiming. And this at root is because the world economy has not been cured of the disease of which the Asian crisis was but a symptom.

On top of this, a number of important indicators which the bourgeoisie has been presenting as signs of economic health over the past six years or more are beginning to point in the opposite direction. In the USA, the index of values for the ‘old economy’, the Dow Jones, has fallen by over 9% since January 2000. In the same period, the index of the ‘new economy’, the Nasdaq, has loste Nasdaq, has lost 43% of its value and 53% over the last 8 months (figures from Le Monde, 1 and 22 December 2000). And more generally “most of the world’s major stock exchanges fell during 2000. There hasn’t been a similar result since the beginnings of the 90s in the US and since 1994 in Europe” (Le Monde 2 December).

“No one is prevented from getting rich” (French ad); “Either you’re rich, or you’re a cretin” (Business). These media slogans, which reveal the profound cynicism of the bourgeoisie towards those who ‘don’t succeed’, were based on the share performances of the ‘new economy’. As even the bourgeoisie is beginning to admit that the new economy wasn’t a miracle cure after all, such slogans are becoming totally out of synch with reality for the vast majority of people.

Although the optimism of the official version hasn’t altered, the American bourgeoisie has accepted that growth is slowing down, that unemployment and inflation are on the increase. Faced with new threats of recession, there is no alternative but to resort even more to the drug of debt. But this is not a neutral procedure. Among other things Among other things it opens the door to the spectre of inflation. This is causing great unease among those in charge of economic policy: the bourgeoisie fears open recessions because they tend to give an impetus to the class struggle. But it also fears inflation because it can push the working class as a whole to fight for the defence of its purchasing power.

Even if it is difficult to be precise about the form that the new acceleration of the economic crisis will take, it is clear that this is what is already happening. Further signs of this are the job cuts in important industrial sectors in France 2000 at Bull, 2700 at Gilette; in the USA 15,000 at General Motors, between 75,000 and 80,000 following General Electric’s acquisition of Honeywell, 26,000 at DaimlerChrysler, 16,000 at Lucent technologies, 7700 at WorldCom, 5300 at J.C.Penney, 1300 at Amazon.com; in Britain threatened closure of Vauxhall in Luton, and of steel plants in South Wales, etc… But while the crisis means the worsening of an already unbearable situation for millions of people, it is also the best ally of the proletariat, because it compels it to engage in massive struggles against the attacks of the bourgeoisie and, in the longer term, to develop the perspective of the overthrow of capitalism.

(1) See the articles in the series ‘30 years of the open crisis of capitalism’ in International Reviews 96, 97 and 98.

(2) See the article ‘The abyss behind “uninterrupted growth in International Review 99 [41].

(3) The control of the rhythm of the crisis demands a degree of international cooperation between the big industrial countries but, among the latter, there is a balance of forces which obviously acts in favour of the most powerful ones, enabling them to take the decisions which are less unfavourable to themselves.

The ideology of globalisation has generated many myths - as much by its ‘opponents’ as by its advocates. In particular there is the idea that multinational corporations are out of the control of nation states and can move capital to wherever they can make the most profit, regardless of the local circumstances. Ralph Nader wants to save capitalism from the big corporations. Noam Chomsky denounces unaccountable private power and the international institutions which impose the ‘Washington consensus’ of ‘neo-liberalism’. The power of ‘international capital’ (which can be used to mean the US, or big corporations, or the biggest powers, or just an abstract ‘evil’) is presented as being so great that it can even overcome the drive of national capitals towards war. In the words of a leftist group, the “pillage” of the poorest countries continues, not in the same way as the 19th century, but with “the urbane international banker replacing the colonial soldier and tax collector” (Workers Liberty, July 2000). To back up this view that the big global corporations now rule the world, it has been said that t has been said that ‘no two countries with a McDonalds have ever gone to war’.

Reality lies elsewhere. Not just because the handful of McDonalds in Belgrade did not prevent the bombing of Serbia by US-led forces, nor simply because of the sheer number of imperialist conflicts either in progress or simmering across the globe. Since the start of the twentieth century, the marxist current has developed its understanding of the intimate relation between the concentration of national capital in the hands of the capitalist state, and the tendency for all states to be pushed into pursuing imperialist policies. This was analysed at the time of the First World War by revolutionaries such as Lenin, Bukharin, Luxemburg and Gorter. They all demonstrated the tendency towards state capitalism, where all enterprises follow the dictates of the national state, and the tendency towards imperialist conflict, all within a capitalist system that had reached its historic limits once it covered the planet. If ‘globalisation’ means anything, it’s what capitalism achieved at the beginning of the 20th century, by creating a world economy. It did not remove the basis for imperialist conflict, as Kautsky argued with his theory of ‘ultray of ‘ultraimperialism’, (“the joint exploitation of the world by internationally united finance capital in place of the mutual rivalries of national finance capitals”, as Lenin cited Kautsky in Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, 1915). No, it brought these conflicts to a veritable paroxysm.

Today, at the start of the 21st century, while much has changed - imperialist blocs have come and gone, forms of state control have changed - the essential framework established by the marxist movement has been verified by history.

The influence of globalisation myths

Unfortunately, while the ICC is convinced of the validity of the marxist framework for understanding today’s imperialist conflicts, this is not shared throughout today’s proletarian political milieu. In particular, the Communist Workers Organisation, and the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party of which it is a part, have, in recent years, made a number of concessions to globalisation ideology.

In the 1997 revision of the IBRP’s platform we read that imperialism as a process “recognises no state frontiers and commands no national loyalties from the indigenous bourgeoisie of the peripheral zones. These latter are part of an international capitalist class and are just as enmeshed in the machinations of international finance capital as the bourgeoisie of the traditional capitalist metropoles.” The conclusion drawn from this is that “the modern capitalist state is national only in the sense that it is dominated by the bourgeoisie of a certain nationality. In other respects it remains an agent of international capital and the particular imperialist grouping to which it is presently allied.” (Revolutionary Perspectives 14, p28). While initially it did not seem that this applied to a major power such as Britain, this is not now so clear. In RP 19 they write: “Globalisation has further made protection of national interests virtually impossible for a single second order state such as Britain. These can only be protected by a larger grouping of states. The actual nature of ‘National Interests’ has also changed. Globalisation of production has produced such a penetration of foreign capital that it is no longer shat it is no longer strictly correct to speak of ‘British Capital’ and British Capital’s ‘interests’” (RP 19, p 29)

The danger is that, in doing away with ‘British Capital’, the CWO remove the basis for the very existence of British imperialism. For the IBRP “the WTO [World Trade Organisation] is part of the club run by the richest capitalist powers and their multinationals. Its purpose is to oversee the pulling down of any national barriers that might impede the creation of a true global economy for today’s giant monopolies” (Internationalist Communist 18). The role of such as the British state has changed as “governments now find that the way to defend the interest of the national capital is to play the role of broker and creator of political and social stability for international finance capital” (Revolutionary Perspectives 17). It appears that British national capital (if it exists at all) is only a facilitator for unidentified (but probably US dominated) international capital. Logically, this would undermine any foundation for British imperialism.

Conflict in Ireland. Or not.

Any analysis has to be tested in practice. The ICC’s insistence on the break-up of the western bloc following the collapse of the bloc once dominated by Russia, the end of the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the US, the pursuit of an independent imperialist orientation by Britain, and the retaliation by the US, give a framework for understanding the events of recent years in Northern Ireland. In particular, the Good Friday Agreement has broadly benefited the US at the expense of British imperialism, which has put forward many obstacles to its imposition.

For the CWO, what’s been going on in Northern Ireland has involved rational decisions, based on almost exclusively economic considerations, made by powers almost without conflicting interests. In RP 9 (winter 98) they identify a coincidence of US and British interests in the unfolding ‘peace process’. “The US was decisive in originating and maintaining the process... A major aim is to expand investment opportunities... The British state wishes to disentangle itself from its military commitments in Ireland” (p6).

In RP 11 they insist that “the economic motives for Britain to cut itself free of the burden of Northern Ireland are obvious and far outweigh any benefits she might derive from holding onto the province” (p15). Delving into demography, they see the ‘obvious’ implications of the erosion of the Protestant majority and argue that “the more farsighted leaders of Unionism can see this and the majority of their supporters have now concluded that greater co-operation and greater integration with the South is in their best interests” (p15) In this view the rational Unionists and their supporters have accepted integration with the South and only “the Neanderthal rump of Unionism around Paisley will not accept this”, (ibid).

The verdict of the CWO on the Good Friday Agreement is that “in practice Irish Nationalism and Ulster Unionism have been superseded. Both the British and Irish bourgeoisies see their interests as being better served by prostrating themselves at the feet of international capital. Their aim is primarily to create the best conditions for attractonditions for attracting international capital to both the Northern and Southern parts of the island. The godfather of this deal and the main beneficiary will be US imperialism” (RP 11, p13). The comrades admit that “under capitalism there can be no lasting peace” (ibid), but it is difficult to square that assertion with their view of Ireland, where the US is the main beneficiary, ‘international capital’ is happy with its investment opportunities, and the British and Irish bourgeoisies are grateful for any crumbs left on the table. While the CWO say that periods of peace “will become less frequent” and that “ultimately capitalism offers us ideologies which lead to the barbarism of war” (ibid p16) it is hard to see how that applies to Ireland where the bourgeoisie has ‘superseded’ the main nationalist ideologies.

In RP 15, they return to the inevitability of the ‘Anglo-American’ peace process. While acknowledging that the Unionists/loyalists oppose the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, this is a minor matter, as “the outdated Unionist resistance clinging to forms and relationships which no longer harmonise with the needs of imperialise needs of imperialism will be swept aside - only the timescale is in doubt” (p7). The implications of this remark are not dwelt on. The Unionist parties and loyalist terrorists are vital instruments of British imperialism in Northern Ireland, particularly against the possibility of an independent united Ireland. As Trotsky said in 1916 “an ‘independent’ Ireland could only exist as an outpost of an imperialist state hostile to Britain”. To say that unionist resistance will be inevitably swept away by the US is to imply that Britain is incapable of defending its interests in its own backyard.

Possibilities for ‘normalisation’

As time has passed the CWO have become more aware of the ‘obstacle’ of Unionism. In RP 18, while they see a narrow majority of the Official Unionists following the Good Friday Agreement, they acknowledge that “this is a very fragile arrangement and the position could collapse into chaos” (p29). But having used the awful c-word, which puts in doubt the smooth running of the US operation, they still insist that “the bourgeoisie, no matter how bigoted, invariably act ited, invariably act instinctively to maintain their own interests… the ‘hidden hand’ of profit-rates... is more than capable of countering residual attachments to the Union Flag” (ibid). If “dissident” Unionists don’t recognise what’s in their interests, then “immense pressure” will be brought to bear on them. What form would this pressure take? A strong lecture to Mr Paisley on ‘how to better recognise where your interests lie’ or maybe something more forceful?

No, the reason that the so-called ‘dissidents’ act the way they do is not because of ‘bigotry’ or ‘backwardness’, but because the disruptive actions of many in the loyalist camp serve the interest of British imperialism. Marxist analysis is a very concrete affair. If you examine the statements and activities of the Unionist parties, the loyalist terrorists and the British state in Northern Ireland, you’ll find that they are not identical. This either means that they have different interests to defend, which neither the CWO nor the ICC have ever suggested, or that they are different expressions of the defence of British imperialism’s interests. This is the ABC of marxism: idC of marxism: identifying the different forces in society and how their interests are advanced. After the Omagh bombing, for example, the CWO rightly talk of a “victory to the ‘forces of democracy’ - i.e to the capitalist state” (RP 12, p2). But, in starting the article, they describe the Omagh bomb as “pointless savagery” as if the devastating effect of a car bomb could not serve the interests of the ‘rational’ forces in capitalist society. In terms of the interests of the capitalist state it wasn’t “pointless”. Regardless of who exactly planted it, it helped to strengthen the state’s repressive apparatus.

In RP 18, the CWO repeat what they described in RP 15 as the central features of the “convergence” between US and British interests:

“ - The preparedness of the British bourgeoisie to abandon the state structures established in the early 1920s

- The desire to demilitarise the situation and to ‘normalise’ investment opportunities in an aopportunities in an area of low wages and a divided working class heavily imbued with varieties of bourgeois ideology.

- The absence of any significant imperialist power with the desire or ability to manoeuvre against the USA/Britain in the area

- The co-option of the bourgeoisie in the Irish Republic into the process

- The full agreement of the main Loyalist terrorist organisations - unsurprising given their links to the British state - to support the imperialist ‘peace’ process.” (p28)

The vision presented here is alarmingly close to the dominant one presented in the media in Britain. Press and TV say that, with sectarian prejudice put to one side, it has been possible, with the help of the US, to embark on a ‘peace process’ that will make Northern Ireland ‘normal’. The only problems are the dissidents and terrorists, but they have been marginalised by the others who are doing their best for ‘peace’. For the ’. For the CWO, the bourgeoisie, particularly the US, want to demilitarise the situation and to normalise investment opportunities. The only problems come from the outdated Unionists, and the US will marginalise them if they get out of hand. The CWO have crossed no class lines, but their analysis echoes strongly the propaganda of the bourgeoisie. For the capitalist media what has happened in Northern Ireland is the triumph of rational people in the pursuit of ‘peace’. For the CWO it is the triumph of rational capitalists in pursuit of profit.

Polemics should be used to clarify

It should be underlined that throughout their intervention the CWO have not neglected the wider imperialist picture. They have for some time asserted how “the bourgeoisie in both Britain and Ireland are caught, in more than the geographical sense, between a German-led Europe and their old American links” (RP 18, p29). While this is true, the comrades seem to think that the dominance of the US and Germany is so overwhelming that the lesser powers are no longer capable of struggling in defence of their own interests.

Britain is undeniably a 2nd-rate power, but still very much an imperialist force defending its interests in many regions across the planet. One of the main priorities of the dominant faction of the British bourgeoisie is how to do this independently of other powers, particularly the US. There is still a fundamental tendency towards the formation of imperialist blocs, and there are substantial elements within the British bourgeoisie that advocate a pro-US orientation; this has provoked a long history of tensions within the ruling class in Britain. But, for revolutionaries, identifying the main tendencies within the bourgeoisie is an important task, no matter how tedious it might seem. Class consciousness is not just a self-consciousness, it also means ‘know your enemy.’

In RP 18 the CWO refers to the “ICC’s ‘topsy-turvy’ interpretation of history” (p29) on the question of Ireland. They say that it is “obsessive” to see the dominant faction of the British bourgeoisie having an independent orientation. When they say that Britain is ‘caught’ between Germany and America, they are at least right in identif right in identifying the only two powers who, ultimately, have the capacity to dominate an imperialist bloc. What they miss out is the material reality that drives British capital to try and defend its own interests, against the encroachments of other major imperialisms.

They also criticise us for seeing “the Irish Republicans as reliable clients of the US bourgeoisie against the British state.” ‘Clients’ is the CWO’s word - we have tended to describe Sinn Fein and the IRA as pawns, agents of US imperialism. In the CWO’s analysis, their assertions point to most (or all?) forces in Ireland serving the interests of the US, the “main beneficiary” of the ‘peace process’. Yet the CWO seem to suggest that the mainstream republicans are ‘unreliable’ when, in practice, of all the different groupings, Sinn Fein and the IRA have been the most keen to stick to the spirit and the letter of the Good Friday Agreement, the best defenders of the ‘Pax Americana’.

So, when the CWO paraphrase our position as seeing that “‘part of the British state’ is now an agent of thes now an agent of the US and an irreconcilable opponent of the British bourgeoisie” (RP 18, p29) they are shocked by our “peculiar method”. Yet what could be more straightforward. Sinn Fein have ministers in the Northern Ireland Executive, which is an organ of British imperialism (albeit one taking a form forced on it by the US). So long as Britain and the US do not have shared interests then Sinn Fein will be “irreconcilable” to British interests at certain levels, while still prepared to implement policies for the Executive that satisfy capitalism’s needs in areas like Health and Education. It is difficult to know what most offends the CWO: that we identify British capital as defending its own interests, or suggest that the British state is not merely a conduit for ‘international finance capital’. And as for the IRA, do the CWO want us to believe that this republican faction is an instrument of something other than US imperialism? And if so, what?

The ICC’s analysis of Ireland is an attempt to identify the contradictory and antagonistic forces involved in the situation. When the CWO say that some Unionists are far-sighted enough to appreciate the necessity for a United Ireland, or that the Ireland, or that the British government wants to disentangle itself from Ireland, we disagree. We have consistently shown that the Unionists continue their virulent defence of the link with Britain, and that British governments (and oppositions) have not for a moment flinched from upholding the Union.

We will continue, at every opportunity, to insist on what the groups of the communist left have in common: the shared heritage, the basic positions of principle. It remains the case that the CWO and the ICC are the only groups in this country who consistently denounce all the bourgeois gangs involved in the carnage in Ulster, and who defend an internationalist orientation for the working class. At the same time, our differences in the analysis of an evolving situation do have important implications. The ICC has identified the tendency toward an imperialist free-for-all, and shown how the antagonism between the US and Britain lies behind the conflict over the ‘peace process’. The CWO denies there is any real conflict as “British and American interests are able to accommodate to each other” (RP 18, p29). Where the ICC has tried to demonstrate what the period following the break-up of the blocs has meant in terms of meant in terms of the intensification of imperialist antagonisms, the CWO has clung to a view of the rational bourgeoisie examining the state of its accounts in order to determine imperialist policy - in so far as any nation can even be called imperialist. For us this approach makes dangerous concessions to the bourgeoisie’s campaigns about globalisation, a central aim of which is to mask the reality of imperialist conflict in the period since the disappearance of the blocs. Globalisation ideology repeats Kautsky’s fantasies of a world unified and pacified by the pursuit of commerce. Real life demonstrates that since the collapse of the blocs imperialism has increasingly employed military force, countries have fallen apart or are divided by warring factions, and the bourgeoisie has more and more resorted to archaic and religious ideology in the reinforcement of nationalism. Capitalism is not calmly putting aside its divisions and proceeding with the rational process of capital accumulation. It is driven by the economic crisis into increasingly destructive imperialist conflicts, which only the revolutionary struggle of the working class can prevent from escalating into total barbarism.

On 5th December 2000, 600,000 postal workers in India went on a nationwide strike. All sections of postal workers, in all corners of India, were involved in this strike that lasted till 18th December 2000. From day one of the strike the entire media and state machine, including the highest courts, were directed toward attacking and discrediting the postal workers as a selfish and irresponsible sector holding ‘society’ to ransom. The state used all the tricks short of direct violence to crush the militancy of the workers. It declared the strike illegal, proclaimed no work, no pay, enforced the ESMA (Essential Services Maintenance Act), called paramilitary and military units to man postal services. All this was accompanied by propaganda about how private courier service operators were managing the situation very well and the government was not bothered about the strike.

The postal workers are a particul workers are a particularly exploited and militant section of public sector workers and have often fought the bosses for better living conditions and better pay. The last time they went on strike, in 1998, it was one of the major episodes of class combat at the time. But the recent strike was the biggest since their historic 15 days strike in 1969. In 1969 postal workers had gone on strike in a context of massive and militant struggles of many sectors of workers. Faced with the militancy of the postal workers, at the time, the state had used naked and brutal violence against workers and their families to suppress the postal strike. This time around, alongside the direct oppressive instruments of the state, the unions played an insidious role in defeating and demoralizing workers.

As part of a round of ‘economic reforms’, the bosses have been talking of new attacks on the jobs and living conditions of postal workers. In line with different estimates put out by the bourgeoisie, due to technological changes more than 30% of postal employees have become surplus to requirements, so that postal services need ‘restructuring’. In addition, the bosses speak of privatisation of segments of postal operations. The present strike and the ferocious response it provoked from the bossesvoked from the bosses needs to be understood in the context of the extremely bad working conditions of postal workers and above all of the proposed offensive of the bosses.

Union sabotage

From the start the unions tightly controlled the strike. It was called jointly by all three main postal unions - the leftist NFPE (National Federation of Postal Employees) and NPO (National Postal Organisation) that control the majority of the branches, and BPEF (Bharatiya Postal Employees Federation), the union of the ruling BJP. It is significant that very little initial mobilisation was done among the postal workers. When the strike started most workers were not even aware of the demands. On the first day the participation was very low, often limited to union cadres. It was only later that workers jumped into the struggle - they thought this a good opportunity to fight for better working conditions and above all against the threat of redundancies looming in the background.

The demands that the unions framed did not even raise the issue of the threat of redundancies that is the main agenda of the bosses. Moreover, they were framed in such a way as to sow mutual suspicion and divisions among and divisions among the workers, especially between the 300,000 full time workers and an equal number of part time rural postal workers. Clearly, the unions had started with an agenda of dividing and defeating the workers and laying the groundwork for the bosses’ coming offensive. The workers were full of anger and militancy and persisted in their fight despite all threats of the bosses. But they were not strong enough to defeat this trap laid by the bosses and unions.

From the very beginning of the strike, the bosses were determined that workers should come out of the strike with a sense of defeat and surrender. This was akin to what the bourgeoisie did during power workers’ strike in Utar Pradesh in June last year. The difference is that the power sector workers had struck against the bourgeoisie’s offensive (the ‘reforms’) and the bosses were determined to crush the workers and push through their offensive, which they did after crushing the strike. This time, they have taken recourse to demoralizing workers before initiating ‘reforms’.

The strike is defeated

Thus the government was not at all conciliatory - they proclaimed that they have imed that they have conceded what they could. And the strike finally ended, not as customarily happens, with a promise of ‘sympathetically considering’ workers’ demands. On the contrary, the government proclaimed the strike illegal and prepared to enforce the ESMA, which entitles it to imprison and sentence any and every striking worker.

Faced with these threats of the government, the BPEF, postal union of the ruling BJP, asked workers to go back to work on 18th December 2000. Next day the leftists followed suit and asked all workers to return to work.

In the aftermath of the strike, the postal workers find themselves bitter and demoralized. Unions are now going around hammering the message that if workers could not win with the recent strike, nothing can now be done. Clearly, workers need to understand that the bourgeoisie had laid a trap for them and that they are preparing for a bigger offensive. The communications minister, Mr. Paswan has been saying that postal services need to be restructured to remain profitable. In these conditions, workers need to draw lessons from their recent experience and prepare to confront the bosses by breaking the union stranglehold and uniting with other sectors ofth other sectors of workers. It will be a difficult task given the recent setback, but it will be the only way.

Communist Internationalist, ICC nucleus in India

The deployment of British and American bombers to attack targets around Baghdad in mid-February was a fitting celebration of the tenth anniversary of the ‘end’ of the war against Iraq in February 1991. Ten years ago, Desert Storm, the military operation of the UN coalition of 29 countries led by the US, was unleashed against Iraq following its invasion of Kuwait. It was supposed to be in defence of ‘international law’ and ‘world peace’.

By the end of the Gulf War there were more than 550,000 US troops in the area. The British and French troops together amounted to about 45,000. The US forces were equipped with 2200 tanks, 500 combat helicopters and 1500 war planes. NATO deployed 107 warships in the region. The US navy had more than 700 nuclear weapons on its ships and submarines. The war removed the Iraqi forces that had invaded Kuwait. But Saddam Hussein, built up as one of the great tyrants of modern times, was not toppled. As we know, he has remained the leader of Iraq up to the present day. And the fact is that he was not the real target of the US-led offensive.

Following the post-89 break-up of the Russian bloc there was no way that the US could maintain the discipline of the western bloc, which fell apart as each country pursued its own interests. By launching the Gulf War, the US ensured that every country in the world knew the extent of its ability to mobilise at the military level. It was first and foremost a demonstration of its status as the only remaining superpower.

The military enforcement of the ‘no-fly’ zones with almost daily actions has continued ever since, but the bombings of mid-February were the biggest in more than two years. They were a reminder that while Bush has replaced Clinton (who in turn replaced Bush senior) the might of US imperialism continues. To a certain extent this reminder was well taken. A Russian general, Leonid Ivashov, called the recent air strikes "a challenge to the international community ... Today no state on earth can feel secure" (Financial Times 24/2/1).

Despite this, the support of the "allies" for the US has been dwindling, while opposing voices have multiplied. The recent bombings were condemned by a whole host of countries, from France, Russia and China to Saudi Arabia and Egypt. It is also clear from the conflict in Israel/Palestine that the US is not successful in imposing its will in every situation regardless. As for the involvement of the devious British, it should not be seen as that of a "partner" to the US, but as the action of an imperialism with a long-established presence in the region, trying to advance its own particular interests.

Hypocrisy of the ‘humanitarian’ warmongers

Ten years ago, there were hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian and military deaths. Today once more, through the miracles of technology (in particular depleted uranium), the arsenal employed by the allied forces is the cause of malformations of new-born babies in the area, of leukaemias and cancers for the military personnel of the big powers and anyone else caught in the theatre of operations. And for ten years the almost daily bombardment by US and British forces has continued to spread terror and death across Iraq. In the last four years British and American aircraft have flown more than 16,000 sorties. In 2000 they dropped 500 bombs on Iraq, in 1999, 1500. The cost to Britain of patrolling the "no-fly" zones has been more than £900m so far, and continues to rise.

This is not the only consequence of the bourgeoisie's "crusade for peace". It is estimated that between 5000 and 6000 Iraqis die every month as a consequence of the economic sanctions imposed by the US and still supported by Britain. The suffering is worse for children, the sick and the old, deprived of food and medicine by the effects of the embargo. The US and Britain blame Saddam's regime for these deaths, claiming that the regime does gain adequate funds for food and medicine from the trade that it is allowed to engage in, but chooses to use this income to build weapons or line the pockets of the elite. But even if the shortages were not really as bad as many reports have indicated, why would you expect such a corrupt and repressive regime not to "misuse" scant economic resources in such a way? As always, the allies' real victims are not Saddam and his cronies, but the Iraqi population they are supposedly so concerned about.

The situation faced by the Kurds is a perfect illustration of the cynicism of the ‘democratic’ ruling class. During the Gulf war the airforces of Britain, the US and France distributed leaflets to the population of North and South Iraq, encouraging them to desert and revolt - letting them think that all the military potential of Saddam Hussein had been destroyed by the military operation. In fact, the allies deliberately left Saddam's best trained force - the Republican Guard - untouched. This gave the butcher of Baghdad a free hand to brutally massacre the Kurds of Iraq, and this was the allies' intention. By allowing Saddam to crush forces that were traditionally hostile to the current regime, the big powers were able to limit the risks of Iraq being totally dislocated by the formation of a Kurdish state, which would have severely destabilised the whole region. Furthermore, once the bloodletting had been accomplished it served as a new pretext to maintain the British and American airborne military presence over Iraqi territory, the "no-fly" zones to "protect" the Kurdish population, which has shared the appalling deprivations inflicted on the Iraqi population.

And when some Kurds recently tried to escape this hell and the rusty boat they were in ran aground on French beaches on the Cote d’Azur, it was not the end of their nightmare. Despite expressions of humanitarian concern, the French media focussed on the fight against illegal immigration, outlining the subtle distinction between political refugee and economic migrant. For the refugees there is only desperation in the face of ruling class hostility. The British government claims to be against the oppression of the Kurds, but British Home Secretary Jack Straw made it plain that he was determined that none of the Kurdish refugees would set foot on British soil. If they did he would invoke EU rules and send them back where they came from.

It should also be added that the British air force uses Turkish airbases to patrol northern Iraq. These are the same airfields as the Turkish air force uses as bases to bomb the Kurds in South East Turkey and in Iraq. Over the last 15 years Turkey has destroyed 3000 villages, killed 30,000 people and created three million refugees in its war on the Kurds. All the major imperialisms value Turkey as a significant power in the region.

Ten years after the Gulf war it can be seen that the "new world order", so dear to the great democracies, has led to a worsening of chaos and barbarity all over the world, with its refugee camps, its mass graves and increasing resort to military action to advance imperialist interests.

Late last year, the 520 workers at the Chef Cookers (domestic stoves) factory in Brunswick, in Melbourne, Australia, were told that the factory would be closed soon. Only one month before, the union covering these workers had "negotiated" a limitation in provisions for redundancy packages. This right wing union, the Australian Workers' Union, is notorious for its reactionary role. It has long been militantly pro-capitalist and, for at least a century, been a major source of racism and virulent Australian nationalism in the "labour movement". The State Government, currently run by the Australian Labor Party, parades as a sort of Aussie version of Tony Blair's "Third Way". In November last year, in fact, this government invoked draconian Essential Services legislation that the previous Liberal/National Party Coalition Government had not dared use, to help bludgeon power workers to end their wildcat strike (see World Revolution 240). Neither of these forces - neither the AWU nor the State ALP - was therefore able to pose as a militant opponent of the planned factory closure, when it was announced.

This created a potential problem for a ruling class which is all too aware that it is essential to deflect workers' anger at the worsening epidemic of factory closures down harmless dead ends. All was not lost, however: enter the Trotskyists. Public meetings, demonstrations, rallies and petitions condemning the ‘ruthlessness’ of the company have been organised, principally by the International Socialist Organisation (ISO). The ISO has spearheaded a campaign, which it describes as "a broad united front with the Australian Workers Union, local councillors, ALP politicians and concerned residents" (ISO web site). This has made it much easier for the union to wear down workers' resistance to the planned closure.

Anti-working class campaign

This anti-working class campaign has enabled the union and even the Labor State Government to appear as if they are prepared to stand behind the workers who are under the gun. Thus, when AWU State Secretary, Bill Shorten, claims that the workers themselves were responsible for the savaging of their redundancy provisions, the ISO dutifully repeats his arguments on their web site. When the workers need to develop links with other groups of workers, and begin talking to them of a common plan of action, the ISO proposes protest stunts and petitions. When ALP MPs ‘denounce’ the planned closure in the name of Australian nationalism and Victorian parochialism, the ISO reprints the MPs’ sickening appeals word-for-word on its web site. When the AWU proposes that the workers ‘blockade’ the plant if ‘negotiations fail’, the ISO concurs enthusiastically, and proposes that the workers use an even more ‘militant’ means to cut themselves off from other workers in struggle, by extending any blockade to an occupation.

Disagreements between the ISO, on the one hand, and the AWU and the Labor Party on the other, are presented as proof that the ISO are the only force prepared to go all the way for the workers. In fact, this is a convenient - and necessary - division of labour within the left wing of capital. The ISO’s principal role in this campaign is to provide pseudo-militant credentials to the AWU and at least some of the ALP MPs. But, for those workers who see through the lies and subterfuges of the traditional left, the ISO is there to divert them into the safe terrain of the radical left wing of capital. An ISO Socialist Worker article argues: “If Email still refuse to keep the factory open, the Premier, Steve Bracks, should come in and nationalize the factory, keeping it open and returning the profits to the people” - as if state monopolies ever belonged to the working class, and have not always been just another form of capitalism, which have been shedding workers in great numbers in all countries in recent years, just like the private sector corporations. Any worker who follows this, by identifying with nationalised industry, is tying himself, not to the interests of his own class, but to those of the capitalists.

Attacking workers’ consciousness

The ISO’s main slogan in this campaign has been the old Stalinist ‘people before profits’ - a sheer impossibility for capitalism at any time (such an enterprise would not see out a month of trading!), let alone in the middle of capital’s gravest ever economic crisis! In fact, the ISO sharply denies capital’s crisis, spreading the illusion that the closure is planned simply out of pure greed, by a corporation making record profits. By so doing, the leftists are severely attacking workers’ consciousness. After all, if capital is not in a serious crisis which threatens humanity with wars and worse, what need is there for a fight to the finish?

Indeed, the leftists are doing all that they can to restrict the Chef Cookers workers to ineffectual action in one suburb. The leaflets, articles and speeches of the AWU and the leftists alike are replete with references to the need to unite with the so called ‘Brunswick community’. The ISO have a ‘community telephone tree’, you see. What more could you want?

Only the ICC has spoken out against this reactionary nonsense. As the ICC leaflet distributed at the last rally put it, the threatened closure of the factory is “not a struggle by ‘Brunswick workers’ but a part of the struggle of the entire working class against the economic crisis of capitalism”. Chef workers, like all workers facing such attacks, need to understand their struggle in this context in order to see that all those, like the unions or the Labor Party or leftists, who would have them defend ‘their’ national or regional industry are their enemies. Their strength lies only in uniting with other workers.

ICC Leaflet

The stated purpose of today’s rally is to ask Email/Electrolux why it puts ‘profits before people’ and why it ignores ‘demands of the workers, the union and the local community to keep the factory open’. The organisers of this protest campaign include Bill Shorten, State Secretary of the Australian Workers Union, Labor MPs Carlo Carli and Kelvin Thomson, and the International Socialist Organisation (Socialist Worker).

No-one can doubt the sincerity of ordinary workers involved in this and earlier protests; we do not doubt that these workers simply want to stop the closure of the Chef Cookers factory — and the 520 sackings it will cause. The authors of this leaflet are just as determined to support any workers’ action which will fight against the rising tide of mass sackings. So we also believe that it is absolutely crucial to avoid tactics which have been shown time and again to not only fail, but to lead workers to disaster. We need to all do some hard thinking about how workers can begin to be successful. As workers opposed to all the capitalists’ plans to make the working class pay for the crisis of the bosses’ economic system, we also believe that it is vital to speak frankly about the traps being set for workers in the current campaign.

Chef workers’ situation is a problem for all workers

The first trap is to think that the problem of Chef Cookers’ workers is a problem just for ‘Victorian workers’ or the ‘Brunswick community’. The reality is that capitalism is in the grip of a very serious economic crisis all over the world. Workers are being sacked in every country; this is symptomatic of very serious economic problems for the capitalists’ system — not just a problem in Brunswick! So we need to look for methods of struggle which unite the mass of workers in action, instead of limiting ourselves to protests in one suburb.

Every worker can see that conditions are getting tougher — that is, that the capitalists are trying to make workers pay for this crisis of the bosses’ system. In every country right now, prices are rising, as the real value of our pay drops, social security is cut to the bone, and mass sackings occur. Even under the Federal Government’s dodgy figures, at least 44,000 full-time jobs were lost in December 2000 alone throughout Australia.

The Australian Workers Union and the MPs involved in the Chef Cookers campaign admit that employers are carrying out massive sackings. But the unions and the ALP MPs still claim that a solution can be found within capitalism. While AWU State Secretary Bill Shorten and even the ALP MPs talked vaguely about ‘action’ at the start of their campaign in order to give themselves credibility, they have shown their real intentions more recently. The ALP State Government and the AWU have written to Electrolux, proposing that it allow workers to buy the factory. This would entail workers handing over their pitiful redundancy payments to Electrolux. (Don’t forget that the AWU negotiated a reduction in such payments only one month before the announcement was made to close the factory!) According to the Herald Sun of 7 February, workers would make the factory viable then resell it to Electrolux: “My advisers believe it’s possible to structure a deal that would give Electrolux a healthy injection of cash with no risk”, says Shorten.

In other words, the ‘solution’ is to make Chef workers capitalists. But this could only be viable if the workers acted like capitalists everywhere who are faced with profitability problems. That is, the directors appointed to direct the factory must run it ruthlessly — like any other business— cutting the workforce, and speeding up production. This is the only way it could compete on the international market — as it must, or find itself being outsold by more ruthless international competitors. And there is no guarantee that this strategy would work even for the small group of former Chef employees not sacked by the new ‘worker directors’. This ‘solution’ has been tried in many countries and the end result is always failure as far as jobs preservation is concerned. And, by turning workers into two bob capitalists, it is also guaranteed to divide those facing sacking off from the rest of the working class.

The ‘solution’ being proposed by the union and the Labor Party is really a deadly trap: workers would hand back their redundancy payments, be compelled to act like capitalist bloodsuckers and still probably end up on the street! In the process, they would destroy any possibility of a united fight by themselves against the capitalists’ attacks, in conjunction with other workers.

Workers have only themselves to rely upon

Some others in this campaign say they agree that a buyout is not the solution and that the alternative is action. However, they propose signing petitions and occupying the factory. Petitions (saying ‘please’ to the boss) have never changed anything, but what about occupations? According to the leftists around the paper Socialist Worker, (Bulletin No. 3, in December 2000) an occupation would stop the transfer of machinery “and would be a beacon of resistance for workers across Australia”, allowing “other Email workers” to “build solidarity action”.

Once again, the history of workers’ struggles tells a different story. It is true that some very militant workers have occupied their factories throughout history, but the result is never that these factories become ‘beacons of resistance’ to other workers. The real outcome is that the workers lock-up their struggle inside their individual factories or corporations, cutting themselves off from other workers who could support them if asked to join them in united strike action.

This is not a struggle by ‘Brunswick workers’ as the organisers of this campaign claim. It is a part of the struggle of the entire working class against the economic crisis of capitalism. So it is time that Chef workers took the ‘campaign’ out of the hands of the community committee organised by their false friends the AWU, the Labor Party and Socialist Worker — who have all shown that they work for the capitalists’ interests — so that they can take real united action with other workers who want to fight back against the capitalists’ attacks. The unions, the ALP and the bogus socialists all serve the class enemy. All workers have only themselves to rely upon.

Instead of a so-called people’s campaign by the ‘community of Brunswick’, this means taking the fight out of the back streets of Brunswick, to other workers willing to consider taking fighting action. Instead of protests pleading with the boss to ‘put people before profits’, and to let the workers buy the factory, it is time for Chef workers to take their fight to other workers. Massive delegations can be sent to other workplaces, beginning in the northern suburbs.

A real workers’ campaign can be built on the basis of this bold action. Regular, frequent, general assemblies of all workers involved can decide on appropriate action to draw other workers into the fight. Action can include workers’ demonstrations and industrial action, including strike action. A working class action campaign is the only way that our class can muster its strength as a class, and potentially force the capitalists to retreat.

ICC, 14/2/2001

In last year’s US presidential elections Ralph Nader, standing in favour of a more ‘green’, less corporate, capitalism, persuaded more than 2.5 million people to vote for him, including many who would not otherwise have bothered turning up at the polling station. In Britain, the ruling class is also concerned about the growing lack of interest in capitalist politics. Learned professors from Essex and Sheffield Universities are concerned at the results of their research which “if this is confirmed by actual turnout in a few months’ time, electoral participation will look like it is in long term decline” (Guardian 1/3/01). They suggest that “the 2001 general election is set to have the lowest turnout of any since Lloyd George went to the country in 1918” (ibid). In this context the Socialist Alliance has just launched its general election campaign. Supported by celebrities such as Harold Pinter, Ken Loach, Linda Smith, Jeremy Hardy, Rob Newman, Mark Steel, Mark Thomas, Ricky Tomlinson and John Pilger, the SA exists because today, with discontent and suspicion in the working class, there is the possibility that beyond apathy with elections there lies the potential for a struggle against the whole capitalist system. Following on from the Nader example, a report from its opening press conference says that “the SA campaign claims that it will attract disenfranchised voters who would otherwise not vote at all - at least 100,000 overall” (Guardian 2/3/01).

The SA was originally a loose alliance established in 1997. Increasing numbers of groups became interested in participating in it. Candidates stood in the 1998 Euro elections, in the May 2000 elections for the Greater London Assembly, and in various local elections. The groups now involved include the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Party of England and Wales (ex-Militant), the Alliance for Workers Liberty (Workers Liberty/Action for Solidarity), Workers Power, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Weekly Worker), the International Socialist Group (Socialist Outlook) as well as other groups and individuals. While all these groups are proud of their particular identities, one thing they’ve always had in common has been support for the Labour Party at election time. Indeed, while their current plans are for at least a 100 candidates, (and supporting the 72 (ex-Militant) Scottish Socialist Party candidates in Scotland) elsewhere they will be recommending staying in the Labour fold. One of the SWP’s election slogans, for example, is “Keep the Tories Out” (“we still prefer a Labour victory to a Tory” - Socialist Worker 3/3/01). So why are they standing, if they don’t even want a change in government?

Mopping up discontent

At an SWP conference last November leading member John Rees said that “People’s disillusion with the electoral system - shown by low turnouts - and New Labour should not be left to others to exploit. We want socialists to gain from the anger in society” (SW 18/11/00). John Nicholson, a former deputy leader of Manchester Council and a leading member of the SA was reported as saying that “millions of working class people felt betrayed by New Labour and were looking for an alternative” (SW 7/10/00). Because of this “we have to make sure that alternative is a socialist alternative - otherwise the right wing, the Tories and the Nazis can gain from disillusion with New Labour” (ibid).

In fact the elements who constitute the SA know perfectly well that workers’ disillusionment can go in a very different direction from “the Tories and the Nazis”. The real alternative is to struggle as a collective class against the attacks of the Labour government, rather than the atomisation of the passive isolated individual in a polling booth. The SWP, for instance, published an article in Socialist Worker (28/10/00) on the question of elections and made a point of attacking the “‘left’ communists in Germany who were opposed to socialists contesting elections”. The article was headlined “Part of shaping anger with Blair” - that is, giving workers’ anger a shape which will be no threat to capitalism, and no benefit to the working class. The SWP say that: “Now you can hit back at Tory Blair” (SW 3/3/01) by voting Labour and surrendering to the charade of bourgeois democracy.

Propaganda for state capitalism

While the main reason for the SA’s existence is as part of the democratic charade, the detail of the points they’re standing on can’t be ignored. When Lenin mistakenly put forward the idea of (that contradiction in terms) ‘revolutionary parliamentarianism’, against the German Left Communists, he at least had the merit of wanting to make propaganda against the capitalist system. The various items agreed by the groups of the SA are all policies for the capitalist state to follow: changing the way hospitals, schools and council services are financed; ensuring state control of council housing, the London Underground, air traffic control and the Post Office; boosting local government; renationalising the buses, railways and water industry; changing the tax and welfare system.

In the SA there is an “80/20” formula, where they campaign on the 80% that they agree on and avoid debating the 20% they disagree on. The 80% are state capitalist policies. The 20% includes such details as the Weekly Worker’s request that the minimum wage “be decided on the basis of what is needed to physically and culturally reproduce the worker and one child” and that in prisons “cells must be self-contained and for one person alone” (25/1/01). The 20% also includes the fact that, during the war in Kosovo, some of the SA’s constituent groups supported the Serbian war-drive and others the NATO bombing. Their only difference was on which group of capitalist gangsters workers should die for.

Deepening confusion

One final point should be made about the SA campaign. It is curious that, after literally decades of disputes between all the different tendencies in the SA, the main leftist groups should finally have come together, for the first time since 1951, at this particular historical point. The explanation to this can be found in the current state of class consciousness. Over the last ten years workers have been disorientated, without even, in some respects, a sense of basic class identity. The confusion in the working class is accentuated when a unified force like the SA (claiming to be ‘revolutionary’ etc) insists that political life can take place in the framework of bourgeois democracy, and that the alternatives are nationalisation or privatisation, Left or Right. The reality of capitalist society is of the struggle of class against class, the working class against its exploiters.

The best hip hop is eloquently intelligent; lyrical, satirical, even politically critical; a worthy offspring of blues, jazz and soul.

But the hip hop scene has long been dominated by ‘gangsta rap’. And gangsta ideology is one of the many ways through which capitalism exerts its control over the exploited and the oppressed.

The gangsterisation of society is a typical expression of decomposing capitalism. In Russia the mafia is almost indistinguishable from the ruling political elite; in Liberia or Sierra Leone the gangs are armed to the teeth and engage in ‘civil war’; in the US urban ghettos, the gang has become the refuge for the most dispossessed, a pseudo-community offering them a means of day-to-day survival. But just as in Africa the armed gangs become instruments of competing imperialisms, so in New York or LA the gangs are in no way an expression of proletarian revolt, as the self-proclaimed ‘communists’ of Aufheben once suggested. On the contrary, they function as instruments of capital’s totalitarian occupation of social life.

This is obvious at the level of commerce: gangsta culture is a conduit for the drug trade, the weapons trade, and even the fashion industry. Nike, Reebok and the other labels are inseparable from the gangsta image. But gangsta is also a political ideology, a packaging of revolt, channelling rebellion into new forms of division. The rap group Public Enemy once chanted the slogan ‘Fight the Power’. But the influence of black nationalism on such groups ensures that the real power, which exploits all colours with equal zeal, remains hidden from view. Black nationalism – together with gangsta’s infamous demeaning of women and gays – is a means of dividing the proletariat, of obliterating its class identity.

Eminem, of course, has managed to cross the racial divide; and this, alongside his undoubted talents as a rapper, is one of the reasons why he has been made into a megastar. Eminem, we are told, is the voice of ‘white trash America’: codename for the most down-trodden section of the white American working class. And how is this section of the proletariat presented through the chain-saw wielding, blue overalls-wearing, drink and drug-guzzling posture adopted by Eminem in his controversial British tour? Not just as misogynist and homophobic, but above all as self-destructive and nihilistic: “I don’t give a fuck”. And nihilism is just another way of sterilising critical thought.

But what about all the shock and outrage vented by the Daily Mail, the Beckhams, or the politically correct Student Union puritans? More grist to the campaign, boosting Slim Shady’s subversive image. Real subversion lies elsewhere – in the rigorous criticism of this social order and the proposal of a revolutionary alternative. When the working class unites across all divisions, and calls capitalism into question, it will draw behind it the best of the artists, and put an end to the bourgeoisie’s cynical theft and manipulation of all forms of cultural creativity.

We are publishing here the theses on parliamentarism, drawn up by Amadeo Bordiga on behalf of the communist abstentionist fraction of the Socialist Party of Italy, the nucleus of the Communist Party of Italy, formed in 1921.

The theses were submitted for discussion at the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920. At this time there was a major debate within the CI about whether communists should take part in parliamentary elections, and work inside parliament if elected. The majority position, defended by Lenin, Trotsky and others, was that of “revolutionary parliamentarism” - the idea that revolutionaries could use the parliamentary forum as a “tribune” from which to denounce capitalism and advocate the communist revolution. The left communists - Bordiga’s fraction in Italy, the KAPD in Germany, Sylvia Pankhurst’s group in Britain among them - argued that the period of working in parliament was over. In the new period, when proletarian revolution was directly on the agenda, the ruling class was using parliamentary “democracy” as a means of opposing the workers’ struggle for the power of the soviets; if the Communist parties took part in the charade of elections and in the parliamentary “talking shop”, it would spread dangerous confusions within the ranks of the working class. In our view, history has amply confirmed this view, but we will look at this debate in more detail in a future article.

Today there are all sorts of groups which claim to be “revolutionary” - such as the various Trotskyist factions inside the Socialist Alliance - who claim that they are following on the tradition of “revolutionary parliamentarism” by standing in the forthcoming elections. This is false. As we show in the article in this issue, these “socialists” do not aim to destroy capitalism at all, but merely propose “radical” alternatives for its management.

Today it is rare to find any genuine communist groups advocating the old tactic of revolutionary parliamentarism. But precisely because the pseudo-revolutionaries of today use the errors of the past workers’ movement to justify their bourgeois politics, the theses of the left communists remain as relevant today as they were in 1920.

2. Communists deny the possibility that the working class will ever conquer power through a majority of parliamentary seats. The armed revolutionary struggle alone will take it to its goal. The conquest of power by the proletariat, which forms the starting point of communist economic construction, leads to the violent and careful abolition of the democratic organs and their replacement by organs of proletarian power - by workers’ councils. The exploiting class is in this way robbed of all political rights and the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. a government system with class representation, is set up. The abolition of parliamentarism becomes a historical task of the communist movement. Even more, representative democracy is precisely the first form of bourgeois society that must be brought down, and moreover even before capitalist property.

3. The same must happen with local government institutions, which should not be theoretically posed as an opposite to the state organs. In reality their apparatus is identical with the state mechanism of the bourgeoisie. They must similarly be destroyed by the revolutionary proletariat and replaced by local soviets of workers’ deputies.

4. At the present moment, the task of the communists in mentally and materially driving forward the revolution is to free the proletariat above all from the illusions and prejudices that were spread by the treachery of the old social democratic leaders. In those countries which have been ruled for a longer time by a democratic order which is rooted in the habits and thoughts of the masses, and also in the old socialist parties, this task is of special importance, and assumes the first place among the problems of the preparation of the revolution.

5. Participation in elections and in parliamentary activity at a time when the thought of the conquest of power by the proletariat was still far distant and when there was not yet any question of direct preparation for the revolution and the realisation of the dictatorship of the proletariat could offer great possibilities for propaganda, agitation and criticism. On the other hand, in those countries where a bourgeoisie has at yet only started and is creating new institutions, the entry of communists into the representative bodies, which are still in a formative stage, can have a big influence on the development of events in order to bring about a favourable outcome of the revolution and the final victory of the proletariat.

6. In the present historical epoch, which has opened with the end of the world war and its consequences for the social organisation of the bourgeoisie - with the Russian revolution as the first realisation of the idea of the conquest of power by the working class, and the formation of the new International in opposition to the traitors of the social democracy - and in the countries where the democratic order was introduced a long time ago, there is no possibility of exploiting parliamentarism for the revolutionary cause of communism. Clarity of propaganda no less than preparation for the final struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat demand that communists carry out propaganda for a boycott of the elections on the part of the workers.

7. Under these historical conditions, under which the revolutionary conquest of power by the proletariat has become the main problem of the movement, every political activity of the Party must be dedicated to this goal. It is necessary to break with the bourgeois lie once and for all, with the lie that tries to make people believe that every clash of the hostile parties, every struggle for the conquest of power, must be played out in the framework of the democratic mechanism, in election campaigns and parliamentary debates. It will not be possible to achieve this goal without renouncing completely the traditional method of calling on workers to participate in the elections, where they work side by side with the bourgeois class, without putting and end to the spectacle of the proletariat appearing on the same parliamentary ground as its exploiters.

8. The ultra-parliamentary practice of the old socialist parties spread the dangerous conception that all political action consists only of election campaigns and parliamentary activity. On the other hand the proletariat’s aversion for this treachery has created a fertile soil for the syndicalist and anarchist tendencies which deny that the political action and activity of the party have any value. Therefore the Communist Parties will never achieve great success in propagating the revolutionary Marxist method if they do not base their work directly on the dictatorship of the proletariat and on the workers’ councils, and abandon any contact with bourgeois democracy.

9. The excessively great importance ascribed in practice to the election campaigns and their results, the fact that the party dedicates to them all its forces and human, press and economic resources for quite a long period of time means on the one hand that all the speeches at meetings and all the theoretical statements to the contrary, the conviction is strengthened that this really is the main action for the achievement of communist goals. On the other hand it leads to an almost complete renunciation of any work of revolutionary organisation and preparation by giving the party organisation a technical character that stands in complete contradiction to the requirements of legal and illegal revolutionary work.

10. As far as those parties are concerned that have affiliated to the Communist International by a majority decision, further participation in election campaigns prevents the required sifting out of the social democratic elements, without whose removal the Communist International will not be able to carry out its historic role.

11. The actual character of the debates that take place in parliament and other democratic organs excludes any possibility of moving on from a criticism of the opposing parties to propaganda against the principle of parliamentarism, to action that exceeds the limits of the parliamentary constitution. In exactly the same way it is impossible to obtain a mandate that gives the right to speak if one refuses to submit to all the formalities of the electoral process.

Success in the parliamentary fight can be achieved merely by skill in the use of the common weapon of the principles on which the institution bases itself and by using the nuances in the rules, just as success in the election campaign will be judged more and more according to the number of votes and seats obtained.

Every attempt by the Communist Parties to lend the practice of parliamentarism a totally different character will simply lead to a bankruptcy of the energies that will have to be sacrificed to this labour of Sisyphus. The cause of the communist revolution calls summarily for direct action against the capitalist system of the exploiters.

The foot and mouth crisis in Britain, which is now spreading to the rest of Europe, is having a devastating economic impact. Nearly half a million animals have already been slaughtered, and the epidemic is still not yet under control. British food exports have been banned, while the closing of the countryside is losing the tourist industry a £100 million a week. The cost of the crisis is already estimated at 1.1% of GDP.

The present epidemic of foot and mouth is not a ‘natural’ catastrophe, any more than mad cow disease, swine fever, salmonella, E. coli, and other livestock infections are. It is the result of modern intensive agriculture: “The modern animal farm not only allows but paves the way for the outbreak of disease. We cram thousands of genetically uniform animals into unhygienic warehouses, generating a feast for microbes. We recycle animal manure and slaughterhouse waste as feed. We process meat at breakneck speed in the presence of blood, faeces and other contagion agents. Long distance transport of food creates endless opportunities for contamination.” (International Herald Tribune, 15.3.01)

The ‘we’ is not the population in general but the capitalist class in their frenetic search for capitalist profit. And the present degeneration of the farming industry is particularly the product of the crisis of the profit system, which takes the form of crises of overproduction. The consequent decay of the infrastructure of the capitalist economy, including agri-business, is the result of the capitalist attempt to lessen the impact of the crisis by all kinds of economies in production costs.

Mad cow disease was provoked by economies made in animal feed production, by adding abattoir waste, to offset the fall in the selling price of cattle on the world market. Result: a growing number of human victims of the agonising vCJD that turns the brain to jelly. Foot and mouth is an old disease, well known since the 16th century in Europe and one which ‘modern’ capitalism had seemed to be rid of. But Britain suffered a major epidemic in 1967. It had never used vaccination, preferring the cheaper method of wholesale slaughter. Yet in 1991 (while foot and mouth spread to Asia) other European countries also abandoned vaccination, because it was too expensive, and so other outbreaks have appeared on the continent in the 90s.

The present epidemic has expanded much more rapidly and extensively than in 1967 principally because of the recent practice of transporting animals for slaughter over longer and longer distances, within countries and over entire continents. In 1967 only one region was involved, this time it had spread to many before the first case was recognised.

Capitalism in decomposition is incapable of humanising the present system of agriculture. On the contrary, the present catastrophe, by getting rid of much of the huge surplus in livestock and by ruining the smaller producers, is only preparing for even more intense competition on the world market, and more intensive farming that will lead eventually to further disasters and more dangerous food.

In the face of the growing absurdity of capitalist production, the capitalist propaganda machine tries to hide the contradictions and puts forward all sorts of illusions to lull us into thinking that it is possible to have the present system without its convulsions. The politicians talk about making agriculture more ecologically sound and putting the emphasis on quality rather than quantity when they are preparing to further reduce the subsidies to producers that the different nation states can no longer afford. As the Financial Times, a business paper that is obliged to give some of the truth, said: “West European farmers obliged to convert to less intensive or organic production would need much greater subsidies than they receive today, or higher protectionist barriers in order to compete against their rivals in world markets” (5.03.01)

At the same time that the bourgeoisie is obliged to reduce the budget for the Common Agricultural Policy of the EU, the left wing of this class produces all sorts of laments for the golden past of self-sufficient local farming and pretends that it is possible to return to it by getting rid of ‘globalisation’. Some even blame the working class for demanding cheap food and not being prepared to pay the price for healthy produce! The working class isn’t to blame: in global terms capitalism benefits by cheapening food production since it reduces the cost of labour power overall, and so increases relative exploitation and profitability. Again the voice of capitalist truth from the FT affirms: “A steady supply of cheap food is a public good that should not be dismissed lightly [the workers have to be fed]. Europe, indeed the world, needs efficient farms deploying modern techniques to provide it. That means specialisation and trade, including arbitrage [carting animals long distances around the country to find the best price, or even just to avoid being sold at a loss] to take advantage of price differentials. There can be no return to a rural idyll of small-scale, local production.” (ibid).

As the economic crisis worsens, not only will the quality of food for the mass of the population continue to deteriorate, but its cost will tend to escalate as the weaker agricultural competitors are forced out of business, and those remaining try to offset the increasing loss of subsidy from the state.

It is only the abolition of the capitalist market at the world level and the installation of a society in which human needs will be the motors of production which will permit the emergence of rational methods of food production capable both of nourishing humanity and avoiding widespread disease and pollution.

Como 30.3.01

With the recent confrontations in Macedonia, yet another part of the Balkans is on the verge of imploding into chaos. After Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, this new theatre of war threatens to further destabilise a region which has been subjected to blood and fire for ten years. And once again, the local populations are exposed to massacre and barbarity through the confrontation between rival nationalist cliques.

In this conflict, it’s the Macedonian army and police against the UCK, the separatist Albanian guerrillas, a new armed wing of the same Albanian mafia which was at work in Kosovo but was officially dissolved.

The ingredients of a new powder keg

Serbia has also been put on a war footing against other pro-Albanian militia, after a year of sporadic skirmishes which threatened southern Serbia from the valley of Presevo and Tanusevci, a frontier village between Macedonia and Kosovo. NATO, and the US in particular, have authorised the Serbian army to make an incursion into the security zone set up since July 1999 round the Kosovan frontier, This concession is aimed at preventing the pro-Albanian militia from acting directly against Serbia. In exchange, Serbia has presented a ‘platform’ of negotiations which on 12 March, under the aegis of NATO, resulted in a cease-fire with another pro-Albanian faction, the UCPMB. This led to the combat zone being displaced towards Macedonia, around Tetovo, the country’s second town, which is near to Kosovo and which is home to a population which is 80% Albanian-speaking (the population of Macedonia as a whole is about one third Albanian).

Ten years after proclaiming its independence in 1991, following the break-up of Yugoslavia, Macedonia is once again at the heart of the Balkans conflicts, just like it was in the wars at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. First it was at the centre of a popular uprising against Ottoman rule, which in turn led to the war between Greece and Turkey in 1897. Then, after its ‘liberation’, which marked a decisive step in the disintegration of the Ottoman empire following the first Balkan war in 1912, the ‘ownership’ of Macedonia was a major imperialist stake in the second murderous conflict which saw Serbia and Greece fighting against Bulgaria. This conflict was one of the immediate causes of the first world war. The same antagonisms are still waiting to resurface at the first opportunity. Not only the old rivalry between Serbia and Albania, which has been revived by the war in Kosovo - Macedonian territory is also claimed by Bulgaria and Greece.

The role of the great powers

In response to the recent evolution of the situation, we have seen a spectacular turn-around in the position of most of the great powers towards Serbia. Since the ousting of Milosevic and his replacement by Kostunica, this is a state which has become much more "presentable" for the western democracies, who have gradually "normalised" their relations with Serbia. They are trying to make us believe that the great powers within NATO (which has 42,000 soldiers in KFOR) are acting as the guardians of peace and democracy, as the defenders of civilisation against nationalist extremism and wicked people in general. Yesterday it was the Serbs who were in the grip of a dictator accused of wanting to restore ‘Greater Serbia’; today it’s the Serbs and the Slav population of Macedonia who have to be protected, and fingers are being wagged at the Albanians whose government is suspected of trying to set up a ‘Greater Albania’. But only two years ago the ‘international community’ claimed that it was defending the Albanian population of Kosovo. This humanitarian pretext was in fact the essential justification for NATO’s devastating intervention. But it was an out and out lie. By unleashing their military operations, the allied forces knew very well that they would push Milosevic into intensifying and generalising his policy of massive deportation of the local populations. What’s more, the bombing of Serbia and Kosovo turned the region into a pile of ruins. And the partition of Kosovo into different sectors under NATO control, which was supposed to put an end to Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing, has simply parked the local populations in barbed wire ghettos, where they live in miserable conditions in a climate of permanent ethnic hatred.

As in all the Balkan conflicts over the past 10 years, the great powers never get mixed up in the situation for the reasons they give, but only to defend their own imperialist interests in the region. The same imperialist appetites motivate all states, from the smallest to the largest. At the moment all the great powers are openly supporting the Macedonian government and NATO has called for extra troops to deal with the pro-Albanian guerrillas between the Serbian and Macedonian frontiers. But behind the facade of unity between the great powers lie the same cleavages and rival imperialist interests which have already been asserted in the previous Balkan conflicts this last decade. Each one of them makes use of the local nationalist cliques. As in Croatia, Bosnia or Kosovo, the interests of the great powers diverge profoundly and while all of them hesitate to throw too much oil on the fire right now, each one is still seeking to draw whatever benefit it can from the present situation. And if the occasion arises, these divergent interests will come to the surface in Macedonia as well.

Thus France, for example, having been forced last year to take part in the bombing of Serbia in order to be able to maintain its presence in the Balkans (in the form of occupation troops who are holding part of Kosovo in the name of KFOR), is using this opportunity to go back to its traditional policies, on the one hand by renewing its ties with its old Serbian ally, and on the other hand by rushing to express support for Macedonia. As in the past, it is doing this in association with Britain. When the current hostilities began, it was Paris which ran to the president of Macedonia with offers of aid, while the foreign minister went to Skopje and proclaimed “we don’t want to allow the terrorist groups to endanger the stability of Macedonia and the whole region”. Another spokesman declared “we support the Macedonian government’s policy of moderation” - a sentiment echoed almost word for word by Mr Robin Cook at the exact moment that the Macedonian army (moderately, no doubt) began shelling Albanian villages. Meanwhile the British SAS has been seizing Kosovo Albanians on suspicion of being involved in the mass killing of Serbs.

As for Germany, which ten years ago was encouraging Slovenia and Croatia to go for independence, thus precipitating the break-up of Yugoslavia, and which in Kosovo actively supported the UCK, it has not changed its overall objectives in the region: to increase Serbia’s isolation and above all to surround it with a ring of pro-German states. But Germany’s imperialist aims are more long term: to deprive Serbia of access to the Mediterranean by provoking the secession of Montenegro.

The main interest of the US is to preserve the status quo, to act as the leader of NATO in order to contain the ambitions of the European powers - to remain master of the game in the Balkans, even though it is finding it harder and harder to keep control of the situation. One of the most recent examples of this loss of control can be seen in the Bosnian-Croat Federation established by the 1995 Dayton accords. Here the majority of Croat soldiers have left the common army in a move towards establishing a ‘third entity’ (Herzeg-Bosnia) which would leave Muslim areas caught between Serbs and Croats. This undermines the credibility of Dayton.

Finally Russia, by calling loudly for a firm intervention against the ‘Albanian terrorists’ is still trying to present itself as Serbia’s most reliable patron.

This is why counting on the ‘international community’ and on NATO to prevent things spiralling into chaos in the Balkans, which is the notion advertised by all the governments and the media, is a total illusion. Already each power is trying to play its own game behind the limited confrontations that have taken place. But they are also playing with fire. It’s obvious that the extension of the conflict to the whole of Macedonia, the possibility that Macedonia will fall apart, would increase the chances of a more active intervention by other states who have a direct interest in the situation, like Bulgaria and Greece. That would mark a real escalation of military tensions, spreading them outside ex-Yugoslavia for the first time since 1991. The fact that the bourgeoisie is conscious of such a danger is shown by an article which appeared in Le Monde on 18 and 19 March “If the upsurge of violence spreads to the whole Albanian community and if the integrity of Macedonia is threatened, it would then be very difficult to contain the appetites of many others and it could start a chain reaction” Why? Because capitalism is sinking inexorably into military barbarism. This is a clear manifestation of the bankruptcy of this system. But the bourgeois press never point that out.

CB 20.3.01

Regardless of delays in the date for the election, the campaign has already started, and it’s clear what’s in store.

The Labour Party’s mock horror movie posters, ‘Economic disaster II’ and ‘Son of Satan’, picturing Hague and other Tories, show that the strategy of making the campaign personal is no idle threat. “Even if we are criticised for being personal, we will be raising the profile of the election. We have got to give people a reason for voting and we will do that by stoking fear of the Conservatives” said a senior Labour spokesman (The Times 20.3.01). This follows on from Blair’s speech in Scotland in February condemning apathy, and Tony Benn’s farewell speech to parliament in which he said “The real danger to democracy is not that people will overrun Buckingham Palace and run up the Red Flag but that people won’t vote.” Academic studies have pointed to the possibility of the lowest electoral turn-out since 1918. The Socialist Alliance is trying to get workers interested in the democratic charade.

Labour is hardly mentioning its record on the economy and public services. It prefers to recreate the anti-Toryism that dominated the 97 election. The reasons for this are clear. Just look at the state of the economy and Labour’s management of it. It’s in perfect continuity with the government of John Major.

The capitalist economy in crisis

Capitalism has suffered 30 years of crisis. With the slowdown in the US, the world economy is heading for a further decline in the coming period. There is no likely candidate to play the role of locomotive and drag it out of the mire. Japan is still not able to crawl out of 10 years of economic problems. The Asian ‘tigers’ are clearly out of the picture, as is the ‘new economy’ whose speculative bubble has already burst.

“Gigantic debts at every level, ever increasing attacks on working class living conditions internationally, inability to integrate the growing masses of unemployed into capitalist relations of production, etc. these are the fundamental consequences of the capitalist economy. States, central banks, stock exchanges, the IMF, all the financial and banking institutions and all the ‘actors’ of world politics in general are trying to regulate the chaotic functioning of the casino economy, but facts are stubborn and capitalism’s laws always end up imposing their rule.” (International Review 104).

Here in Britain we are seeing the continuing decline of manufacturing industry with the 6,000 jobs due to go at Corus, the planned closure of Vauxhall, Luton as well as the cutback at Ford, Dagenham. Even that great British institution, Marks and Spencers, is announcing redundancies. Official unemployment has gone down to around 1 million - a level that was considered outrageous in 1970. But if those who want a job, but aren’t entitled to make a claim, and those on government training schemes etc, are added in, the true figure rises to 4 million. We could also mention the increase in temporary, insecure and part-time jobs.

The Labour government manages the capitalist crisis - by attacking the working class

Running the country means managing the national capital in the interests of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie. In the economic crisis this can only mean attacking working class living and working conditions, to make the country’s industry more competitive. The Labour government was always very clear about this. In 1997 they promised to keep to the spending limits set by the previous Tory government for the first two years.

One of Labour’s first achievements was to save money on benefit payments. The ‘New Deal’ combined an ideological attack (blaming the unemployed for not working), with measures to push people off benefits and into poverty. Together with increased means testing this has allowed the state to cut its social security spending in real terms. And, as the chancellor boasted in 1998, “we are cutting the costs to business of employing 13 million lower paid workers.”

The success of these policies can be measured in the increase in poverty, particularly among children, during the lifetime of the government. In particular there are now a million more people whose income is less than 40% of national average than in 1997 (see WR 242). The chancellor’s ‘war chest’ (from which he was able to make an electioneering ‘family friendly’ budget that was still ‘prudent’) is based on four years of attacks on the working class.

Workers are finding it very difficult to resist these attacks. Lacking self-confidence in their own strength as a class, having been battered by a whole series of ideological campaigns, they find it difficult to know how to respond to attacks such as redundancies. In particular there are no struggles on the scale of the mass strike in Poland in 1980 or the miners’ strike here in 1984-5 which give some idea of the real strength of the working class.

As the economic crisis continues to worsen all governments must attack the working class. Given the disorientation in the working class today Labour and left wing governments are in a very strong position to impose those attacks with a ‘caring’, or ‘third way’ ideology. It is for this reason that the Sun has thrown its weight behind Labour, as the best choice for the ruling class, in the next election.

However the working class, although disorientated, has not been defeated. There continue to be small but encouraging signs of the development of struggles that hold a promise for the future.

WR 31.3.01

All the politicians, from Hague and Blair to the Socialist Alliance, all the papers from the Sun to the Socialist Worker, are telling us once again that it’s time to exercise our ‘democratic rights’, to take an interest in the ‘debates and issues’ raised by a general election.

There was a time, back in the 19th century, when workers fought for the right to vote. The first real workers’ political party, the Chartists, focussed its struggle in Britain around this demand. It was opposed by the bourgeoisie, which feared that universal suffrage would result in the overthrow of capitalism.

But by the time that capitalism really was under threat - from the proletarian revolutions of 1917-20 - the ruling class had realised that parliament and elections were the best possible antidote to the revolutionary movement of the working class - with its direct democracy in the form of the workers’ own mass organisations: the soviets or workers’ councils. In Germany in 1919, the Labour party of the day justified its brutal suppression of the revolutionary workers with the argument that the parliamentary National Assembly was ‘democratic’ and the workers’ councils were ‘undemocratic’. At that same point, the ruling class in Britain finally granted ‘universal suffrage’, not only to women over 30, but to the 40% of men who did not yet have the vote. In other words, the working class as a whole got the vote when parliament had become a dagger pointed at the revolution’s heart, a cover for repression and counter-revolution.

‘Democracy’ can only be a sham in a society where one class holds the monopoly of wealth and weapons, where the media and the means of communication are in the hands of the ruling class and its state. As for the working class, it cannot express itself through capitalist elections, which atomise it in the polling booths and drown it in a sea of amorphous ‘citizens’. All the parties that workers are called on to vote for in parliamentary elections share the same basic agenda - defence of the national economy, sacrifices for the exploited, the continuation of capitalism. And parliament itself is no more than a talking shop, a show of discussion in a system where the real decisions are taken elsewhere. The true face of bourgeois democracy is seen less in parliamentary debates than in the massive police operation this May Day, which was designed as a warning to anyone who even thinks of calling the capitalist system into question.

The proletariat has no interest in being sucked into the false debates and non-existent alternatives offered by capitalist elections. It does have an interest in fighting the attacks on its living standards which any party whose job is to ‘manage’ capitalism is forced to impose, whether it talks about ‘socialism’, the ‘free market’ or some ‘third way’ between them. The exploited class, principal victim of these attacks, does have an interest in rediscovering its class identity and reaffirming its historical alternative: the revolutionary destruction of the capitalist state, ‘democratic’ or otherwise, and the radical reorganisation of social life. WR

The main political parties claimed to have agreed that ‘race’ wouldn’t be an issue in the election campaign. The party leaders signed a declaration prepared by the Commission for Racial Equality. And then, of course, the ‘debate’ on ‘race’ got under way.

Some leading Tories refused to sign the CRE pledge. In Dagenham a Tory leaflet accused Labour of “importing foreign nurses with HIV”. Robin Cook made a speech where he said that the British were not a race and that the national dish was Chicken Tikka Masala. Tory MP John Townend declared that “our homogenous Anglo-Saxon society” has been seriously undermined by immigration and that there was a danger of the British becoming a “mongrel race”. Black Tory peer Lord Taylor thought that Townend should be expelled from the Tory party. Asian peeress Lady Flather said that Hague was being ‘weak’ on Townend. Another Tory MP said that Townend was basically right. Norman Tebbit said he didn’t “know of any happy multicultural society”. Former Prime Minister Edward Heath denounced Hague for not expelling Townend, but wasn’t surprised at his behaviour as, in his view, the party was now “on the extreme right ... So many of them feel and think the same way.” All this has happened before the election is officially under way.

Keeping Labour in government

The turmoil in the Tory party on the eve of an election must have surprised some people. By appearing to be a divided party, riddled with extremists, it’s almost as if the Tories wanted to lose. Those who remember the 1980s will recall that it was a divided Labour party, arguing within itself for five years before expelling the ‘Militant extremists’, that kept the Tories in government, and ensured that neither Michael Foot not Neil Kinnock stood a chance of becoming Prime Minister.

In the present period there is no good reason for the ruling class to replace the Blair government. Labour is doing everything that could be expected from it, just like the other left-of-centre teams that are in government in the majority of EU countries. However, although Labour has been solidly ahead in the opinion polls almost continuously since the last general election, that doesn’t mean that the bourgeoisie is going to leave anything to chance. The Tory party’s well-publicised divisions over ‘the race issue’ paint it as ‘extremist’, something further enhanced by revelations of how many of their election candidates come from the right-wing ‘hanging and flogging’ tendency. The intention is to prevent the Labour vote slipping though voter apathy. Apart from Cook’s speech, Labour itself has hardly had to do anything.

Labour uses racism and anti-racism

The racist face of the modern Conservative Party should not make anyone forget what the Labour party is like. Its attitude to immigration, refugees and asylum seekers, for example, has always been based on putting the needs of the national capital first and last. They have introduced and enforced repressive legislation in the past, and the present government is most definitely no exception. They have followed on from the previous Tory government and introduced their own particular innovations.

For example, a recent ministerial instruction to immigration officers (under the provisions of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000) says that people should be refused entry if “there is statistical evidence showing a pattern or trend of breach of the immigration laws by persons of that nationality” (Guardian 24/4/01). In other words, if the British state wants to target some particular ethnic or national groups, they’ve now got another weapon at their disposal. And if there is someone who’s not familiar with the English language and they need information that “is not available in a language which the person understands, it is not necessary to provide the information in a language which he does understand” (ibid). Labour certainly has nothing to learn from the Tories when it comes to racism.

At the moment, although Labour is making a lot of being ‘tough’ on immigration and on ‘economic migrants’ in particular, it is anti-racism that is the dominant note in the ideology of the British bourgeoisie. Labour talks of the importance of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘social inclusiveness’, while a faction in the Tory party is portrayed as hopelessly reactionary.

Meanwhile, the leftists play a minor role in this campaign. The Socialist Workers Party, for example, enthused that “Robin Cook, the foreign secretary, was absolutely right to put forward an anti-racist message” (Socialist Worker 28/4/01). At the same time they criticise Labour’s position for being “shallow” and for having “given ground to the right”, because they don’t think its anti-racism is forceful enough. They want to mobilise workers behind the part of the bourgeoisie that uses anti-racist ideology. But workers have no interest in supporting any part of the bourgeoisie. Their only concern should be the defence of their own class interests. Car 1/5/01

Introduction - Parliament is alien to the working class

Faced with another general election, and the calls by any number of so-called ‘socialists’ for the working class to chose between the capitalist parties standing for parliament, genuine communists have to reaffirm their total rejection of the whole ‘democratic’ circus.

In the previous issue of WR we published the Theses on Parliamentarism presented by the Communist Abstentionist Fraction of the Italian Socialist Party to the second congress of the Communist International in 1920. The Italian left around Bordiga was in the forefront of opposition to the CI’s tactic of ‘revolutionary parliamentarism’. But it was not alone. In Germany, the Communist Party originally rejected the parliamentary tactic; and when the left was expelled from the party and formed the KAPD, it continued to defend positions that were very close to those of the Italian left, as can be seen from this extract we are here publishing from the article ‘World Revolution and Communist Tactics’, by Anton Pannekoek, published in 1920.

It has often been argued by those who descend politically from the Italian left - the ‘Bordigist’ current - that the anti-parliamentary views of the Dutch/German left actually had nothing in common with the marxist analysis of the Abstentionist Fraction, and were more akin to anarchism’s ahistorical rejection of politics and authority in general. But as the extract shows, the clearest position of the Dutch/German left in 1920 was founded on sound marxist premises: recognition that parliamentary tactics had been useful during the ascendant period of capitalism, but were no longer so in the epoch of the proletarian revolution; overt support for the October revolution in Russia; unhesitating advocacy of the necessity for a communist party.

It is true that there was a tendency, even among the best elements of the German left, to pose ‘the masses’ against ‘the leaders’ in an abstract way that, in later years, was to degenerate into the excesses of councilism, with its rejection of the party and of centralised organisation. But the essential concern of Pannekoek’s text remains entirely valid and expresses a fundamental truth about the communist revolution: that it can only come about if the great mass of workers throw off their old habits of deference and passivity, and gain confidence in their own ability to overthrow capitalism and reorganise society.

The proletariat develops such confidence by struggling on its own class terrain, and through the decisive intervention of the communist vanguard in those struggles. The parliamentary terrain by contrast is completely alien to the working class in the period of capitalist decline, and any involvement in it can only serve to undermine proletarian identity and self-organisation. On this point there was complete harmony between the Italian and German left communists at the high point of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23.

Parliamentary activity and the trade-union movement were the two principal forms of struggle in the time of the Second International.

The congresses of the first International Working-Men’s Association laid the basis of this tactic by taking issue with primitive conceptions belonging to the pre-capitalist, petty-bourgeois period and, in accordance with Marx’s social theory, defining the character of the proletarian class struggle as a continuous struggle by the proletariat against capitalism for the means of subsistence, a struggle which would lead to the conquest of political power. When the period of bourgeois revolutions and armed uprisings had come to a close, this political struggle could only be carried on within the framework of the old or newly created national states, and trade-union struggle was often subject to even tighter restrictions. The First International was therefore bound to break up; and the struggle for the new tactics, which it was itself unable to practise, burst it apart; meanwhile, the tradition of the old conceptions and methods of struggle remained alive amongst the anarchists. The new tactics were bequeathed by the International to those who would have to put them into practice, the trade unions and Social-Democratic Parties that were springing up on every hand. When the Second International arose as a loose federation of the latter, it did in fact still have to combat tradition in the form of anarchism; but the legacy of the First International already formed its undisputed tactical base. Today, every communist knows why these methods of struggle were necessary and productive at that time: when the working class is developing within ascendant capitalism, it is not yet capable of creating organs which would enable it to control and order society, nor can it even conceive the necessity of doing so. It must first orientate itself mentally and learn to understand capitalism and its class rule. The vanguard of the proletariat, the Social-Democratic Party, must reveal the nature of the system through its propaganda and show the masses their goals by raising class demands. It was therefore necessary for its spokesmen to enter the parliaments, the centres of bourgeois rule, in order to raise their voices on the tribunes and take part in conflicts between the political parties.

Matters change when the struggle of the proletariat enters a revolutionary phase. We are not here concerned with the question of why the parliamentary system is inadequate as a system of government for the masses and why it must give way to the soviet system, but with the utilisation of parliament as a means of struggle by the proletariat. As such, parliamentary activity is the paradigm of struggles in which only the leaders are actively involved and in which the masses themselves play a subordinate role. It consists in individual deputies carrying on the main battle; this is bound to arouse the illusion among the masses that others can do their fighting for them. People used to believe that leaders could obtain important reforms for the workers in parliament; and the illusion even arose that parliamentarians could carry out the transformation to socialism by acts of parliament. Now that parliamentarianism has grown more modest in its claims, one hears the argument that deputies in parliament could make an important contribution to communist propaganda. (1) But this always means that the main emphasis falls on the leaders, and it is taken for granted that specialists will determine policy - even if this is done under the democratic veil of debates and resolutions by congresses; the history of social democracy is a series of unsuccessful attempts to induce the members themselves to determine policy. This is all inevitable while the proletariat is carrying on a parliamentary struggle, while the masses have yet to create organs of self action, while the revolution has still to be made, that is; and as soon as the masses start to intervene, act and take decisions on their own behalf, the disadvantages of parliamentary struggle become overwhelming.

As we argued above, the tactical problem is how we are to eradicate the traditional bourgeois mentality that paralyses the strength of the proletarian masses; everything that lends new power to the received conceptions is harmful. The most tenacious and intractable element in this mentality is dependence upon leaders, whom the masses leave to determine general questions and to manage their class affairs. Parliamentarianism inevitably tends to inhibit the autonomous activity by the masses that is necessary for revolution. Fine speeches may be made in parliament exhorting the proletariat to revolutionary action; it is not in such words that the latter has its origins, however, but in the hard necessity of there being no other alternative.

Revolution also demands something more than the massive assault that topples a government and which, as we know, cannot be summoned up by leaders, but can only spring from the profound impulse of the masses. Revolution requires social reconstruction to be undertaken, difficult decisions made, the whole proletariat involved in creative action - and this is only possible if first the vanguard, then a greater and greater number take matters in hand themselves, know their own responsibilities, investigate, agitate, wrestle, strive, reflect, assess, seize chances and act upon them. But all this is difficult and laborious; thus, so long as the working class thinks it sees an easier way out through others acting on its behalf- leading agitation from a high platform, taking decisions, giving signals for action, making laws - the old habits of thought and the old weaknesses will make it hesitate and remain passive.

While on the one hand parliamentarianism has the counter-revolutionary effect of strengthening the leaders’ dominance over the masses, on the other it has a tendency to corrupt these leaders themselves. When personal statesmanship has to compensate for what is lacking in the active power of the masses, petty diplomacy develops, whatever intentions the party may have started out with, it has to try and gain a legal base, a position of parliamentary power; and so finally the relationship between means and ends is reversed, and it is no longer parliament that serves as a means towards communism, but communism that stands as an advertising slogan for parliamentary politics. In the process, however, the communist party itself takes on a different character. Instead of a vanguard grouping the entire class behind it for the purpose of revolutionary action, it becomes a parliamentary party with the same legal status as the others, joining in their quarrels, a new edition of the old social democracy under new radical slogans. Whereas there can be no essential antagonism, no internal conflict between the revolutionary working class and the communist party, since the party incarnates a form of synthesis between the proletariat’s most lucid class-consciousness and its growing unity, parliamentary activity shatters this unity and creates the possibility of such a conflict: instead of unifying the class, communism becomes a new party with its own party chiefs, a party which falls in with the others and thus perpetuates the political division of the class. All these tendencies will doubtless be cut short once again by the development of the economy in a revolutionary sense; but even the first beginnings of this process can only harm the revolutionary movement by inhibiting the development of lucid class-consciousness; and when the economic situation temporarily favours counter-revolution, this policy will pave the way for a diversion of the revolution on to the terrain of reaction.

What is great and truly communist about the Russian revolution is above all the fact that it has awoken the masses’ own activity and ignited the spiritual and physical energy in them to build and sustain a new society. Rousing the masses to this consciousness of their own power is something which cannot be achieved all at once, but only in stages; one stage on this way to independence is the rejection of parliamentarianism. When, in December 1918, the newly formed Communist Party of Germany resolved to boycott the National Assembly, this decision did not proceed from any immature illusion of quick, easy victory, but from the proletariat’s need to emancipate itself from its psychological dependence upon parliamentary representatives - a necessary reaction against the tradition of social democracy - because the way to self-activity could now be seen to lie in building up the council system. However, one half of those united at that time, those who have stayed in the KPD, readopted parliamentarianism with the ebb of the revolution: with what consequences it remains to be seen, but which have in part been demonstrated already. In other countries too, opinion is divided among the communists, and many groups want to refrain from parliamentary activity even before the outbreak of revolution. The international dispute over the use of parliament as a method of struggle will thus clearly be one of the main tactical issues within the Third International over the next few years.

At any rate, everyone is agreed that parliamentary activity only forms a subsidiary feature of our tactics. The Second International was able to develop up to the point where it had brought out and laid bare the essence of the new tactics: that the proletariat can only conquer imperialism with the weapons of mass action. The Second International itself was no longer able to employ these; it was bound to collapse when the world war put the revolutionary class struggle on to an international plane. The legacy of the earlier internationals was the natural foundation of the new international: mass action by the proletariat to the point of general strike and civil war forms the common tactical platform of the communists. In parliamentary activity the proletariat is divided into nations, and a genuinely international intervention is not possible; in mass action against international capital national divisions fall away, and every movement, to whatever countries it extends or is limited, is part of a single world struggle.

(1). It was recently argued in Germany that communists must go into parliament to convince the workers that parliamentary struggle is useless - but you don’t take a wrong turning to show other people that it is wrong, you go the right way from the outset!

Once the dry ice of the election spectacle has cleared, the new government can get on with its job: defending capitalism at the expense of the working class.

After every election it’s the same, regardless of which party gets in. The indications are that, this time round, the ruling class prefers Labour to provide the best team for looking after its interests.

Millions of people will not have voted in this election; millions more will have voted without enthusiasm or conviction, feeling in their hearts that ‘all the politicians are the same’.

These feelings are soundly based. All the politicians are fundamentally the same because all the parties that take part in capitalist elections are in favour of maintaining the capitalist system. This goes from the British National Party and the Tories on the right to Labour and the Socialist Alliance on the left. All are united in their devotion to the interests of the British national economy, the British state, British imperialism. Not one stands up for the working class, which has no country, no state, no economy to defend.

A capitalist government can never be anything but the ‘executive committee of the ruling class’. A party which holds the reins of a capitalist government can never do anything but run it in the interests of capital.

Today the prime necessity for every national capital is to keep afloat in the face of an economic crisis which has been gradually but remorselessly deepening for the last three decades. The phoney US ‘boom’ of the last ten years, fuelled by massive debts, has already reached its limits. This augurs very badly for the world economy as a whole, which has been desperately clinging to the US ‘locomotive’. Like any company facing bankruptcy, the national economy, Britain Ltd, and its board of directors, the government, has to take drastic action: cut the wage bill, lay off workers, close plants, slash benefits. This is what the Tory government under Thatcher and Major did; this is what Blair’s New Labour did after 1997, and it has every intention of doing it again, but even more so, after this election.

One of the reasons why Labour is the best team for managing British capitalism at the moment is that it’s more skilled at presenting attacks on working class living standards as ‘reforms’ in everyone’s interests. It ‘reformed’ the unemployment benefits system by calling it the New Deal and forcing hundreds of thousands of young people into low paid, insecure jobs, or simply depriving them of benefits altogether. Now it’s hinting at wide ranging ‘reforms’ of the health service which will certainly involve massive cuts wrapped up in the ideology of decentralisation and privatisation.

Workers (the vast majority of us, because the unemployed are also part of the working class) have no interest in choosing which gang of politicians is going to lord it over us for the next four or five years. But we do have an interest, a very urgent interest, in defending ourselves against all the attacks that the new government is going to unleash. Defending ourselves means opposing wage cuts, redundancies, reductions in benefits, elimination of basic services. It does not mean fighting for state ownership as against privatisation, a false demand which the unions have already put forward to derail the struggles of tube and postal workers, and which will be used even more in future struggles around the health service.

State bureaucrat or private boss; Tory or Labour these are just the forms which capitalism takes on at different moments. They are all the guardians of exploitation, and the exploited can only defend themselves by fighting against all of them. WR 2.6.01

In their election manifestos all the political parties made grand statements about Britain’s role in the world. Labour set out its “ten-year vision for British foreign policy”; the Tories talked of Britain being “one of the world’s most respected democracies, one of its most influential leaders” while the Liberal Democrats called for an “internationalist approach”. As ever, the reality behind such words is a brutal defence of national interests.

Ambitions for British imperialism

In the period since 1989, when the old bloc system fell apart, imperialist policy has become immensely complex, even apparently contradictory at times. Every imperialist power had to decide on the best way to advance its interests. For second rate powers like Britain and France the weight of the US and Germany affects all that they do, the US being militarily dominant around the globe, while Germany is economically dominant in Europe. The major part of the British ruling class sought to steer a policy between the two, tacking now one way, now another to advance their own interests. For example, in the first stages of the war in ex-Yugoslavia the Conservative government supported Serbia against Croatia and Slovenia, which were backed by Germany, whilst also co-operating with France to block attempts by the US to intervene.

The election of Labour in 1997 strengthened this policy since the party was united, unlike the Tories who had a significant faction that advocated closer links with the US at the expense of Europe. Throughout the last four years the British ruling class has been able to pursue its policy in a more consistently and determined way which, while it has not always been completely successful, has allowed British imperialism to largely maintain its place in the world.

In Yugoslavia, after the setback of the Dayton Accords in 1996, when the US stamped its authority on the region, British imperialism adopted a more cautious policy, generally seeming to go along with the US whilst still pursuing its own line. This was most evident during the conflict over Kosovo in the spring of 1999. Britain’s participation in the US-led bombing of Serbia, its traditional ally in the region, was a blow to its credibility but, through the very vigour of its participation, it retained an important position within the overall imperialist struggle.

In Africa, Britain has suffered setbacks, notably by being replaced by the US as the main backer of Uganda, one of the strategically most important countries in the area. In Sierra Leone, in contrast, it asserted its military capability by mounting a spectacular ‘hostage’ rescue, through which it reinforced its influence in the region.

In the Middle East it has pursued a generally discreet strategy, continuing to back the US against Iraq, whilst opposing the US in its central stronghold of Israel through expressions of ‘concern’ about the Palestinian uprising.

The US has put pressure on Britain in its own backyard through the ‘peace’ process in Ireland. Even if this pressure has been reduced recently, the potential remains for the US to cause further difficulty when it feels like it.

Common sense militarism

All of the parties are united in their defence of militarism. According to the Tories, the British army is “respected around the world”; while for Labour “Our armed forces are the best in the world at fighting if they have to, and keeping the peace where they can”. All promised to keep nuclear weapons while Labour boasted of its commitment to “investing more in real terms in our armed forces over the next three years” and the Tories of “making it a priority to achieve the armed forces full manning levels”.

In fact, one of the features of the last few years has been the increasing use of military force by British imperialism around the world, notably in the interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, where the skill and strength of Britain’s military counteracts some of its other weaknesses. Its forces have been reorganised to meet the new period, with the emphasis on flexibility, rapidity of response, and “the ability to project force at distance and speed” (Labour). This goes alongside a continued effort to sell arms around the world, where Britain has a 20% share of the market.

Differences over strategy

All parts of the British ruling class want to advance its imperialist interests. Its main faction has a policy of maintaining a position of independence from the US. There is also a minority, generally described as ‘Euro-sceptics’, which continues to believe that Britain should have a closer relationship with the US in order to oppose Germany.

This difference can currently be seen over attitudes to the European Union Rapid Reaction Force and the US National Missile Defence System, ‘Son of Star Wars’. The Labour manifesto set out the position of the main faction. While declaring support for NATO, it backed the intervention of European forces “where NATO as a whole chooses not to engage,” and that, “The European defence initiative is an important part of our defence policy. Europe spends two-thirds as much as the US on defence, but gets only a fraction of its effectiveness”. The position was developed in a speech during the election campaign: “The choice between the US and Europe is a fundamentally false one. We are stronger in Washington if we are seen to be leading in Europe. And we have more influence in Europe if we are seen to be listened to in Washington”. On the Son of Star Wars project, the Liberal Democrats were blunt, stating that they “Oppose the national missile defence system”, which they describe as “a threat to international stability and arms control agreements”. Labour didn’t openly oppose the project, but hinted at it through talk of the need to control the spread of nuclear weapons. “We will encourage the US to consult closely with NATO allies on its ideas for missile defence”.

The Conservative Manifesto opposed to these positions a pro-US stance. It argued that “our primary alliance, NATO, is being weakened by a concerted drive to create an independent military structure in the EU” while declaring, in language that could have been dictated from the White House, “We believe our close ally deserves our support in countering new threats from rogue states and terrorists equipped with weapons of mass destruction”.

There is a clear difference of emphasis in the strategy required for British imperialism. A Labour government will ensure that the strategy of the main faction of the British bourgeoisie will continue to operate. North, 28/5/01.

At the time of writing, the latest atrocity in Israel/Palestine is the suicide bombing at a Tel Aviv disco, which left at least 17 young people dead and scores more injured. By the time this paper comes back from the printer, it is more than likely that the Israeli state will have exacted its revenge � perhaps another air raid on a refugee camp charged with harbouring the terrorists of Islamic Jihad who have claimed responsibility for the Tel Aviv bombing. Sharon will pretend that this is an attack on a military target, but as ever it will be defenceless civilians who will die or see their homes reduced to rubble. This in turn will provoke new acts of revenge by the Islamic groups or even by hapless, despairing individuals, like the Palestinian bus driver who drove his bus into a line of Israeli passengers.

Faced with this endless spiral of nationalist hatred, there will be lamentations and pious declarations by those who paint themselves as the apostles of peace, the representatives of the ‘international community’. The US will provide further proof that it is not retreating into isolationism by calling on both sides to carry out the recommendations of the Mitchell plan (ceasefire, freeze on new Jewish settlements, return to the framework of the Oslo accords). The European Union, for its part, has pledged 60 million euros to shore up the Palestinian Authority, which is being reduced to bankruptcy by the Israeli blockade and bombing. All will talk about the tragic nature of the events unfolding in the Middle East.

We communists, internationalists, who owe no allegiance to any state or nation, we also say that this situation is a real tragedy; but not for the same reasons as the official spokesmen of ‘peace’ and ‘reason’.

It is a tragedy because every act of indiscriminate violence, every lynching, every hate-filled demonstration behind Israeli or Palestinian flags, is a new blow against the only solution to this murderous conflict: the international unity of the workers against their exploiters. Every new suicide bombing makes it more likely that Israeli workers will turn to the Israeli state for protection; every Israeli air raid makes it more likely that the victims will see their only salvation in the Palestinian Authority or the armed Islamic gangs.

It is a tragedy because this conflict, like so many others ravaging the world today, is reinforcing nationalism precisely at a time when nationalist ideologies are historically redundant and should be more discredited than ever. Just look at Zionism, whose claim that it would create a safe haven for persecuted Jewry is more ridiculous now than it has ever been. Today there is no less safe place to be Jewish than Israel. And look at how the ‘humanitarian’, even ‘socialist’ claims of early Zionism have melted away, to be replaced more and more by religious obscurantism and open anti-Arab racism, backed up by planes, tanks and the bulldozers which routinely obliterate Palestinian farms and villages to make way for settlements of the Chosen People. And this evolution is in turn mirrored by Palestinian nationalism: 30 years ago its ideology was ‘democratic’, ‘secular’, even ‘marxist’; the enemy was not Jews but Zionism. Today that mask is off and the cult of the suicide bomber, fuelled by Muslim fanaticism and directed against all Jews, is the real face behind it. Workers in the Middle East should be rejecting these ideologies with contempt like the Iranian workers who, in the 1980s, had the strength and consciousness to drive the Islamic Guard cops out of the factories and oil fields. Instead, they are being drawn more and more into the nationalist trap, and not one internationalist, proletarian voice seems to be raising itself in opposition to the sirens of patriotism.

Of course the mouthpieces of the grand democracies, the UN and other august international bodies, also declare that the growth of these irrational dogmas is a bad thing all round. They claim to stand above these conflicts and indeed to offer the only realistic way out of them. We reject these claims as false and hypocritical. The great powers have always stoked up the conflicts in the Middle East and used them for their own ends. Zionism gained a foothold in the Middle East first because the British wanted to create a ‘little loyal Ulster’ in the region, then because the USA needed Israel as its local gendarme in this key strategic zone. Palestinian nationalism was in turn armed and supported by other powers keen to upset the status quo: first Hitler’s Germany, then the USSR, today America’s European rivals. All the ‘peace solutions’ put forward by these powers are not aimed at peace but at securing their own imperialist interests in the Middle East. Are we really to believe, for example, that the US and the British ruling class, who have subjected the Iraqi population to ten years of bombing and starvation in pursuit of these same imperialist interests in the same region, really have the welfare of the Israeli and Palestinian population in their hearts?

Does this mean that there is no hope at all? That is not our position: on the contrary, the impossibility of any solution in the Middle East within the framework of capitalism is a further argument for the necessity of revolution. But revolution is not pie in the sky: it must be prepared by a practical movement, by the class struggle of the exploited. Today there is no doubt that, in Israel/Palestine, this movement is being drowned out by the tidal wave of nationalism. But it exists nevertheless, and the material basis for it is being made stronger by the terrible economic cost of this war, not only for the impoverished Palestinians but for the Israeli workers as well. And here and there we see small signs that there is still the ability to see things from a different angle: in the growing number of young Israeli reservists who are refusing to serve in the occupied territories, in the statements by Palestinian mothers and fathers who understand that their sons are being sent to their deaths by those who prosper from their misery.

The fact remains that the workers and the oppressed of the Middle East cannot break the nationalist spiral on their own. The working class alternative will only seem real to them when the proletarians of the main industrial concentrations, who are not divided up so deeply along national or racial lines, return loudly and massively to the terrain of the class war. Amos 2.6.01

In your guidelines to your website, you say that its aim is to “link to any site or document which we feel relates, in whole or in part, to discussion about communism, or to discussion based on a ‘communist perspective’, taking communist in the sense defined in the statement on the homepage for the site. (1)

We use the word ‘communism’ as shorthand despite the likelihood that it will confuse some people who will think that we are talking about the so-called ‘communist’ countries or the communist parties associated with or supporting those countries because we don’t have a better word. The political currents we feel a degree of affinity with have called themselves many sorts of things libertarian communists, anarchist communists, left communists, autonomists what could broadly be described as the ultra left”.

We note that your list of “journals, organisations and projects” you are linked to includes the ICC. But while, as far as we can see, all other journals, organisations and projects are presented in a neutral or positive way, the ICC alone is given an extremely negative definition as an “absurd new age sect which employs a conservative form of left-communist discourse to promote itself as a political community”

We would like to know why you have chosen to single us out in this manner. We also think that if you are going to make such serious accusations, a minimum of explanation or argumentation is called for, especially considering that many people will have only heard of the ICC through your website, and could easily be put off investigating our own site by such a description.

The labelling of authentic communist organisations as “absurd sects” is not limited to your website, nor to the plethora of publications some of which are advertised in your list whose main activity consists in denigrating precisely the organisations which descend most directly from the historical communist left. These are mere offshoots of the bourgeoisie’s grandiose world-wide campaign about the ‘death of communism’, which is aimed at proving not only that communist society is an “absurd” utopia, but also that there could be nothing more ridiculous than revolutionary militancy. In such a view, participating in collectively organised communist activity is the precise equivalent of joining “absurd sects” like the Moonies or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In this sense, it seems to us that your attack on the ICC falls directly into line with this campaign.

In any case, we await your reply.

Yours for communism,

The ICC, March 2001

(1) The homepage describes communism as “a society without money, without a state, without property and without social classes. The circulation of goods is not accomplished by means of exchange: quite the contrary, the by-word for this society is ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’” a definition which we obviously agree with.

In mid-June the number of foot and mouth cases in Britain reached 1,782, affecting 8,354 premises. Further cases have been found since. The latest estimate is that some four million animals will be slaughtered before the epidemic is eradicated, amounting to 7 to 8% of the national herd.

The foot and mouth crisis is only the latest example of the problems facing agriculture in Britain. Over a year ago the government wrote "�there is a crisis in British farming� Exchange rates and the legacy of BSE, and a fall in international commodity prices in recent years combined to drive down prices and support and drive costs up" ('Strategy for Agriculture' MAFF). Farm incomes are reported to have declined by 69% between 1995 and 2000, from £5.3bn per annum to £1.9bn. Between 1998 and 2000 the number working in agriculture fell by about 10%, from 608,000 to 556,000. The report continues, "But the crisis also reflects underlying structural problems in British farming. These result from a tradition of subsidy and protection under the Common Agricultural Policy�" This is only very partially true, since the CAP is not actually the cause of the problems of farming, whether in Britain or anywhere else in Europe, but rather an attempt to deal with problems that stem, not from the agricultural sector, but from the overall crisis of capitalism. The government's solution is the familiar insistence that the industry "must be competitive, diverse and flexible" and "must respond better to consumer demands". This is nothing but a demand to bow down before the laws of capitalism, whose rule across the world spreads hunger, poverty and disease.

Agriculture and capitalism in Britain

The present condition of agriculture in Britain can only be understood in its historical context. Since Britain occupied a central place in the development of capitalism this understanding will also contribute to understanding the general questions about agriculture, poverty and starvation.

It was the industrial revolution above all that determined the subsequent development of agriculture. 'The Agrarian Question', written by Karl Kautsky in 1898 shows how the impact of the industrial revolution subordinated all production to the market, changed the pattern of land ownership, wiped out the peasantry in its traditional form, and systematised production.

In 1800, agriculture still seemed to dominate the British economy, employing about a third of the workforce and accounting for the same proportion of the national income. It had been able to respond to a doubling of the population, largely through the application of better methods of cultivation (crop rotation, changes in patterns of animal husbandry to allow more to be kept over the winter etc). In 1830 90% of the food consumed was still produced in Britain. This had been achieved by a complete transformation of agriculture.

The driving force for this change was the development of capitalism, which destroyed traditional peasant industry. This led to fundamental changes in land ownership as peasants and small producers were forced off the land and farms increased in size in order to produce the surplus necessary to make a return. The growth of capitalist production created a demand for 'free' labourers: its impact on the previous feudal society created them and, in so doing, ended feudalism.

In Britain, one of the most important expressions of this was the gradual enclosure of the traditional open field system from about 1760 on. By the start of the 19th century the peasantry as a class had virtually ceased to exist in Britain.

The economic strength of industry was soon reinforced with political power. In 1815 the landed interest was able to pass the Corn Laws which protected the high profits they had enjoyed during the Napoleonic Wars by imposing tariffs on imports of wheat. Their repeal in 1846 reflected the dominance of the industrial interests that sought lower food costs in order to reduce the cost of labour.

Agriculture now became subservient and secondary to industry. Initially this led to a boom as the development of industry and urban areas increased demand, while the cost of transport and the difficulty of storage meant there were few imports to threaten the national monopoly. The application of industrial and scientific techniques brought substantial increase in production along with sharp reductions in manpower. In 1840 the number had already dropped to 25% of the working population and continued to decline, although it did not lose its position as the single largest employer until the start of the twentieth century. Its significance in the national economy rapidly declined: in 1851 it still accounted for 20% of national income, by 1891 it was less than 8%.

In the last quarter of the 19th century cheap imports began to come in, particularly from the Americas and this time demands for protection were swept aside. In the first years of the 20th century British agriculture entered a period of decline in which profits were largely maintained at the expense of investment.

Farming in decadence

At the time of the First World War agriculture only accounted for about 6 or 7% of national income, the amount of land cultivated had declined and British agriculture had become relatively less productive than Germany's. Imports had become increasingly important, exceeding home production in terms of monetary value and calorific content. The outbreak of war did not lead to an immediate change, although the government did encourage people to take on allotments. Subsequently the state took steps to guarantee prices to farmers and to ration food.

After the war state intervention was forced to continue in the face of the growing crisis. Domestic production was protected, prices to farmers were guaranteed and various Marketing Boards were established to boost sales. In 1936 £40m was paid in subsidies. However, imports now accounted for about 70% of food consumed and the contribution of agriculture to the national income continued to fall.

The Second World War saw an immediate and much more substantive response by the state resulting in a 50% increase in arable acreage and a consequent decline in meat production. The use of fertilisers increased two to three times and the number of tractors and combine harvesters quadrupled. The state dictated what was to be grown and allocated labour and machinery. Output almost doubled.

The impetus this gave to agriculture carried on after the war leading to a significant increase in productivity. State intervention was maintained, the Agriculture Act of 1947 continuing the protectionist policy and instituting an annual price review. Initial resistance to joining the European Economic Community turned to a recognition of the necessity of doing so after attempts to establish a rival trading bloc were dashed, although Britain was not accepted until 1973. This period saw a substantial industrialisation of farming, with increased use of fertilisers and chemicals accompanying the consolidation of large farms, with hedges being ripped out to turn small fields into big ones. In the 70s and 80s serious problems of overproduction developed in Europe, leading first to the stockpiling and destruction of food and then to paying farmers not to cultivate part of their land. The CAP now dominates the European Union's budget.

The importance of agriculture to the British economy has continued to decline. In the 1990s it averaged 1.4% of GDP. Last year it was just 0.8% and exports amounted to only £630m. Yet it continues to be heavily subsidised: the 'Strategy for Agriculture' details the subsidies the government plans to provide, including a £1.6bn seven-year programme. The main reason why agriculture, which is such a small part of GDP, gets so much state support is strategic: to abandon domestic production would leave Britain at the mercy of its imperialist rivals if a war broke out. It also plays the role of managing the countryside. This is implicitly acknowledged in the current policy of diversification, whether into niche production or non-agricultural activity.

How farming faces the crisis of capitalism

The crisis of British agriculture is only a particular expression of the general crisis of capitalism, in which immense productive capacity struggles to find profitable outlets. This may seem an absurd and obscene contradiction in a world where millions starve each year but in capitalism starvation and the overproduction of food go hand in hand.

"For revolutionaries, the real issue here is capitalism's own productionist logic, as Marx analysed in Capital: 'Accumulation for accumulation's sake, production for production's sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie, and did not for a single instant deceive itself over the birth-throes of wealth�'. Here lies the logical and the unlimited cynicism of capitalism: the accumulation of capital and not the satisfaction of human needs is the real goal of capitalist production, and therefore the fate of the working class or of the environment, is of little import". (International Review 104, 'Only the proletarian revolution will save the human species').

In this respect, agriculture is just another capitalist industry. In response to the crisis of overproduction it has to cut costs, sell more cheaply. One capitalist gains the advantage, but once others catch up they are back to square one. Humans, animals, fish, trees, plants, mineral resources, water, air: none of it can count. Everything is secondary to the accumulation of capital. If animal feed is expensive, then give them the remains of their own kind. The use of this strategy for cattle feed, chiefly in Britain, led to the horrors of BSE. If vaccinating sheep and cattle against foot and mouth is not cost effective, run the risk and slaughter millions if things go wrong (which might give a temporary respite to the problem of overproduction anyway). If keeping animals in fields is too labour intensive, herd them into vast factory farming buildings so only a handful of workers need be employed.

Such is the nature of agriculture and food production in capitalism. As the crisis deepens the only perspective is for farming to become more harmful to farmworkers' health, more destructive to the environment, for more food scares and crises, and for greater hunger. The only way out is the destruction of capitalism. North, 24/6/01.

At the end of the 19th century Frederick Engels called anti-semitism "the socialism of fools".

You're poor, you're exploited, your life is miserable - so blame it on another group, the vast majority of whom are also poor, miserable and exploited, in the case Engels was talking about, the Jews. Who can benefit from this except the exploiters? It's exactly the same in Britain today with all the hatred being stirred up against 'asylum seekers', or Asians, or blacks - a hatred that has burst out into 'race riots' in a number of northern towns.

Those who stir up racial divisions most openly, like the British National Party, use the same old arguments: you're poor because of them. They get all the jobs, the housing, the welfare hand-outs. In 99 cases out of a 100 this is simply a lie: official statistics invariably confirm that poverty, unemployment and lack of housing are worse among 'immigrant' sectors of the working class. But even if it were true that immigrant workers got a better deal from the state, it would not alter the deeply anti-working class nature of such arguments. Aren't all workers, to one degree or another, faced with attacks on wages, jobs, benefits and housing? Do we have any other weapon to defend ourselves with except getting together as workers against our exploiters? Any ideology which sets worker against worker serves the capitalist class. The ruling class and its state don't give a damn about the colour of your skin as long as it can sweat surplus value out of you. But it is very interested in promoting racial divisions because they weaken the capacity of the working class to unite and fight back.

The BNP aren't the only racists

Faced with the provocative actions of fascist type groups like the BNP or the NF in Oldham, Burnley and elsewhere, there are all sorts of 'anti-racists' running around telling us that these groups are the number one problem we have to deal with. But the BNP are simply pawns in a bigger game. Wasn't it the major political parties who helped stoke up the current tensions with the whole campaign about 'asylum seekers', with its phony distinction between 'political' (acceptable) and 'economic' (not acceptable) asylum seekers - as if both weren't equally the victims of capitalism's world wide crisis? Wasn't it the major parties, backed by the tabloid press with its scare stories about asylum seekers living in five star hotels at the tax-payer's expense, who have been vying with each other to come up with more and more brutal ways of dealing with illegal immigrants? Isn't it the entire police force which, following the inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence murder, was charged with "institutional racism"? Racism is far too useful a weapon to be left to the likes of the BNP. It is manipulated and used to the hilt by the state as a whole.

And what's more, the whole ideology of anti-racism and multiculturalism also serves the interest of the state, because it too divides the working class up into racial and religious categories and calls on them to organise on the basis of their separate 'identity' or 'culture'. They - especially the most radical ones, like the Socialist Workers Party - claim that the nationalism of the oppressed is more progressive than the nationalism of the oppressor. This argument is another blow against workers' unity. Look what has just happened in the Balkans. Hundreds of thousands died because the bourgeoisie succeeded in getting people mobilised to fight each other along ethnic, national, or religious lines. In Kosovo one minute Serbian nationalism had the upper hand over Albanian nationalism, making it the 'nationalism of the oppressed'; the next minute, thanks to NATO, the Albanian nationalists had the tables turned and began persecuting the Serbs. Which nationalism was more progressive then? Answer: neither. Both are equally reactionary, because both are used to get workers to slaughter each other for a cause which is not their own - the cause of capitalist and imperialist war, which is plunging whole regions of the planet into barbarism right now.

Capitalism breeds racism because it is based on national divisions and competition. The capitalist class, from right to left, is therefore inherently racist. The capitalist disease of racism infects and affects the working class, weakening it and dividing it. But the working class is a truly international class. It has no nation to defend because it owns nothing but its labour power, and is exploited in the same way all over the globe. The working class struggle is therefore the only practical antidote to racism, both in the short and the long term. In the short term, because in their day to day struggle against the effects of exploitation, workers of different 'colours' either stand together or go down in defeat. And in the long term, because only a worldwide workers' revolution can finally free humanity from the insane national and racial divisions which threaten its very existence. WR, 30/6/01.

Protesters at June's EU summit in Gothenburg were met with the full force of Sweden's liberal democracy. The police attacked with dogs, batons, the cavalry and gunfire. 3 people were shot, 90 injured and 600 arrested. The EU leaders, including Tony Blair and Jack Straw, condemned the "thuggery" of the protesters and backed the police. The Danish Prime Minister thought it a "paradox" that there could be protests at a meeting "where we are working towards a better world". Blair said it was OK for protesters to protest, but, according to him, the way that capitalism was organised was universally beneficial: "The fact is that world trade is good for people's jobs and living standards".

At the same time that capitalist leaders say that they are working for a 'better world' they defend measures that ensure that the conditions of millions are deteriorating. They talk of the benefits of 'globalisation' while the IMF admits these don't extend to the poor. They defend their democracies and the right to protest, while all over the world governments are strengthening their repressive powers. They talk of 'humanitarianism' and the defence of 'civilised' values as they send troops into the Balkans, bomb Belgrade and Baghdad, and tighten the sanctions which continue to kill every day in Iraq.

The weapons of the ruling class

The reasons for the bourgeoisie's hypocrisy can be understood by looking at the way the ruling class dominates society. To maintain social order the capitalist class relies on repression and ideology, state power and propaganda, brute force and lies. Everything they do can be seen as a reflection of both aspects of their class rule.

For example, Blair blamed an "anarchist travelling circus" for being at the root of what happened at Gothenburg (and Seattle etc before it, with Genoa still to come in July). At the ideological level this is the old lie that there would never be any conflicts in society if it wasn't for a minority of 'troublemakers'. At the level of repression governments throughout Europe have swapped intelligence on 'anarchist ring leaders' and propose to treat them like football hooligans and take away their passports. The German and French interior ministers are looking at "a co-ordinated and hard response to this new form of extremist, cross-border criminality" (Guardian 18/6/1). Governments will be prepared to target the movements of anyone who they deem to be a potential cause of difficulty. You don't have to be an 'anarchist ring leader' for the state to keep tabs on you.

With the coming G8 meeting, set for July 20 in Genoa, you can see the bourgeoisie preparing for every eventuality. Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, has said that up to 150,000 protesters are expected, and that exceptional measures will be required. George Bush will stay on an aircraft carrier, and other world leaders attending the meeting will be in a cruise ship moored offshore. The protection of meeting places will be rigorous. Access to Genoa will be difficult.

As for the demonstrators it will be an excellent opportunity for the Italian state to practice crowd control. The tactics of the state in London on May Day this year, where 6000 police held 1500 protesters helpless at Oxford Circus for several hours, show one approach. At Genoa they could try anything from cutting the city off from the outside world to a massive display of force to trying out new weaponry. The bourgeoisie is always keen to try out new tools. Even in Northern Ireland, where there has been direct military rule for more than 30 years, the army has just borrowed some water cannon from the Belgium state which might come in handy during any disturbances this summer.

Democracy goes with repression

The one thing that might have puzzled some people about the police violence in Gothenburg is how it tallies with Sweden's reputation as a progressive democracy. In reality democracy in Scandinavia behaves exactly as democracy anywhere. In Ancient Greece democracy was a form of rule by the slave owners. In the modern capitalist world democracy is a form of rule by the bourgeoisie in its exploitation of the working class. It will talk of 'human rights' and 'democratic freedoms' but its central concern is a social order in which it can pursue the goal of capital accumulation.

Violent state repression has been just as much a characteristic of the bourgeoisie in Britain, the home of 'free speech' and 'fair play' as anywhere in the world. It's hard to choose when there have been so many examples. In 1819 there was the Peterloo massacre, a crowd of 80,000 at a political reform meeting in Manchester were attacked by the forces of the state, 11 people were killed and 400 injured. In November 1887 troops fired on a demonstration in Trafalgar Square. In November 1910 the police and military attacked miners in Tonypandy and one worker was shot dead. In August 1911, in a series of attacks on workers' demonstrations and other actions in Liverpool, two workers were shot dead - two warships had been sent to assist. During the 1913 Dublin strike and lock-out police attacks left five people dead and hundreds injured. In the early 1930s the police attacked demonstrations of the unemployed all over the country. During the Labour government of 1945-51 troops were deployed against workers' actions on 18 occasions. In 1972, on Bloody Sunday, the army shot dead 13 demonstrators in Northern Ireland. Within the living memory of many are the police attacks on the miners and printers strikes in the 1980s.

Internationally, even without considering repression in the colonies of the European powers, or the horrors during times of imperialist war, when millions have died in the cause of capitalist democracy, there are even more dramatic examples of the violence of bourgeois repression. When the bourgeoisie defeated the Paris Commune in 1871 as many as 30,000 were murdered. In the repression against the German Revolution in the early 1920s, workers died in their tens of thousands. Against the Russian Revolution the armed forces of 14 countries were sent to back up the White Terror.

The examples from Britain are not as dramatic. This is because the bourgeoisie has a longer experience of maintaining social order than any other, and has developed many sophisticated means for defending itself. Take the situation in Britain in 1919, where there was widespread unrest and the bourgeoisie was deeply worried by events taking a 'Bolshevik' direction. Against a strike movement in Glasgow in early 1919, involving many sectors, there was uncompromising repression. A demonstration on 31 January was brutally attacked by the police. By the next day Glasgow was under military rule, occupied by troops armed with machine guns, tanks and planes. Against other major strikes in 1919, involving the miners and railwayworkers, the ruling class adopted a different approach, explicitly relying on the trade unions to undermine workers' struggles. The confidence that workers had in the unions brought about their defeat.

In Gothenburg we saw both faces of the bourgeoisie. There were the reassurances that they were really concerned with the welfare of all humanity. There were demonstrators being shot in the back. Workers should be aware that these are two sides of the same exploiting class. Barrow 28/6/1

The ruthless slaughter of thousands of civilians in New York and Washington, the majority of them workers, in the very heart of the USA, of capitalism's number one economic and military machine, was not only an abominable war crime. It also marks a giant step in the decomposition of the existing social order.

For this was not, as the propaganda merchants tell us, an attack on civilisation 'from the outside'. It was further confirmation that this capitalist civilisation, which not only reigns in the 'west' but over the whole planet, is a civilisation in decay which threatens the very future of humanity.

The events in the USA show that the free-for all military tensions which have racked the globe since the fall of the blocs a decade ago can no longer be kept to the margins of the system. From the Gulf in 1991 to the Bosnian war, then the bombing of Belgrade in 1999, the reality that 'capitalism means war' has been written in blood in one of its main nerve centres.

And how is the US ruling class - supported by Blair and the 'democratic allies' - exploiting the natural solidarity that millions have felt for those who died so horribly in the hi-jacked planes, or amidst the rubble of the World Trade Centre? By using it to drum up support for slaughter on an even bigger scale - for massive military action aimed at defending the most sordid imperialist interests.

There is much talk about a 'second Pearl Harbour' and the comparison is accurate. In 1941 the US state - which had been informed of the Japanese plans well in advance, and did nothing to stop them - used the attack to drag a reluctant population into the second world holocaust. Today the US ruling class will cynically use these events to try to stop the decline in its global 'leadership' (i.e., imperialist domination).

It's also the Gulf war replayed, on an even bigger scale: then Saddam was used as the whipping boy, but the USA's real motive was to make a huge display of military power, aimed at persuading all other countries in the world that it is the boss, the world cop. Prior to the terrorist assault on the US, America was facing increasing hostility from its former allies in Europe, over the Kyoto agreement, 'Son of Star Wars', and all the rest. Today America is using the crusade against 'international terrorism' to build a new coalition where countries like France, Britain, Germany and Japan will have no alternative but to fall in line behind the US.

And once again, as the US and NATO prepare a new round of carnage, the exploited and the oppressed of the world will be asked to take sides: for 'civilisation', for 'democracy', for 'national security'; or, if they live in the so-called 'Muslim' countries, they will be asked to support the 'holy war' of Bin Laden, or Saddam, or Hamas.

But Bush, Blair and Bin Laden are all cut from the same cloth. The only difference between them is that those who run the major states of the globe have much more firepower. The terrorists who attacked America killed thousands; the 'democracies' which bombed Baghdad and Belgrade killed hundreds of thousands, and have been doing the same thing all over the world, for almost a hundred years, from World War I to Hiroshima and Dresden, and from Vietnam and Cambodia to all the massacres of the past decade.

To understand the sickening hypocrisy of the 'anti-terrorist' democracies, you only have to look at Afghanistan, which is likely to be the main target of the USA's military response. This poverty-stricken country has already been through over 20 years of war. Bin Laden, the current devil incarnate, was set up by the CIA to fight Russian imperialism; and the Taliban regime which now shields him was also supported by the US against other Islamic factions when it first came to power. Furthermore, the extensive military action that the US and NATO are now planning for Afghanistan, and probably other parts of the Middle East, will only deepen the chaos in this war-torn region, just as it did in the Gulf and the Balkans. And once again, the victims of this 'punishment' won't be Bin Laden or Saddam, but the vast mass of an already desperate population.

But the fact that the US and the 'democracies' are the world's most powerful terrorists is no reason to support the Saddams and Bin Ladens of this world. They are not fighting capitalism and imperialism; they are part of it. Capitalism can only be only fought when the working class struggles for its own interests, which are the same in all countries.

The workers of the world have no state or country to defend. Against the war cries of their exploiters, our only interest is to revive the class war against exploitation, and finally to put an end to a 'civilisation' which is pushing humanity towards barbarism. 13.9.01

In Genoa, during the meeting of the G8 in July, Carlo Giuliani was shot and then run over by a police vehicle. Following the shooting of protesters at June's EU summit in Gothenburg - the first time since 1931 that the Swedish police have used live ammunition against demonstrators - Giuliani's death was the first fatality in 'anti-globalisation' protests.

As had been anticipated, the Italian state was prepared for massive repression, with the acknowledged force of thousands of riot police, the paramilitary carabinieri, snipers, satellite surveillance, a missile defence system, helicopters, planes, boats (including at least one submarine), tear gas, water cannon and 200 body bags, with no doubt other unpublicised weapons and tactics. Alongside the one death more than 500 people were injured, many of them hospitalised. When the police made their raid on the Genoa Social Forum more than 60 people were injured. In custody scores were beaten up or tortured.

Among the protesters there were differences of opinion about what had happened. Many Trotskyists said that some of the 'black bloc' anarchists had been allowed to do what they wanted by the police, had been filmed discussing with the police, were seen getting out of police vans, and were, at least in part, classic provocateurs stirring up the situation. Some leftists criticised the Tute Bianche protestors for being non-violent, or just plain 'clowns'. Stalinists had cast doubt on the credentials of 'Anti-Fascist Action' in Gothenburg; Genoa witnessed further criticisms by the 'conventional' left of the 'anti-capitalist' demonstrators. Meanwhile, a lot of anarchists were suspicious of the left, accusing it of just jumping on the bandwagon.

Seattle, Prague, Nice, Gothenburg, Genoa... the processions continue

Many of the observations from demonstrators were accurate. For example, the role of the 'black block' was suspicious, and the evidence for its links with the state is strong, not least the fact that the police actually acknowledged their infiltration. On another level the activity of pacifists like the Tute Bianche in Italy (or the Wombles in Britain) is futile in the face of state repression. As for the leftists, it is no surprise to see them at 'anti-globalisation' actions, as wherever they go, they always try to direct militant energies up blind alleys, and into the defence of bourgeois democracy.

The media said that the confrontations between police and demonstrators were predictable and not spontaneous. This is not said because the bourgeoisie wants to see unpredictable spontaneous struggles, far from it. The intention is to imply that there's a conspiracy behind every demo, but, more importantly, there's an attempt to portray the demonstrations as alien to the norms of bourgeois democracy. The implicit lesson is 'throwing stones never changed anything - when you're older you'll realise that the only real change comes through the ballot box.' In Genoa the likes of Blair and co. made a point of saying that those inside the conference rooms had been democratically elected. Outside the halls many demonstrators fell into disputing whether the forces of the state could really be called 'democratic', as if Genoa and Gothenburg were a new trend, rather than being typical of the attacks of the bourgeois state.

To really understand what's been happening at the 'anti-globalisation' demonstrations, as with any other question in class society, you have to look at the social forces, the classes and ideas involved. A demonstration can be staged to further the cause of any class. Workers can stage marches as a way of linking up with other workers, or to protest against repressive or other actions from the capitalist state, or, for unemployed workers, it can be a means of struggle when the workplace has been denied. On the other hand, demonstrations by the Countryside Alliance, the BNP and any number of nationalist campaigns show that any bourgeois cause can mount a demo if required.

For those involved in the skirmishes at each successive summit, whatever their motivation or social origin, the spectacular showdowns with the police have been futile confrontations. If there are people who are seriously trying to come to grips with the nature of capitalist society and how it can be overthrown, then any drive they have for understanding will be diverted by the ritual battles.

This is actually celebrated by Roger Burbach, Director of the Centre for the Study of the Americas, in Berkeley, California. He is an advocate of the "carnival of life" against the "opulent and grotesque world that has been foisted on us by the new corporate robber-barons". He says that "Most importantly, the anarchists and the anti-globalisation protests provide an outlet for the pent-up frustrations and the sense of alienation of a new generation" (in Anti-capitalism: a guide to the movement). This is crude stuff, but at least it's honest. When there are 'frustrations' and 'alienation' in 'a new generation' then opportunities to let off steam, without making any threat to social order, are valued by the ruling class. When you're only concerned with the next campaign, the next demonstration, the next battle with the police, then political reflection will not be your main priority. At Genoa the state intended that there should be violent confrontations, to provoke either disgust, pacifism or terrorism - all false alternatives.

The intervention of revolutionary organisations like the ICC, based on the historic experience of the workers' movement, insists that the violence of the modern capitalist state is no exception to some abstract democratic norm. The rule of the bourgeoisie can really only ever be a dictatorship over the exploited class, however democratic the fa�ade in front of it. For those who want to participate in the real struggle against this class rule, there is no substitute for serious political discussion about the nature of this rotting society and how it can be destroyed. The 'anti-globalisation' parades tend to hinder the possibility of such discussion; indeed they consistently march under the banners of the very democratic myths that are such an obstacle to the development of class consciousness.

Barrow, 30/8/01.

When the CBI announced recently that Britain would escape recession, this was hardly enough to inspire confidence, particularly once we take into account the fact that manufacturing in Britain is in recession, with a 2% slump in output last quarter. This was followed by the news that the US economy is also just staying out of recession but with a growth rate close to zero. It has cut its forecast growth rate severely and its forecast budget surplus by 50%.

The world's other major economies are no better off. Japan, after a decade of recession, has seen its Nikkei stock exchange fall to a 17 year low at the end of August. The Euro zone cut interest rates after the ECB announced it had underestimated the effects of the global and US slowdown. Clearly the economic problems we are talking about are global in nature.

The ruling class and its media have changed their tune. We are no longer hearing about the success of the economy, based on globalisation or the dot com companies, as we did at the end of the 90s. But even that 'success' was not all it was cracked up to be. If the USA enjoyed a decade of continuous growth in the 90s, the average growth rate was significantly lower than in the 80s, which was lower than growth in the 70s. Furthermore, this growth was largely based on the massive resort to debt, another fact that the ruling class is no longer able to conceal. The potential disasters contained in debt-fuelled growth were demonstrated at the end of the 90s, which saw the crash of the Asian 'tiger' economies in 1997, followed by further international economic convulsions as other second rank economies, such as Russia, defaulted on repayments. The 'boom' of the 1990s was nothing but a part of the global crisis of capitalism that has been developing slowly but surely since the end of the 1960s, with massive unemployment and economic convulsions that the ruling class claimed to have overcome 30 or 40 years ago.

The long slow decline in the economy world wide is not the result of any mismanagement or stupidity on the part of our rulers, but due to the fact that for a almost a century the capitalist system has been in decay. That is to say that it has no way out of its historic crisis, can only continue on the basis of increasingly massive debt, and can only reinvigorate its cycle of production on the basis of a bloody redivision of the world market, as occurred in 1914-18 and 1939-45. Since the end of the post-second world war reconstruction in the 60s, there has been a continuing escalation in imperialist conflicts, and things have getting worse since the cold war ended in 1989, as witness the wars in the Gulf, ex-Yugoslavia, Africa or the Middle East (see p3). The plans for the 'Son of Star Wars' defence system show the USA trying aggressively to maintain its status as the world's only remaining super-power (see p8).

While the arms industry does indeed employ workers, this does not mean it is in any way positive for the economy. Its products cannot be eaten or worn or make new products, but can only be used to destroy. Yet the vast resources eaten up by this industry must be taken from somewhere, particularly from social spending. The choice 'guns or butter' remains as relevant today as in the 1930s, and the bourgeoisie will always choose guns over the living conditions of the working class unless it is forced to do otherwise.

Job losses and other attacks on working class living standards

If the 'boom' of the 90s did not mean any respite for the working class, today's slowdown is definitely the signal for new attacks. In fact two recent surveys of consumer confidence, in the USA and in the UK, have shown a fall in confidence to levels similar to those in 1998, after Russia defaulted on its repayments, or 1992 after 'Black Wednesday'. One of the main concerns expressed was the fear of rising unemployment. The reality of this concern is illustrated in Japan where unemployment has now risen to the highest level since records began in the 1950s. And we also see massive job losses being announced.

Some of these job losses have been announced internationally, as with the 16,000 due to go from Fujitsu, some of which will be in Britain, to follow the 850 jobs already lost over here in the past year. Hitachi and Toshiba will axe 20,000 jobs, as will NEC.

Home grown companies are also shedding jobs. Postal sorting offices are being closed and the work moved out of London with over 2,000 jobs to be cut, and 6,000 jobs to go at BT, to take just two examples.

Job losses are always accompanied by worse conditions and increased exploitation for those remaining in work. And we must not forget the attacks on health services, with fewer services available on the NHS after increased state control through the National Institute of Clinical Excellence and the Primary Care Trusts. Nor the long process of cutting entitlement to social security payments.

There is a great deal of anger in the working class against the effects of the crisis and the attacks on it, which will force it to respond. In doing so it faces great difficulties. There are no important struggles to provide a beacon for the working class as there were with Poland in 1980 or the miners in 1984. The working class lacks confidence in its ability not just to change society, but even to defend itself on a day to day level. This gives much more scope for the trade unions and the left to pose as defenders of the working class through campaigns against privatisation (see p4) or within the anti-globalisation campaign (see p1 and 4). These are both used by the bourgeoisie to pretend it is not capitalism, but only this or that aspect of it (private ownership, multinationals etc) that is responsible for the crisis, and so to divert workers from struggling for their own needs into a dead end that is harmless to the ruling class.

However slow and difficult the development of workers' struggles will be in these conditions, this is the only way for the class to regain confidence in its own strength and to remember the lessons of the great struggles it has already engaged in. Faced with the impasse of capitalism today that is the only way out for humanity. WR 1/9/01.

The world wide success of the film Gladiator has generated a renewed interested in Ancient Rome and the role of gladiators. Any inquiry into this question has to raise the spectre of the slave war between 73 and 71 BC, which was lead by the gladiator Spartacus. Unlike the fictional Gladiator which opposes the central character and his small band of gladiators to the truly wicked emperor Commodus, the real slave revolt saw 100,000 or more slaves waging war on their Roman oppressors and defeating the seeming invincible legions time and time again. This revolt, though bloodily crushed, has inspired revolutionary movements. The main grouping of revolutionaries in Germany who opposed World War 1 adopted the name of the Spartacus League to express their determination to wage war on the ruling class; and like Spartacus and the slave army the revolutionary struggle of the workers in Germany was drowned in blood. Thus the name Spartacus became synonymous with the revolutionary aspirations of the exploited. Whereas Gladiator is about the hero and his small band of gladiators standing up for an empire based on 'justice' (no mention of the exploitation of slaves) against the oh-so-wicked Commodus: in short for democracy against dictatorship.

The aim of this article is not to make a critique of Gladiator or to produce a detailed history of Spartacus, but to show why the Spartacus revolt, though carried out by a different exploited class, can really only be understood and claimed by the movement of the exploited class in this society, the modern proletariat. By the same token we will show how the modern class of 'slave-owners', the bourgeoisie, has tried to distort the history of Spartacus and tried to use it for its own ends.

The Slave Wars

The rising of the slaves between 73-71 BC did not come out of nowhere. It reflected the wider social turmoil rocking the Roman Republic. By the second century BC the Roman army had conquered the Mediterranean and was extending itself throughout Europe. These ever-expanding conquests brought with them an increasing supply of slave labour, which was used to replace the peasantry that had been the bedrock of the Roman Empire. Instead of the old system of peasant smallholdings, there was a growth of huge estates that used slave labour to extract raw materials and produce agricultural goods. In the cities the artisans were increasingly being replaced by slave labour. At the same time, a very small minority of the ruling class was able to take over the control of the exploitation of the resources of the newly conquered territories. This produced powerful social tensions: between the ruling class and those driven into unemployment in the cities or to the cities from the countryside, and also between the different interests within the ruling class. We do not have space here to go into a detailed analysis, but would recommend readers to consult Karl Kautsky's The Foundations of Christianity. These tensions lead to a series of bloody civil wars from 130 BC. During that period the Gracchus brothers led movements of the dispossessed, particularly the former legionaries who had once received parcels of land for their years of service, against the state: "The private soldiers fight and die to advance the wealth and luxury of the great; and they are classed the masters of the world, while they have not a foot of ground in their possession" (Tiberius Gracchus, quoted by Plutarch, cited in M Beer's The General History of Socialism and Social Struggles. Russell & Russell, 1957). In 132 BC Tiberius and his supporters were slaughtered by the ruling party, and in 121 BC his brother Caius and his supporters met a similar fate. In the following years, massacre and bloody civil war became the norm as tens of thousands were killed as different fractions of the ruling class fought each other for control of the state.

It was in the middle of this turmoil that the slave war led by Spartacus broke out. But again this has to been seen in the context of the two previous slave wars that had taken place in Sicily (BC 134-32, 104-101). In these wars tens of thousands of slaves on the massive estates that covered the island rose up and defeated their Roman masters, and then fought wars against Roman legions until being crushed with great violence. At the time of the first war, in Asia Minor in the Kingdom of Pergamum, Aristonikos, the half-brother of the former king, faced with the Romans, freed the slaves and set up the Sun State, which was taken to mean a 'communist' order. There was "complete political democracy; the whole of the inhabitants, native and foreign, property-owning and disinherited, received the franchise and the independent administration of their State" (Beer, ibid, p153). From 133 to 129 the Romans waged war against the Sun State until they finally crushed it

Against this background of social turmoil and a succession of bloody slave wars, the 3rd great slave war broke out.

The course of the revolt

The information that we have on Spartacus and the slave war is very limited - a few thousand words, written by ancient historians from the ruling class: Sallust, a Roman Senator (1st century BC), Plutarch and Appian were wealthy aristocrats (2nd century AD). The very fact that these members of the ruling class felt the need to deal with this revolt demonstrates how important it was.

As we have said, our aim is not to give a historical account, but it is necessary to lay out the main aspects. Initially, Spartacus and 70 odd other gladiators broke out of their gladiatorial school in Capua, after their plan for a bigger break-out had been discovered. The fact that such a group of gladiators from different ethnic backgrounds, trained to kill each other, could have formed such a plan, testifies to a real solidarity between them. Once free they fled to mount Vesuvius. Here Appian says many slaves and some freemen joined them "Since Spartacus divided the profits of his raiding into equal shares, he soon attracted a very large number of followers" (Appian, in Spartacus and the Slave Wars, a Brief History with Documents, by Brent D. Shaw, p140). Such proto-communist measures marked Spartacus's leadership: "Spartacus did not permit merchants to import gold and silver, and he forbade his own men to acquire any. For the most part, he purchased iron and copper and did not censure those who imported these metals" (Appian, ibid, p 142). These measures must have been a very important feature of the slave war because the Roman Historian Pliny compares it to the greed of the Empire: "We know," says Pliny in the thirty-third book of his Natural History, "that Spartacus did not allow gold or silver in his camp. How our runaway slaves tower above us in largeness of spirit!" (quoted in Kautsky's The Foundations of Christianity). These actions cannot have been imposed on the mass of the slave army by Spartacus but must have reflected the desire of the majority for a more equal society. Spartacus was also against the wanton plunder carried out by sections of his army, particularly those under the command of the Gaul Crixus. "Spartacus himself was powerless to stop them, even though he repeatedly entreated them to stop them and even attempted by sending on ahead a messenger" to warn other towns (Shaw, p148).

It was these divisions within the slave army that appear to have been one of the main reasons for them not escaping Italy, even though the army reached the Alps twice. However, Florus (2nd century AD) said that after obliterating the army led by Lentulus in the Apennine Mountains and then attacking the camp of Gaius Crassus, Spartacus thought of attacking Rome itself.

In the end, after being forced into the very south of Italy by Crassus and with the arrival of more legions from abroad, Spartacus and the slaves were faced with either capture or making a last stand. The slave army chose the latter. They turned in full battle ranks and marched on the pursuing legions. 36,000 died on the battlefield and many more after, as the ruling class relentlessly hunted down all those that had had the audacity to defeat their legions, to kill their generals and nobles, and to stand up to the ruling class. As a warning to all other rebels, the ruling class crucified 6,000 survivors of the slave army along the main road to Rome.

The eventual defeat of the slave army was not simply the results of internal divisions or tactical errors. It reflected the historical limitations of the epoch: despite being the most advanced civilisation the world had yet seen, Roman slavery could never have developed the productive forces to the point where a truly universal communist society could have come out of it. The downfall of slavery could only have been replaced by a more progressive system of exploitation (thus, following its decline, there was the development of feudalism in Europe). Within this framework, it has to be understood that the slaves were not a revolutionary class in the sense of carrying within their struggle the foundations of a new social system, still less a conscious programme for its realisation. Their hopes for a society where private property would no longer exist were doomed to remain dreams, based on memories of a lost tribal order and on myths of a primordial golden age. This does not mean that marxists look down on the revolts or the communistic dreams of previous exploited classes: on the contrary, these revolts have rightly inspired generations of proletarians, and these dreams remain indispensable stepping stones towards the scientific communist outlook of the modern working class

The response of the bourgeoisie to Spartacus

The development of the bourgeoisie's response to the slave war is very enlightening. In 18th century France the revolutionary bourgeoisie held Spartacus as a hero and expression of their own struggle against feudalism; in 19th century Italy he was also adopted by the revolutionary bourgeoisie. However, once the bourgeoisie had established its undisputed supremacy, Spartacus became a dreaded figure, because the slave war was uncomfortably close to the class war now beginning to take shape between the bourgeoisie and its deadly enemy, the working class. This horror became manifest with the revolutionary struggles between 1917 and 27 when "Spartacism" became synonymous with Bolshevism and world revolution: "the name 'Spartacist' now adopted by the German Communists, the only party in Germany which is really fighting against the yoke of capitalism, was adopted by them because Spartacus was one of the most outstanding heroes of one of the very greatest slave insurrections, which took place two thousand years ago" (V. I Lenin, The State, in Collected Works no 29). Echoing Rome's bloody suppression of the original Spartacus movement, the Germany bourgeoisie crushed the modern day slave war with great brutality.

In the years of counter-revolution which followed, the ruling class felt less threatened by the spectre of class war, and by the 1950s, felt confident enough to recruit Spartacus for the cold war.

To this end the American ruling class used the vehicle of Hollywood and Stanley Kubrick's film Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas. This is not to deny the artistic merit of the film, which is vastly superior to the 'up-to-date' glut of special effects in Gladiator; indeed, it contains moments which beautifully convey the liberating power of solidarity, as in the portrayal of the original break-out from the gladiator school and above all in the immortal scene when the Roman victors are trying to identify Spartacus and thousands of captured slaves step forward proclaiming "I am Spartacus". Nonetheless the ideological intent of the film is never far from the surface. Spartacus himself is turned into a Christ-like figure leading the slaves to freedom. This is made clear at the end of the film when he is crucified. This is a deliberate lie used to pacify the memory of the slave war. Spartacus did not die on the cross but fighting his way towards Crassus, the very symbol of the Roman ruling class - he was the richest and most powerful man in Rome - in the final battle. "When his horse was brought to him, Spartacus drew his sword and shouted that if he won the battle, he would have many fine horses, but if he lost, he would have no need of a horse. With that, he killed the animal. Then, driving through weapons and the wounded, Spartacus rushed at Crassus. He never reached the Roman, although he killed two centurions, who fell with him" (Plutarch, ibid 136).

The film is used to boost the values of the "West" against dictatorship. The film drove home the message that dictatorship could only be opposed by freedom, democracy and Christianity. At the beginning of the film the voice-over says that whilst the war of Spartacus and the slaves was defeated, it was Christianity that eventually freed the slaves (while not mentioning that Christianity was a pillar of European slavery from the 16th to the 19th centuries). Slavery itself is presented as a 'stain' on Roman civilisation, rather than as its foundation.

It was also part of the US's drive to win the markets of the former British colonies. Kirk Douglas says in his autobiography The Ragman's Son that he insisted that all the main Roman ruling class characters were played by British actors whilst the slaves were Americans or others.

Stalinism also contributed to distorting the meaning of the Spartacus revolt. The film's screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo, a Stalinist, equated Spartacus with Stalin and the hot headed Crixus, who in the film breaks away from Spartacus to attack Rome, as Trotsky.

The film is based on the novel by Howard Fast. In the film the slaves are shown as following Spartacus to the bitter end, but in the book the slaves are held responsible for the failure of the war. Fast, as a good Stalinist, had nothing but contempt for the working class. This is reflected in the book where the slaves are portrayed as not being up to Spartacus's revolutionary ideals. This is also the message driven home in Arthur Koestler's novel The Gladiators. Koestler had been a Stalinist in the 30s but had become openly disillusioned with the revolution and the proletariat. For him, as for Fast, Spartacus is the revolutionary leader leading a rabble not up to his ideals.

A more vicious recent attack is made by Alan Baker in his book The Gladiator: the Secret History of Rome's Warrior Slaves, a book that rides on the back of the success of the film. In a chapter on Spartacus Baker affirms the opinion of the historian Christian Meir that he was "a robber chief on the grand scale". This shows the low level the bourgeoisie will fall to in order to attack a movement that challenged their ancestors. The ancient historians had more dignity and, though hating Spartacus and all he stood for, still acknowledge his strength of personality. "Spartacus was a Thracian, born among a pastoral nomadic people. He not only possessed great spirit and bodily strength, but he was more intelligent and nobler than his fate, and he was more Greek than his (Thracian) background might indicate" (Plutarch, op cit p131-2).

At the beginning of the year Channel 4 had a programme on Spartacus. Again, although the programme was more balanced, it still showed Spartacus as not being up to his revolutionary image, because, on one occasion, he made captured Romans fight in gladiatorial games and even crucified a captured Roman. Perhaps more significant is that the documentary was made by a former military man and concentrated on Spartacus's extraordinary strategic and tactical abilities. It said nothing about the social ideals of the movement and still less about how such a huge mass of slaves and other oppressed strata managed to organise for the struggle (indeed, this remains almost completely obscure to this day).

The ruling class will certainly continue to make whatever use it can of the great class warriors of the past. But as for Spartacus, we will end with Marx's assessment, written in a letter to Engels: "Spartacus emerges as one of the best characters in the whole of ancient history. A great general, a noble character, a genuine representative of the ancient proletariat".

For Marx the greatness of Spartacus, in the final analysis, stems from the fact that he was "a genuine representative of the ancient proletariat": in other words, he was a product of the struggle of an exploited class which dared to challenge its exploiters. In a world still based on the exploitation of one class by another, Spartacus remains a potent symbol for the modern proletariat, which has the capacity to end all forms of slavery once and for all.

Phil, 17/7/01.

The range of issues raised at each 'anti-capitalist' demonstration is wide. The state of the environment, climate change, free trade, the role of big corporations, privatisation, Third World debt, economic policies of the G8, the role of the World Trade Organisation, the structural adjustment programmes of the IMF and the World Bank - these are all targets of the leftists, anarchists, greens, religious groups and non-governmental organisations that turn out for the 'anti-globalisation' protests.

If you take any item from the 'anti-globalisers' agenda you'll find something where neither diagnoses nor solution call capitalism into question. A currently popular example is the fact that, of the top 100 economic entities in the world, 49 are big corporations and 51 are national economies. What's implied is that if the big companies were not so big then we could all enjoy exclusive exploitation by an array of oppressive nation states. Many even say that poverty is caused by privatisation, while ignoring the reality of state-enforced austerity programmes. When workers struggle they take no account of the formal status of their employer - workers in Poland in 1980-81 staged massive strikes against a whole range of state-run enterprises, the miners in Britain in 1984-85 fought against the nationalised Coal Board, and today, when postal workers across the country fight, it's not against a private boss, but against the conditions enforced by the state-run Post Office.

The campaign against the big corporations is typical - and behind every other issue is raised the question of the nature of capitalism, its crises, competition and inability to satisfy the needs of humanity. While there are those who are beginning to make connections between the various aspects of capitalist society, the 'anti-globalisation movement' reduces all concerns to campaigns for changes within capitalism.

The perspective of revolution

In protests such as those at Genoa and Gothenburg, the religious groups, the charities and non-governmental organisations don't pretend to be anti-capitalist. Their actions are intended to put pressure on the ruling class to make its system of exploitation work for the benefit of its victims. Any 'concessions' made to such groups will be for propaganda purposes.

However, the description of 'anti-capitalist' doesn't apply to the leftists and most of the anarchists either. Trotskyists (and the remnants of Stalinism) are defenders of state capitalism. With anarchists there are many varieties of ideology (some indistinguishable from leftism) but what they have in common is a commitment to protest in itself. They have no perspective, and certainly no recognition of the conscious working class as the only force capable of overthrowing the dictatorship of capital. At the London May Day 2001 protests there was a banner reading "Overthrow capitalism and replace it with something nicer". Another popular motto is "Our world is not for sale" - which is plainly untrue, as everything in the world, in particular labour power, has become a commodity with a price, and the world is clearly not 'ours', as it is dominated by the ruling capitalist class. In Genoa one of the major catchphrases was "a different world is possible". Against the vague whimsy of such useless slogans marxism has always had a clear critique rooted in material reality.

Take the concept of 'globalisation'. Time magazine, on July 23, before the Genoa protest, approvingly quoted from the Communist Manifesto of 1848: "Modern industry has established the world market. All old-established national industries have been destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries whose products are consumed in every corner of the globe. In place of the old wants, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes ... All fixed, fast-frozen relations are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air." The Time writer implies that this describes the vibrant nature of capitalism over the last 150 years. In fact Marx and Engels saw the bourgeoisie's sweeping away of feudal and other pre-capitalist modes of production, and the establishment of a global economy, as being the historic task of capitalism. With this achieved the international revolution of the working class became a possibility. But, in the absence of workers' revolution, with capitalism having penetrated every corner of the globe for roughly the last hundred years, the bourgeois economy has not been a dynamic system that merely trades commodities. On the contrary, capitalism has long been an obstacle to the real development of the productive forces, which is the fundamental material cause of all the wars and catastrophes that have been plaguing humanity since the early 20th century. The global capitalist economy was a step on from pre-capitalist production, because it created the bases for an international workers' revolution and the creation of a communist society; but if this possibility is not realised, capitalism's continuation can only spell disaster for humanity.

A class for communism

One of the leading advocates of 'anti-globalisation', George Monbiot, has said that it is "in numerical terms, the biggest protest movement in the history of the world" (Guardian 24/7/1). He comes to this conclusion by affirming that "almost everyone agrees that the world would be a better place" without the activities of the big corporations, and that "most people would be .. happy to see the headquarters of Balfour Beatty or Monsanto dismantled by non-violent action". The 'protest movement' in Monbiot's mind is only 'big' because it includes just about anyone who's unhappy about an aspect of modern life. It includes everyone from people who are a bit worried about 'global warming', to those that donate to Oxfam or Christian Aid, to the leftists who want the role of the state in capitalism to be further strengthened, but also it includes those who are beginning to sense that the only real 'anti-capitalism' is one that involves the mobilisation of millions against the rule of the bourgeois state.

Better candidates for 'biggest protest movement' come from the history of the working class struggle. Every workers' struggle is a protest against the conditions of proletarian existence. Between 1917 and 23, for example, the working class took power in Russia, staged mass insurrections in Germany, shook Italy, Hungary and Austria to their foundations, and engaged in bitter struggles in Britain, Spain, the US, Argentina and Brazil. Or, more recently, between 1983 and 1989 there were significant, often massive struggles in Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, the US, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Holland, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, India, Tunisia, Morocco, Columbia, Bolivia, Greece, Israel, Rumania, Russia, Bulgaria, Poland, Yugoslavia, Japan, and the Dominican Republic, to cite only the main examples. Not only far bigger 'numerically' than Monbiot's 'protest movement', the actual significance of international waves of workers' struggle is greater because the working class, at the heart of the capitalist economy, has the capacity to destroy capitalism and build a society based on relations of solidarity. The struggle of the working class has the ultimate perspective of the establishment of a world human community. Because organisation and consciousness are the only weapons the working class has, the struggles and discussions of today are already important steps in making that perspective a reality. Barrow 30/8/1

The terrible bloodbath on the 11 September was not a sudden bolt out of the blue by “Islamic fanatics”. On the contrary, it was a new, and qualitatively more serious, link in a long chain of wars, acts of destruction, developing militarism and arms build up.

The lie of a ‘New World Order’ is once again exposed

10 years ago the present American president’s father promised a “New World Order” because the collapse of what his predecessor � Ronald Reagan - had called the “evil empire” had brought about the victory of “democracy” and “Liberal” capitalism. This was supposed to lead to a society where military conflicts would progressively disappear and all nations would live under Right, Law and Justice, in capital letters. With the appearance of the first serious convulsions in the old Soviet bloc a completely different perspective was opened up “Far from encouraging peace, the disintegration of the blocs which emerged from Yalta, and the decomposition of the capitalist system which underlines it, implies still more tension and conflicts. The appetites of the minor imperialisms, which up to now have been determined by the world’s division into two major camps, will only increase, now that these camps no longer dominated by their leaders before” (‘Presentation to the Theses on the Economic and Political crisis in the USSR and the Eastern Countries’, International Review 60). We insisted that we were not going towards a “New World Order” but towards “A world of bloody chaos, where the American Policeman will try to maintain a minimum of order by the increasingly massive and brutal use of military force” (‘Militarism and Decomposition’ International Review 64).

The Gulf War in 1991 was the first episode in this; then came Yugoslavia, the Middle East, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Sierra Leon, Congo, Algeria, Angola, Afghanistan, Timor, Chechnya, Colombia, Burma, Kashmir� This succession of violent convulsions form part of the dynamic that led to the terrible assault on the Twin Towers. This dynamic is based on a historically unprecedented explosion of imperialist appetites amongst both great and small states - appetites that had been more or less contained by the discipline of the blocs. But over the past ten years, in the absence of this discipline, and in the general context of an ever-deepening economic crisis, we have been plunged into a chaotic spiral of confrontations, which, if the proletariat does not react, will end up leading to the destruction of humanity.

What lies behind this dynamic? Will it be possible to reach a point of equilibrium that will allow these tensions to be contained with a framework of negotiations?  The different factions of the ruling class clearly put forwards this idea. The official message of the Western governments is that the “democratic” great powers are seeking to set up just laws that will allow a “New World Order”. The only problem is that this praiseworthy effort is being torpedoed by a whole series of dark forces: dictators such as Saddam Hussein or Milosevic, international terrorism which now possesses terrible and secret weapons, the “rogue” states (North Korea, Afghanistan, Libya etc). In order for this much-promised “New World” to be achieved it will be necessary to mobilise behind the military crusade against these “new threats” and  “new forms of war”.

The explanations given by the left of capital, although they are more insidious, are no less fragile. They certainly see the need to “struggle against terrorism” and the “new forms of war” and are therefore very enthusiastic about the military mobilisation. But at the same time they add a twist of criticism about the “excesses” of “neo-liberalism” and “globalisation”, which are obstacles to a more just world order.

Lastly, the message of the factions that support the “rogue” states and “international terrorism” is no less repugnant than that of their “civilised” opponents. They justify acts such as the attack on the Twin Towers by saying that they are “an action by the oppressed peoples against imperialism” and that they are retaliation against the populations of the opulent metropoles for the suffering of the Palestinian and Arab masses.

All of these political currents are expressions of a capitalist system that is leading humanity towards barbarism. Their crude claims not only don’t explain anything, but have the aim of tying the proletariat and the great majority of the population to the yoke of capitalism and imperialism, of stimulating the most base instincts of hate, revenge and massacre.

Military barbarism in the phase of capitalist decomposition

Only the historical method of marxism, the most advanced expression of the class consciousness of the proletariat, can provide a coherent explanation of the murderous disorder that reigns in the world, and put forward the only possible solution: the destruction of capitalism in all countries.

In 1989, faced with the collapse of Stalinism and the imperialist bloc organised around Russia, we demonstrated that these events signalled capitalism’s entry into a new and terminal phase of its decadence: the stage of decomposition. In the document ‘Decomposition, the final phase of capitalist decadence’, published in International Review 62 we showed that its roots lay in a new characteristic of the period opened up by 1968: on the one hand, the proletariat had revived its class struggle but had not been able to go beyond the merely defensive level. Nevertheless, this made it difficult for the bourgeoisie to impose its response to the endless crisis of its system: generalised imperialist war. All of which sucked world society into a morass: “As crisis-ridden capitalism’s contradictions can only get deeper, the bourgeoisie’s inability to offer the slightest perspective for society as a whole, and the proletariat’s inability, for the moment, openly to set forwards its own historic perspective, can only lead to a situation of generalised decomposition. Capitalism is rotting on its feet”.

This morass has profoundly marked the evolution of capitalism at all levels of its existence “to such an extent that the contradictions and expressions of decadent capitalism that mark its successive phases do not disappear with time, but continue and deepen; the phase of decomposition appears as the result of an accumulation of all the characteristics of a moribund system, completing the 75-year death agony of a historically condemned mode of production. Concretely, not only do the imperialist nature of all states, the threat of world war, the absorption of civil society by the state Moloch, and the permanent crisis of the capitalist economy all continue during the phase of decomposition, they reach a synthesis and an ultimate conclusion within it” (ibid).

At the level of the evolution of imperialist tensions, the world scene has been dominated by a series of particularly grave and destructive elements:

* The United States, whilst being the only military superpower, has been faced with its authority being increasingly challenged, not only by nations with their own aspirations (Germany, France, Great Britain�) but also by an increasing number of other states.

* Each state follows its own policy and virulently affirms its refusal to submit to the discipline of the more powerful states. This is the explosion of what we call “every man for himself”.

* Alliances between states have become circumstantial and lost all solidity and continuity. They are ephemeral and temporary, forming and falling apart at a dizzying speed.

* Conflicts fester without any remedy, beyond any possibility of stabilisation. The conflicts inherited from the Yalta epoch have not been resolved but rather have become indefinitely prolonged.

* Imperialist strategy � as a coherent and long-term political and military orientation � has become increasingly less possible. It has been replaced by immediatist, contradictory tactics, without stable alliances, that have worsened the chaos and destruction even more.

* A consequence of the former is that the policy of all the great powers � and even more so of the smaller ones - consists more of destabilising the allies of its rivals than constructing its own network of loyal states.

* The great powers are implicated in the use of terrorism as a means of war; the world situation is characterised by “the development of terrorism or the seizure of hostages, as methods of warfare between states, to the detriment of the ‘laws’ that capitalism established in the past to ‘regulate’ the conflicts between different ruling class factions” (ibid).

All this has aggravated the chaotic nature of imperialist conflicts, because as we demonstrate in the Resolution on the International Situation from our 14th Congress, which took place in May 2001 “..the fragmentation of the old bloc structures and disciplines unleashed national rivalries on an unprecedented scale, resulting in an increasingly chaotic struggle of each against all from the world’s greatest powers to the meanest local warlord�The wars characteristic of the present phase of capitalist decomposition are no less imperialist wars than the wars of previous phases of decadence, but they have become more widespread, more uncontrollable, and more difficult to bring to even a temporary close” (International Review 106) .

The United States is the biggest loser in this situation. Its national interests are identified with the maintaining of a world order built for its own advantage. However all of the pillars upholding  such an order have been overturned by the evolution of decomposing capitalism:

* The threat of the Russian bear, which pushed the affluent bourgeoisies of Europe and Japan to voluntarily submit to American tutelage, no longer exists. This has encouraged them to pursue their own ambitions, and this can only lead to a widespread clash with American interests.

* The development of the economic crisis has whetted the imperialist appetites of all states, resulting in campaigns of conquest, in attempts to destabilise their rivals’ underlings, in risky adventures that can only end up by further spreading chaos.

* Social decomposition spreads through all countries, but above all the weakest ones. This generates all kinds of centrifugal tendencies and powerful movements towards dislocation and schism. All types of gangs and warlords terrorise the population whilst at the same time fighting against the central state. These fires have not only been fanned by neighbouring states but also by the world and regional powers through their thinly veiled support. Some examples of this situation are the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Russia, Colombia, Mexico, Sierra Leone, Liberia, etc.

Confronted with this blood-soaked mess, the world’s sheriff, the United States, has been obliged to carry out enormous displays of force, as we saw in the Gulf and Kosovo. These exhibitions of its overwhelming military power have forced its rivals to bend the knee and line themselves behind the great godfather. Nevertheless, when the effect of intimidation wears off, they all return to their old ways, forcing the US to react on an even bigger scale. It is certainly significant that just prior to September 11, tensions between Europe and America (over Kyoto, ‘Son of Star Wars’, the Euro-Army, etc) had never been so sharp.

The USA is compelled to use military force to reaffirm its world domination

It is difficult to work out who exactly was behind the bloody attack of 11th September. However, what is certain is that even while the bodies were still warm, the American state immediately began to loudly bang the drums of war. Taking full advantage of the terrible emotional impact of the massacre on the American population, it unleashed violent patriotic hysteria in order to carry out an unprecedented war mobilisation.

Simultaneously, the countries of NATO have had to stand to attention; not only that, they have also had to stomach the application of Article 5 of the Treaty that obliges them to show “solidarity” with any of the members countries that have been attacked. The United States has told them in no uncertain terms, through the words of a high-ranking diplomat, that “those who are not united with the coalition will be considered and treated as an enemy”.

Practically all the world’s regimes have unreservedly supported the USA’s plans. Only the Taliban, officially designated as being guilty of hosting the shady Bin Laden, have refused and called for a “Holy War”.

However, there are noticeable differences between the new military deployment being prepared by the US and the one carried out in 1991. Then it was fundamentally an exhibition of force, whereas today, as Bush has declared “it is not a question of vengeance, nor of a symbolic reaction, but of winning a war against barbarous behaviour”.  Therefore in his televised harangue he said that “we ask you for patience because the conflict will not be short. We ask you for tenacity because the conflict will not be easy. We ask you for all our strength because the road to victory will be long”.

What is being laid out for the coming weeks is a widespread military campaign which will encompass several theatres of operations. The choice of Afghanistan as the main target is not an accident or simply the result of Bin Laden’s presence. This country has a fundamental strategic importance. It is situated at the crossroads between Russia, China, India and at the same time its immense mountains can serve as an observatory and a platform for putting pressure on the Middle East � Palestine and Israel, the Arab Emirates, Arabia etc - which is a crucial centre for the control of Europe. The United States has not only forced all of the states and especially its former allies to follow its plans; it is also seeking out more stable and durable positions which will allow it to have a much greater control over the world situation.

The period ahead will see a dramatic aggravation of imperialist tensions:

* Firstly because an act of war has struck massively and directly at the workers and population of the world’s main city, New York. A tendency that has prevailed since 1945 has come to an end: the workers of the main industrial centres are no longer going to be free from the scourge of war; from now on they are going to be exposed to reprisals comparable to the attack on the Twin Towers that could result in thousands of victims.

* Secondly, because the response that the USA is preparing will take the form of a much more prolonged military operation. This will involve a much greater deployment of military force than during the Gulf war.

* Thirdly, because this is inevitably going to lead to costly and difficult operations involving the occupation of territory, with the consequent use of infantry and their involvement in bloody struggles.

The qualitative leap in the evolution of imperialist tensions is more than obvious. We are not on the eve of the third world war as alarmist announcements have claimed. Nevertheless, this is not any consolation because these events dramatically confirm the tendency that war has taken on in the period of decomposition; and this in the long run can be just as dangerous as a Third World War. As we say in the International Situation Resolution from our last Congress “The working class today thus faces the possibility that it could be engulfed in an irrational chain reaction of local and regional wars�This apocalypse is not so far from what we are experiencing today, the face of barbarism is taking material shape before our eyes�Humanity today does not merely face the prospect of barbarism in the future: the descent has already begun and it bears with it the danger of gradually eating away at the every premises of any future social regeneration”

In the second part of this article we will examine the effects of these recent events on the class consciousness of the proletariat.

The American bourgeoisie has exploited the catastrophe of 11 September to try and reassert its imperialist power on an unprecedented scale. The British bourgeoisie has also not missed the opportunity to play its own imperialist game, to advance its own military, diplomatic and political position on the world arena at the expense of its rivals, cynically exploiting sympathy for its ‘own’ victims in the terrorist attacks.

Of course the British bourgeoisie, like most of the rest of the world bourgeoisie, rushed to denounce the terrorist attacks, to solidarise with the United States, to support the declaration of democratic war on terrorism, and invoke, along with other major powers, the ‘mutual defence’ article of NATO’s constitution. But, beyond that ‘solidarity’, even more than during the Gulf War or the wars in the Balkans, the differences between the major powers remain - particularly their resistance to the US, the one super-power among them. Britain, despite appearing to be the US’s poodle, is no exception.

The massive riposte planned by the US following the terrorist outrages is precisely aimed.  Its target is not just Osama bin Laden’s network, an even feebler foe than Iraq was in 1991, but at the pretensions of other capitalist states, in particular the other major powers, that, since 1989, have begun to oppose and resist US world hegemony.

Britain, like France and Germany, in various parts of the world, but particularly the Balkans, have been trying to defend their own imperialist interests now that the threat of the Soviet Union no longer forces them to cower behind the United States. The planned European army, first proposed by Whitehall, is a barely disguised threat to the hegemony of US-led NATO in Europe. According to Henry Kissinger’s recent book, Does America need a foreign policy?, the most troubling threats to US dominance in the world are precisely ‘European developments’.(1) Conversely, Britain  has much to lose in terms of world stature by an overwhelming display of US military force in the Middle East.

Why Britain proclaims its loyalty

American imperialism is well aware of what British imperialism is up to. “Tony Blair was not the first European leader to visit President Bush. But he was the most fervent in expressing unreserved support and in trying to rally round the other Europeans. In this he is simply following half a century of tradition. Virtually every British prime minister since Churchill has leapt at an opportunity of reviving his partnership with the president of the United States. It plays well electorally and gives a sense of world leadership.” (International Herald Tribune, 26.09.01.)

The British bourgeoisie is hoping, by running alongside the American military juggernaut, to limit the scope of the latter’s impact on its own imperialist prestige and grab for itself more of the kudos out of the coming carnage than rivals like France and Germany. That’s why, shortly after his Washington visit, Blair informed a meeting of Labour MPs that the object of British foreign policy was to ‘restrain’ America. Much of the British bourgeois media has echoed this theme.

The reason that the ruling class in Britain sustains the illusion of a ‘special relationship’ between the UK and US is to disguise the existence of imperialist and nationalist divisions and use internationally-shared ‘democratic values’ to try and mobilise the population for the sacrifices to come .

But Britain’s characteristically perfidious strategy on the world arena is fraught with danger.

Despite Britain’s diplomatic experience on the world scale as a former ‘superpower’, especially in the middle East, it will be destined for disappointment if it hopes to cash in without the underlying military force.

Foreign secretary Jack Straw has made the first high level British diplomatic visit to Iran since 1979, ostensibly to galvanise support for action against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. He met with Yasser Arafat for the same purpose. But his trip was also a pitch to be, in the words of the 1997 October Labour Party conference, the ‘best’, if not the ‘biggest’ imperialist power. But, if you are going to ‘punch above your weight’, be prepared for a black eye. Straw’s visit turned into a fiasco as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon initially cancelled a meeting with him because of his “anger, outrage and disappointment” at an article written by Straw for an Iranian newspaper which was taken as support for the Palestinian cause. Bush, speaking from the position of US strength, subsequently told the world that a Palestinian state was always part of the US “vision”, hitting back at Sharon when he compared US behaviour to 1930s appeasement of Nazi Germany.

British imperialism will receive more diplomatic humiliations as a result of the gap between its pretensions and its relative military impotence on the world arena.

The British military has sent an armada  to Oman of comparable size to that used in the Falklands War. It’s officially on an exercise, but conveniently placed to intervene in Afghanistan. But the British military is far from integrated into the strategic plans of the Pentagon, as the assistant US Defence Secretary made clear at the recent NATO summit. The ‘allies’ will be called upon only when summoned by the United States. Despite its relative importance in comparison with the military strength of other European powers, the British armed forces are destined to be proved puny in comparison with those of the United States in the coming offensive. Not that this will stop it contributing as much as it can to the escalation of military barbarism and the growing chaos of international relations.

If there is one level at which British imperialism is still the ‘envy of the world’ it is in its propaganda expertise. The British media, particularly its newspapers, were exemplary in adding to the terror of the attacks on the US by giving them every conceivable echo. This was not because of any real human sympathy, but to help reinforce the passivity, fear and perplexity of  the population. In the name of humanitarian outrage, it led the world in drawing phoney lessons to reinforce all capitalist states, insisting that the world is faced with two fundamental alternatives: not socialism or barbarism, but democracy or terrorism, good or evil, for which no sacrifice is too great.

The US tells it straight

While President Bush has welcomed British ‘loyalty’, he’s also made clear US determination to make the ‘crusade against terrorism’  a one horse race. You are either for America or against it. Despite the talk of a ‘coalition’ of states, this will not be like the allied coalition in the Gulf War. This time round the only role for other states will be to obey the diktats from Washington.

As the Washington Post (20/9/01) made clear ...

“If Washington broadens the focus beyond bin Laden and perhaps Afghanistan, it will lose the support it needs to carry out the surgical plan effectively. This is the message Mr Bush will hear from President Jacques Chirac of France, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, the Saudi foreign minister, Saud Faisal, and others this week��Listen to their concerns, Mr President, and be your affable, charming self. But leave your visitors in no doubt that America’s losses will be avenged and America’s vulnerabilities minimised � whether they ride in the posse or not”. Como 4/10/01

Note

(1) When Bush targets those who harbour terrorists as much as the terrorists themselves, he is letting the European powers understand that he is not just talking about ‘rogue’ states in the middle East.  The revelations of the ease with which anti-US terrorist networks operated in Britain and Germany, for example, show that the European powers are not the allies of the US they pretend to be.

In response to the horrible war crime of 11 September, new and equally horrible war crimes are now being committed by the USA, which has come under direct attack for the first time in nearly two hundred years. Even before the first assaults were launched on an already ruined Afghanistan, tens of thousands of Afghan refugees were being condemned to death by starvation and disease. The death list will increase dramatically now the military strikes have begun.

We are being told that the coming war will be a war for the defence of democracy and civilisation against a network of Islamic fanatics led by bin Laden. But bin Laden and his breed, by deliberately setting out to slaughter as many civilians as possible, are only following the fine example already set by capitalist civilisation, which rules the entire planet today. For this civilisation, this mode of production, which has been in deep decay since the First World War, has already given us the terror bombing of London (the Blitz), of Dresden and Hamburg, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of Vietnam and Cambodia; the majority of these slaughters were also carried out in the name of democracy and civilisation. In the last decade alone it has given us the massacres in Iraq and Kuwait, in Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro; in Algeria, Rwanda, the Congo, Chechnya and the Middle East. In every one of these horror-stories, it has above all been the civilian populations which have been held hostage, forced to flee, tortured, raped, bombed and herded into concentration camps. This is the civilisation we are being asked to defend - a civilisation which now lives in a state of permanent war, which is sinking deeper and deeper into its own decomposition, threatening the very survival of the human species.

The working class is the main victim of capitalist war

With the massacre of September 11 we have entered a new stage in global imperialist conflict, a stage in which war will become more permanent and more widespread than at any time since 1945. And as in all of capitalism’s wars, the working class and the poorest sections of society will be the main victims. In the Twin Towers, the majority of the dead were office workers, cleaners, firemen, in short, proletarians. In Afghanistan, it is the utterly dispossessed, press-ganged into the Taliban armies or fleeing for their lives from both the government and the US onslaught, who will pay the highest price.

And the working class is not only a victim in the flesh; it is also a victim in its consciousness. In the USA, the bourgeoisie is taking advantage of the legitimate outrage and disgust created by the terrorist attacks to stir up the worst forms of patriotic hysteria, to call for ‘national unity’, for solidarity between exploited and exploiters. Everywhere the Stars and Stripes is being used as a symbol of defiance against the bin Ladens of the world, tying the workers to the interests of the nation, and thus of the ruling class.

In Europe, we are being told that ‘we are all Americans now’, once again seeking to turn human sympathy for the dead into support for the new war drive. And if workers are not asked to take the side of civilisation against terrorism, they are asked to see bin Laden as a symbol of ‘resistance’ against oppression and to prepare for Holy War, as in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East, or among ‘Muslim’ populations in the central countries. In this version of the events, the ‘Americans got what they deserved’. This is yet another way of preventing workers from seeing their true class identity, which cuts across all national frontiers.

Throughout the world, the proletariat is being subjected to state terror in the name of the fight against terrorism. Not only the terror imposed by the climate of national chauvinism, but also by the very concrete measures of repression being set up throughout the world. The very real fear generated by the events in the USA provides the ruling class with the perfect climate to increase its whole system of police controls, identity checks, phone-tapping and other ‘security’ measures, a system that will in future be used not against terrorist suspects but against workers and revolutionaries fighting capitalism. The issue of identity cards in Britain and the USA is just the tip of this iceberg.

The answer to war is not pacifism but the class struggle

The ruling class knows that it needs the loyal support of the entire population, but above all of the working class, if it is to take its imperialist designs onto a new level. It knows that the only real obstacle to war is the working class, which produces the vast majority of social wealth,  which is the first to die in capitalism’s wars. And this is precisely why the workers must reject any identification with any national interest. To struggle against the march towards war, they must revive and develop the struggle for their own class interests. The struggle against redundancies being demanded not only as a result of the recession but also as a consequence of the terrorist attacks. The struggle against sacrifices at work, imposed to strengthen the ailing national economy or the war effort. The struggle against repression justified by the hunt for terrorists and subversives. It is this struggle alone which can enable the workers to understand the need for international class solidarity with all the victims of capitalist crisis and devastation; it is this struggle which alone can open up the perspective of a new society free from exploitation and war. 

The proletarian struggle has nothing in common with pacifism, as exemplified by the new Coalition to Stop the War that has been set up in Britain by CND, the Trotskyists and others. The pacifists make their appeal to the UN and to international law; the proletarian struggle can only expand if it breaks the barriers of the law. Already in the most ‘democratic’ countries, any effective forms of struggle (such as mass or secondary pickets, decision-making by general assemblies rather than union ballots, etc) have, with the assistance of the trade unions, become illegal. The outlawing of the class struggle will become even more explicit in a period dominated by war.

The pacifists also make their appeal to ‘all decent minded people’, to an alliance of all classes opposed to the positions of Blair and Bush. But this is yet another way of drowning the workers in the population at large, at precisely the time when the number one problem for the working class is to rediscover its distinct social - and political - identity.

 Above all, pacifism has never opposed the national interest, which in the epoch of imperialism can only be defended by the means of imperialism. This goes not only for the ‘respectable’ pacifists like Bruce Kent, but also for pacifism’s ‘radical’ wing, the leftists, who always seek to get the workers to ‘defend’ one nationalism or another. In the Gulf war, they defended Iraq; in the Balkans war they argued about whether to support Serbia or the Kosovo Liberation Army (and thus NATO); today they are scrabbling around to find some ‘anti-imperialist’ faction to support, if not bin Laden and the Taliban, then the ‘Palestinian Resistance’ whose ideas and methods are exactly the same.

 Far from opposing war, pacifism is a necessary adjunct to the military coalition of the bourgeoisie, a way of delaying and diverting an authentic class consciousness about the meaning of war in this society. Humanity is not faced with the alternatives of war and peace. It is faced with the alternatives of imperialist war and the class war, of barbarism and the communist revolution. This was the alternative announced by Lenin and Luxemburg in 1914, and answered by the strikes, mutinies and revolutions which brought an end to the first imperialist world war. After almost a hundred years of capitalist decadence and self-destruction, that alternative stands before us with even sharper clarity. 

WR, 8.10.01

The following text was written for a meeting of the No War But The Class War group in London on November 1st. The group has a continuity with groups under the same name formed during the Gulf war and the Kosovo war, but it has attracted new energies and, in our opinion, can serve as a focus for serious discussion about the meaning of the current war, and for proletarian intervention against it. The ICC’s contribution was thus put forward in a spirit of constructive criticism. On the whole the contribution was received in the same spirit: after it was presented, a number of comrades voiced unease at the lack of political discussion in recent meetings. It was decided that the next meeting would concentrate on a discussion about the effects of the war on the international working class - which for us is an absolutely key issue because an effective intervention in the real movement of the class can only be based on a lucid analysis of where that movement is to be found.

No War But The Class War meets every Thursday at 7.30, at the Sebbon Street Community Centre, Islington, London NI (behind Islington Town Hall)

As we did with its previous version, at the time of the Kosovo war, the ICC welcomes the reappearance of the ‘No War But The Class War’ group in response to the latest carnage. The leaflet that was distributed at the demonstration of 13 October essentially defended a proletarian position against the war and against pacifist illusions. We also think that the small section on the aims of the group is correct when it explains that the ideas in the leaflet are not the statement of a political programme, but “the basis of more discussion and action”.

The public meeting on 21 Oct was an excellent opportunity to discuss the significance of the September 11 attacks and the new Afghan war, which for us mark a very important step in capitalism’s ‘progress’ towards barbarism, and pose considerable difficulties for the working class and its struggle in all countries. We also welcome the fact that the meeting was open to the contribution of groups of the communist left.

The presentation at the public meeting raised many issues which needed a thorough discussion - particularly with regard to the current capacity of the working class to respond to the situation, the degree to which workers have been affected by the patriotic hysteria in the USA and the ‘Muslim’ frenzy in the east. In our view these difficulties were seriously underestimated in the presentation; but at any rate this was surely a matter for discussion. There is still a need to define what is meant by class opposition to war, and we are still convinced that this cannot be taken for granted. However, the impression we have got from the two meetings we have attended (it may have been different in the previous ones) is that within the group there is a strong resistance to really discussing the issues posed by the war, and a very strong leaning towards ‘activism’, ie the desire to ‘do things’ without really thinking them through. This could be seen in:

- the decision (which a lot of comrades seem to recognise was a mistake) to break up the public meeting into small groups around discussions on what to do, making it virtually impossible to have any coherent discussion about the presentation;

- the decision on Thursday to rush off to an army recruitment fair without any thought about the real aim of such an action, the security considerations in today’s heavy atmosphere of anti-terrorism, etc;

- the growing influence of what might be called the ‘anti-capitalist lobby’ within the group, who have not defined their politics but are extremely keen to get NWBTCW involved in forming an ‘anti-capitalist bloc’ within the next pacifist demo, or in music benefits with no indication about which political forces are benefiting; they have also proposed that NWBTCW should get on the podium at Trafalgar Square through some sort of deal with the Stop the War coalition.

As already mentioned, the ICC has more than once emphasised the need to discuss the most basic question posed by the war: what is meant by a class response to war in this period. To us it appears that this is almost taken for granted, but it would be extremely dangerous to do so. What happened in Brighton surely confirms this. As we understand it from the account by the comrade from Brighton, the NWBTCW group there was simply swamped by an arrival of elements from the Stop the War campaign; and even those who call themselves ‘autonomists’ and ‘communists’ simply went along with the idea of creating a broad front of all those ‘opposed’ to the war, which is precisely the approach of the SWP, CND, etc.

The SWP is also proclaiming that the best hope of opposing the war is to turn the ‘anti-capitalist’ movement into the anti-war movement, and to some extent this has been what has happened. Although in America some of the more openly bourgeois organisations like the greens and the AFL-CIO withdrew from the anti-war demonstrations after 11 September, the majority of the ‘anti-capitalist’, or more accurately, anti-globalisation groups have formed the basis for the pacifist pseudo-opposition typified by the Stop the War Coalition. In our opinion, we have to be very clear that just as the anti-globalisation jamboree is by no means a proletarian movement against capital, so the present ‘Stop the War movement’ has nothing to do with a working class, internationalist response to capitalist war.

We think that unless there is a real discussion in ‘NWBTCW’ about the nature both of the ‘anti-capitalist movement’ (which for us is to a large extent controlled by the bourgeoisie, even if there are undoubtedly some positive elements within or around it) and of the current ‘anti-war movement’, there is a danger that it could be dragged into functioning as a radical wing of pacifism.

There are times when decisive action is required and further discussion becomes a hindrance. But there are also times when the priority of the moment is to reflect, to understand, to analyse, to clarify. We are living through a descent into an era of unprecedented irrationality, where mythologies once thought forgotten have risen to the surface with swords in their hands. To resist these mythologies, and all the more familiar ones maintained by capitalism, we must not hesitate to defend the necessity for thought, debate, and theory.

We thus think the most important function for a ‘NWBTCW’ group is

- to act as a focus for all who want to understand how to fight the war on a proletarian terrain. It should be an open, non-membership circle of discussion, organised on a more or less local basis; there should be no distinction between internal and external meetings, unless specifically decided;

- to be a centre for activities and interventions which would as much as possible reflect the discussions within the circle. This may mean that some interventions would be done in the name of the circle as a whole, some by particular groupings within the circle.

Particular proposals

- publication of a bulletin with contributions from all the various groups, currents and individuals involved; perhaps the bulletin could be called Against Capitalist War (and perhaps the name of the bulletin could serve as the name of the group or network of groups). The first one could report on the story of the group so far and publish all the internationalist leaflets and statements which have circulated in and around the group;

- the eventual organisation of a national conference, where more time can be devoted both to political discussion and the coordination of activities;

- for Nov 18: we repeat our proposal for an autonomous meeting at Trafalgar Square. The only real moment that an alternative to the pacifists, leftists and nationalists can be posed is at the end of the demo; that’s the most favourable time for polarising questioning and dissatisfaction with the official opposition. At one level or another, this means not ‘joining’ the official platform but confronting it, although we mean confronting it politically, not provoking a punch up. Whether or not people are ‘in’ the march, our energies would be best employed in preparing to make a stand at this point in the demonstration. And we should discuss both the dangers and the advantages of such a course of action.

WR, November 2001

In the name of ‘fighting terrorism’, a deluge of bombs is raining on the impoverished population of Afghanistan. Tens of thousands of men, women and children are fleeing the horror, but what awaits them at the end of their flight is more horror: a beast-like existence in refugee camps, a slow death from hunger, cold and disease as winter sets in.

Once again we are witnessing the true face of the ‘humanitarian’ actions undertaken by the great powers. The barbarism they have unleashed will certainly outstrip the barbarism of bin Laden and his network of petty imperialist gangsters.

We have been told over and over again by the ‘civilised democracies’ of the USA and Britain that they are only targeting the terrorists, that they are doing all they can to minimise civilian casualties. This lie is already wearing thin: ‘accidental’ or not, the number of ‘smart’ bombs that have destroyed homes, schools or hospitals is mounting daily. As for the gesture of ‘humanitarian aid packages’ being dropped from the skies, this is just a sick joke when everyone knows that the bombing is not only creating a growing exodus of desperate people, but is also obstructing the transport of food and supplies to the hungry. And let’s not forget the mass of conscripts press-ganged into the Taliban army. Here there isn’t even any pretence: they are being ‘carpet bombed’ without mercy. And this also is a form of mass murder.

As for the ‘war aims’ of the ‘anti-terrorist coalition’, what are we to make of the announcement that it may after all be impossible to catch bin Laden, or that the ‘war against terrorism’ may last 4, 10, even 50 years? Is it that the great powers, and the US in particular, don’t know what they are doing � or is it that they are using the September 11 massacre as a mere pretext to pursue military and strategic aims that correspond to their own imperialist interests? Since an imperialist power can only act to defend its imperialist interests, we know what our answer is! (see the article on the back page for more analysis of the real agenda behind this war).

Meanwhile, back home, the fear of terrorist attack is being kept alive by the massive campaign about bio-terrorism and the anthrax alert. Whoever is actually addressing the envelopes of white powder, they are certainly a gift to the ruling class. Those who have died from anthrax infection have all been workers: what better way of proving that the working class has no choice but to rely on the state for protection against the sinister terrorists, and to rally behind the ‘just’ war against terrorism.

Workers: this is not our war!

‘Those who are not with us are against us’: this is how Bush demanded that all the USA’s imperialist rivals have to line up behind the world cop in its latest military adventure, its latest attempt to ensure it remains the world’s only superpower. But the same false choice is offered to the workers, to the exploited and the oppressed of the world. We must either support the ‘war against terrorism’ or line up behind bin Laden and the Taliban. Or we must support bin Laden and the Taliban because they are fighting the ‘Great Satan’, the US and its allies.

No! Bush, Blair, bin Laden all belong to the same class of gangsters. The capitalist class which exploits us, which profits from our labour power, and which throws us onto the dole, is the same class which regularly massacres us in its sordid imperialist squabbles. Useless to choose between individual leaders or states, because they can only embody the needs of this rotting social system.

Workers: we cannot afford any illusions. Capitalism is faced with an insurmountable economic crisis and war has been its method of survival for about a 100 years. After the two world wars and the ‘cold war’, the ‘new world order’ of peace and prosperity promised by Bush Senior has been a dark decade of war � in the Gulf, in the Balkans, in Africa, in the ex-USSR ... and in Afghanistan, which has not seen a day of peace for over 20 years. The fact that the ruling class is now telling us that the ‘war on terror’ will run and run is already an admission that we have nothing to look forward to but an endless spiral of wars and devastation. Peace is impossible as long as capitalism lasts.

The only alternative, the only perspective for the human race, is the destruction of this system before it destroys the planet bit by bit. And only the exploited class, the proletariat, the first victim of capitalist war, can make this perspective a reality. This above all is why workers must refuse to make any common cause with their exploiters; this is why they must refuse to be paralysed by the atmosphere of fear and terror which the ruling class is trying to perpetuate; this is why they must stick to their own class interests and fight against the degradation of their living and working conditions.

No to ‘sacrifices’ in the name of the national interest or the war!

No to collaboration with the capitalist state in the name of ‘fighting terrorism’!

No to support for the Taliban or bin Laden in the name of Islam or ‘anti-imperialism’!

Against the imperialist war of the exploiters, for the class war of the international proletariat!

Every day there’s another voice added to the chorus of criticisms of the bombing of Afghanistan. Not only is there CND, the Stop The War coalition, various MPs and left-wingers, but also major newspapers. “THIS WAR IS A FRAUD” read the front page of the Mirror (29/10/1). The Guardian has queried the objectives of military action, asked what the bombing has achieved so far, and if food deliveries can be increased, maybe with a pause in the bombing. There is opposition to the use of cluster bombs, calls for a greater role for the UN and concern for ‘innocent victims’ and ‘non-military targets’ such as hospitals, old peoples’ homes, Red Cross warehouses and UN facilities.

Many individuals want to do something against the war on Afghanistan, against the spread of the ‘war against terrorism’ - even if it’s not yet clear to them what would actually be effective against the insatiable appetites of the militarists.

But it would be wrong to have any illusions in any MP, editorial writer or those who dominate the ‘anti-war’ movement and insist on their ‘humanitarianism’ or ‘socialism’ when they add their few words of reservation on British foreign policy, as they are all just outpourings from a class of warmongers.

‘Criticisms’ of war that suit the ruling class

It is, for example, taken for granted by ‘critical’ MPs (and others) that the UN should take a significant role in the ‘war against terrorism’. It is also an assumption of US policy that any eventual post-war (post-Taliban?) regime in Afghanistan will be enforced by the UN, rather than having blatant US puppets in power. The UN will continue to be a tool of the major imperialisms, as it has been ever since its foundation.

Labour ‘critics’ say they’re worried about ‘innocent victims’, pretending to be shocked at discovering the capitalist war machine functions with indiscriminate brutality - as well as justifying the murder of anyone they deem ‘guilty’. All the fuss about ‘cluster bombs’ rather implies that death by other means would somehow be preferable. Paul Foot (Guardian 30/10/1) refers, in passing, to “daily military blunders in Afghanistan” - but fewer ‘blunders’ can only mean greater ‘efficiency’ in the process of destruction.

Foot was defending MP Paul Marsden from accusations of being like those who ‘appeased’ Hitler in the 1930s. They were both upset that anyone could suggest there was anything suspect in their anti-fascist credentials. Anti-fascism was one of the main ideologies used by the ruling class in Britain to mobilise the population to die in the service of British imperialism in the Second World War - a ‘just’ war in Foot’s view.

Marsden himself, in his own report of the interview with Hilary Armstrong, showed no reluctance in supporting the war: “the UN should take charge of the military action, not the US. It would be much more effective. By all means send in the SAS, but lets get the UN onside first”. His difference with the Labour leadership is only a matter of emphasis, a quibble over tactics.

There are other MPs who say they are concerned that US action is gradually spreading beyond the initial focus on bin Laden. This is hardly controversial within the British ruling class as Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, for example, has just been in Washington saying exactly that. One of the reasons that Britain has been running with the US is to try and influence the extent of US imperialism’s campaign - in the interests of British imperialism of course.

Whenever you scratch the noted ‘critics’ of the government you find a warmonger. In 1991 George Galloway got a lot of publicity for his thoughts on Iraq. This time round he has suggested that “if military action was seen as unavoidable, the target should have been the Arab legions in the mountains” (Guardian 20/10/1). On a historical note Galloway identifies with Aneurin Bevan and his criticisms of government policy during the Second World War. Bevan, like his latter-day followers, had no quarrel with British imperialism’s war aims, just the means to achieve them.

Meanwhile, the Mirror (29/10/1), answered the stock ‘what’s the alternative to bombing?’ question, with the example of Northern Ireland, and how brilliant it was that Britain “did not react by sending fighter jets to Belfast”. Their praise for British strategy, the use of MI5, MI6, the SAS and other regiments will not impress those who have lived in Northern Ireland during the last 30 years and witnessed the extensive militarisation of society. Paul Foot as well, “can suggest to Bush, Blair and the rest of them a whole series of policies” (Socialist Review November 2001). There’s this alternative for British imperialism to consider, for example: “Should not the entire diplomatic and political efforts of our government be directed instead to solving the crisis in the Middle East?” (Mirror 18/10/1)

Against all the lies which make out that somehow US militarism is an exception to the pattern of imperialist strategies, that capitalism can exist without war, that wars can take place without casualties, communists defend one essential truth. Only the international revolution of the working class is capable of destroying the economic system that gives rise to wars, and creating a society based on relations of solidarity, a human community. Bev 1/11/1

Imperialist war always puts revolutionaries to the test. Against the propaganda of the ruling class, which aims to win over the working class, or at least to silence it, the first duty of a revolutionary organisation is to denounce the war: to say as loudly and as clearly as it can that imperialist war is never in the interests of the working class.

Revolutionaries oppose the war

All of the groups of the proletarian political milieu in Britain have taken a class stand against the war in Afghanistan.

The proletarian political milieu is composed of those organisations that are part of the communist left, that is of those groups who trace their origins to the minorities that opposed the degeneration of the revolution in Russia, defended class positions against the rise of Stalinism and fascism and denounced the Second World War as being every bit as imperialist as the first. In Britain there are three organisations of the proletarian milieu: the Communist Workers Organisation1 (CWO), which is part of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP); the International Communist Party that publishes Communist Left2; and the International Communist Current, whose section in Britain is World Revolution. Following the barbaric acts of September 11, all of these organisations published leaflets and/or statements on the web denouncing the attacks and opposing the imperialist war that was immediately promised. They have all called on the working class to oppose the massacres of their fellow workers and other oppressed strata, and to join the class war against capitalism.

Immediately after the attack on the World Trade Centre, the ICC issued a statement for the web which was also distributed as a leaflet at meetings, paper sales and elsewhere (‘Bush, Blair and Bin Laden are all terrorist gangsters’). Once the USA launched its first air strikes on Afghanistan, we put out an international leaflet (‘Only one answer to imperialist war � the international class struggle’) which was distributed in more countries and in bigger numbers � at demonstrations and workplaces as well as smaller meetings and street sales. Both texts are available from our address.

The IBRP’s initial statement was entitled ‘USA Coalition Declares War on the World’. It is direct and unequivocal in its denunciation of the war and in its recognition that capitalism is the real cause:

“The devastating suicide attacks on key symbols of US capitalism’s financial and military might may have shaken the complacency of the most powerful state in the world but in no sense is it a victory for the exploited working class. Not only are ordinary wage workers amongst the thousands killed, but the assaults are being used to legitimise heightened state repression. The ‘war against terrorism’ will be used within the metropolitan countries as a weapon against internal oppositions and particularly against the working class, and any emerging proletarian political organisations. In that sense, organised state terror has already preceded September 11th’s events, with its police attacks on anti-globalisation protesters. However, the events of September 11th have increased the prospect of humanity being thrown back into barbarism.

This is not a rhetorical flourish or a question of mysterious ‘forces of evil’ leading the planet to Armageddon. On the contrary, it is the concrete calculated policies stemming from the rivalry between the very material interests of the capitalist powers which makes the 21st century just as dangerous and warlike as the last”.

There is nothing here of the hypocrisy of the ‘left’ and the ‘peace’ movement who say ‘yes, the attacks were terrible, but�the US had it coming to it’ and so excuse the slaughter of innocent people in America. The attacks and the US response are acts of barbarism; their cause is not simply US imperialism � as if no other country were imperialist - but capitalism itself. To say that the US is to blame is to let capitalism off the hook. Those who say such things become accomplices of imperialist war.

At the ‘peace’ demonstration of October 13, where the ICC distributed its international leaflet, the CWO comrades gave out their broadsheet Aurora which also made a clear distinction between class struggle against war and “the saccharine sweet sirens of pacifism�”, which calls for “prayer, candlelit vigils, e-mailing George Bush or Tony Blair or writing to the local MP”. Against these false solutions Aurora calls for the defence of workers’ living standards by struggling outside and against the unions, for the paralysis of capitalism’s economic and military apparatus, for reviving the perspective of the revolutionary overthrow of world capitalism. Or, again, from the IBRP statement: “Only the international working class, once aware of its own interests, is capable of changing the world. We have no interest in supporting either side in this ‘new war’ � if the ruling class has its way our only role will be as victims and cannon-fodder. All the bourgeois factions whether US-led, national liberationist or Islamist are equally against the working class. Only by paralysing these forces and politically defeating all the irrational ruling class ideologies will we be able to create a world without war, exploitation and terror. Socialism or Barbarism. There is no third road.” .

The ICP are equally clear in their denunciation of the way the ruling class has cynically used the attacks to try and get the working class to support war:

“Following the terrifying massacres in the United States, the regime’s spokesmen, both Right and Left, are loudly proclaiming that the war which is about to happen, or rather which has already begun, is between the North and South, between us � the rich, and them � the poor. A war to protect our civilisation, capital’s civilisation. [�]

“Whoever hijacked the Boeings it was certainly the right moment in terms of propping up capitalism, just as the choice of targets � a military building and buildings full of workers � will make it easier to weld together the opposed classes of American society. Bearded priests are playing their part in tricking the disinherited masses of the poor countries by channelling their class rebellion into nationalism and religious fanaticism.

“But the working class in the North of the World has nothing to gain from supporting this war either. Rather than safeguarding its miserable, non-existent privileges as citizens of the rich West, all it can really expect from the war is death and increasing poverty; as they should already know from the experience of two terrible world wars and two no less terrible post-war periods” (‘The capitalist regime uses Terrorism and Anti-terrorism to force the proletariat into the Imperialist War’).

Like the IBRP, the ICP is clear that war is an inevitable consequence of capitalism and that the only way to oppose imperialist war is to wage the class war: “Workers have to oppose this war, but neither cursing it nor relying on the pressure of public opinion is enough; what is needed is to oppose bourgeois power with the power of a mobilised working class”.

*************************************

In a second article we will look at the analyses the proletarian organisations make of the motives behind this war and the perspectives it opens up. Here we will find, alongside points of convergence, a number of disagreements. But these differences, significant though they are, do not diminish the importance of the fundamental class positions examined above. These positions are the product of many decades of political struggle and they are essentially what marks revolutionaries off from the world of bourgeois politics. They form the basis of proletarian solidarity against the derision, lies and outright repression which the bourgeoisie has above all aimed at communists in times of war. It is from this starting point alone that we can embark upon a fraternal debate about the areas that separate us. North

1 PO Box 338, Sheffield, S3 9YX. https://www.ibrp.org [67].

2 PO Box 52, Liverpool, L69 7AL.

The Taliban regime has been toppled. The followers of Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden have been driven from power in most of Afghanistan. We were told that the battle between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban would be long and hard, in particular for Kabul. But the Taliban have retreated without a real confrontation, crushed under American bombing, and are now under threat in their last stronghold in the region of Kandahar.

Faced with the apparently unexpected rapidity of events, the foreign ministers of the member countries of the UN met urgently in New York on the 12 November to call for the slowing down of military action and the acceleration of political action. Conversely America increased its pressure for the speeding up of the military offensive. Instead of trumpeting their satisfaction at the defeat of one the principle centres of ‘international terrorism’, and faced with a situation of growing anarchy, the imperialist powers in the security council of the UN made a worried appeal to the Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban forces to “keep to their responsibilities concerning human rights” and to exercise power while “respecting people and assuring social peace”. We can only underline the sickening hypocrisy of these criminals giving lessons to the little gangsters and cliques that they supported for their own interests, when the great powers are the principle warmongers and their rivalries are directly responsible for the biggest massacres in history.

What the dramatic situation in Afghanistan shows once more is the free for all among the great powers. No consensus exists between them to eradicate international Islamic terrorism, which in any case is not the real game; nor are they interested in ‘humanitarianism’, which is only a pretext to settle their scores by bleeding populations white.

The pressure of American policy

The attack on the Twin Towers was the dreamt-for pretext for the US to apply a military policy already defined this summer by the secretary of defence Donald Rumsfield, i.e. pursuing its strategic priorities in Asia instead of Europe and the Mediterranean basin. In order to clearly affirm its authority in this part of the world, the United States has decided to crush the Taliban in Afghanistan by itself, with its own methods, only leaving a miniscule role to its best ally Britain, and excluding a country like France, which has been itching to take America’s hand in order to play its own pawns. Since September 11 Bush has constantly repeated that this war is going to be long, and that it’s not only against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The entire world is to become an ‘anti-terrorist’ hunting ground: “We have had a good beginning in Afghanistan, but much remains to be done (�) we will pursue them to the end” he declared a week after the taking of Kabul. Shortly after that he began growling menacingly towards Iraq, which many see as the next target, although a number of other candidates have been floated (Yemen, Somalia, etc).

The United States can boast today that it has won certain advantages. With the rapid victory of the ‘anti-Talibans’, it has for example silenced those European powers, headed by France, who criticised the validity of bombing and thus the whole of American strategy. By the same token it has gained a certain success with its own ‘public opinion’ by defeating the Taliban enemy with a policy of ‘zero deaths’. This has allowed Washington to better justify the dispatch of 3200 marines in addition to 500 special forces already on the spot, as well as a highly sophisticated and destructive military armada.

The imperialist free for all

However, everything is far from being a walkover for the White House. Contrary to the Gulf War where the US imposed its law on Saudi Arabia and brought to heel the western powers hostile to its intervention, the United States has clearly decided to act for itself. Looking at the different demonstrations of US force since the Gulf War, whether the spectacular defeat in Somalia in 1992, the attempt to bring American order to ex-Yugoslavia, or the massive war against Serbia in 1999 in the name of defending Kosovans, the US has been systematically opposed by their old allies of the western bloc. In such a context, in the breakthrough they have made in Afghanistan, the US policy is to ride alone. In order to block the pressure of its ‘allies’, the American government is presently supporting the Northern Alliance, until now supported more by Russia. At the same time Washington has deliberately not armed the more important but less dependable Pashtun factions closer to Pakistan.

Thus when Bush officially told the Northern Alliance on the 10 November not to enter Kabul, defence secretary Rumsfield at the same time told it to do as it wished, but “without committing exactions”. Faced with its rivals America throws oil on the fire of a chaotic situation.

The most eager bourgeoisie of all, the French, already eclipsed by the vote on the first resolution of the UN, has been able to justify its presence in Uzbekistan in the name of humanitarianism. It’s thus no accident that Paris has developed a whole press campaign on the danger of a relapse to the kind of anarchy we saw between 1992 and 1996, given the return to power of the Afghan warlords. Hubert Vedrine, French foreign minister, unblushingly addressed a threat to “those who are going to exercise power in Afghanistan”; henceforth they would be “under the vigilant gaze of the international community”. The French media, like the media in most of the western countries, who yesterday couldn’t find words bad enough to denounce the Taliban, has suddenly discovered their virtues since they at least established a state and a stable social situation. Another example of the vileness of the bourgeois class, whose truths vary according to its immediate interests.

The French army, presently isolated, rejected by the American pack leader, is thus impotent, back to square one, at the Uzbekistan border, whose head of state, supported by the United States, is dragging things out while waiting to draw profit from his part of the Afghan cake.

The consensus between the great powers is so uncertain that Great Britain itself, despite being in the first rank since the first day of the conflict, has decided “not to put its forces in place without the agreement of the United States and a clear understanding of what our troops will do in the framework of the military coalition”, and has stood down thousands of troops who were expected to be deployed. In fact, the British bourgeoisie, despite Blair’s declarations of allegiance, has been excluded by Bush from all the decisions taken about Afghanistan for the past two months (see the accompanying article in this issue).

The disappointment of France and Great Britain indicates the policy of the United States in this conflict: to elicit the ‘solidarity’ of its old cold war allies toward its own strategic vision, but to deprive them of any benefit that they might expect from this solidarity. Obviously the European powers who announced their support for operation ‘Enduring Freedom’ weren’t doing it to win Bush’s smile but because it was the only means of being there when the spoils were shared out. The little part of the cake that Blair or Chirac were hoping for was to deploy their troops on the spot. This would prevent the American godfather from enjoying the monopoly of military presence in this part of the world, which in turn would leave its hands entirely free to pursue its own exclusive interests. But Bush has apparently decided not to even grant them these crumbs. The only solidarity that the American gangster appreciates from his second strings is obedience.

Capitalism’s only perspective is chaos

The Bonn conference which began on 26 November between Europe and the different Afghan factions has the avowed aim of establishing a “multi-ethnic regime representing the diversity of the country”. In reality it is only an episode in the free for all now reigning in Afghanistan. But this conference is above all part of the wider free for all amongst the great powers who pretend to have a political solution for Afghanistan.

It is also significant that this conference is being held in Germany and not in Great Britain or in France who have been until now the most active in the military operation (even if modestly). By giving Germany the diplomatic prestige of organising this conference, the biggest power is trying to play its allies off against each other.

Not only is the Afghan powder-keg becoming one of the new zones of confrontation between the great powers, a major stake of the imperialist balance of forces in the period to come; it is also extending capitalist chaos further to the east. Afghanistan has always represented a key region between the Middle and Far East, and between three large countries, Russia, China and India, a region which has always been a stake between the eastern and western blocs during the cold war. Today the conflicts within Afghanistan are much more likely to spread to the neighbouring region. Thus the countries to the north, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, are trying to play off Russia and the United States. Pakistan’s rival factions, already wound up in the preceding period of American intervention, are going to tear into each other more than ever, while the loss of Islamabad’s Taliban ally will make it all the more vulnerable at the geo-strategic level. Meanwhile India is being caught between the pressure of the US and China, which has generously supplied its atomic capability to India’s arch-rival, Pakistan. The imperialist pretensions of India are thus pushing it to oppose the military presence of the US in a region where it wants to be one of the preponderant powers.

The future announced by the circling of all these vultures is sombre indeed. Once again they are going to sow death and chaos in the name of peace, humanity, and civilisation �in reality for the needs of a dying social system.

KW, 24 /11/01.

With the ‘liberation’ of Kabul, Kunduz and other Afghan cities, the ruling class is trying to paint the war in new colours. We are now being told that, thanks to American bombs, we can celebrate the fall of the Taliban regime and the arrival of Northern Alliance troops in these cities. The systematic bombing of Afghanistan is supposed to be a small price compared to the benefits obtained: women can throw off the burka (although very few have actually done so) and men can cut their beards and go to the pictures. This is the compensation the population is offered for the hundreds, perhaps thousands of ‘collateral’ deaths, the destruction of homes and of the already collapsing infrastructure, the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands who still face a winter of misery and starvation not to mention the political oppression that will undoubtedly be imposed upon them by the new gang that has taken over.

The Northern Alliance is the same clique which plunged the country into chaos after the defeat of the USSR. Its rule of rape and pillage resulted in many welcoming the Taliban as a better alternative. And already it has shown its real nature very clearly: pogroms against ‘foreign’ Taliban, the massacre of 500 prisoners after the so-called revolt at Marzer e-Sharif (aided and abetted by US air attacks), the execution of 150 prisoners at Takteh Pol, near Kandahar for ‘refusing to surrender’.

And yet we are being sold the line that the Taliban (supported by the US when it first came to power) was, along with bin Laden’s al-Qaida group, the real cause of the suffering of the Afghanistan population, the real cause of the present war - and that now at last the country can look forward to peace and reconstruction.

Lies! In Afghanistan, as in the Middle East, in Kosovo, in all the other so-called ‘humanitarian wars’, the civil population has simply been held hostage by the imperialist rivalries between different bourgeois states and gangs. The barbarism of war isn’t caused by a particular faction of world capital, but by world capital as a whole.

The defeat of the Taliban will bring no prospect of peace either in the short or the long term. On the contrary, ethnic conflicts are going to sharpen, further destabilising both Afghanistan and the region around it. The real perspective is one of growing chaos, whatever the ‘solutions’ cooked up by the UN or by the various imperialist powers, local or global. All of them, including the USA’s most ‘loyal’ ally, Britain, are trying to get a foothold in the country under the guise of ‘peacekeeping’ or ‘humanitarian aid’, and so prevent the US from achieving total and undisputed control of this key strategic region at the crossroads of Asia and the Middle East. The end of the present phase of the conflict will only whet the appetites of the competing imperialist sharks and thus prepare the ground for further competition and conflict.

War in the name of peace

War in the name of peace - it’s nothing new. The ruling class has been singing the same refrain since the beginning of the 20th century. The first world war was the ‘war to end war’. Balance sheet: 20 million dead. The second world war was fought in the name of democracy against fascism, civilisation against barbarism. Balance sheet: 60 million dead. Today, in the name of another noble cause, the ‘fight against terrorism’, capitalist civilisation has carried out new massacres that in turn will provoke even bigger massacres in the future, not only in Afghanistan, but throughout the entire region. Already the US is looking for the next target on its ‘anti-terrorist’ hit list, the current favourite being Iraq.

Peace is impossible in decadent capitalism. War has become the way of life of this doomed and dying system. Since the first world war, capitalism has demonstrated over and over again that it has exhausted all possibilities for peaceful expansion. At that point it entered into a permanent crisis of overproduction, and so into a state of permanent self-cannibalisation, acted out through the endless military rivalries of the various nation states, large or small. The more capitalism sinks into its economic contradictions, the more it rots on its feet, the more wars will multiply, revealing the utter bankruptcy of a system which has nothing further to offer humanity.

The only way to put an end to this hellish spiral is to put an end to capitalism before it destroys the planet. And this can only happen if the working class develops its struggles against the effects of the economic crisis, against poverty and unemployment, against the intensification of exploitation; if it comes to understand the intimate connection between war and the crisis of capitalism; if it reaffirms its own historic perspective, its political programme: the replacement of capitalism with a society without classes, frontiers and nations, a society based on the satisfaction of human needs and not on exploitation, competition, and the hunt for profit. Only in such a society can there be real and lasting peace on Earth. WR 1/12/01

From the very first moments, American bourgeois propaganda has likened the 11 September attack on the World Trade Center to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 7 December 1941. This comparison is laden with considerable psychological, historical and political impact, since it was Pearl Harbor that marked American imperialism’s direct entry into the Second World War. Like all bourgeois ideological myths, whatever the elements of truth that offer superficial credibility, this propaganda barrage is laced with half-truths, lies, and self-serving distortion. But this is no surprise. The politics of the bourgeoisie as a class are based on lies, deception, manipulation, and maneuver. This is particularly true when it comes to the difficult task of mobilizing society for all out war in modern times. There is considerable evidence that the bourgeoisie was not taken by surprise by the attacks in either case, that the bourgeoisie cynically welcomed the massive death toll in both cases for the purposes of political expediency in regard to implementation of its imperialist war aims, and other long range political objectives.

The machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie

All too often, when the ICC denounces the machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie, our critics accuse of us of lapsing into a conspiratorial view of history. However their incomprehension in this regard is not just a misunderstanding of our analysis, but � even worse � falls prey to the ideological claptrap of bourgeois apologists in the media and academia whose job it is to denigrate as irrational conspiracy theorists those who try to ascertain the patterns and processes within bourgeois political, economic and social life. However, it is not even controversial to assert that lies, terror, coercion, double-dealing, corruption, plots and political assassination have been the stock in trade of exploitative ruling classes throughout history, whether in the ancient world, feudalism or modern capitalism. Lying and manipulation, a mechanism employed by all preceding exploiting classes, have become central characteristics of the political mode of functioning of the modern bourgeoisie, which, utilizing the tremendous tools of social control available to it under the conditions of state capitalism, has taken machiavellianism to a qualitatively higher stage.

This is not to say all events in contemporary society are necessarily predetermined by the secret scheming of a small circle of capitalist leaders. But even with an incomplete consciousness, the bourgeoisie is more than capable of formulating strategy and tactics, and using the totalitarian control mechanisms of state capitalism to implement them. To turn a blind eye to this aspect of the ruling class offensive to control society is irresponsible and plays into the hands of our class enemies.

Machiavellianism of the American ruling class at Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor offers an excellent example of bourgeois machiavellianism at work. We have the benefit of more than half of century of historical research, and a number of military and opposition party-controlled investigations to draw on. According to President Roosevelt, 7 December 1941 was “a day that will live in infamy,” an example of Japanese treachery. It was used as a means to mobilize public opinion for war in 1941, and is still portrayed in the same way in the capitalist media, schoolbooks and popular culture. Nevertheless, considerable historical evidence demonstrates that the Japanese attack was consciously provoked by American policy. The attack did not come as a surprise, and the Roosevelt administration made a conscious decision to permit the attack both to occur and to sustain significant losses of life and naval hardware, as a pretext to secure America’s entry into the Second World War. A number of books and considerable material on the Internet have been published on this history. Here we will only review the highlights just to illustrate the operational aspects of bourgeois machiavellianism.

In 1941, the Roosevelt administration was anxious to enter the war against Germany. However, despite the fact that the American working class was firmly trapped in the grip of a trade union apparatus (in which the Stalinist party played a significant role) that had been imposed under state authority to control the class struggle in all key industries; and despite the fact that the working class was imbued with the ideology of anti-fascism, the American bourgeoisie still faced strong opposition to war within the population, not only within the working class, but even within the bourgeoisie itself. Public opinion polls showed 60% opposed to entering the war before Pearl Harbor, and the America First campaign and other isolationist groups had considerable support within the bourgeoisie. The decision to impose an oil embargo against Japan and the transfer of the Pacific fleet from the West Coast of the US to a more exposed position in Hawaii served to provide motive and opportunity for Japan to fire the first shots against the US, and thereby provide the pretext for direct American intervention in the imperialist war. As presidential advisor Harold Ickes put it in a June 1941 memo, “There might develop from the embargoing of oil to Japan such a situation as would make it not only possible but easy to get into this war in an effective way.” In November 1941, Secretary of War Stimson wrote about the plan to “maneuver them (Japan) into the position of firing the first shot without too much danger to ourselves.”

The report of the Army Pearl Harbor Board (October 20, 1944) described this conscious decision to sacrifice lives and equipment at Pearl Harbor, concluding that during “the fateful period between November 27 and December 6, 1941 numerous pieces of information came to our State, War and Navy Departments in all of their top ranks indicating precisely the intentions of the Japanese including the probable exact hour and date of the attack.” This information included:

� US intelligence sources learned on November 24th that “Japanese offensive military operations” had been set.

� On November 26, “specific evidence of the Japanese intentions to wage offensive war against Great Britain and the United States” were obtained by US intelligence.

� “A concentration of units of the Japanese fleet at an unknown port ready for offensive action” was also reported on November 26.

� On December 1, “definite information came from three independent sources that Japan was going to attack Great Britain and the United States, but would maintain peace with Russia.”

� On December 3, “the culmination of this complete revelation of the Japanese intentions as to war and the attack came� with information that Japanese were destroying their codes and code machines. This was construed�as meaning immediate war.”

This intelligence information was given to the highest-ranking officials in the War and State Departments, and shared with the White House, where Roosevelt personally received twice-daily briefings on intercepted Japanese messages. Despite the desperate urgings of intelligence officers to send a “war warning” to military commanders in Hawaii to prepare for imminent attack, the civilian and military brass decided against doing so, and instead sent what the board termed “an innocuous” message.

This evidence of prior knowledge of the Japanese attack was confirmed in numerous sources, including journalists and memoirs of participants. For example, a United Press dispatch published in the New York Times on December 8, included the following under the subhead ‘Attack Was Expected’:

“It now is possible to reveal that the United States forces here had known for a week that the attack was coming and they were not caught unprepared.”

In a 1944 interview, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, revealed that “December 7 was far from the shock it proved to be to the country in general. We had expected something of the sort for a long time.” On June 20 1944, British Cabinet Minister Sir Oliver Lyttelton told the American Chamber of Commerce, “Japan was provoked into attacking the Americans at Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty on history ever to say that America was forced into the war. Everyone knows where American sympathies were. It is incorrect to say that America was ever truly neutral even before America came into the war on a fighting basis.” Winston Churchill confirmed the duplicity of the American government rulers in the Pearl Harbor attack in this passage from his Grand Alliance:

“The President and his trusted friends had long realized the grave risks of United States neutrality in the war against Hitler and what he stood for, and had writhed under the restraints of a Congress whose House of Representatives had a few months before passed by only a single vote the necessary renewal of compulsory military service, without which their Army would have been almost disbanded in the midst of the world convulsion. Roosevelt, Hull, Stimson, Knox, General Marshall, Admiral Stark, and, as a link between them all, Harry Hopkins, had but one mind... A Japanese attack upon the United States was a vast simplification of their problems and their duty. How can we wonder that they regarded the actual form of the attack, or even its scale, as incomparably less important than the fact that the whole American nation would be united for its own safety in a righteous cause as never before?”

Roosevelt may not have anticipated the extent of the damage and casualties that the Japanese would inflict at Pearl Harbor, but he was clearly prepared to sacrifice American ships and lives, in order to arouse the population to rage, and to war.

In the second part of this article we will examine evidence for similar machiavellian intrigues around the Twin Towers horror.

JG, 1/12/01.

In WR 249 we reported the return of the ‘No War But The Class War’ group in response to the ‘war on terrorism’ and the first attacks on Afghanistan. As the basis of the group is opposition to war on a class basis, the ICC thinks that its re-appearance is positive and our militants have participated in the majority of NWBTCW’s London meetings. As in its previous manifestations NWBTCW contains all sorts of people. Some call themselves anarchists, some anti-capitalists, some communists and some who would resent any label being put on their views. This means there are a number of different approaches to the ‘anti-capitalist’ movement, to activism, and to political discussion. One thing that is shared by all NWBTCW participants is a rejection of the leftist campaign of the Stop The War coalition. In response Workers Power have attacked NWBTCW - at a meeting, in their November paper and in on-line discussion.

In the NWBTCW leaflet distributed at the 18 November Stop The War demonstration there is opposition to the leftist ideology of ‘anti-imperialism’ as it means giving support to capitalist regimes such as that of the Taliban, and leads into an anti-Americanism which writes off an important part of the working class. As the leaflet says: “That the left performs such a counter-revolutionary role does not surprise us - they are after all the left wing of capital”.

“This is sheer nonsense” says Workers Power. Their position is one of defending Afghanistan “without giving any political support to the Taliban”. This is what Trotskyists call ‘military support’, where workers and poor peasants are told they should die in the service of capitalism, without supporting the capitalists. The idea of ‘military support’ not being ‘political support’ is a completely false distinction in the face of the militarised class rule of the bourgeoisie. No faction of the ruling class is going to be upset that WP have withheld their ‘political’ support, just as long as workers are prepared to lose their lives in defence of their exploiters and oppressors. ‘Military support’ means military discipline against workers who struggle to defend their own interests. Workers Power preaches the unity of the classes for “a just struggle” in Afghanistan, against the class war on capitalism.

And the same applies in Britain. NWBTCW denounces the Stop the War coalition as a “cross-class alliance with religious leaders, MPs and other enemies of the working class”. WP thinks this is “startling” as they consider that it’s not necessary to be against capitalism to “defeat the government’s war effort”. But why do capitalism’s governments go to war? It’s in defence of their class interests. And it’s only by the working class becoming a conscious organised force to destroy the capitalist system that the imperialist war drive will finally be extinguished.

Workers Power condemns “the ridiculous alternative ... that the struggle against the war and the struggle against capitalism are one”. They attribute this view to ‘anarchism’, but in reality it is the view of marxism. In the First World War revolutionaries fought for the working class to turn the imperialist war into a civil war against the bourgeoisie - in contrast to the social democrats and anarchists who recruited for the war effort. In the Second World War revolutionaries defended the same perspective - in contrast to the Stalinists, Trotskyists, anarchists and anti-fascists who participated in the war drive of the Allied imperialisms. Today, revolutionaries are enthusiastic when people come together to discuss working class opposition to war and it’s only right that the Trotskyists of Workers Power should attack these efforts.

Car, 30/11/01.

From the 20th of December to early January the economic and social chaos in Argentina was headline news. The economy went into free fall, the population took to the streets and five presidents came and went within as many weeks. These events expressed a spectacular worsening of the economic, social and political crisis in Argentina. This article seeks to analyse the main implications of this situation for the working class.

The Argentinean economy is totally bankrupt: it has been in recession for the last three years, and now the level of debt represents more than half of the GNP. Three quarters of export earnings are eaten up by simply paying the interest of the $150 billion foreign debt; unemployment affects half the active population. Argentina is a country which in the space of ten years has gone from hyperinflation to hyper-debt. After three years of recession and the “salvage” plan of 2000 the IMF refused, last November, to unblock billions of dollars that had been promised. Without this money to service its gigantic debt, the government imposed a “little bank holiday”: people could now only take out a maximum of 1000 pesos a month. Savings and wages were kidnapped by the state itself. After three years of recession, three years of galloping unemployment, poverty, job insecurity, after wages and pensions being cut month after month, people are now faced with their bank accounts being confiscated by the state. Everywhere, economists, experts, all sorts of hacks, are putting forward their analyses of Argentina’s particular misfortunes (seeing the cause in corruption, domination by US capital and similar symptoms). But whatever analysis it puts forward, the bourgeoisie’s “solution” is the same as always: to make the proletariat pay, to exploit it even more. Wherever similar economic disasters have taken place, be it South East Asia, Russia, Turkey or Mexico, such “new plans” have amounted to nothing more than the same old trick.

Argentina is no exception; rather it is a forerunner of what is going to happen throughout large areas of the world.

In Argentina’s case the IMF is doing all it can to avoid it contaminating neighbouring countries and even Europe. The IMF has made it very clear that it would be suicidal to provide the bottomless pit that is Argentina with new loans. Such actions would indeed only spread the disease of hyper-debt. Therefore, the only way to proceed is, as always, to squeeze the workers and non-exploiting classes even more.

At the same time, the IMF, as the representative of the western bourgeoisie, has to put up a wall against its particularly corrupt and arrogant Argentinean counter-parts. If in March 2001 there were three finance ministers within 10 days, now within the space of 15 days there have been 5 presidents one after the other! All of these have used every nuance of Peronism, from the comic populism of Rodriguez Saa who promised “the immediate stoppage of debt payments” this “to be followed by a million jobs”, to the dyed-in-the-wool populist Duhalde who was the Peronist candidate against De La Rua and who now criticises “all the stupid and corrupt who have got us into this mess” referring, amongst others, to his former buddy Menem.

The unpegging of the Peso from the Dollar

Along with the blocking of savings, the new government decided to unpeg the peso from the dollar, which means that two “floating” pesos are worth a dollar. This measure has been presented in a very demagogic way: it is necessary to stop the flight of capital; thus for those who want to buy dollars, 1 peso will still equal 1 dollar. On the other hand, in order to buy foreign goods, it will be necessary to use the “actual” peso, which is worth much less. The result of this for a population where pauperisation is already widespread is price increases for essential necessities. The “miracle worker” Cavallo (former Economics Minister) who invented “dollarisation” ten years ago in order to strangle hyperinflation, was brought back in to strangle hyper-debt. Now the self-same Cavallo can be thanked for the return of inflation and an increase in the cost of living, along with a freeze on wages. However, it is clear that today the situation is even worse. And, what is more important, the entire world economy is now in open recession.

The working class must not allow itself to be drowned by the other social layers

Over the last three years unemployment and insecurity has increased daily for the working class in Argentina. Today the degradation of its living conditions has gone into freefall.

But another aspect of the Argentinean crisis is the pauperisation of what the sociologists call the “middle class”, the pride of the Argentinean “nation”. By this they mean shopkeepers, small business people, the liberal professions (these petty bourgeois layers are often then thrown into the sociological mix with state employees, who are mainly workers). The “little bank holiday” of accounts was a serious blow for the Argentinean petty-bourgeoisie, which was already impoverished, bitter and desperate. The confiscation law has hit them with full force. Nevertheless, they have to be seen for what they are: the “middle class”, not the proletariat. The hunger riots, the looting of supermarkets and lorries transporting basic foodstuffs, the “cacerolazos” (the banging of saucepan lids as a sign of protest by demonstrators) have been clearly marked by the presence of these social layers. Most of these events have been called by their organisations: in Cordoba, the violent demonstrations were organised by the PME. In Buenos Aires, alongside the shopkeepers have been the lawyers who have led the demonstrations against the “corrupt judges” of the Supreme Court.

It’s true that the initial impetus behind the looting of supermarkets often came from the poorest strata in society, which included many proletarians. But in the first place such actions in themselves are not characteristic of the proletarian struggle, since instead of focussing on the collective appropriation of the means of production and distribution, they centre round the individual acquisition of consumer goods. In the second place, both the looting and the subsequent demonstrations came to be heavily dominated by the petty bourgeois elements, so that the workers could not affirm their independent demands and interests. The weight of the middle classes was symbolised in the loud displays of nationalist flag-waving on many of the demonstrations.

The working class in Argentina thus finds itself in a very difficult situation. Faced with an enormous attack on its living standards and a veritable social and political crisis, it has so far been unable to assert its own class interests or its confidence in itself as a distinct social force, and has been swept along by a growing tide of directionless anger.

The proletariat in Argentina is certainly one of the most combative in Latin America. Since 1968 there have been a number of upsurges of militancy. In 1969 workers in Cordoba - the second biggest city - took control of the city for several days. In the 1990’s and even in 2001 there have been general strikes involving hundreds of thousands of workers. And in the last year or so there has been a movement of unemployed workers in Argentina, which has seen assemblies of unemployed workers seeking to organise their struggle. These assemblies have also attracted employed workers. It also appears that prior to the December/January events there had been a growing number of strikes among numerous sectors.

However, despite this combativity the working class in Argentina has been unable to push back the attacks of the bourgeoisie. As well as suffering from the general blows against proletarian self-confidence inflicted by the campaigns against communism and the advancing decomposition of capitalist society, it has also had to battle against more specific ideologies: the democratic illusions inherited from the period of military dictatorship, the populist myths of Peronism, the poison of nationalism (the strength of which was demonstrated by the ability of the hated military junta to mobilise support for the absurd Malvinas adventure in 1982). The unions also have a strong ideological weight in the class. Whilst many workers don’t trust the main union, the CGT, which is run by the Peronist mafia, these state organs are still able to mobilise hundreds of thousands of workers in general strikes. Whilst democratic illusions may have been weakened by experience, with many workers now distrusting all bourgeois politicians, this distrust is being channelled into inter-classist protests about corruption, against the IMF etc.

The very serious nature of the difficulties facing the working class in Argentina is exemplified by a recent event. On Friday the 11th January 600 “piqueteros”, composed of a group of very combative workers and unemployed, gathered in front of the Buenos Aires Central Market to load crates of provisions into lorries in order to take them to workers’ neighbourhoods when they were attacked with sticks by a group of a thousand, underpaid, porters from the Central Market. They were chased into fields where many were beaten and seriously injured. This is not just an anecdote. As an Argentinean newspaper remarked “The confrontation between the exploited and the starving pathetically syntheses the foundations of the Argentinean crisis, the beating up of the “piqueteros”, in order to drive them away from the Central Market by a group of porters”. Here we have a tragic conflict between, on the one hand, the “piqueteros” who have dissipated their combativity in the blocking of roads and other radical actions without any result; and on the on the other hand, the porters manipulated by the Peronist unions as shock troops of Mafiosi politicians.

Today, faced with the situation of poverty which confronts it, the anger of the working class in Argentina is being dissipated amongst a morass of futureless social layers. To claim to help the working class by becoming over-excited about this movement and by uncritically applauding an inter-classist popular revolt, because it appears to be against the interests of the bourgeoisie, is to push the proletariat even further into the arms of the decomposing petty-bourgeoisie. This is precisely the role being played by the leftist groups inside and outside Argentina, particularly the Trotskyists who claim that there is already a revolutionary situation in Argentina (1).

It is only through developing its struggle on its own class terrain, affirming itself as an autonomous class with its own means of struggle - massive strikes and demonstrations around demands common to all the exploited - that it will be able to integrate into its own struggle the other social layers who are victims of poverty and capitalist austerity. And in the longer term, struggling on its own terrain is the only way that will allow the working class to put an end to its misery, through building a balance of force in its struggle that will allow it to overthrow capitalism on a world scale. Only the affirmation of its revolutionary perspective will enable the proletariat to build another society based not on exploitation and profit and the laws of the world market, but on the satisfaction of human need. And it is only in a world communist society that the distribution of the means of consumption will be effectively developed for the whole of humanity.

In this sense, revolutionaries have to be clear; their role is not to console their class, but to insist that it defends its own perspective and its own interests, to put it on guard against the dangers that menace it. In particular, the proletariat cannot allow itself to be lead astray by the inter-classist revolts and democratic illusions.

As we have always made clear, this revolutionary perspective depends essentially upon the development of the struggle of the most concentrated and experienced battalions of the world proletariat, and above all, those in the old Western Europe. Due to their long experience of the traps of the democratic state, of the parliamentary games and union manoeuvres, only the proletariat of the most industrialised countries can open the gates to the international generalisation of struggles and the ultimate overthrow of capitalism. It was in old Europe that capitalism was born and created its own gravedigger. It is in this part of the world that the proletarian giant will deliver the first decisive blows.

To openly acknowledge the difficulties facing our class has nothing to do with ‘Eurocentrism’ or ‘indifference’ towards the workers in the peripheral countries. We cannot hope to succeed against our enemy unless we make an honest appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses on our side of the class barricade.

PN 20.1.02

(1) The leftist and anarchist press has talked about the emergence of “popular assemblies” or “neighbourhood assemblies”, even of assemblies of delegates from these organs. We do not have enough material at our disposal to define the class nature of these organs. Certainly their territorial nature, in the present situation where the working class is finding it so hard to struggle independently, would make them highly vulnerable to the influence of non-proletarian strata, when they are not creations of the leftists pure and simple. But to claim, as the leftists do, that these are embryonic soviets, is to indulge in a false radicalism which serves to prevent the workers from measuring the true scale of the task in front of them.

The world capitalist economy is openly in crisis. Japan, the US and now Germany are officially in recession. The economic indicators are in the red. In 2002, the rate of growth in the 30 OECD countries will not go above 1%. The optimistic assurances of the experts about the recovery being just around the corner look more and more like whistling in the dark.

The reality is that working class living standards are in decline all over the world. Take the growth of unemployment. In the USA, 2 million jobs were lost in 2001. Huge new redundancy plans have been announced in the heart of the industrialised countries, in all sectors, from the car industry (eg, 60,000 at Fords USA) to aeronautics (eg the 6000 at Airbus, following the massive lay-offs in the wake of the September 11 attacks); from new technology (computers, mobile phones) to old industry (mines in Spain, steel in Germany) and services (the tens of thousands of jobs threatened in the post in Britain). Not to mention the collapse of the ‘internet economy’ where the speculative bubble burst some time ago. At the same time we are seeing the dismantling of welfare systems, as in the health service in France and Britain, or the brutal reductions in pensions in Germany and Italy. Flexibility, part-time and precarious jobs are being imposed in different forms in all countries. Since the summer of 2001, the adoption of the Euro has served as a pretext for raising the cost of living across Europe.

After going through three months of recession, Argentina’s dive into bankruptcy is a real pointer to the future that capitalism has in store for us. This country was formerly presented by the world bank as a model of economic improvement. Now the only way that the latest president Duhalde can get the loan he needs from the IMF is to promise another 100,000 redundancies. Not only are other Latin American states like Brazil and Chile teetering on the same brink, but the ‘tiger’ economies of South East Asia, which have already been through the 1997 crash, are facing new alarms. The bankruptcy of Argentina, like the collapse of the US energy giant Enron, are signs of the global bankruptcy of the capitalist system.

The fact that capitalism has no way out of its crisis transforms economic competition between nations into a spiral of military confrontations. Against the background of a saturated world market, the nation states of the world are hurled into conflicts in which strategic interests take over from the immediate hunt for profit. All countries, big and small, are caught up in the logic of imperialism, of accelerated military spending and of open or concealed conflicts with their rivals. Ever since World War One, capitalism has been in a permanent state of war; war has become inseparable from the survival of the capitalist mode of production. This has been shown to be more true than ever since the downfall of the Russian bloc, which was supposed to usher in a new era of world peace. In fact the resulting dissolution of the old bloc discipline has merely released the appetite of every imperialist power to pursue its own national interests and has multiplied the arenas of conflict.

The military intervention in Afghanistan, presented as a “war against terrorism”, is a concentrated expression of the contradictions of the system. It is being led by the world’s cop, the USA, in order to impose a disciplined world order that corresponds to its interests; but it succeeds only in spreading further chaos, in stirring up new conflicts. In Afghanistan itself, which is already in a state of utter ruin, fighting has already begun between the various factions who have been brought in to succeed the Taliban. The Afghanistan conflict has in turn helped to aggravate the rivalries between India and Pakistan, and between Israel and the Palestinians. Meanwhile Bush is talking about an “axis of evil” that includes Iran, Iraq and North Korea, all of whom could be future targets of the “war against terrorism”. US troops have also been sent to the Philippines to help the government crush the Islamic insurgents there. Bush has made it quite clear that the anti-terrorist crusade will go on indefinitely and will be aimed at all who give succour to the USA’s enemies. And these enemies, in the final analysis, also include the USA’s nominal allies. One of the key strategic aims of the Afghanistan war is to enable the US to put a block on any further European (and particularly German) advance towards the Middle East and Central Asia.

In all these conflicts, it is always the civil population, the exploited and the oppressed, who are the main victims � bombed, massacred, exiled, forced to beg for handouts in refugee camps where they face death through starvation, cold and disease. This plunge into the barbarity of war is the clearest of all expressions of the historic bankruptcy of a system which now threatens the very survival of the human race.

The social order which throws millions of workers onto the dole in the industrialised countries is the same social order which slaughters the civil populations in the weaker countries. This is why it’s so important for proletarians to understand this connection: by fighting against the devastating effects of the economic crisis, by affirming their own class interests, workers are also fighting against the roots of war and barbarism. By taking up the combat against job-cuts and wage-cuts, against the deterioration of its living and working conditions, the working class is laying the groundwork for a wider and deeper combat against the capitalist system and its deadly train of war and catastrophe.

WR 2.2.02

War today has become a permanent feature of daily life under capitalism the world over. Since the Gulf War, the world working class has again and again been confronted with the reality of war � numerous wars in Africa and Yugoslavia, the war in Kosovo, the Chechen war, the war in Afghanistan and now the war drive in India and Pakistan where two nations with nuclear weapons are at each others’ throats.

This reality of a war-racked decomposing capitalist system is indeed horrific. Without a historical, marxist framework it may fill one with despair. It is this historical materialist analysis of the reality of capitalism today that provides the key to understanding the wars and the crises ravaging the world capitalist system.

The wars, and the whole cycle of crises, wars, and reconstruction (First World War, Second World War, the setting up of blocs at Yalta), that have ravaged the capitalist system since the beginning of 20th century can only be understood in the framework of the onset of the decadence of this system since 1914. At the same time, the immediate framework in which the current wars are unfolding is defined by the collapse of the system of blocs at the end of the 1980s and the decomposition of the capitalist system. As we have repeatedly shown, the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 in turn led to the collapse of the western bloc. This eliminated the discipline of blocs, which used to contain the uncontrolled eruption of conflicts among the smaller powers. The reality that has unfolded since then is best defined by ‘every man for himself’, where all powers, big or small, are out to satisfy their imperialist appetites at whatever cost. The great powers, including the world’s only superpower, the global gangster, the US, find it more and more difficult to contain these conflicts among the lesser gangsters.

The wars referred to earlier have been the product of this tendency of everyman for himself. The beating of the war drums between India and Pakistan, the war that is being prepared between them today, while rooted in their past, is unfolding in this global framework of spreading chaos, this tendency of everyman for himself.

The latest war drive between India and Pakistan

Since the December 13 terrorist attack on the Indian parliament, the Indian bourgeoisie has been clamouring for war against Pakistan. In the wake of this attack, all factions of the Indian bourgeoisie met in parliament on 18th Dec and declared their support for any military or diplomatic action, including war, the government might take, like the Americans, to ‘punish’ the ‘terrorists and their backers’.

Immediately after this, the Indian bourgeoisie started a campaign of war-mongering. The politicians started making statements to stir up war hysteria and the media started whipping up war frenzy through ‘patriotic’ reporting about preparations for war. This has been accompanied by a mobilisation for war all along the border. Nearly half a million soldiers have been moved to the border between India and Pakistan. This has been reciprocated by their Pakistani counterparts. Both states have moved their military machines to the borders.

Both India and Pakistan have moved civilian populations out of the border areas. They have been laying mines in the cornfields on the borders.

This sabre-rattling has been accompanied by a ‘diplomatic offensive’ by India, a game in which the Pakistani bourgeoisie is on a weaker wicket at this moment. The Indian bourgeoisie has recalled its ambassador from Pakistan. Each one has asked the other to cut diplomatic staff by 50% and has restricted the movement of diplomatic personnel to capital cities. Both have forbidden each other from the use of their air space for civilian flights and have cut all transport links. There is also talk of abrogating some old treaty � the ‘Indus Water Treaty’. At one level they have completed all preparations for war, with both armies standing face to face to start killing each other at any time.

“Either we live or you live”

On the surface all this is just a result of the December 13 attack on the Indian Parliament. But if it finally breaks out, this war won’t be the first between Pakistan and India. Since their birth in 1947, India and Pakistan have already fought four open wars (1948, 1965, 1971, and 1999) and have been on the brink of open war on a number of occasions. When not engaged in open war, they have been involved in ‘proxy wars’ as in Kashmir, or earlier in the Indian Punjab and in Karachi/Sindh.

The very birth of these two states is rooted in war. Their relation � in the minds of their ruling bourgeoisies � seems to be defined by a simple, deadly equation � “Either we live, or you live”. An equation that characterised the relations of the two blocs during the cold war and ended with the destruction of the Soviet bloc. The bourgeoisie in Pakistan speaks of “bleeding India to death by a thousand cuts” (daily war in Kashmir, Khalistan, elsewhere). And the Indian bourgeoisie often speak of the need for a “final war” with Pakistan, which alone will allow peace to prevail. This talk of “bleeding through a thousand cuts” and of a “final war”, in addition to expressing their mutual hatred, also expresses their respective strengths and strategic calculations.

Who carried out the December 13th attack?

Regarding the December 13 attack on the Indian Parliament in which 14 people were killed, the Indian bourgeoisie quickly decided and declared, as the Americans did after 11th Sept for Bin Laden, that these were carried out by Let and Jaish, the two Pakistani based terrorist groups, with the help of ISI, the Pakistani secret service. They demanded that Pakistan take action against these gangs. Simultaneously they started mobilising for war.

The claims of the Indian bourgeoisie about Let and Jaish have been accepted by the world bourgeoisie � the Americans and British banned them soon after India’s declarations. Under their pressure, Pakistan has also banned Let and Jaish and arrested their leaders.

On the surface the terrorist attack on India has not benefited the Pakistani bourgeoisie. It has in fact come in handy for the Indian bourgeoisie to put Pakistan in a corner. Yet it is possible that Let and Jaish carried it out with the connivance of dissident elements within the Pakistani state who thought a war between India and Pakistan would serve their interests. It is also possible that the Indian state itself allowed this attack to happen. In any case, it has been extremely successful in using it to put Pakistan on the mat. Even before this, the Indian state had strengthened its offensive in Kashmir. More people are now being killed everyday in Kashmir than at any recent time.

But a more concrete encouragement for the Indian bourgeoisie to go onto the offensive has been the turn of events in Afghanistan. For years the Taliban regime in Afghanistan acted as an extension of the Pakistani state. Pakistan used Taliban-ruled Afghanistan as a training centre, as a staging ground to fan separatist movements in Kashmir, but also in central Asia and Chechnya. Afghanistan was for Pakistan what it is now aimed to be for America � a conduit for the spread of its influence in Central Asia. Pakistani strategists used to say that control over Afghanistan gave Pakistan a strategic depth vis-a-vis India. This is one reason why the US has had to kick Pakistan to join the so-called coalition against terrorism and for the destruction of the Taliban regime.

The destruction of the Taliban has been a severe blow to Pakistan. It has relatively weakened its position and thrown the Pakistani bourgeoisie into disarray. It has fostered divisions within its ranks. The Indian bourgeoisie has taken advantage of this situation and accelerated its offensive against Pakistan.

Will war break out?

Left to itself, the Indian bourgeoisie would go to war. But this does not suit the interests of the only superpower, the US. It is engaged in its ‘war against terrorism’ in Afghanistan. Although the Taliban regime has been destroyed, America still needs Pakistani support, forced or willing, to achieve its strategic goals � completely destroying the Taliban, establishing a stable regime that is under its full control, using it to penetrate the Central Asian republics and to oversee the whole landmass around Afghanistan. Immediately, a war between India and Pakistan would jeopardise all this. It would compel the US to take sides and upset its long-term plan to dominate this whole area.

Also, the US is aware that given their deep-rooted hostility, and especially given the desperation of the Indian bourgeoisie, a war between India and Pakistan has the possibility of turning into a bigger conflagration. There is a risk that if war seriously endangers Pakistan, it will compel China to flex its muscles (China has already been expressing its ‘mounting worries’ about the tensions between India and Pakistan and there have been reports of Chinese troop movement on the Indo-China border). This would in turn compel the US to react.

Owning to all this, the US has been putting increasing pressure both on India and Pakistan � on India to ‘use restraint’, on Pakistan to take action against terrorists. In this the US has been joined by a plethora of ‘world leaders’ � Tony Blair, Chirac, Annan etc (although these ‘allies’ don’t hesitate to pursue their own national interests during their ‘peace’ initiatives). So far this pressure has been successful in holding back the two combatants. At this moment, it seems very likely that a war will not break out immediately in south Asia.

Even if ‘peace’ prevails for the moment and the imperialist interests of the global powers are successful in compelling India and Pakistan to disengage and demobilise, it will only be a temporary interlude. This won’t be only because of the legendary enmity of India and Pakistan, but because the very logic of capitalism is war.

The tasks of the working class

As part of its war preparations, the bourgeoisie has been trying to whip up national hatred and patriotic frenzy. But the working class has nothing to gain from this war, these imperialist conflicts of their rulers and exploiters. They must refuse to be taken in by the propaganda of the bourgeoisie. The working class can advance its interests only by developing its class struggle against its exploiters, and by establishing its class unity across national boundaries. The working class and its revolutionary vanguard, the communists, have no sides to choose. They oppose all sides in the war and call for worldwide unity of the working class, for the destruction of capitalism.

CI January 2002

The ICC has just excluded one of its members. Such a measure is not often taken by our organisation. The last exclusion of a member of the ICC goes back to 1995 and the previous one took place in 1981. We only apply such a sanction when we are faced with extremely serious faults, and this is why we generally accompany it with a communiqué in the press because we consider that the element being sanctioned represents a danger not just for our organisation but for the whole proletarian political milieu and the sympathisers of the communist left.

The element who is being excluded, Jonas (who also signed articles in our press with the initials JE) has in fact behaved in a way totally unworthy of a communist militant. We reproduce here extracts from the resolution the organisation has adopted on this matter:

“Jonas presented his resignation in May 2001 with the argument that his health did not permit him to carry on the political combat in our organisation when the latter was, according to him, threatened by an ‘enterprise of demolition’. In reality, the ICC has noted that while Jonas retired from the organisation, he by no means ceased all activity towards our organisation. On the contrary, it has been established that this ‘retirement’ was only a means to carry out, secretly and with impunity, an activity hostile to the ICC, in particular:

- blaming its militants and setting them against each other, by attributing some of them and the central organs with the responsibility of aggravating his health problems;

- taking advantage of his political authority and the sympathy he had acquired to incite a certain number of the organisation’s militants to rebel against its decisions and discipline, pushing them into a destructive and suicidal political dynamic;

- circulating, both inside and outside the ICC, a whole series of extremely grave accusations against a certain number of militants, while at the same time refusing to meet with, or even recognise, the commission charged with examining accusations of this type;

- refusing to meet any delegation of the organisation charged with communicating the accusations against him so that he could present his defence, while he had nothing more to say about a document transmitted to him at the beginning of December 2000 which already described behaviour on his part which was absolutely unacceptable and hostile to the ICC”

One of the most intolerable and repulsive aspects of his behaviour is the veritable campaign he has waged against a member of the organisation - accusing them in the corridors and even in front of people outside the organisation of manipulating those around them and the central organs on behalf of the police, and of only having participated in previous combats for the defence of the organisation to divert suspicions, while in fact being an accomplice of Simon (an adventurer expelled from the ICC in 1995), with whom in some way there was a “division of labour”.

It can happen that a sincere militant of a communist organisation, rightly or wrongly, can have suspicions towards another militant. It is then up to that militant to raise the issue with the organs which the organisation has given itself to deal with questions of this type and which can then examine the elements upon which the suspicion is based with a maximum of attention, prudence and discretion. But this was not the attitude of Jonas. In fact he categorically refused to meet the commission charged with examining this kind of problem while continuing to distil his poison.

We should make it clear that the ICC member accused by Jonas of being a “cop and an accomplice of Simon” asked that there should be a detailed inquiry about them, in order to be able to continue as a militant in the ICC’s ranks. This inquiry came to the formal conclusion that there was absolutely no basis for the accusation and exposed its lying, malicious character. This did not prevent Jonas from carrying on with his slanders.

“The fact that Jonas refused to meet the ICC to explain his behaviour in itself constitutes proof that he is conscious of having become an enemy of our organisation despite his theatrical declarations to ‘his comrades’, whom in reality he presents (with the exception of those he has dragged along with him) either as ‘cops’, or as ‘Torquemadas’ or as poor ‘manipulated’ cretins”.

Today Jonas has become a bitter enemy of the ICC and is behaving in a manner worthy of an agent provocateur. We don’t know what his underlying motives are, but we are quite sure that he represents a danger for the proletarian political milieu.

ICC, 24/2/02

The official meaning of the war in Afghanistan: the defence of the civilised, democratic world against terrorism and Islamic fanaticism, fought by the civilised and democratic states standing shoulder to shoulder with the USA.

The real meaning: an imperialist conflict where the official enemy is only a scapegoat and the real enemies pose as friends.

Ever since the collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc at the beginning of the 1990s, the USA has been faced with a growing challenge to its world domination. Not just from the minor enemies (also former friends in most cases) who have been the target of US bombs � Saddam, Milosevic, bin Laden and the Taliban; not just from second and third rate powers, once loyal clients, who are more and more ready to follow their own immediate aims, like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Israel; but also, and above all, from the major powers who were once the mainstay of the western bloc, but who, now that the Russian bear is no threat, are themselves pursuing their own imperialist ambitions: France, Germany and Britain.

Three times in the last decade the USA has had to resort to massive displays of military force to remind all its former vassals who is the world’s boss. Each time its success in dragooning its rivals into US-run military ‘coalitions’ has been far outweighed by the sharpening of conflict that followed soon afterwards. Not long after the Gulf war, in which Germany was given a role only as a moneybags, German imperialism revived its historical ‘drive to the east’, provoking the war in Yugoslavia by supporting the independence of Croatia and Slovenia. After nearly a decade of war and massacre in the Balkans, the USA was compelled to launch its air war against Serbia � on the surface to defend the oppressed Kosovans, in reality to enable the US to implant itself in a region previously dominated by Germany, France, Britain and Russia.

The Afghan war takes this pattern to a new level. Presented as a justified response to the horrible slaughter of September 11, the war had in fact already been planned: in July 2001 the US warned Afghanistan that an attack was being prepared, and it had already set up military bases in Uzbekistan. The real motive behind the war was once again to ‘restore order’ in a world where the dominant rule has become ‘every man for himself’. The rows over America’s rejection of the Kyoto treaty, over the ‘Son of Star Wars’ anti-missile programme, over the ‘Euro-army’, helped to swell a growing tide of anti-American propaganda in Europe. September 11 and the campaigns about ‘solidarity with the USA’ called a temporary halt to this, but even while the majority of the European powers claimed to back America’s ‘anti-terrorist’ assault on Afghanistan, the differences were always visible. Most of Europe’s governments officially supported the war, but there was plenty of scope for the expression of doubts and criticisms. For its part America was quite determined to give its allies a minimal role in the fighting. Britain in particular was systematically humiliated, the role of its troops in the actual combat being embarrassingly below the level of Blair’s grand military posturing. This US ‘unilateralism’ has been attacked more and more vociferously by European experts and diplomats who claim that even NATO � which the US formerly used as a cover for its interests against the squabble-prone United Nations � is virtually redundant. “Will the Americans ever fight a war through NATO again? It’s doubtful. The US reserves the right to itself to wage war, and dumps on others the messy, expensive business of nation-building and peace keeping” (former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt, quoted in The Observer, 10 February 2002).

In the last month or so the divisions between the US and its ‘allies’ have once again got the press talking about a ‘new low in US-European relations’. First we had Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ speech which brought forth a storm of polemics from the French, the Germans, even ex-Tory ministers like Chris Patten, who insisted that none of the countries of the ‘axis’ (Iraq, Iran, North Korea) could be proven to have any direct links with al-Qaida. They were especially incensed by the inclusion of Iran in the axis: had Germany and Britain not been wooing Iran since September 11? The US targeting of Iran was partly a response to Iran’s efforts to procure a sphere of influence in the new Afghan carve-up by backing its own choice of war-lords and armed gangs. But it is even more a way of issuing a warning to the likes of Germany and Britain. The naming of North Korea serves a similar purpose in the Far East in relation to the ambitions of China and Japan.

More recently, the press in Europe has revealed America’s determination to launch an attack on Iraq and topple Saddam. According to a US state official cited in The Guardian (14 Feb), it was very unlikely that the Iraqi regime would accept the stringent programme of weapons inspections the US will demand. “As the American intelligence source put it, the White House ‘will not take yes for an answer’, suggesting that Washington would provoke a crisis”. An article published on 5 February in the same paper observes that Germany had led the chorus of protests by European states against the ‘axis of evil’ speech. The words of Berlin’s deputy foreign minister, Ludger Vollmer, were particularly significant “We Europeans warn against it. There is no indication that Iraq is involved in the terrorism we have been talking about for the last few months� this terror argument can be used to legitimise old enmities”.

At the same time the US announced a new defence budget of unprecedented proportions: a 15 percent increase, the biggest in 20 years, and more than double the military spending in all the European Union. Over the next five years the total budget is planned to rise to two trillion dollars. This means that America’s share in the world’s arms expenses will be as big as the next 25 biggest budgets put together. And the gap is not merely financial. It is also technological � no European state can come anywhere near the US in the use of pilotless attack aircraft, satellite information systems, speed and scale of military transport, and so on. And it is strategic: “�the Afghan war has fundamentally reshaped the architecture of international alliances. Central Asia is splattered with new American fortresses, the Pacific and Indian oceans are patrolled by aircraft carriers and fleets of awesome size” (Observer, 10 February, ’Armed to the teeth’ by Peter Beaumont and Ed Vulliamy. ) This article points out how alarmed the Europeans are at all this: “Lord Robertson, the usually unflappable (NATO) secretary general, has been moved to warn some members that unless the declining European defence expenditure is reversed then Europe � and the Europeans in NATO � are in danger of becoming military pygmies”.

Thus we can see the emerging contours of a new arms race, of a new period of rising imperialist tensions between the most powerful states in the world. The ‘war against terrorism’, Bush has always insisted, has the whole world for its stage and will continue indefinitely. That is because its real aim is not to combat terrorism but to permanently terrorise the world into submission to US diktats. The European powers know this, and their opposition to the US has nothing to do with concern for those who will die as a result of thus lurch into unending warfare. It is based solely on the calculation of their own imperialist interests.

Does this mean that we are heading towards a third world war? Not for the foreseeable future. To fight a world war you need more than just temporary alliances or largely economic conglomerations like the EU. You need fully formed imperialist military blocs. The road to the formation of such blocs can only go so far today for a number of reasons. The tendency for each country to pursue its own national-imperialist interests not only causes problems for the US � it also makes it very difficult for the major European powers to sink their own rivalries and enmities and come to together as a single anti-US bloc under the leadership of the most powerful European nation (this, of course, is Germany, whose very history demonstrates the problem). No less important is the vast military imbalance we have already referred to. The war in Afghanistan, while sharpening tensions between the US and its rivals, has underlined this imbalance even more. As Beaumont and Vulliamy put it, “The reality � even before the latest proposed increases in military spending � is that America could beat the rest of the world at war with one hand tied behind its back”. Conflict between European powers and America will continue and indeed worsen, even taking the form of proxy wars fought through local gangs or even nation states. But it cannot yet be an overt confrontation.

But there is another reason why a third world war is not on the agenda. Imperialist blocs require an ideology if they are to mobilise their populations, and above all their proletariats, for war. The US bourgeoisie has certainly achieved a good measure of success in whipping up a massive campaign of nationalist hysteria after the September 11 attacks, and even gives us a glimpse of what capitalism would need to do on an even bigger scale to drag the proletariat off to war. But a war against the Taliban is one thing; even the US bourgeoisie is not ready to mobilise its workers to make war on ‘democratic’ Europe. And in Europe itself, even the ‘war against terrorism’, while creating negative feelings of disorientation and fear, did not at all actively mobilise the proletariat. Underlying this is the fact that the working class today � in contrast to the 1930s � has not been subjected to a massive defeat and is still ready to defend its class interests rather than sacrifice itself on the altar of war.

And this is precisely why the big wars of today are still aimed at scapegoats rather than at the real enemy. The bourgeoisie is still unable to pursue its imperialist rivalries to their ultimate conclusion. But this is no reason to fall into complacency. The efforts of the USA to impose ‘order’ on a world sliding into chaos can succeed only in aggravating and extending that chaos; humanity is even more menaced by a spiral of local and regional wars than by a single world holocaust. Even more dangerous is the fact that such a spiral could take place without the bourgeoisie having to defeat the workers of the central capitalist countries in a direct confrontation. We could be defeated piecemeal, gradually succumbing to the loss of our class identity, by the creeping rot of a disintegrating social system, making it increasingly impossible for the working class as a class to take power and save society by organising it anew.

And still the working class remains the only force capable of preventing this slide into the abyss. Its current struggles may seem puny in the face of the relentless attack on its living standards demanded both by the deepening world economic crisis and the huge growth in military spending and preparations for war. But the simultaneity of these two elements is no accident; they spring from the same source � the decadence and obsolescence of the capitalist system � and they mutually reinforce each other. In struggling against both crisis and war, the working class can come to recognise their intimate connection, and thus to understand the necessity for its own revolutionary alternative.

WR, 2/3/02.

The new outburst of violence between Hindus and Muslims in India that began on 27th February with the burning to death of 58 Hindus on a train has now claimed the lives of at least 295 people. The true figure may be far higher. Men, women and even young children have been the victims of brutal massacres in several parts of the state of Gujarat, some of them being doused in petrol and set alight. The papers have been quick to describe this as the fruit of “deep-rooted sectarian grievances” (Guardian 1/3/02), explaining that the Hindus on the train were returning from a ceremony in Ayodha to dedicate the building of a new temple on a disputed religious site. In 1992, Hindu nationalists destroyed the Ayodha mosque and in the violence that followed some 3,000 people died.

The Indian Government and opposition parties issued a joint statement calling for peace, while troops were sent in to keep peace and a strict curfew was imposed. The Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee has cancelled plans to attend the Commonwealth summit in Australia in order to deal with the situation. However, the Indian state is not quite the shocked onlooker it presents itself as. In the first place, many of the Muslims, who have been the principle target of the riots since the burning of the train, have had their pleas for help ignored by the police. In city of Ahmedabad, the centre of the violence, all of the inhabitants of one Muslim enclave were burnt to death. To date only 900 troops have arrived to police this city of some 5 million people. In the second place, the current government is dominated by the BJP, which came to power by provoking Hindu sectarianism against Muslims. While the leadership of the BJP today appeals for restraint, in 1992 many of them participated in the destruction of the Ayodha mosque.

However, the violence in India today is no more the simple reflection of ‘deep-rooted sectarian grievances’ than is the case in the former Yugoslavia or Northern Ireland. While such tensions are a historical reality, they are subordinate to the forces that shape the capitalist system that dominates the globe. Sectarian violence, wherever it appears and whatever its original causes, is always subsumed within the political and imperialist struggles of the ruling class. In the Indian sub-continent, one of the determining factors has been the rivalry between India and Pakistan which, since their independence from Britain in 1947, have remained in a state of open or covert war. This reached a new peak in the new year when it seemed that open war was possible, as India piled the pressure on Pakistan following the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament on December 13th. However, this situation itself was but a result of the global imperialist struggle which, since the USA’s declaration of the ‘war against terrorism’ has seen changes in the balance of political forces in many parts of the world, even when apparently unconnected with Afghanistan. In the sub-continent, as we showed in this paper last month (see WR 251, ‘Against capitalism’s war drive in India and Pakistan’), this has been expressed in a weakening of Pakistan’s position because of its support for the Taliban, a situation which the India government has sought to exploit.

The Indian and Pakistani governments may or may not have directly orchestrated the latest violence, but it is their imperialist rivalry that sets up the dynamic that produces such violence; meanwhile, behind these third rate powers stand those of the second and first ranks whose manoeuvrings determine the whole global situation.

And while the bourgeois factions and nations manoeuvre, it is the exploited and the oppressed who pay the price. The vast majority of those burnt and beaten to death are the poor, the slum-dwellers, the proletarians. What is more, every religious or racial slaughter is a blow against the ability of the working class to unite and fight back against growing poverty and war. Indeed, it is a prefiguration of the dark future that capitalism in its death agony offers humanity, a world where the exploited have lost all hope and plunge into hell with their hands round each others’ throats. But that future is not yet assured; and we who raise the flag of workers’ unity are not idle dreamers, but the only ones who point to an alternative future for mankind.

North, 2/3/02

Since its origins, the workers’ movement has had to face up to repression from the bourgeoisie. However, it would be a serious error, a real expression of naivety, to think that such repression only takes the form of physical repression directed against workers’ strikes or uprisings.

The proletarian revolution is the first in history whose success fundamentally depends on a revolutionary class consciousness about its own goals, about the final aims of its combat against capitalism: communist society. Inevitably, in capitalist society, this historical consciousness develops in the proletariat in an uneven way; and this is why revolutionary class consciousness is initially crystallised in the political organisations of the proletarian vanguard.

Police provocation within revolutionary organisations

It is an irony of history that the bourgeoisie has often shown itself to be more far-sighted than the working class masses on the crucial role of revolutionary organisations. The ruling class has always paid particular attention to the political organisations that defend the need for a communist revolution, even in periods in which they are an extreme minority, even completely unknown to the vast majority of the working class. This remains true whatever the political regime of the day. To give just two examples that concern ourselves directly:

• an important part of our book on the Italian Communist Left is drawn from the archives of Mussolini’s secret police, who maintained a spy within the very small group that published Bilan in the 1930s;
• right at the beginning of the group which became our section in France, we learned through a repentant police agent that our group was already being watched by the police.

Only once in history have the methods of the political police been examined in an exhaustive manner by revolutionaries: after the October revolution in Russia, when the archives of the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, fell into the hands of the Bolsheviks. It was on the basis of these archives that Victor Serge wrote his book What Every Revolutionary Should Know About Repression, which to this day remains a very valuable expose of police methods. As Serge put it, the Okhrana was “the prototype of the modern political police”. However, as we shall see, spying and police provocation weren’t born with the Okhrana, and revolutionaries didn’t wait until Serge’s book before understanding that they were the subject of police interest.

What is the aim of this police interest? It’s not simply to spy on, repress and destroy revolutionary organisations. The bourgeoisie and its political police know very well that the political organisations of the proletariat are not generated in the heads of the individuals who compose them, but by the very conditions of the class struggle, the permanent opposition between the working class and capitalist society.

It’s therefore no accident if the figure of the agent provocateur has always been so abhorred in the workers’ movement, both in its political organisations and the organs the class gives rise to during the course of its struggles (general assemblies, factory committees, etc). From their beginnings the political organisations of the working class have tried to protect themselves against the activities of agents provocateurs. Thus in the 1795 statutes of the London Corresponding Society, one of the first working class political organisations, we have the following rule: “Persons attempting to trespass on order, under pretence of showing zeal, courage, or any other motive, are to be suspected. A noisy disposition is seldom a sign of courage, and extreme zeal is often a cloak of treachery” (cited in Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 1968 Pelican edition, p 539). In the same way, the Communist League (for which Marx wrote the famous Communist Manifesto in 1848) stated in its article 42: “individuals who have been kept at arms length or excluded, as well as suspicious elements in general, must be watched by the League and placed beyond the pale” However, the effectiveness of police provocation has its limits. As Victor Serge put it: “Provocation can only wipe out individuals or groups and is almost impotent against the revolutionary movement as a whole. We have seen how an agent provocateur became responsible (in 1912) for bringing Bolshevik propaganda into Russia; how another (Malinovski) gave speeches written by Lenin in the Duma (...) Whether a revolutionary leaflet is handed out by a secret agent or a devoted revolutionary, the results are still the same: the essential thing is that it should be read (...) When the secret agent Malinovski acted as Lenin’s voice in the Duma, the Minister of the Interior was wrong to rejoice over the success of his hired agent. Lenin’s words were far more important to the country than the mere voice of a wretch like him”.

Suspicion: a curse for the moral health of revolutionary organisations

Much worse than provocation in itself is suspicion, the distrust that can grow up in an organisation when its members feel themselves to be the target of provocation. This is all the more the case because - apart from this unique case when the Okhrana archives were seized - revolutionaries obviously aren’t in a position to find proofs in the police archives, while the police themselves do all they can to cover their tracks and protect the real spies. The worst thing is that often the police don’t actually need to do anything; they can just let suspicion and distrust take root and gather the fruits: the paralysis or even the break up of the revolutionary organisation. Thompson’s book The Making of the English Working Class gives us a striking example of this kind of paralysis: “In 1794 one Jones, of Tottenham, was accused (mistakenly) of being a spy, because of his violent resolutions which were alleged to be for the ‘purpose of entrapping the society’. Jones (the genuine informer, Groves, reported with wry relish) complained: ‘If a Citizen made a Motion which seemed anyways spirited he was set down as a Spy sent among them by the Government. If a Citizen sat in a corner and said nothing he was watching their proceedings that he might better report it (...) Citizens hardly knew how to act’” (op cit.).

While distrust within a revolutionary organisation can bring about paralysis and disintegration, suspicion is a burden which often proves unbearable for the individual militant (Serge cites examples of militants who committed suicide, or carried out desperate acts, because they were unable to clear themselves of an unjustified suspicion). A communist militant sets himself in opposition to the whole of bourgeois society; he is placed outside the normal order of things, accused by the bourgeois propaganda machine of being a fanatic or a bloody criminal. He can be hunted down like a wild beast. To keep his head held high, a communist militant must not only maintain an unquenchable conviction in the historic cause of the proletariat, in the future of humanity, in the necessity and possibility of a communist revolution; he must also preserve his honour as a militant, the respect and confidence of his comrades in arms. There is no worse shame for a communist militant than to be designated a traitor. Suspicion is terribly easy to sow, and very hard to wipe out. This is why communist militants have the duty to defend their dignity faced with suspicion and slander, just as the organisation has the responsibility not to tolerate these poisons, which can only destroy its unity and solidarity between comrades.

It was not for nothing that in 1860, Karl Marx published his denunciation of Karl Vogt, a spy in the service of Napoleon III, who himself accused Marx of being a police agent. ‘Well-meaning’ bourgeois commentators often see this text as a weakness of Marx’s, a distraction from his ‘philosophical’ work, a futile attack on a pathetic individual. It has also been claimed that the text, with its minute attention to Vogt’s most lamentable activities, is an example of Marx’s ‘authoritarianism’, his inability to take criticism. This is to understand nothing of Marx’s motives. Marx hated talking about himself or his personal affairs in public, but he felt obliged to devote a year to this indispensable work in order to defend both his personal honour as a revolutionary, and also and above all the movement of which he was a part.

Victor Serge was quite correct to write: “There is a tradition of it: the enemies of action, the cowards, the well-entrenched ones, the opportunists, are happy to assemble their arsenal... in the sewers! Suspicion and slander are their weapons for discrediting revolutionaries”.

The danger of uncontrolled suspicion within the organisation was well understood by revolutionaries of the past, as we can see from the statutes of the League of the Just, the predecessor of the Communist League (these draft statutes are from 1843): “If someone wants to complain about someone or some question connected to the League, they must do so openly in the (section) meeting. Denigrators will be excluded” (point 9).

Towards the end of the 19th century, this basic position was further refined. It was not enough to expel the denigrator; it was necessary to deal with unfounded accusations so that they wouldn’t undermine the organisation. This method of the workers’ movement was formulated in the statutes of the Berlin section of the German social democratic party, which in 1882 (when the party was working in illegality) declared: “Every militant - even when it’s a well-known comrade - has the duty to maintain discretion about the subjects discussed in the organisation, whatever the issue. If a comrade hears an accusation about another comrade, he has the duty in the first place to deal with it confidentially, and he must demand the same from the comrade who informed him of the accusation; he must establish the reasons behind the accusation and know what lies behind it. He must inform the secretary (of the section), who must clarify the question in a confrontation between the accused and the accuser (...) Any other action, as for example the sowing of suspicion without definite proofs attested by the secretaries (ie those responsible to the section) can cause considerable damage. Since the police have an obvious interest in promoting divisions in our ranks by spreading denigrations, any comrade who does not stick to the procedure described above runs the risk of being considered as someone working for the police” (cited from Fricke, History of the German Workers’ Movement 1869-1917).

It is evident that in the conditions of illegality of that time, revolutionaries were preoccupied on a day to day basis by the danger of police infiltration. But suspicion within the organisation is not always the work of police action; it can arise without the slightest provocation from the state. Even when accusations are launched with the best intentions of protecting the organisation, the distrust they sow can be even more dangerous to the health of the organisation, and to the security of its militants, than real provocation. This is what Serge again draws attention to: “Accusations are murmured about, then said out loud, and usually they cannot be checked out. This causes enormous damage, worse in some ways than that caused by provocation itself (...)This evil of suspicion and mistrust among us can only be reduced and isolated by a great effort of will. It is necessary, as the condition of any real struggle against provocation - and slanderous accusation of members is playing the game of provocation - that no-one should be accused lightly, and it should also be impossible for an accusation against a revolutionary to be accepted without being investigated. Every time anyone is touched by suspicion, a jury formed of comrades should determine whether it is a well-founded accusation or a slander. These are simple rules which should be observed with inflexible rigour if one wishes to preserve the moral health of revolutionary organisations”.

In the first part of this article, we have tried to show:

• first, that police provocation has existed since the beginning of the workers’ movement, and that its goal has often been to destroy the revolutionary organisation by sowing distrust in its ranks;
• secondly, that revolutionaries have always considered such accusations as being just as dangerous for the health of their organisations as if they had been the work of the police;
• finally, that revolutionary organisations have had a method for dealing with these accusations. This method consists above all of placing them in an appropriate organisational framework, in order to prevent distrust from spreading in an uncontrolled way in the organisation, like a virus. It is this method, inherited from the workers’ movement, that the ICC has always sought to adopt when faced with accusations or suspicions towards its militants.

The communist organisation does not have a ‘natural’ place in bourgeois society; on the contrary, it is a foreign body within it. The antagonism between communist principles and bourgeois ideology is played out not only outside the organisation, but inside it as well. The infiltration of ideologies alien to the proletariat can take the form of opportunist political positions being taken up by a part of the organisation, but also and much more insidiously through forms of individual behaviour which are passed on from the ruling class (or from certain social strata with no historical future) and which are diametrically opposed to what should be the comportment of a communist militant.

Slander: a weapon for discrediting revolutionary organisations

The ICC has always insisted that the question of the political behaviour of militants is a question linked to the principles of a class which is the bearer of communism. Against the poison of distrust and suspicion, we say in our platform that “the relations between the different parts of the organisation and the ties between militants necessarily bear the scars of capitalist society and therefore cannot constitute an island of communist relations within capitalism. Nevertheless, they cannot be in flagrant contradiction with the goals pursued by revolutionaries, and they must of necessity be based on that solidarity and mutual confidence which are the hallmarks of belonging to an organisation of the class which is the bearer of communism”. Similarly our statutes say that the behaviour of a militant cannot be in contradiction with the aims we are fighting for, and that debates in the organisation “are carried out with the greatest political rigour, while avoiding personal attacks which cannot take the place of coherent political argument”. To forget these rules of behaviour, to allow oneself to be carried away by the spirit of competition which is inculcated by bourgeois society, can lead one further and further away from the terrain of debate between communists; in certain circumstances (for example when militants are in a minority and are short of political arguments) it can lead them to launching campaigns of slander against their comrades, who are seen as enemies to bring down.

The use of campaigns of slander against militants within revolutionary organisations has dotted the history of the workers’ movement since its origins. We only have to recall Bakunin’s slanders against Marx within the First International, where the latter was accused of being a “dictator” (as a result of being a Jew and a German!); the calumnies spread after the 1903 Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party by the Mensheviks against Lenin, who was accused of wanting to introduce a reign of terror in the party, like Robespierre. We can also cite the extreme case of the campaigns of denigration aimed against Rosa Luxemburg by the opportunist elements in German social democracy, who were to betray the principles of the working class in 1914. Thus in the corridors of the party Luxemburg was accused of having the morals of a libertine, and even of being an agent of the Okhrana, by militants who a few years later, in January 1919, would organise her murder: we refer to the ‘bloodhound’ Noske and his accomplices Ebert and Scheidemann.

To give one last example, our predecessors in the Gauche Communiste de France also had to deal with slanders inside the organisation, as we can see in this resolution adopted at the GCF conference in July 1945:

“Approving the resolution of the general assembly of 16 June which registered the break from the organisation by these elements, the conference raises its voice in particular against the campaign of base slander, which has become the preferred weapon of these elements against the organisation and against its militants as individuals.

By resorting to such methods, these elements, while exposing their real policies, create a poisonous atmosphere by introducing suspicion, the threat of pogroms (to use their own expression), gangsterism, thus perpetuating the infamous tradition which up to now has been the speciality of Stalinism.

Considering it urgent to put an end to such slander, to prevent it from taking the place of political debate in the relations between revolutionary militants, the conference decides to address itself to the revolutionary groups, requesting that they institute a court of honour which will take position on the revolutionary morality of the militants who have been slandered, and to refuse entry into the proletarian movement of slander and slanderers”.

Thus our organisation, by rejecting slander and slanderers, is in full continuity with the combat of past revolutionaries for the defence of the organisation against all the efforts to destroy it. Slander not only has no place in the ranks of the proletariat, but is one of the preferred weapons of the bourgeoisie for discrediting communist organisations and sowing generalised distrust towards the positions they defend. To be convinced of this we only have to recall the campaign of slander against Lenin (accused by the Kerensky government of being an agent of the Kaiser and German imperialism) on the eve of the Russian revolution, with the aim of discrediting the Bolshevik party; and those waged against Trotsky (accused of being an agent of Hitler and of fascism) to discredit any struggle against Stalinism in the 1930s.

The fight against slander is not only a vital necessity for militants and the organisations they belong to. It concerns all the organisations of the communist movement. This is why, when faced with destructive behaviour of this kind, which can only play the game of the bourgeois state, the ICC has always alerted the whole proletarian political milieu: “When such behaviour comes to light, it is the duty of the organisation to take measures not only in defence of its own security, but also in defence of the security of other communist organisations” (‘Report on the structure and functioning of the revolutionary organisation’, International Review 33).

Since the following article was written the ICC has held an Extraordinary International Conference in which the organisation as a whole was able to discuss and take a position on the behaviour of the 'Fraction'. In next month's WR there will be an article on the work of this conference.

Revolutionary organisations have always had to defend themselves against attempts to discredit them (see our article in WR252, "The struggle of revolutionary organisations against provocation and slander"), and the ICC has not been spared this task during its more than 30 years of existence. Today, it is once again the target of a destructive attack by a small number of its own 'discontented' militants, who for months have been carrying out a scorched earth policy within the organisation. They have produced a text titled On dit qu'ils ont la rage! (Note 1) [75], which some of our subscribers have received in the post. This text was also distributed at the ICC's Paris public forum on 16th March, along with another titled New exclusions from the ICC. Our intention here is to make our own position clear, and to counter this flood of lies and slander with the truth. We will return to a more in-depth analysis of the significance of a method which consists in covering a revolutionary organisation in dirt.

The two texts protest against several of the ICC's political positions and attitudes:

• The exclusion of Jonas, "a founding militant of the ICC [whose] only fault was to have been one of the first and most determined to combat, without hesitation or compromise, what we had begun to analyse in recent years (and not only in France) as an alarming turn within the ICC both on the level of its internal functioning and at the level of its general political orientations".

• The supposed 'persecution' directed against a 'fraction' which has emerged within the ICC, and which is the author of the two texts in question: "Today, it is not just an isolated ex-militant who has been treated as unclean and expelled from the ICC; the exclusion of a fraction is in progress. It only remains for the ICC to find a 'credible' justification in order to make public the exclusion of the other members of this fraction, one after the other".

Still according to the authors of these two texts, this situation is the result of a serious crisis within the organisation, which is described as follows: "The ICC is today confronted with a flagrant contradiction between the image it wants to give of a healthy, open, fraternal organisation that encourages debate and (...) the reality of its present refusal of any expression of internal disagreement, along with a regime of constant pressure, rumours, and slanders against its own militants". In fact, the ICC is supposedly in a state of degeneration, as one of the two texts suggests elsewhere: "The ICC's accusation of 'political unworthiness' has as much effect on us as that directed by a degenerating Communist International against Bordiga, Trotsky, and other Bolshevik militants to justify their exclusion".

We are thus confronted with a group of militants, proclaiming themselves an 'internal fraction of the ICC', who openly defend an ex-militant of the ICC, Jonas, whose exclusion we have made public in a communiqu� published in WR252.

The exclusion of Jonas: an individual whose behaviour was that of an agent provocateur

Among the reasons we gave for this exclusion was the following: "One of the most disgusting and intolerable aspects of his behaviour was the veritable campaign that he both led and promoted against a member of the organisation (...) with accusations, behind the scenes and even before people outside the ICC, of manipulating both friends and family, and the central organs, on behalf of the police" (Communiqu� to our readers (Note 2) [76]). The members of the so-called 'fraction' cannot deny this fact which is obvious to all within the ICC, nor have they ever done so any more than Jonas himself. In reality, "the fact that Jonas has refused to meet the ICC to explain his behaviour is in itself an admission of the fact that he is aware of having become a sworn enemy of our organisation, despite the theatrical declarations to his 'comrades' whom in reality (with the exception of those he has succeeded in dragging in his wake) he depicts as either 'cops', inquisitors, or poor manipulated cretins". In deciding to exclude Jonas, we have done no more than adopt the traditions of revolutionary organisations within the working class: "Since the beginning of the workers' movement, its political organissations have always reacted with unbending severity (including with exclusion) against the authors of slanderous accusations against their militants, even when these were in good faith...". (Note 3) [77]

The militants of the 'fraction' recently informed us of their disagreement with the decision to exclude Jonas, which they considered 'iniquitous', and 'demanded' that the ICC give them the right to reply in our press.

It is perfectly possible that the facts with which a militant is charged may be contested either by himself or by others (which is not the case as far as Jonas is concerned), but the press is not the place for the expression and discussion of such disagreements. The organisations of the working class have adopted specific means for dealing with such delicate questions, in commissions mandated to do so. As a last resort, a militant who considers himself unjustly dishonoured can also appeal to a jury of honour drawn from groups of the Communist Left. Needless to say, we have also proposed this possibility to Jonas.

However, we have accepted that the members of the 'fraction' should put forward an opposing viewpoint on the sanction, but with the following proviso: "For it to be productive, the defence of such a viewpoint should make critical reference to our article on 'The struggle of revolutionary organisations against provocation and slander'; in particular it should demonstrate in what way our predecessors in the workers' movement were mistaken, or in what way historical conditions have changed such that their practice in the defence of the organisation is no longer valid today". The 'fraction' has answered the ICC's proposal by distributing, behind our backs, one of the two texts denigrating the ICC (our subscribers informed us of its existence as soon as they received it), while we only discovered the existence of the other at our public forum in Paris.

In reality, Jonas' refusal to defend himself according to the rules and methods in the workers' movement corresponds to the fact that his real concern, above anything else, is that the group that has remained faithful to him should take his defence by covering the ICC in dirt. And this is indeed what the 'friends of Jonas' are doing.

The 'fraction': a parasitic body within the ICC

After trying for months to destroy the organisation from the inside, Jonas' friends have now begun the same destructive attack against the ICC and the contacts around it on the outside. Why are they behaving like this?

This is not the first time that the ICC has confronted organisational problems. We have already given an extensive account of these in our press (Note 4) [78], in particular as regards a tendency to personalise political questions, more especially as the result of the domination by criteria of affinity and individual loyalties, to the detriment of a party spirit, which presupposes the fullest development of militants' individual commitment and responsibility in the service of the collective body that is the organisation.

We have also highlighted the similarities between the problems with which we have been affected and some of the episodes of the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP (Russian Social Democratic Labour Party) in 1903. Faced with the attitude of the Mensheviks, the attacks of which he was the target, and the subjectivity which had infected Martov and his friends, Lenin replied: "The 'minority' regroups within the Party heterogeneous elements united solely by their desire, conscious or not, to maintain the relations of the circle, the forms of organisation that preceded the Party". These elements "naturally raise the standard of revolt against those vital restrictions that the organisation demands, and they erect their spontaneous anarchism into a principle of struggle, wrongly describing this anarchism (�) as a demand in favour of 'tolerance', etc". Later he continues, "When I consider the behaviour of Martov's friends after the Congress (...) I can only say that it is an insane attempt, unworthy of Party members, to tear the Party apart (�) And why? Solely because they are displeased at the composition of the central organs, since objectively this is the only thing that divides us, the subjective considerations (offence, insults, expulsion, pushing aside, wounding, etc) being nothing more than the fruit of wounded pride and a diseased imagination" (Lenin, Account of the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP).

The historical experience of revolutionary organisations shows that questions concerning their functioning are political questions in their own right, and deserve to be treated with the closest attention and the greatest depth. This is why we will return in our press to the analysis of those weaknesses which have made it possible for such difficulties to reappear in our own ranks. For the moment, we will concentrate on this concrete expression of those difficulties.

These comrades' discontent was crystallised by the fact that the ICC's 14th Congress called into question certain orientations that they had defended, both within and outside the old central organ. Contrary to the 2nd Congress of the Russian party, the make-up of the central organ was not in question, since those among them who had previously belonged to the central organ were re-elected by the Congress, which counted precisely on their experience and the confidence which up to then they had deserved.

As the 14th Congress' resolution on its activities demonstrated, the ICC diagnosed the existence of a threat to its organisational tissue and functioning, resulting from the persistence of a circle or clan mentality, an idea to which the comrades were bitterly opposed. The Congress also rejected their previous positions by highlighting the danger of over-optimism in our ranks, leading us to underestimate these difficulties. Moreover, the Congress appointed an investigation commission mandated to shed light on the malfunctioning in the permanent commissions of our central organs, something that these comrades saw as a real threat, with the consequence that they shortly began to do whatever they could to sabotage the investigation commission's work.

Just like the Bolshevik party before its Stalinist degeneration, the ICC does not have a monolithic conception of the organisation. The existence and expression of disagreements within the organisation are not a problem in themselves. The existence of differences is recognised in our statutes as being a part of the necessary process of clarifying political disagreement. What is a problem however, is the fact that since then a certain number of militants in our French section have adopted a policy of systematically violating our organisational rules. Reacting out of "wounded pride", they adopted an anarchistic attitude of violating the decisions of the Congress, of denigration, slanders, bad faith, and outright lies. After several violations of our organisational rules, some of them serious to the point of forcing the organisation to react firmly, these comrades held a series of secret meetings during August 2001, which finally gave birth to a group baptised a 'collective for reflection'.

The organisation has since acquired a copy of the proceedings of one of these secret meetings � something the participants would have liked to avoid. These proceedings demonstrated clearly to the other members of our organisation that these comrades were fully aware that they were fomenting a plot against the organisation, demonstrating a total lack of loyalty towards the ICC, which was expressed in particular through:

• the creation of a strategy to deceive the organisation and impose their own policy on it;

• a putschist, leftist approach, which posed the political problems we were confronting in terms of "recovering the means of functioning" (in other words, control of the central organs);

• the creation of an "iron solidarity" among the participants and against the central organs, clearly turning their backs on the freely accepted discipline of a proletarian organisation.

We have since learnt that at the same time, some of these militants were already establishing a secret correspondence with members of other ICC sections.

After lengthy discussion, notably on the significance of the approach expressed in the notes of the secret meetings, those taking part in or supporting the 'collective' decided to dissolve it, and to rejoin the debate within the organisation's framework. They recognised in particular that a real desire to clarify has nothing to fear from an open debate, where every comrade is called to involve himself completely with a view to strengthening the organisation. They recognised that only after such a debate would it be possible to see whether there existed two irreconcilable political orientations, and if such were the case, whether it were necessary to form a tendency or fraction with a real and responsible content. Moreover, the comrades committed themselves to undertake a profound reflection on the reasons that had led them to behave as enemies of the organisation.

Sadly, a month later some of the members of the late 'collective' turned their backs on their own previous decision and formed a group which they called 'internal fraction of the ICC'; they then began a campaign of systematically and repeatedly violating our organisation's statutes. To cite only a few examples: the use of other comrades' personal addresses; refusal to pay their dues in full; refusal to attend the meeting of the central organs to which they belonged or were invited, under the pretext that the ICC should "first discuss the 'fraction's' status"; threat to publish in public the internal documents of the life of the organisation; refusal to deliver to the organisation a document that circulated among certain militants and apparently contains extremely serious accusations against other militants; refusal to meet with other members of the organisation on the pretext that the organisation had decided to retain the notes (which could be consulted at any moment) from any meeting of this kind. (Note 5) [79] On top of this long list, we now have to add yet another: the theft of the file of addresses of the subscribers to R�volution Internationale by the member of the central organ to whom this responsibility had been entrusted, even before the 'collective's' existence was openly declared.

Faced with such destructive behaviour, and not because of any political differences, the organisation had no other choice than to defend its own survival by adopting the sanctions laid down in the statutes. Without the common respect of those organisational rules which are embodied in our statutes and freely accepted by all, there is no organisation.

This phenomenon of an organisation within the organisation, acting within it like a parasitic and destructive body, is not new either. It existed in the First International in the form of Bakunin's Alliance for Socialist Democracy, against which Engels declared: "It is high time to put an end, once and for all, to the internal struggles which are provoked daily within our Association by the presence of this parasitic body.

These quarrels only serve to waste that energy which should serve to combat the regime of the bourgeoisie. By paralysing the International's activity against the enemies of the working class, the Alliance admirably serves the bourgeoisie and all its governments" (The General Council to all the members of the International).

Contempt for the spirit and the letter of the ICC's statutes

Each time that a group of militants has left our organisation, trying as they did so to cause it the maximum possible damage, they have never failed to accuse the ICC of 'Stalinist' degeneration, and to present themselves as its real continuation. The militants who today have grouped under the banner of the 'internal fraction of the ICC' are no exception. Their declarations claiming that they want to undertake a political struggle within the ICC are nothing but a fig-leaf to hide their constant war against its internal life and its activity.

In fact, it was these comrades' own behaviour that created a growing conviction within our organisation that their proclaimed desire to undertake the work of a real fraction was nothing but a bluff. The problem is that � for a while at least � they are likely to create confusion and distrust outside the organisation, now that they have decided to reveal their idiocies in public. We can only answer whatever doubt they may succeed in sowing by reminding our readers that throughout its existence the ICC has only very rarely excluded a militant, and then only on the grounds of extremely serious faults that endangered the organisation. Never has any militant been excluded for political disagreements. Today, the ICC attributes the greatest possible importance to the clear expression and confrontation of disagreements, on the basis of texts and contributions to its internal bulletins, while all the discussions are summarised in reports at every level of the organisation, to give an overview of the advance of the debate. However, for us as for Rosa Luxemburg, the principle of freedom of criticism within the organisation is accompanied by this non-negotiable precondition: "independent thought is of the greatest importance to us. But this is only possible if � all slanders, lies and insults aside � we welcome gratefully and without distinction of tendency, the opinions of people who may be mistaken, but whose only aim is the health of our Party" (Freedom of criticism and science). (Note 6) [80]

As for the accusation that the ICC is violating its own statutes by refusing to recognise the 'fraction', this is a gross falsehood.

The 'collective' and the 'fraction' that followed it were not formed on the basis of a positive alternative orientation to a position adopted by the organisation, but by a gathering of the 'discontented', who put all their disagreements into a common stew and then tried to give them a semblance of coherence. This is why the premature and totally unprincipled formation of the 'fraction' has nothing to do with what the fractions in the workers' movement represented historically: "Unlike the tendency, which only arises in the case of differences of orientation on circumstantial questions, the fraction is justified by programmatic disagreements which can only end either in the exclusion of the bourgeois position or in the departure of the communist fraction" ("Report on the structure and functioning of the revolutionary organisation", point 10, in International Review n�33). The organisation could not simply ignore this analysis because of the 'fraction's' temper tantrums and its demands for recognition. Nor has it in any way violated its statutes by calling into question the right of organised tendencies or fractions to exist within the ICC. Quite the contrary. It is precisely because, as our statutes say, "the organisation cannot judge when such an organised form should be either constituted or dissolved", that the members of the 'fraction' can meet as they choose to put forward collectively within the organisation whatever positions they choose. Just as for any other comrade of the organisation, the press is also open to them to put forward clearly elaborated minority positions. Indeed, it is for this very reason that we proposed that these militants should use the columns of the International Review to express their disagreements with our conception of the fraction's historical role, as we presented it in an article in n�108 of the Review. Needless to say, they hastened to 'accept' this proposal� by posing a whole series of preconditions which were completely unacceptable to us because they implied that the whole organisation should in fact adopt their positions. This episode is eloquent in demonstrating that the expression of their disagreements with the ICC, in public and before the working class, is the last of their concerns.

Far from adopting an approach aimed at convincing us of their positions through serious political argument, these militants' 'struggle' for the official recognition of their "fraction" has in their eyes justified a series of gross violations of our statutes (to the point where within the ICC these comrades are commonly known as the 'infraction'). They have trampled underfoot one basic principle of our functioning: "the fact that they defend minority positions in no way absolves members of the organisation from any of their responsibilities as militants" (extract from the ICC's statutes). Without this, a united organisation that allows disagreements to exist within it, is impossible. One of their violations � the reduction by 70% of their dues (obligatory for all), in order to cover their own expenses � is a clear demonstration of this. If the organisation were to accept this, then it would be violating its own statutes, and would open the door to a situation where every militant could vary his dues according to his level of agreement with this or that position of the organisation. Such a situation would lead directly to the destruction of the organisation.

The 'friends of Jonas' clearly intend to drag the organisation to its destruction. And against such 'rabid' destructiveness, the ICC is more determined than ever to defend itself and to defend the principles of the workers' movement.

ICC, 21st March 2002

NOTES

(1) We can render this roughly as "They claim we have rabies", a reference to a French saying according to which if you want to kill your dog, you first accuse it of having rabies. (Back) [81]

(2) In the same communiqu�, we also reported that the militant of the ICC accused by Jonas of being "a cop" demanded that a vigorous enquiry into the truth or otherwise of the accusation be conducted, before being allowed to continue to work within our ranks. The enquiry concluded that these accusations were totally without foundation and were indeed slanderous and ill-intentioned. This did not prevent Jonas from continuing to spread his slander. (Back) [82]

(3) Extract from a resolution voted during a discussion in a meeting of the ICC, and for which those members of the 'fraction' who were present also voted. (Back) [83]

(4) See in particular the International Review n�82, and the article on the 11th ICC Congress and the struggle to build the organisation, and the "Theses on parasitism" in International Review n�94. (Back) [84]

(5) A practice on the organisation's part which was all the more justified by the blackmail to which we were subjected by the 'fraction' threatening the public distribution of our internal documents. (Back) [85]

(6) This restriction, apart from the extreme measures of suspending comrades, has taken another form. All the militants who had taken part in the 'activity' of the 'collective' were asked to develop in writing the reasons that they had already given orally for its dissolution. Our organisation's intention was to allow all its members to get to the roots of the incomprehension which had allowed such hostile and destructive behaviour to develop amongst us. Since no such contribution was forthcoming, we decided that the comrades concerned could not write on organisational questions in the internal bulletins, until this condition was satisfied. This is the reality that the 'fraction' now fraudulently travesties as a demand for Maoist-style 'self-criticism'. When the 'fraction' appeared, the organisation changed this requirement, given that the 'fraction' actually defended the late 'collective'. We no longer asked the militants concerned to undertake an in-depth criticism of their destructive behaviour, but only to take an argued position on the facts, either for or against. To this day, and despite the promise published in the "fraction's" own Bulletin n�1, they have failed to do so. This is why the members of the 'fraction' who took part in the meetings of the late 'collective' cannot publish contributions in the ICC's internal bulletins. This has not stopped the organisation itself from taking the decision to publish certain of their texts when it was necessary for one reason or another that the ICC be aware of their content. (Back) [86]

The escalation of barbarism in the Middle East is part of the escalation of military conflicts across the whole planet. Following the September 11th attacks the USA launched a long term crusade against 'terrorism', starting with the war in Afghanistan, an intervention which had been planned well before the destruction of the Twin Towers. This was followed by the increase in tensions between India and Pakistan. Then came the build-up towards a new attack on Iraq, supposedly to make it accept UN weapons inspectors again, or even to depose Saddam. And to emphasise the seriousness of the USA's intent, the Pentagon 'leaked' US plans to use nuclear weapons, if necessary, against anyone else alleged to possess weapons of mass destruction, such as China, Russia, North Korea, Syria, Libya or Iraq.

All this is an expression of the US strategy to maintain its status as the world's sole superpower against any potential rival. It is not Afghanistan or Iraq that threaten the world's most powerful imperialism, nor even Russia or China, despite being nuclear powers themselves, but the great European powers and Japan. Germany has the greatest potential to form an imperialist bloc to rival the USA because of its industrial might and geographical position at the heart of Europe; but it is far from being able to realise that potential today because its military arsenal is puny in comparison to the American armed forces. This has been demonstrated time and again, in Iraq in 1991, in the Balkans and most recently in Afghanistan when the USA was able to go it alone in a military campaign half way round the world. (See 'The real motivations for the US offensive', p.8 and 'Is Britain America's poodle?', p.2 for more in-depth analysis).

Yet each time the US demonstrates its massive power and imposes its 'order' on the world it stirs up new instability and more resentments which can in turn be aggravated and used by its most important rivals. After war in Afghanistan, conflict between India and Pakistan. After new threats against Iraq, increased fighting in Israel and Palestine.

Israel steps up operations against the Palestinian Authority

Palestinian suicide bombings have increased in number and in their horrifying effects. Following the killing of 22 Israelis in Netanya at the start of the Passover holiday, Israel launched its largest military operation for 20 years. This spiral of violence can only be understood as part of the growing imperialist chaos in the world today. When preparing the Afghan war, the US talked of support for a future Palestinian state, much to Israel's irritation, but only to keep the support of the Arab countries. The success of the Afghan operation "has dealt a serious blow to the 'Arab cause', and is therefore a catastrophe for Arafat who has been greatly weakened. This helps Israel to push its Palestinian enemy onto the ropes with the consequence of aggravating the open war that it has been dragging out for years" (International Review 108). Since these words were written (last November) Arafat has found himself confined to a cellar in his headquarters, unable to communicate with the outside world except by Israeli agreement.

This has allowed Israel - acting on behalf of the US - to block the European powers from gaining influence in the Middle East conflict; it openly prevented the delegation of Javier Solana, EU foreign policy spokesman, and Josep Pique, Spanish foreign minister, from meeting Arafat, unless he agreed to leave the area with them. They were allowed to meet Peres, but would get little change from such a firm US ally. Nevertheless, the European powers can only base their attempts to gain some influence, or destabilise this US sphere, on contact with the Palestinians and Arabs. Hence the rearguard actions such as the British, French, Italians and others who have travelled to the West Bank to act as human shields, or the balance of media propaganda in Europe, which is highly critical of Israeli actions.

A dilemma for the USA

The US, Israel's greatest ally, has been mindful of its wider imperialist interests in its approach to the Middle East. It is clear that the USA supports the present Israeli action: Bush has condemned terrorism and supported Israel's right to defend itself. Both Bush and Colin Powell have said that Arafat and the Palestinians brought their situation on themselves.

But the US is also aware that Arab countries' support for further attacks on Iraq will depend on it appearing to make some attempt to restrain Israel and work for 'peace' in the region. So they have also called for Israeli withdrawal and insisted on US envoy Zinni being allowed to meet Arafat, even if the media were kept well away. This is a real dilemma that seems to have caused disagreements within the US administration, and explains the constant changes in the Americans' language about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The perspective of worsening violence

There is no lack of peace initiatives - from the US, from Europe, from Saudi Arabia. These follow the Madrid conference, the Oslo Accords, the historic handshake at Camp David. Leaders of the conflict on both sides, Arafat, Peres and Rabin, have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which is their reward for fomenting war and terrorism for decades. The more they talk of peace the more they drag the population of the region into war.

On the one hand the Palestinians face the bombardment of their homes and refugee camps with the destruction of vital infrastructure, the shooting of anything that moves including children and ambulances. And more recently tanks in their streets, curfew. This is used by the Palestinian bourgeoisie and its backers to feed anti-Jewish hatred and recruit more suicide bombers.

On the other hand the Israeli population is facing murderous attacks by gunmen and suicide bombers, whether dispatched by the Islamic radicals of Hamas or the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, which is directly linked to the Palestinian Authority. This is used by the Israeli bourgeoisie and its backers to feed nationalist anti-Arab propaganda.

In reality it is not one 'people' or the other, but the global imperialist 'game', involving both Israel and the Palestinian Authority as well as their more powerful backers, that is responsible for all this barbarism. And this game will not be stopped by campaigns that advocate solidarity with Israel or with Palestinian nationalism. The only force that can oppose imperialist war is the proletarian class struggle, which owes no allegiance to any nation, and whose ultimate aim is to make the entire planet a homeland for humanity.

WR, 6/4/02

The anti-terrorist crusade that the American ruling class has been carrying out for the past 6 months has been a considerable success.

The USA has installed its military headquarters at the heart of a new strategic region, Central Asia, not only by directly occupying the former military bases of the former USSR republics of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kirghizstan, but also, more recently, by sending US military advisers to Georgia. This country, still run by Gorbachev’s former minister Shevardnaze, is thus totally outside of Russia’s control at the precise moment when Russia had envisaged intervening in Georgia, which has been accused of acting as a base for ‘Chechen terrorists’. We are also beginning to see America’s attempts to take control of Yemen, which occupies a key position between the African and Asian continents via the Gulf of Aden which links the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean.

A military escalation across the entire planet

With its intervention in Afghanistan, the US has reaffirmed its status as the only world cop, demonstrating its ability to intervene in any part of the planet, even in Afghan mountains reputed to be impregnable. After the installation of the provisional government in Kabul, which has been struggling to survive the bloody skirmishes between the factions who make up the fragile anti-Taliban coalition, Operation Anaconda aims to wipe out the last pockets of Taliban/al Qaida resistance in the Afghan mountains. This has involved two months of incessant bombings which have cost the lives of more Afghan civilians and even eight US soldiers. The US has warned that the war is far from over, thus preparing the ground for further murderous raids in the area.

At the same time, the US has taken new steps up the global military escalator. Alongside the 11 March speech by Bush about the “dangers that face America”, a Pentagon report revealed an “emergency plan” for the use of nuclear weapons against other major nuclear powers such as Russia and China, but also against the threat of chemical and biological weapons by Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Syria and Libya. Strengthened by their success in taking control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal (a little publicised benefit of the intervention in Afghanistan), the USA is upping the stakes in its policy of dissuading other powers from opposing it. At the same time it is conditioning its population to live in permanent fear of attack and to accept as ‘normal’ the US of these kinds of weapons in response or even as a deterrent.

US policy in the Middle East

Today, the US is offering a sordid trade to the Arab states as well as to the European powers: the recognition of a Palestinian state in exchange for war against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. This is why we are seeing the return of US emissary Zinni to the Middle East and Vice-President Cheney’s tour around nine ‘friendly’ Arab states and Israel. The USA’s about-face, which took the form of getting a vote in the UN for a resolution which “recognises the right of existence of a Palestinian state alongside Israel”, when it has for years been exercising its veto against similar resolutions, costs it very little and doesn’t change much on the ground. At the same time, the retreat of Israeli tanks from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and the efforts to resume bi-lateral negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, are also the product of pressure from Washington. But they in no way mean that we will see an end to the violent exactions by Israel or to Palestinian suicide bombings, or to Israeli pressure on the Palestinian Authority. On the other hand they do serve to sweep the carpet from under the feet of international protest. This benefits the US as well as Israel. The multiplication of massacres and outrages, such as the killing of an Italian journalist in Ramallah or the firing at ambulances by the Israeli army, only plays into the hands of the European powers, adding fuel to their criticisms of the US and enabling them to present themselves as defenders of the Arab states. With the ‘affair’ of the US-based Mossad agents who didn’t pass on to the US government all the information they had relating to September 11, alongside Colin Powell’s criticisms of Israel’s policy of reprisals and repression, the US is hoping to put pressure on the Sharon government not to be too much of a Lone Ranger.

As for the peace plan presented by Saudi Arabia, the US has expressed a lot or reticence towards it, seeing it as an attempt by regional powers to assert their own claims and squirm away from US tutelage; at the same time the US has remodelled the plan to suit its own purposes. For America, the essential thing is to remain master of the game and leave no space for any of its imperialist rivals.

Getting ready for a new Desert Storm

If the American bourgeoisie is preparing so actively for a new and spectacular operation against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (a mobilisation of 200-300,000 men has been announced), it’s because the latter is a major strategic objective for the US. There are two main reasons for this. First, a new demonstration of force is vital. Through their intervention in Afghanistan, the US has proved that is still a superpower, the only one that can play world cop. It has also demonstrated its capacity to act alone, indicating to the other powers that if they want to keep their slice of the imperialist cake, they can only do this on the coat-tails of the US, playing out the role assigned to them by Washington. However, even though they have been paralysed in this campaign and incapable of offering any alternative, the European tendency to challenge the US has still been more rapid and direct than it was eleven years ago, after the Gulf War. Right after the fall of the Taliban we had the European media campaign about the USA’s Camp X-Ray prisoners being kept in conditions outside the provisions of the Geneva Convention. In mid-February, the French minister of foreign affairs, Vedrine, described the American approach to the struggle against terrorism, which presents it as a struggle between good and evil, as being “simplistic” and based on a “utilitarian unilateralism”. This exasperated the White House and led to the French ambassador being called in. But there have been many other criticisms of US arrogance, notably in Germany (the ‘Green’ minister Fischer saying that “the allies are not satellites”), in Spain and even in Britain (as the European Commissioner for foreign affairs, Chris Patten put it, “true friends don’t lick your boots”). This is why the US is once again banging the drums of war, well aware that the European powers can do little about it. Indeed in the last few weeks there has been a real change of tone: France, which for years has been protesting against the sanctions and military operations that have continued to be directed against Iraq by the US (and Britain), now admits that “it is necessary to act against Saddam Hussein’s policy of re-armament” and participated in the ultimatum concerning the readmission of UN arms inspectors to Iraq. Even if the resistance is stronger in the Arab states (Dick Cheney was faced with having to respond to the argument of the crown prince of Bahrain, who said that “the people who are dying in the street today are not victims of any Iraqi action but of Israeli action”), these states lack the means to stand up against American ambitions for very long.

The second motive is that the USA is animated by a major strategic interest in intervening massively against Iraq. In its offensive aimed at ensuring control of the main strategic zones of the planet, the USA is being pushed to more and more exploit its advantageous position. And here Iraq plays a key role. From now on, "Washington intends no longer to count on allied states which enjoy a certain margin of manoeuvre, but on vassal states which owe it absolute allegiance. The establishment of such a regime in a country like Iraq would be the first step in this direction" (from the newspaper Al Hayat published in London; cited by Courrier International of 14 March). In the perspective of anchoring its presence and influence in Central Asia right up to the gates of China, Russia and the Indian sub-continent, America is seeking to establish a single and continuous geostrategic sphere of influence: "the strengthening of hegemony over Iraq and its transformation into an axis of US influence is a matter of the first importance, because Iraq is the junction of the two areas: the ‘far east’ of the Arab world, it is also a look-out post onto Central Asia. On this chessboard, states and their frontiers, their peoples, their destinies, are nothing but pawns. And there is only one player (op cit). We should add that from Iraq it is also possible to keep a close watch over the neighbouring states which are least reliable or most threatened by instability: Iran and Syria on the one hand, Jordan and Turkey on the other.

Today, contrary to 1991, the US is seeking to exert a direct control over Iraq and the Baath party, which demands the elimination of Saddam Hussein, especially because today there is no longer the same threat of Iraq breaking up: the Kurdish and Shiite minorities have become too weak to play a major role. Again this is unlike 1991, when Bush Senior cynically pushed these minorities to rebel, the better to leave them to the mercy of the Republican Guard � the very part of the Iraqi army that the Americans allowed to survive so it could carry out its dirty work.

At the time of the Gulf war, we showed that the operation against Iraq was just a pretext which was really aimed at halting the dynamic towards the dissolution of the western bloc; in particular, that it was mainly directed against the European powers, to prevent them from freely pursuing their own imperialist agendas. Today, the dominant trend in imperialism all over the world is ‘every man for himself’, and this is being aggravated by the phenomena of decomposition (terrorism, exacerbated nationalism). If it is to preserve its imperialist dominion, the US gendarme has only one resort: massive force directed at the least challenge to its authority, no matter where it comes from. Twelve years ago we were promised a new world order of peace. Every day since then has proved this to be a lie. The multiplication of US operations aimed at ‘restoring order’ all over the world really demonstrates that capitalism as a whole can offer us nothing more than ever-widening military chaos and barbarism.

ED, 22/3/02.

This article is adapted from Revolution Internationale No 322, publication of the ICC in France. Since it was written there have been several shifts in the situation. For the most recent developments see the lead article of this issue [87].

The recent election in Zimbabwe was, according to a Guardian editorial (14/3/2) a "crime against the people". The election was "thoroughly fixed, fiddled, manipulated, and comprehensively stolen". Surveying the scene the editorial-writer found that "The evidence of massive fraud, rooted in intimidation and skulduggery of every kind, was to be found in every province, every township and every polling station. In short, the whole thing stinks."

There was indeed a lot of evidence for this fraud. There was the intimidation by the army, people forced to vote for the government in postal ballots, the reduction of polling stations in the areas where the opposition MDC had the strongest presence, rural no-go areas for the MDC, voting procedures made deliberately laborious with queues of 20 or 30 hours in the biggest towns, ballot boxes already stuffed with votes before they arrived in polling stations, people just removed from the electoral roll, the last-minute appearance of a second voters' list with an extra 400,000 names on it: all these were cited by those who condemned the election as not being 'free and fair'.

On the other hand, there were those, not just in Africa, who thought that the election was 'legitimate', that criticisms of it sprang from 'colonialist' interests, or were at least tinged with hypocrisy.

The Mugabe government was foremost in describing the colonialist manoeuvres of the British government and its allies in trying to 'destabilise' Zimbabwe. That the British High Commissioner had previously played a sinister role in Belgrade was grist to the 'anti-imperialist' mill. It was claimed that Britain had set up bases in Zambia, Botswana and Mozambique in preparation for an invasion. A Zimbabwean paper reported that the MDC had requested British military intervention if it lost the election.

Meanwhile, some commentators gave examples of other recent elections, some of which had been 'rigged', and others that were at least 'flawed', saying how two-faced it was to single out Zimbabwe for the full glare of publicity. Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Malawi, the Republic of the Congo, Montenegro, Ukraine, Russia, Slovakia and Italy have been among the countries cited for varying degrees of electoral irregularity. In addition, the example of George W Bush's election to the US presidency has often been mentioned, as well as the complete absence of elections in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.

The situation facing the mass of Zimbabweans

With all this concern about elections there has been little space left in the media for reporting what life in Zimbabwe is like. Inflation is between 100-120%, unemployment is at 60% (80% for young people), life expectancy has gone down 10 years during the last decade, and 25% of adults have HIV/AIDS. These are the things that concern people in Zimbabwe, along with the terror of state repression, Zimbabwe's participation in the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the hunger that comes from extensive food shortages. Until recently Zimbabwe was a net food exporter, now nearly half its domestic needs have to be imported. After the election it was reported that Zimbabwe "plans to import huge amounts of food to stave off starvation caused by drought and agricultural chaos. It wants 200,000 tonnes of corn from Kenya, Brazil and Argentina" (Guardian, 23/3/02).

In government for the last 22 years, ZANU-PF have presided over a deterioration in the living standards of the working class and other exploited strata. Their land policy - redistributing white-owned farms to Mugabe's cronies, 'war veterans' and others who want to become small proprietors - has not so far benefited a hungry population, nor is there any prospect that it will in the future.

As for the 'alternative' of the MDC, it has gradually evolved since it was founded by unions in 1999. In accordance with the demands of the IMF and the World Bank, it is committed to privatisation and similar 'free market' policies. There is no evidence that such an approach has ever worked in favour of the exploited or oppressed. In Zimbabwe, as everywhere else in the world, bourgeois democracy means the continuing domination of the same exploiting ruling class. When Jack Straw said that "Zimbabweans have been denied their fundamental right to choose by whom they are governed" (Guardian, 15/3/02) he was showing what 'democratic rights' mean in decadent capitalist society. ZANU-PF and the MDC have expressed many violent differences of view, but they are united in their desire to maintain capitalist exploitation and the order of the state.

The poison of democracy

Although the bourgeoisie can't offer any genuine improvements in the conditions of life of the non-exploiting population, through its democratic campaigns it tries to convince us that we have common interests with our rulers. They have all their armaments, but we are told that the power of the ballot box is the greatest force on earth. In one sense that is close to the truth, for the mystification of democracy is one of the most powerful weapons that capitalism has.

A week before the election the Daily News in Zimbabwe declared that "It is now left to Zimbabweans themselves to deliver themselves from evil. And their only weapon is their vote." In a few short phrases the classes in society, with their different, opposing interests, are reduced to a mass of atomised individuals, fodder for the parties of the bourgeoisie in its democratic system.

The opposition of the MDC fed on widespread discontent throughout the country. It called itself the Movement for Democratic Change, but while it offered lots of democratic rhetoric it could not offer any change in the situation for those who live in Zimbabwe. Before the election MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai said of ZANU-PF: "They may want to arrest me, and at worst kill me, but they will never destroy the spirit of the people to reclaim their power". Elsewhere Trevor Ncube, publisher of a weekly newspaper insisted that "the people's passion and craving for change is palpable." These oppositionists respond to the discontent and unrest in Zimbabwe, but only with propaganda for a capitalist system that has proved itself bankrupt. Talk of the indestructible "spirit of the people" and "the people's passion" is not going to keep hunger at bay nor miraculously dissolve the state's repressive apparatus.

It is worth adding that the left-wing Socialist Workers Party has a sister organisation in Zimbabwe, and an MP who is part of the MDC. They say that "Only struggle can win real freedom" (Socialist Worker 16/3/02), but before the election result was known thought that "If Mugabe declares he has won and gets away with it, most workers will feel crushed, intimidated and beaten". If workers feel 'beaten' it's because they swallowed the illusions that the SWP sowed in the democratic farce.

Capitalism's democratic campaign

It's not just in Zimbabwe that capitalism's democratic campaign is important. Just as with the first post-apartheid election in South Africa, where lengthy queues were shown as evidence of people's gratitude for the opportunity to vote, the Zimbabwean election has been used as an argument against growing 'cynicism' about the democratic process in Europe.

A typical article, from Hugo Young in the Guardian (12/3/02), headlined "The people of Zimbabwe have put us all to shame", praises the commitment to democracy shown by people in Zimbabwe. The election "sets an example to all democrats". The political "literacy" of the people "produces an understanding of what democracy means, and an extraordinary willingness to fight for it against obstacles which, in Europe, could not be contemplated". He says there are "universal values and ... democracy is one of them". He talks of the betrayal of "people who in the last few weeks have suffered more for the cause of democratic representation than any western politician has ever had to do".

This is an appeal for people to value and treasure the 'democratic way of life'. By criticising Mugabe's 'cheating' the bourgeoisie elsewhere implies that they are custodians of systems that are 'free and fair'. In reality all the various capitalist parties have their differences of emphasis, but when it comes down to basics - the defence of the interests of the bourgeoisie through state capitalism, imperialism and the repression of the working class - they are united in their commitment to the continuation of the capitalist mode of production. All capitalism's elections are 'rigged' - in ways that are more or less sophisticated - because democracy is an integral part of the bourgeoisie's class dictatorship.

Car, 4/4/02.

ICC Introduction

We are publishing the platform of one of the new groups in Russia, which is moving towards the positions of the communist left. The ICU originated as the Kirov Marxist group in 1997 following a strike by teachers in that city. Initially the group attempted to work with the official Communist Party, later with various leftist groups, but more and more found that such activity was a “useless waste of time”. The current title of their paper in Russia is World Revolution.

The platform is followed by extracts from a letter we sent in response, focussing on the contradiction we see between the fundamentally internationalist approach of the ICU text and the concessions to the ideology of ‘national liberation’ that are contained within it. This is a problem for a number of the new Russian groups and we will be returning to it in other articles.

International Communist Union: Our platform

The ICU’s conception of the world and theoretical basis is Marxism.

The historical movement from primitive communism to integral communism is a process that forms the material conditions for the construction of a world communist society. The construction of such a society will lead not to the end of history but to the beginning of the conscious history of humanity.

The present capitalist mode of production is distinct from all preceding modes of production because of its worldwide, generalised character and is characterised by the exacerbation of class contradictions. At the same time capitalism forms the conditions for the construction of communism. Its development necessarily leads to the development of its contradictions and engenders, reinforces and develops the social force whose mission is the destruction of the capitalist system and the construction of communism - the proletariat. The limit of capital is capital itself.

During the course of its development modern capitalism advances more and more destructive means for solving its contradictions. Two world wars have carried off 60 million human lives. The new world war, the military blocs for which are beginning to form today, will not only bring far greater calamities, but will threaten the very existence of humanity. In this situation there is only one alternative: socialism or barbarism, the world communist revolution or the destruction of humanity.

The Paris Commune of 1871 was the first attempt by the proletariat to carry out this revolution in an epoch when the conditions for it were insufficiently mature. The October revolution of 1917 in Russia was the first step of the authentic world communist revolution towards an international revolutionary wave, which put an end to the first imperialist war. The defeat of this revolutionary wave, notably in Germany 1919-23, condemned the revolution in Russia to isolation and rapid degeneration. Stalinism became the gravedigger of the October revolution.

The statified regimes which saw the light of day under the name of ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’ in the USSR, eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea etc. were and remain capitalist countries, which the ruling ideology has painted with ‘marxist’ rhetoric drawn from the communist programme, the better to hide their bourgeois nature.

Where there is wage labour, there is capital.

Our principles

1. We reject any possibility of building socialist society within national boundaries. In continuity with the traditions of the communist movement, we consider that the task of the social liberation of the working class and of all the toilers is the work of the united world working class, and this solution is only possible in the context of a world proletarian revolution. Faced with the globalisation of the world capitalist economy, the working class must fight not for the narrow interests of this or that state but for the unification of the revolutionary struggle of the workers of all countries under the leadership of the international communist party. The goal of the communists’ struggle is not the well being of this or that nation and its state, but the utilisation of the productive forces created by capitalism in order to build a world classless society - communism. The creation of the conditions for communism demands the overturning of capitalist social relations based on wage labour, commodity production and national frontiers. It demands the creation of a world community whose activity will be geared towards the full satisfaction of human needs.

2. The instrument for building such a society is the worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat through which the working class will create the conditions for the withering away of classes and the state.

3. The revolutionary political organisation is the vanguard of the proletariat, the active factor in the propagation of class consciousness within the proletariat. Its role consists in organising the diverse forms of working class struggle into a unified revolutionary struggle. What distinguishes the communists is the awareness that they stand for the common class interests of the proletariat and this is expressed in their actions. They are the most consistent organised force given the necessity for the communist movement to have a truly worldwide and centralised leadership.

4. During the course of the 20th century the numerous imperialist wars which have been part of the unremitting struggle between states large and small for the conquest or maintenance of influence in the international arena have more and more brought humanity nothing but death and destruction. The working class can only respond to them through its international solidarity and the struggle against the bourgeoisie in all countries.

5. At the same time a number of revolutionary wars and national liberation struggles have made a considerable contribution to human progress, leading to the independent development of young states and developing national industry and a growing proletariat. However the process of the globalisation of the world economy has considerably changed this process. No country in the world can develop its economy on its own without integrating itself into the process of globalisation. This is why wars of liberation can no longer lead to national independence for any people, and why national liberation movements have become mere puppets of this or that imperialist grouping. In these conditions, there is more truth than ever in the principle that the recognition of the right of nations to self-determination, however just it may be, must not result in the subordination of this or that national detachment of the working class to ‘its own’ bourgeoisie. This right must be used by the revolutionary workers of the imperialist states to wage a struggle against the stifling of the small exploited nations by their own capitalism. The slogan of the working class in all nations large and small is that the main enemy is its own national capital, that victory is only possible through the unity of the workers of all nationalities.

6. All nationalist ideology, such as national ‘independence’ or ‘autonomy’, whatever the pretext - ethnic, historical, religious, etc, is a real poison for the workers. Having the aim of getting the workers to take the side of this or that faction of the bourgeoisie, it sets workers from different nations against each other, leading to their mutual extermination for the wars and ambitions of their exploiters.

7. All factions of the bourgeoisie are equally reactionary. To defend itself from revolutionary attack, the bourgeoisie always resorts to social democratic and leftist factions as the last ramparts of the state. All the so-called ‘working class’, ‘socialist’ or ‘Communist’ parties, the leftist organisations (the Trotskyists, Maoists and anarchists) constitute the left wing of the political apparatus of capital. Any tactic of ‘popular fronts’, by mixing up the interests of the proletariat with those of one or another bourgeois faction, can only serve to obstruct and deform the proletarian struggle.

8. Terrorism is in no sense a means of struggle for the working class. It is the expression of social strata that have no historical future. It always provides a favourable terrain for the manipulations of the bourgeoisie. By advocating secret actions by an insignificant minority, it stands in total contradiction with class violence, which is born out of the massive, conscious and organised actions of the proletariat.

Our historical antecedents

The positions of revolutionary organisations and their activity are the product of the past experience of the working class and the lessons drawn from it. The ICU lays claim to the consistent contributions to this cause by the Communist League of Marx and Engels (1847-1852), the three Internationals (the International Workingmen’s Association, 1864-1872, the Socialist International, 1889-1914, and the Communist International, 1919-24), as well as the left fractions which detached themselves from the Third International in 1920-30 during the course of its degeneration.

ICC reply

Dear comrades,

We are very glad to have made contact with your group and are eager to know more about its history, the discussions within it, the content of its publications, and so on. When we first saw the platform on the left-dis website it was obvious to us that we have much in common. We also salute your effort to respond to the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers from an internationalist standpoint. Concerning the platform, there seems to be a high level of agreement with a number of key positions: the perspective of socialism or barbarism, the capitalist nature of the Stalinist regimes, recognition of the proletarian character of the Russian revolution of 1917, opposition to imperialist war and all fronts with the bourgeoisie, including its left wing. What we’re less sure about is whether you agree with the ICC on the historical framework which gives substance and coherence to many of these positions: the conception that capitalism has, since 1914, been a decadent, declining social system.

To give a precise illustration of the problem we are raising: in your statement you argue against ‘fronts’ with the bourgeoisie on the grounds that all bourgeois factions are equally reactionary. And we agree. But this position has not always been valid for marxists. If capitalism today is a decadent system, i.e. one in which the social relations have become a permanent fetter on the productive forces and thus on human progress, it has, like previous forms of class exploitation, also known an ascendant period when it represented progress in relation to the previous mode of production. This is why Marx did support certain fractions of the bourgeoisie, whether the northern capitalists against the southern slaveholders in the American civil war, the Risorgimento movement in Italy for national unification against the old feudal classes, and so on. This support was based on the understanding that capitalism had not yet exhausted its historical mission and that the conditions for the world communist revolution had not yet fully matured.

Now, although you seem to recognise this latter point when you say that the Paris Commune was “the first attempt of the proletariat to bring about the revolution in an epoch in which conditions for this revolution were not quite mature”, the consequences of not having a clear and consistent view of the general historical period become explicit when you come to the national question.

In your view, national struggles have been a source of considerable progress, and the demand for national self-determination still has validity, if only for the workers of the more powerful capitalist countries in relation to the countries oppressed by their own imperialism. You then appear to argue that national struggles have lost their progressive character since the advent of “globalisation”. These statements demand a number of comments on our part.

Our position on the decadence of capitalism is not our own invention. Based on the fundamentals of the historical materialist method (in particular when Marx talks about “epochs of social revolution” in his Preface to the Critique of Political Economy), it was concretised for the majority of revolutionary marxists by the outbreak of the first world war, which showed that capitalism had already “globalised” itself to the point where it could no longer overcome its inner contradictions except through imperialist war and self-cannibalisation. This was the position of the Communist International at its founding congress, although the CI was not able to draw all the consequences for this as regards the national question: the theses of the second congress still saw a ‘revolutionary’ role of some kind for the bourgeoisie of the colonial regimes. But the left fractions of the CI were later on able to take this analysis to its conclusions, particularly following the disastrous results of the CI’s policies during the revolutionary wave of 1917-27. For the Italian left in the 1930s, for example, the experience of China in 1927 was decisive. It showed that all factions of the bourgeoisie, no matter how ‘anti-imperialist’ they claimed to be, were equally counter-revolutionary, equally compelled to massacre the proletariat when it struggled for its own interests, as in the Shanghai uprising of 1927. For the Italian left this experience proved that the theses on the national question from the second congress had to be rejected. Moreover, this was a confirmation of the correctness of Rosa Luxemburg’s views on the national question as against those of Lenin: for Luxemburg, it had already become clear during the first world war that all states were inevitably part of the world imperialist system. Supporting one nation against another always meant supporting one imperialist constellation against another, and all the national liberation wars of the 20s century have reinforced this view. What the Italian left made absolutely explicit was that this also applied to colonial bourgeoisies, to capitalist factions seeking to establish a new ‘independent’ state: they could only hope to attain their ends by subordinating themselves to the imperialist powers which had already divided up the planet. As you say in your platform, the 20th century has been one of incessant imperialist wars for the domination of the planet: for us, this is both the surest confirmation that capitalism is a senile and reactionary world order, and that all forms of ‘national’ struggle are entirely integrated into the global imperialist game.

Luxemburg also made a very rigorous critique of the slogan of ‘national self-determination’ even before the first world war, arguing that it was an illusion of bourgeois democracy in any capitalist state, it is not the ‘people’ or the ‘nation’ who are ‘self-determined’ but the capitalist class alone. Marx and Engels made no secret of the fact that when they called for national independence, it was to further and support the development of the capitalist mode of production in a period in which capitalism still had a progressive role to play. But even in the ascendant epoch the reality of capitalist class rule could not be abolished by any degree of formal ‘democracy’. In the decadent epoch, national liberation, national self-determination, national independence - these are all aspects of nationalist ideology which as you rightly say is “poison for the proletariat”.

The ICC decided, earlier this year, to change the 15th Congress of its French section into an Extraordinary International Conference.

The fundamental task of this conference was to face up to an organisational crisis the most serious in the history of the ICC that emerged suddenly right after its 14th International Congress in April 2001.

Our readers will have read in our press that an ex-militant, Jonas, has been excluded from the ICC for political unworthiness, consisting, amongst other things, of destroying the fabric of the organisation by circulating in a persistent and underhand way calumny and rumours about comrades of the organisation in order to cause disruptions in several sections of the ICC.

This individual regrouped around him, largely on the basis of these rumours, other militants who were mobilised into an all-out war on the organisation, attempting to unravel its centralised statutory principles of functioning, threatening the very existence of the ICC.

This clique directed by Jonas proclaimed itself a ‘fraction’, even though it had been totally incapable of putting forward the least programmatic divergence justifying such a title. The only ‘principle’ of these elements was destructive hate and an insatiable thirst for vengeance. Because they were put in a minority, and were themselves discredited by being incapable of developing the least political argumentation, their actions consisted of plotting against the central organ of the ICC through secret meetings, then systematically sabotaging the activity of the organisation through manoeuvres, provocations, campaigns of calumny, blackmail and the threat to spread their calumnies to the outside, as testified by the content of their infamous ‘internal bulletins’ which are now sent to certain groups and sympathisers of the communist left.

After a year of destructive behaviour trying to destabilise the organisation (as a member of the ‘fraction’ said explicitly in a secret meeting: ‘we must destabilise them’) and pushing militants to rebellion against the central organs of the ICC, the clique of Jonas carried out its last, most miserable act against the organisation. It refused to attend the International Conference unless the organisation recognised this ‘fraction’ in writing and withdrew the sanctions that it had taken in conformity with its statutes (notably the exclusion of Jonas). Faced with this situation, all the delegations of the ICC, even though ready to hear the appeal of these elements (to this effect, the delegations had formed an international commission of appeal on the eve of the Conference composed of militants of several ICC sections so that the four Parisian members of the ‘fraction’ could present their arguments) had no alternative but to recognise that these elements had put themselves outside the organisation. Faced with their refusal to defend themselves in front of the conference and to make an appeal in front of the commission, the ICC recognised their desertion and could no longer consider them as members of the organisation.

The Conference also condemned unanimously the loutish methods used by the Jonas clique to ‘kidnap’ at the airport two delegates of the Mexican section, members of the ‘fraction’, coming to the Conference to defend their positions (these delegates were complicit in their own ‘disappearance’). While the ICC had paid their airplane tickets so they could come to the Conference to defend the positions of the ‘fraction’, these two Mexican delegates were taken away by two Parisian members of the ‘fraction’ preventing them from attending the Conference. In reply to our protests and our demand to be reimbursed for the tickets if the Mexican delegates (who had received a mandate of their section) did not attend the Conference, one of the two Parisian members of the ‘fraction’ in their ‘welcoming committee’ (an ex-member of the central organ of the ICC) laughed in our face: ‘that’s your problem!’. What incredible cynicism! Faced with the hijacking of the funds of the organisation and the refusal to reimburse the ICC for the two tickets, typical of the gangster methods used by the Jonas clique, all the militants of the ICC expressed their deep indignation by adopting a resolution condemning this behaviour. These methods, which are quite comparable to those of the Chenier Tendency (who stole the material of the organisation in 1981), convinced those last comrades still hesitant about the parasitic and anti-proletarian nature of this pseudo-fraction.

The conference was therefore confronted with two necessities. The first and most pressing need was to continue to defend the ICC and its organisational principles in the most rigorous and intransigent way against the repeated attacks and provocations of this parasitic grouping. The second was to draw the profound lessons of these events: what weaknesses of the organisation allowed the parasitic grouping, instigated by Jonas, to appear and develop so rapidly and destructively? It is the second aspect that the present article proposes to develop. (For the first aspect our readers can refer to the article ‘A parasitic attack aimed at discrediting the ICC [90]’ published on our website).

The defence and construction of a revolutionary organisation is a permanent combat

According to bourgeois propaganda revolutionary organisations of the proletariat are doomed to failure since the communist principles that assure their cohesion proletarian solidarity and mutual confidence inevitably come into conflict with the naturally selfish, competitive motivations of the individuals that compose them. Revolutionary organisations, according to this vision, can only be mirror images of the corruption that reigns in the political parties of the bourgeoisie. The latter, not only incessantly propagates the ideology of ‘everyman for himself’ it also gives this theory a practical support through open repression, when necessary, and by fomenting disunity within revolutionary organisations by directly or indirectly encouraging the work of agents provocateurs, adventurers and parasites.

The exploited nature of the working class makes its revolutionary organisations extremely vulnerable to the destructive pressures of bourgeois society. The construction of revolutionary organisations has always required a permanent effort, a constant vigilance, a critical and self-critical attitude without which they run the risk of being destroyed and losing years of effort, thus setting back the revolutionary process.

The struggle of the Marxists in the First International for centralisation against the destructive intrigues of Bakunin in 1872, the struggle of Lenin and the Bolsheviks against the organisational opportunism and ‘landlord anarchism’ of the Mensheviks in 1903, the struggle of the communist left against the degenerating 3rd International in the twenties and thirties, have all prefigured the series of struggles that the ICC has waged since its inception for the internal application of centralised rules of functioning against the circle spirit and clannism, against individualism and petit-bourgeois democratism.

In the same spirit the ICC, contrary to other groups of the communist left who have also been shaken by splits, has always revealed its internal problems so that the revolutionary movement can draw the lessons and strengthen the whole of the proletarian political milieu. We are perfectly aware that groups and elements of the parasitic milieu will descend like vultures on this organisational crisis of the ICC to feed their malicious gossip about the supposed ‘Stalinist degeneration’ of our organisation. Nevertheless, the ICC must continue to draw the lessons of each crisis that it experiences in order to reinforce itself politically.

Given the difficulty of constructing revolutionary organisations, the idea that they are immunised against opportunist degeneration, whether at the programmatic or organisational level, and that they can develop peacefully and without clashes, is particularly dangerous.

It was precisely the development of such an illusion within the ICC, the idea that henceforth the organisation could construct itself without major political combats within it, that the International Conference stigmatised. Thus the ICC showed a certain naivete and a lack of vigilance faced with the persistence of the circle spirit. We had the illusion that this weakness, coming from the historic circumstances of the foundation of the ICC (marked by the weight of petit-bourgeois ‘68ism’ and its leftist and anarchist components) had been eradicated for ever thanks to its combat of 1993-95.

This illusion not only revealed an amnesia about the history of the Marxist movement, but also a loss of sight of the extremely difficult conditions facing the ICC in the present period of the social decomposition of capitalism.

In fact one of the factors which crystallised the recent crisis of the ICC was a discussion on confidence and solidarity within the organisation which, from the beginning, had been oriented by the majority of the members of the International Secretariat (the permanent commission of the central organ) with a different method to that used previously by the ICC in all its debates. From the opening of this discussion, these members of the International Secretariat began a real campaign aimed at discrediting minority comrades in order to put them ‘outside the ICC’ (according to the actual words of a member of the so-called fraction). They began to introduce a monolithic conception within the central organ, totally foreign to the principles of the ICC, even to the extent of opposing the publication in the internal bulletins of contributions of comrades having divergences with the policy of the majority of the International Secretariat. Faced with this serious deviation, that risked leading to the abandonment of the principles of functioning of the ICC and to an organisational degeneration, the central organ of the ICC took the decision, ratified at the 14th Congress of the ICC, to nominate an Investigation Commission charged with clarifying the disfunctioning within its International Secretariat.

Faced with the disavowal of the policy of the International Secretriat Jonas immediately announced his resignation presenting himself as a victim ‘of an enterprise of demolition of the organisation’. According to Jonas, if the International Secretariat (of which he was a member) was disavowed in this way by the central organ of the ICC, then this could only be the work of a ‘cop’. Just after his resignation, Jonas (who didn’t have the courage to come to the 14th Congress of the ICC to defend his positions) immediately pushed seven of the comrades closest to him to meet secretly to form a ‘fraction’. He said to a delegation of the IB: ‘Since we are no longer in charge, the ICC is lost’. The vision of Jonas (of being ‘in charge’) is not the ICC conception of the role of the central organs. This vision, that of bourgeois cliques, little bureaucrats, adventurers and Stalinists cannot tolerate the least divergence, and, bereft of arguments, uses the method of calumny to create disruption first within the organisation and now within the proletarian political milieu too.

Faced with manoeuvres of Jonas and his supporters, aiming to stifle any divergence in the name of ‘confidence’ toward the majority of the International Secretariat (i.e. calling on the ICC to have a blind, unprincipled faith in it) the debate on confidence and solidarity had to be reoriented by the central organ just after the 14th Congress of the ICC, using an historical and theoretical framework that the clique of Jonas continuously denigrated without - as the Extraordinary Conference noted - any political argumentation. This orientation allowed the Conference to begin to develop a serious and argumented debate, within which all the militants without exception could defend their position, expressing their doubts or disagreements in a constructive and fraternal spirit. Clarifying disagreements with the sole objective of reinforcing the organisation as a unified and thus centralised political body, replaced the goal of denigrating comrades who didn’t share one’s point of view.

The weight of democratic ideology

Among the other weaknesses in which Jonas and his clique found a prop, were not only the weight of the circle spirit but also the pressure of democratist ideology on the organisation. In the ICC, democratism was recently manifested through an opportunist tendency to put in question our principles of centralisation, especially through the idea that confidence can only develop within the organisation in inverse proportion to its centralisation. Once the ICC became conscious of the danger of liquidating our principles of centralisation under the weight of democratic ideology, the Jonas clan persisted in the defence of this revisionist version and took it to its pitiful, liquidationist, conclusion. Thus on the 31 January the so-called fraction addressed a declaration to all the militants of the ICC (published in the fraction’s internal bulletin) renouncing all loyalty to the ICC. In place of a centralised debate, clearly posing the divergences while respecting the statutes of the ICC, this clique demanded that the militants of the ICC take up its own litany of insults and calumnies against the central organs of the ICC and some of its members. In other words the clan of the friends of Jonas demanded a whole series of bourgeois rights: the right to spread the worst lies and calumnies against militants and against the central organs in the name of ‘freedom of expression’, the right to destabilise the organisation by plotting behind its back, the right to flout all the rules of functioning of the ICC, the right to only pay 30% of their dues, the right to desert meetings they should attend, the right to steal address lists of subscribers, the right to steal the notes of the central organs to falsify them, the right to steal money from the ICC and to sequest two delegates of the Mexican section to prevent them attending the Conference (out of fear that it would convince them). All this in the name of the ‘freedom of expression’; in fact the freedom to sabotage and destroy! The Conference clearly revealed that the manoeuvres of Jonas had destroyed militants by transforming them into a gang of impostors and forgers. These militants were naive enough to think that by baptising themselves a ‘fraction’, they would be able to mask their petit-bourgeois democratism and their destructive individualism against our principles of centralisation. In other words the clan of the friends of Jonas followed the slogan of the students of May 68: it took its desires for reality. And when the ICC defended itself, did not let itself be destroyed by their putschist methods, and applied the sanctions called for in the statutes, it was denounced in an hysterical way as a degenerate, Stalinist sect, manipulated by a ‘cop’ and ‘Torquemadas’ (according to Jonas’ own words!) This was the sordid motor force behind the formation of this pseudo-fraction. It was nothing other than the weapon of citizen Jonas against the proletarian political milieu: the most shameful and dangerous clan in the whole history of the ICC.

The analysis of this clan’s ideological and political roots was the task set by the Extraordinary Conference of the ICC. The debates at this conference were very rich and the manner of its conduct underlined that, contrary to the calumnies of the ‘fraction’ and the whole anti-ICC parasitic milieu, our organisation, far from stifling divergences, exhorted all the militants to assume their responsibility and express their disagreements. The political depth and passion which animated the debates of this Conference showed the determination of the ICC to mobilise itself for the defence of the organisation and its principles. Finally the ICC recognised the gravity of the stakes for the proletarian political milieu contained in the methods of the clique of Jonas (which is trying to infiltrate the IBRP in order to drag it into its policy of destroying the ICC).

Even though the ICC, throughout its history, has experienced several splits, it has been able to resist their negative effects. Despite numerical losses, the ICC has been able to maintain and politically reinforce an international centralised organisation, comprising sections in fourteen countries. Even though this crisis has been the most serious in the history of the ICC the manoeuvres of the Jonas clique failed to destroy our sections in the USA and Mexico (just as the Chenier Tendency, in the 1981 crisis, failed to destroy the section of the ICC in Britain). The ICC has been able to limit the damage and our numerical losses have been relatively minor in relation to the ambitions of the Jonas ‘fraction’. We have lost some militants but we have saved the organisation and its principles.

The Conference was deeply dismayed at the destructive and suicidal folly into which Jonas had dragged some ICC militants. Militants who were comrades of struggle for many years, in particular one who had always, up till then, shown the greatest loyalty toward the ICC, the greatest confidence toward the central organ and an exemplary determination in the different struggles for the defence and construction of the organisation. The ICC saved two comrades who had participated actively in the secret meetings of the ‘collective’ (which became the ‘fraction’). Becoming conscious of the particularly destructive and suicidal character of their trajectory, these two comrades reported in detail to the Investigation Commission how they were dragged into this sordid adventure. Two other militants that Jonas presented as ‘centrists’ and who had also participated in the secret meetings of the ‘collective’ preferred to resign rather than join the ‘fraction’ and follow the miserable course of this parasitic regroupment.

We are fully conscious that the ICC’s achievement is modest faced with the capitalist hostility that surrounds us. But that in no way diminishes the work of the defence of the organisation realised by the recent Extraordinary Conference which contained not only important lessons for the reinforcement of the ICC, but also for the development of a wider debate in the proletarian political milieu on the dangers which threaten revolutionary organisations. The whole of the milieu must be capable of resisting the destructive forces of bourgeois society, the opportunist temptation and the sirens of parasitism, today and in the period to come.

ICC.

19.04.02

Le Pen’s score in the first round of the presidential elections was an event of historic and international proportions. For the first time, the Front National is posing a threat to French ‘democracy’.

Under the slogan of ‘shame’, a huge anti-Le Pen campaign was unleashed not only throughout France, but internationally as well. Since the results were announced there have been enormous demonstrations, consisting especially of young people, school and college students, determined to ‘bar the way to fascism’. All the forces of the left - the Communist and Socialist parties, anti-racist groups, trade unions etc have been actively organising the protests: on May Day they brought a million people onto the streets. Meanwhile an even broader political spectrum has been calling on everyone to use their vote in the second round to vote for Chirac in order to keep out Le Pen. The slogan of the young demonstrators has been ‘vote for the crook, not the fascist’.

In a future issue of this paper we will look at some of the factors which led to this unexpected result. But even if Le Pen’s victory shows the difficulties the French bourgeoisie has in controlling its own electoral process, the ruling class has certainly succeeded in using this event to mount a new attack on working class consciousness. It has, in short, put all its energies into trying to convince us that democracy is our most precious gift, and that we have no choice but to mobilise massively to defend it.

All the factions of the bourgeoisie are trying to line up the workers behind the false alternative of democracy or fascism. They are trying to build a holy national union against Le Pen, and so prevent the working class from fighting for its own interests.

As soon as the result was announced, all the pundits were telling us that the FN owes its success in large part to the ‘abstentionists’. They are seeking to put the burden of ‘shame’ on the workers who have shown their disgust at the electoral process and the bourgeois parties who take part in it by staying away from the polling booths. These ‘bad citizens’ have put democracy in danger. The moral? We have to make up for this by going en masse to the polling booths in the second round, not to defend our interests as an exploited class, but to defend capitalist democracy, which is portrayed as a ‘lesser evil’ A very similar message, even if in a lower key, is being put across in Britain with reference to the local elections and the danger of the BNP (see ‘Capitalist democracy uses the fascist bugbear’, p.2).

But the cynicism of bourgeois propaganda doesn’t stop there. The ruling class and its media have also taken advantage of the rise of the FN in towns which have for years been dominated by the CP to unleash a campaign aimed at demoralising the workers, at making them feel guilty and at setting them against each other. Proof of this are the headlines of Le Monde on 25 April: “The workers who voted for Le Pen”, “The lost children of the working class”. By presenting the workers as ‘fachos’, reactionary xenophobes, bourgeois propaganda is trying to discredit the proletariat and sow the illusion that the future of society does not lie in the class struggle of the exploited against their exploiters but in the united front of the ‘people of Republican France’ against the fascist danger.

The working class must not be lured into this trap! It must reject the false alternative between fascism and democracy. It must never forget the lessons of one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century: it was thanks to the mobilisation of tens of millions of workers behind the banners of anti-fascism in the 1930s that the parties of the left were able to dragoon the working class into the second imperialist world war. It was in the name of defending democracy against fascism that millions of workers laid down their lives for a cause which was not their own.

Today the historic situation is radically different. The working class has not suffered a massive defeat and is not ready to sacrifice itself for the national flag. But if the current threat is not that it will be drawn into another world war in the name of anti-fascism, there is still a considerable danger in the anti-fascist campaigns � the danger that these campaigns will serve to destroy its class identity and politically dissolve it into an inter-classist movement of ‘citizens’. And that could only prevent it from re-discovering its own revolutionary perspective: the destruction of the bourgeois state, whether ‘democratic’ or ‘totalitarian’.

Workers must never lose sight of the fact that democracy and fascism are two sides of the same coin, the two faces of the implacable dictatorship of capital. It is decadent capitalism which gave birth to fascism. It was the respectable democratic Weimar Republic which, thanks to the treason of social democracy, massacred the revolutionary workers after the first world war and paved the way for Nazism.

It is the same decaying capitalist system which is now creating the conditions for the rise of the FN and similar parties.

On the purely political level, it was Mitterand’s Socialist Party which quite deliberately provided the bases for the FN to develop as a party. It was the SP which originally brought in proportional representation and cynically used the danger of the FN to boost its own democratic credentials.

On a deeper level, however, it is the accelerating decomposition of this society which provides the nutrients for the growth of Le Pen and his kind: crime, mindless violence, terrorism, racism. It is the collapse of whole swathes of the capitalist peripheries under the blows of crisis and war that pushes millions of impoverished human beings to seek shelter in the central countries, creating a refugee problem which the system can only respond to with repression and xenophobic campaigns (which are by no means limited to the ‘fascist’ parties).

The only way out of the nightmare being produced by this dying order is the struggle of the world working class for the overthrow of capitalism and the construction of a new society, a society without exploitation, without national frontiers, without economic crisis and war. A true human community where people will no longer have any need to live in fear of neighbours or strangers. A society based not on the hunt for profit, but on the satisfaction of human needs. Only such a society can free humanity once and for all from all the scars of capitalist barbarism � of which the ideology of the far right is only one expression among many.

And it is certainly not in the polling booths that the working class can affirm its own perspective. Contrary to the excuses of counterfeit ‘revolutionaries’ like the Socialist Alliance or Lutte Ouvriere in France, the working class cannot give any expression to its needs and goals on the electoral terrain.

The only way to fight the extreme right and its national-capitalist programme is to develop the struggle against the capitalist system, against bourgeois democracy, against all the governments, whether of right or left. All of them have one programme to offer us: more exploitation, more unemployment, more barbarism.

Against all the lying campaigns of the bourgeoisie, the working class, which has no choice but to fight for its own interests and with its own methods, is not a reactionary class. On the contrary it is the only revolutionary class in this society, the only force that can take humanity out of the dead-end into which capitalism has led it. The historic alternative is not between fascism and democracy, but between the proletarian revolution and the destruction of the human species.

The democratic game is just a cover for the dictatorship of capital. This is why we do not call on workers to mobilise for Chirac or other crooks; nor do we encourage a purely apathetic attitude to elections. Our slogan is: Workers don’t vote, fight!

ICC.

4/5/02.

The strong electoral showing of Le Pen in France and the party of Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands has led to talk in the media of the danger of fascism returning to Europe. “Not since the 1930s has the threat of racism and fascism been so great” wrote a commentator in the Guardian (9/5/02). The Socialist Workers Party has been saying we’re living through the “1930s in slow motion” for some time. With the increased prominence of political parties that explicitly base themselves on intolerance, xenophobia, and opposition to immigration, while posing as ‘new’ alternatives to the tired old parties of the centre, we’re being asked to believe that fascism is on the agenda again in Europe.

Fascism between the wars

The usual explanation for the appearance of fascist governments in Europe in the 1920s and 30s is as historic aberrations, alien forces of obscurantism, exceptions to the normal ‘civilised’ functioning of capitalism. According to this story fascism came to power against the wishes of the bourgeoisie. This version allows the ruling class to deny any connection with what happened, while at the same time hiding the real historic conditions in which they resorted to this sort of regime as the best suited for the needs of the capitalist state.

In reality the appearance of the fascist regimes corresponded to the needs of capitalism faced with the force of its economic crisis. Following the First World War, in the countries that had been defeated or left impoverished, the only alternative facing the ruling class was to try and gain more of the imperialist cake, to mobilise for a new world war. To do this required the concentration of all powers in the state, to accelerate the development of the war economy and the militarisation of labour, and put an end to conflicts within the bourgeoisie. The fascist regimes were constituted in a direct response to the demands of the national capital. In this they were, like stalinism, only one of the most brutal expressions of the general tendency toward state capitalism which is characteristic of the domination of capital in its historic period of decadence since 1914. Far from the expression of the dispossessed petit-bourgeoisie, fascism was the policy favoured by the big industrial bourgeoisie, in Germany as it had been in Italy.

But if the economic crisis and the necessity for state capitalism are the fundamental conditions for fascism, they are not the only ones. The other major, essential, precondition for fascism is the defeat of the working class. The bourgeoisie has never tried to impose fascism faced with the working class mobilised on its own terrain. In Germany and Italy, the countries where the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 had its widest expression outside Russia, fascism was not imposed until the democratic forces, above all those of the left posing as the friends of the workers, had crushed the revolutionary outburst physically and politically. It was not the Nazis who massacred the revolution in Germany, it was the socialists Noske and Scheidemann, who, in the name of the social-democratic government, bloodily repressed the mobilisation of the working class and murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, using the Freicorps, the embryo of the future Nazi militia. In Italy in 1919-20 the first wave of repression came from the democratic government of Nitti, repressing strikes with hundreds of workers dying. But, even more than the direct repression, what broke the workers’ spirit was being trapped by the unions and the Italian Socialist Party in the factory occupations with widespread illusions in the possibilities of workers’ control of production. The occupation of the factories was doomed to failure, and it was only after the defeat of autumn 1920 that massive repression was unleashed against the working class by the joint forces of the democratic state and the fascist gangs. It was only after the defeat of the working class that Mussolini’s movement was able to develop, with the help of the bosses who financed him and the state that encouraged him. Ultimately it was the defeat of the international revolutionary wave that allowed fascism to take power.

The extreme right today

It is true that the current plunge of capitalist society into decomposition has encouraged the development of all sorts of ideologies searching for scapegoats for the general collapse of society, compensating for the absence of any perspective with ideas that are openly xenophobic and racist. At this level Le Pen, the BNP or neo-nazis elsewhere in Europe are as much a manifestation of social decomposition as are the flight into drugs or religious sects, expressions of a capitalist society that has no future, that is rotting on its feet.

But the bourgeoisie does not need to bring the extreme right to power in Europe because the governmental teams in power are implementing the policies that are needed by the various national capitals, in particular the attacks on workers’ living and working conditions demanded by the state of the economy. Capitalism today needs to deploy its democratic forces to deal with the working class. We are not in the 1930s where workers paid a terrible price for the defeat of the revolutionary wave. Whatever the difficulties facing the working class today it has not experienced a historic defeat and its capacity to resist the attacks of capital is still intact. Figures such as Le Pen in France or Griffin of the BNP would not be capable of controlling the social situation, whereas the democratic mode of capitalist domination, with its various unions, its parliament, its game of government-and-opposition and the ‘diversity’ of its media has a terrible effectiveness in insuring the maintenance of social control and in deploying its ideological manipulations. And the only reason that the bourgeoisie has any need for the extreme right is to give a spurious validity to the democratic state.

To say that fascism is not on the agenda and that the bourgeoisie today prefers the methods of democracy should not give the impression that the democratic state is not capable, when necessary, of bringing repression to bear against workers struggles or communist minorities, nor that it won’t use extreme-right-wing gangs should the need arise. History shows that’s eminently possible, starting with the example of January 1919 in Germany.

For the working class there can be no choosing the ‘anti-fascist’ forces of the bourgeoisie as they have shown that they are every bit as anti-working class as the forces of the right. You need only look at the policies of Blair in this country, or Schroder in Germany, to see that at home the bourgeoisie continues to worsen the conditions in which workers live and work, while abroad pursuing its imperialist interests.

Bourgeois ideology makes the struggle between ‘democracy’ and ‘fascism’, or between ‘freedom’ and ‘totalitarianism’ the keystone of 20th century history. This is pure lies, as it is the same bourgeoisie, the same capitalist state, which turns to one or other of these flags according to its needs and the historic possibilities.

This supposed conflict served as the lying justification for the barbarity of the Second World War, which was presented as a ‘just’ war between the ‘good’ democrats and the ‘bad’ fascists and not for what it really was: the deadly and barbaric confrontation between imperialist sharks. According to the dominant ideology, fascism was the cause of the Second World War, when, in fact, the opposite was the truth: it was the drive to war, the veritable mode of existence for decadent capitalism, that created fascism. Fascism, the ‘absolute evil’, was supposed to have the unique responsibility, with stalinism, for all the horrors that have taken place across the face of the planet during the last century, when, in reality, the ‘other side’, democracy has nothing to learn about massacres and butchery, from Dresden to Hiroshima, from the Vietnam war to the wars in the Gulf and against Afghanistan.

For the working class there is no ‘lesser evil’ in the democratic bourgeoisie. The future of humanity is in the hands of the working class, and one of the biggest obstacles it faces are the ideological campaigns by the ruling class to defend the democratic state with anti-fascist mobilisations. It is the consciousness and the revolutionary perspective of the working class that the bourgeoisie is trying to attack with its proposed false responses to the open failure of its system. Today the myths of ‘peace’ and prosperity are long gone; so the ruling class tries to rally workers with illusions about democracy being the last rampart against barbarism.

Today the greatest danger facing the working class and its capacity to destroy capitalism is not ‘fascism’, real or imagined, but the democratic traps of the ruling class.

PE (adapted from RI 323), 18/05/02

In May the ICC began a series of forums on the theme of the defence of the revolutionary organisation. Despite the very serious events taking place on an international level (the US ‘war on terror’, the massive anti-fascist campaigns in Europe, etc), the ICC felt that it was necessary to keep to this theme because it has been subjected to a very grave attack, in the shape of a campaign of slander being waged by a few ex-members of the ICC grouped under the name of the ‘Internal Fraction of the ICC’ around the element Jonas, who has been expelled from our organisation for political unworthiness (Note 1) [95]. Faced with such a situation it was the responsibility of the ICC to carry out the public defence of its principles of functioning. Without an organisation, there can be no intervention, and this is precisely the aim of the bourgeois state and its accomplices in the parasitic milieu: to destroy revolutionary organisations from the inside and discredit them in the eyes of the working class, and above all in front of those who have been looking for a class perspective in this moribund social system.

The ICC’s section in Britain held a meeting around this theme on May 18. A number of sympathisers came from several towns to offer their solidarity with the ICC against the attacks being mounted by the so-called ‘Fraction’. Some wrote letters of support which we publish below. All the participants regretted the decision of the Communist Workers Organisation (British affiliate of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party) not to attend the meeting. According to a verbal communication, this decision was a matter of principle based on a disagreement with the theme of the meeting. We await a more developed written explanation from the comrades. But as we said at the forum, if the CWO felt that the ICC was making mistake in talking about organisational questions at a public meeting, it would have been better to have argued the case at the meeting rather than boycott it. More importantly, we think that the CWO’s decision is based on a real underestimation of the dangers facing revolutionary organisations in today’s period - above all the danger of parasitism which the ‘Fraction’ expresses so graphically. The IBRP is itself by no means immune from this danger: we refer readers to the latest issue of our publication in the USA, Internationalism 122, which contains an analysis of the recent crisis among the IBRP’s US affiliates or sympathising groups. In our estimation, the evolution of the Los Angeles Workers Voice group, which has recently broken away from the IBRP, is another clear manifestation of the phenomenon of parasitism - political activity geared not towards the construction of serious revolutionary organisations, but towards the discrediting and destruction of the whole proletarian political milieu.

The following article is an account of the meeting that took place in Paris on 4 May, which is of particular interest because it is where the ICC and its sympathisers confronted the ‘Fraction’ directly.

Sixty people, coming from a number of towns in France, but also from Switzerland, Germany, Britain and Belgium, judged the question sufficiently important to attend this meeting in order to hear the arguments of the ICC and confront them with those of the ‘Fraction’. Other contacts, not present at the meeting, sent us letters of support and solidarity that were read out to the meeting.

The choice of the theme for this public meeting was strongly criticised by an ex-member of the IBRP who recently left that organisation. He considered that the ICC was being scandalously irresponsible not to have dedicated the meeting to the situation in France at a time when the working class was faced with a huge anti-fascist campaign.

In reply, we pointed out that in 1872, even though the working class had just been through the two of the most important events of this phase of history - the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune - the Hague Congress of the First International (the only one where Marx and Engels were personally present) made the question of the defence of the organisation its priority.

In fact, if the intervention of this element exposed any irresponsibility, it was his own. This was no surprise to the ICC who had already underlined at a previous public meeting that he had been irresponsible in leaving the IBRP because he had disagreements with the organisation’s analysis of the events of 11 September. It is obvious that you cannot expect the least rigour on organisational questions from an element who has spent the last 20 years roaming through virtually every group in the proletarian political milieu, thus demonstrating the elasticity of his convictions. There has been however one constant in all the variations in his positions: his unbreakable hostility to the ICC owing to the fact that we didn’t integrate this element in 1982, because we considered that he had not overcome all the political confusions that derived from his Trotskyist past. A hostility which, during the course of this public meeting, led him to make common cause with the members of the ‘Fraction’, who in the last few months have shown their ‘sympathy’ towards him as well.

The real nature of the so-called ‘Fraction’

We haven’t got space in the context of this article to give a complete history of this parasitic circle that calls itself ‘The Internal Fraction of the ICC’. In the previous WR we wrote about the extraordinary conference of the ICC which was held at the end of March. A good part of this article dealt with the activities of this ‘Fraction’ and we also refer the reader to the article in WR 253, ‘A parasitic attack on the ICC’ which response to the first public slanders which these knights in shining armour hurled at the ICC.

To summarise the heroic exploits of this so-called ‘Fraction’ we can cite:

• The systematic use of lies as an argument, based on the master of Nazi propaganda, Goebbels’ “a lie repeated often enough becomes a truth” and “The bigger the lie the more force it has to banish doubt”;

• Using the most repulsive slanders and denigrations as a way of silencing those who don’t share their point of view;

• The repeated violation of the organisation’s statutes (such as the refusal to pay their full dues, the secret circulation of documents and the holding of secret meetings aimed essentially at spreading slanders and refining lies);

• Undying loyalty to citizen Jonas who has been behaving in a manner worthy of an agent provocateur;

• Behaving like thugs, through provocations, threats, the theft of material (money, address lists, internal documents).

The only other example of such behaviour on the part of militants of the ICC is the Chenier tendency in 1981. At that time, the ICC showed that this gangster-like behaviour was inspired principally by the individual Chenier, expelled in September 1981, who was later revealed as an agent of the bourgeois state. Today it is clear to the ICC that the thuggish behaviour of the members of the Fraction has been inspired largely by Jonas, who has played a role quite comparable to that of Chenier (even if the ICC has not yet pronounced on the underlying reasons for his behaviour and has renewed the mandate of the investigation commission at our extraordinary conference in order to shed the maximum possible light on this question).

The presentation of the discussion at the public meeting

The presentation had the aim, before reporting on the destructive behaviour of Jonas and his friends, of affirming the positions of the ICC and the whole workers’ movement on the question of the defence of communist organisations against the attacks of the ruling class. It focused particularly on the following questions, which the activities of the so-called ‘Fraction’ have highlighted.

1. Communist organisations need to arm themselves with statutes and its militants have to respect them, otherwise they will paralyse or destroy the organisation. In the case of members who do not respect the statutes, communist organisations must be able to apply sanctions in proportion to the kind of breaches committed. This has the dual aim of allowing the organisation to defend itself and the militants to understand the gravity of their mistakes and get back on the rails.

2. Political debates aimed at clarifying divergences have to be carried out openly within the organisation. Nothing is more alien to the methods of the proletariat than conspiratorial practices which seek to elaborate stratagems, spread calumnies or destabilise militants in order to take over or stay in “command” (this is Jonas’ own term).

3. The bourgeoisie always has the objective of destroying revolutionary organisations. In certain circumstances, it uses direct repression, going as far as jailing or murdering militants. However, even when it doesn’t use such methods, the bourgeois state doesn’t renounce its overall objectives, but uses different means, one being the infiltration of agents provocateurs whose role is to accentuate conflicts between militants and introduce suspicion and distrust between them (as the GPU did in the Trotskyist movement of the 30s). Alongside common political convictions about matters of principle, confidence between militants is one of the main bonds of the organisation; as soon as this confidence is lacking, the organisation is in mortal danger. When it comes to the problem of agents provocateurs, the organisations of the workers’ movement have always created particular organs (commissions of inquiry, juries of honour) which ensure that any suspicions about a militant cause the minimum damage to the organisational tissue. It is directly mandated organs of this type which have to shed light on such matters, not the subjective impressions of this or that individual. The presentation pointed out that at the time of the foundation of the Communist Party of the USA, one of its leaders, Fraina, was accused on several occasions of being a state agent; in fact the person who originated these accusations turned out to be an agent of the FBI.

The performance of the ‘Fraction’

After this introduction, the ICC opened the meeting to all those present, giving priority to the members of the ‘Fraction’. Its spokesman began by declaring that the ‘Fraction’ demanded to be re-integrated into the ICC while asserting that it was carrying out political work with an element expelled from the ICC (as we learned in a letter sent to us by the ‘Fraction’, Jonas is officially a member of the ‘Fraction’). He then made a long intervention (the essentials being contained in a leaflet distributed to the participants), the main aim of which, apart from a series of absolutely inapplicable historical analogies, was to justify the ‘Fraction’s’ acts of indiscipline, its violations of the statutes. Concerning the secret meetings, the spokesman of the ‘Fraction’ had the nerve to justify them by referring in particular to the example of the left oppositions within the Bolshevik party in the 1920s, at a time when the members of the opposition risked prison; whereas the ICC, which had counted on the capacity of its militants to get a grip on themselves (which two of them actually did) did not take the least sanction after the discovery of these secret meetings and of their scandalous content. Apart from this point, the spokesman of the ‘Fraction’ did not give the slightest response to the questions raised in the ICC’s presentation.

The ‘arguments’ of the supporters of the ‘Fraction’

The interventions of the three ‘sympathisers’ of the ‘Fraction’ only confirmed the political vacuity of this parasitic clan and the destructive nature of its activities.

The first was an ex-militant of the ICC who resigned in September 2001 after participating in the secret meetings which were held during the summer of 2001. His intervention was a series of totally untruthful complaints about the bad treatment he had receivedber of the ‘Fraction’). He then made a long intervention (the essentials being contained in a leaflet distributed to the participants), the main aim of which, apart from a series of absolutely inapplicable historical analogies, was to justify the ‘Fraction’s’ acts of indht lying to it. As the presidium remarked, when the secret meetings were discovered, we asked this element how many of them had been held; he replied two when there had really been five and he knew this quite well. This liar is also a braggart because, during the 4th secret meeting (the minutes of which fell into the hands of the organisation by chance), he boasted to his acolytes that he had succeeded in duping a member of the central organ of our section in France. All the evidence indicates that what really concerns this ex-militant today is not the defence of the ICC’s principles, but the defence of his own little personality and of his pals in the ‘Fraction’, to use the words of one of its members in a secret meeting, maintaining “an iron solidarity between us”. Against this “iron solidarity” of a parasitic body within the organisation, the ICC defends the class solidarity that has to unite all the militants of a communist organisation.

It’s not the first time that a militant, tired out by a number of years of commitment, has been unable to admit his new passion for his slippers and his night-cap, and has blamed the organisation for his fatigue. To such ex-militants, one of our subscribers addressed the following advise in a letter to the ICC: “if they are tired, they should just go to sleep”. We could add: that would be the best service they could render to the proletariat.

The second supporter of the ‘Fraction’ is also an ex-militant of the ICC who resigned in 1996. He gave the ICC a lesson in the defence of the organisation by declaring that this meant first and foremost the defence of its principles. These were fine words but this element has not been to an ICC public forum since 1996, even when they were devoted to the defence of communist principles in the face of imperialist barbarism faced with the Kosovo war or more recently the war in Afghanistan. It’s only very recently that this element, a bit like Sleeping Beauty, woke from a long sleep to come and give us lessons in morality. It seems that the ‘Fraction’s’ public attacks on the ICC have had the same effect on this element as the prince’s kiss. His whole political approach is summed up in the fact that it’s only now that he comes to our forums to sow trouble among our contacts. During the 1993 crisis in our organisation (which he described as “war between chiefs”), this former militant of the ICC distinguished himself by engaging in all kinds of manoeuvres, in doublespeak and corridor denigration against other militants, notably members of central organs. In response to this behaviour the organisation passed a special resolution on this element, adopted by all the members of the present ‘Fraction’, calling on him to cease this behaviour and make a criticism of it. This was too much to ask of him and he preferred to leave the organisation shortly afterwards, maintaining a deep hostility towards the ICC, a hostility which was obvious to all the sympathisers present at this meeting.

In his intervention, this element asserted that the ICC had rejected his demand for a jury of honour to clear him of the accusation of being a state agent. If that had been the opinion of the ICC as he claimed (he even said he had “proof” of this), this element would have been expelled and publicly denounced via a communique in our press, which was not at all the case. Furthermore, it’s not up to the ICC to call for a jury of honour for a militant whose intrigues we have certainly criticised, but who left the organisation by his own choice.

These are the kinds of ‘sympathisers’ that the Fraction is waking up today: elements who came to this public meeting not to defend the principles of the workers’ movement and the ICC by taking position on our presentation, but to settle old personal scores with our organisation. This supporter of the ‘Fraction’, having avoided taking any position on the ICC’s presentation and the behaviour of Jonas, presented himself as a victim of ICC slander. It is thus the ICC which has been spreading slanders and not the individual which it has expelled from its ranks. We should also note that in his intervention this element also in a subtle way took up the defence of JJ, whom the ICC expelled in 1995, and whose friends at the time formed a parasitic grouping called ‘The Paris Circle’. Should we then expect to see a rapprochement between the latter and the ‘Fraction’? We know in any case that the ‘Fraction’ has begun to send its “internal bulletins”, which it now says will be sent out “for discussion within the proletarian political milieu” (bulletin no. 9 of the ‘Fraction’), to members of this circle. Do the friends of Jonas now consider that the Paris Circle belongs to the proletarian political milieu and not to parasitism, which was their position when they were still militants of the ICC?

The third ‘sympathiser’ of the ‘Fraction’ (as he described himself) was also a former member of the ICC who resigned in 1993 (Note 2) [96]. But contrary to the second supporter of the ‘Fraction’, this element has up till now been one of our most loyal fellow travellers, who has always intervened with us and given us invaluable support over the years. It was with deep consternation that all the ICC militants and the sympathisers who know this element witnessed the sad spectacle of his turn towards parasitism. This element made an incomprehensible intervention that showed only that he has become violently hostile to the ICC. This is a success for the policy deliberately being carried out by Jonas and his ‘Fraction’: to destroy our milieu of contacts and turn the ICC’s sympathisers into its enemies.

The mobilisation of the ICC’s sympathisers for the defence of the organisation

The numerous contacts of the ICC who intervened supported the political framework given in the presentation and called on the ‘Fraction’ to take position on it. Several interventions protested vigorously against the theft of the list of the addresses of our subscribers, insisting that they had confided their address to the ICC as a political group and not to Mr Jonas and his cabal.

Faced with the interventions by our contacts who, with different arguments, affirmed the necessity for a revolutionary organisation to defend its statutes and to condemn very firmly the methods used by Jonas, what was the response of the ‘Fraction’? Silence! The members of the ‘Fraction’ refused to speak in response to the questions posed to them by the subscribers to whom they had sent their parasitic prose.

In response to this evasive attitude, one of our contacts called on them again to answer. What was the response of the ‘Fraction’? To quietly sidle out (followed by their supporters) giving the pretext that their departure was motivated by “family obligations” (their families seem to be very well synchronised!)

In reality, the reason they preferred to quit the room all together on tip-toe was that they knew that they would be unable to sell their wares to the serious elements of the proletarian political milieu who had come to this public meeting.

Following the remarkable performance of this so-called ‘Fraction’, several of our contacts who had not spoken before intervened to give their full support to the ICC. As one of them said at the end: “I did not see things very clearly when I arrived at this meeting. I give my support to the ICC. It is the attitude of this ‘Fraction’ which has convinced me. These people have discredited themselves by leaving the room when they had been asked to reply to the questions and to take position on what the ICC is saying”.

Before the departure of the ‘Fraction’, one of our comrades (an ex-member of the Jonas clique) gave an eye-witness account of the conspiratorial methods of this enterprise of destruction into which he himself had been dragged. One of our contacts saluted this intervention and said that, in contrast to the vengeful complaints of the fractionists and their supporters, “real courage is what this militant has shown”, because he had managed to put the historical interests of the proletariat above his personal pride, and remain a loyal militant of the organisation.

This public meeting clearly showed that the parasitic behaviour of this ‘Fraction’, animated by loyalty towards declassed elements who have become adventurers, is a pure reflection of the social decomposition of capitalism. The intervention of a sympathiser from Germany demonstrated that the repeated slanders by Jonas and his ‘Fraction’ against members of the organisation in order to destroy them (or “destabilise” them, according to the term used at one of the secret meetings) are very similar to the phenomenon of “mobbing” which has been seen in various workplaces. This sympathiser had himself been a victim of this and talked about his own experience (Note 3) [97].

The discussion also highlighted the danger this cabal represents for the proletarian political milieu, as can be seen from their meeting with the IBRP (which the ‘Fraction’ has described in no. 9 of their bulletin, sent to all our subscribers in France).

One of our sympathisers said clearly that this policy of the Jonas clan is aimed at getting the IBRP publicly mixed up with its intrigues, and thus at compelling it to take up the cause of the ‘Fraction’ against the ICC. “This was not just opportunism but the worst kind of manoeuvring”. For our part, we consider that publishing the discussion between the IBRP and the ‘Fraction’ can only have the aim of discrediting the IBRP in the proletarian political milieu (Note 4) [98].

At the end of the meeting, certain contacts came up to us to offer their help, considering that, as in 1981, the ICC had to recuperate the material and money stolen by the fractionists.

The ICC’s sympathisers cannot help feeling directly concerned in this, seeing that the funds of the organisation emanate not only from the dues paid by its militants but also from their own subscriptions as sympathisers of the ICC. Thus, it’s a part of the money from these subscriptions that has been stolen without scruple by the ‘Fraction’. This is why the ICC is continuing to insist that the Jonas cabal return money stolen from the working class (here we see no problem in the racketeers opening a subscription among their own supporters in order to help reimburse their debts). This is a matter of principle on which the ICC will make no concession, whatever the ‘historical’ and ‘theoretical’ justifications which the fractionists have cooked up to cover their sordid little deeds.

This public meeting showed that, faced with the lumpen methods of the Jonas clique, the Marxist method does indeed “carry enough weight” (Note 5) [99].

The ICC has never before received so many letters of support (some of them were read out at the meeting). Or as the ex-member of the IBRP rather spitefully observed “we have never seen so many people at a public meeting of the ICC in Paris”!

This public meeting was a step in the ICC’s combat for the defence of communist principles. But we know that this combat is not over because revolutionary organisations, being irreducible enemies of the capitalist order, will always be the object of the efforts of the bourgeoisie to destroy them or discredit them. These attacks may be carried out by specialised organs of the bourgeois state or by declasse individuals, as well as by former militants whose loss of conviction can turn into hatred of the organisation they once belonged to and of their old comrades in arms. It is this wearing out of conviction which can push them into resigning over the smallest difficulty, into capitulation to bourgeois ideology and the betrayal of proletarian principles. The fractionists are trying to cover up their real betrayal of the organisational principles of the ICC by posing as the real continuators of the principles of the ICC and all the left fractions before it. Well, a child of five can imagine himself to be Superman, Wonderwoman or Luke Skywalker, but that doesn’t mean that this is true and that grown ups are fooled. Our knights of the ‘Fraction’ may try to tell us that they are the real heroes of the defence of communist principles. However, their political behaviour and their intervention in this public meeting have shown how far away from this they are, and our sympathisers could see it quite clearly. “It’s in their practise that men prove the truth of their thinking” said Marx. The practise of the fractionists proved only the truth of their imposture.

ICC, 25/5/02.

NOTES

(1) See the ‘Communique to our readers’ [100] in WR 252. Among other things this communique says “One of the most intolerable and repulsive aspects of his behaviour is the veritable campaign he led against a member of the organisation, accusing them in the corridors and even in front of people outside the organisation of manipulating those around them and the central organs on behalf of the police”. (Back) [101]

(2) This element, who at his first reappearance for at least 10 years at a public meeting of the ICC, last winter, had begun to denigrate the IBRP, told us twice at this meeting that the break up of the International Communist Party (the main Bordigist group) in 1982 was something to be welcomed! The destruction of revolutionary organisations, even when they are gangrenous with opportunism, has always been a blow against the proletariat and communists never salute such an event. The amiable exchanges between this element and the members of the ‘Fraction’ were founded upon a common political denominator: hostility not only towards the ICC, but also towards the whole proletarian political milieu, even if the ‘Fraction’ claims the opposite. (Back) [102]

(3) This phenomenon of ‘mobbing’ typical of capitalist decomposition has also appeared in the Satanic games at certain educational establishments where gangs of adolescents amuse themselves by selecting one of their number as a target and subjecting them to all sorts of torture, even murder. Perverted games like this are, as with serial killers, an obvious product of a deep mental unbalance, but they are above all expressions of the barbarism of a rotting society which has turned Nazi sadism or the methods of the torturers from the Algerian war into a parlour game. (Back) [103]

(4) And this is indeed Mr Jonas’s aim: to lure the IBRP into a trap and discredit it while at the same time spreading all kinds of suspicion between the groups of the communist left. (Back) [104]

(5) When a delegation of the ICC met the ‘Fraction’ to discuss the modalities of recuperating material belonging to the organisation and to demand the reimbursement of money stolen from the ICC, the brave spokesman of the Jonas clique offered the following threats against our comrades, illustrating the thuggish mentality of this so-called ‘Fraction’: “In any case, in Paris, you don’t carry enough weight!” (Back) [105]

The threat of war between nuclear powers casts a terrifying shadow across the whole world. It is not an empty threat, an episode of sabre-rattling where India and Pakistan will just go to the brink before ‘seeing sense’ and coming to an agreement. “The British and American Governments are seriously contemplating a doomsday scenario in which there is an unstoppable momentum toward a nuclear war in India and Pakistan that would kill millions of people and make millions more homeless across the sub-continent” (The Times, 1/6/02). In an inferior position - Pakistan has 700,000 troops to India’s 1.2 million, 25 nuclear missiles with a lesser range than India’s 60 - “Pakistan has already made it clear that, in the face of a superior enemy, it would be prepared to initiate a nuclear confrontation” (Guardian 23/5/2). British “diplomatic and defence sources” have suggested that neither President Musharraf of Pakistan nor Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee “appeared to be taking into account the sheer scale of the disaster that would follow if nuclear weapons were used, and that they seemed incapable of visualising the disaster that would overwhelm their countries as a result” (The Times, 1/6/2). While “military sources” felt that “neither leader was thinking logically or with any common sense” (ibid), in reality it is a gruesome illustration of the insane logic of the imperialist appetites of the ruling class. Here we have the ruling classes of two countries, where poverty, disease and death stalk the majority of the population daily, setting in motion theie blame for all this with ‘religious fundamentalism’. The Indian ruling class blames Pakistan-backed Islamic fundamentalists for terrorist attacks in Kashmir and on the Indian parliament. On the other side, the Pakistan ruling class blames the fervent nationalism of the Hindu fundamentalism of the ruling BJP party in India, in particular with its brutal counter-insurgency against ‘freedom fighters’ in Kashmir. As for the ‘democratic’ and ‘civilised’ bourgeoisie in the West, they weep crocodile tears about the ‘intransigence’ of the leaders of both countries and call on them to be ‘reasonable’ and seek peace under the guidance of the leaders of the very countries, such as Britain and the US, that train and provide the weaponry for their armed forces.

The ruling classes in India and Pakistan have certainly used fundamentalism in stirring up a war psychosis in each country. The BJP in India uses terrorist attacks in Kashmir and the rest of India as justification for its military threats against Pakistan. Meanwhile the BJP has been implicated in the inter-communal massacres in the state of Gujarat where hundreds of Hindu fundamentalists were incinerated in a train by Islamic militants and in reply thousands of Muslims were slaughtered. The Indian state has deliberately whipped up this hatred which is then directed against Pakistan. Meanwhile the Pakistani bourgeoisie has not only been trying to destabilise India through its backing for the Kashmiri struggle against Indian rule, they also claim that India is backing terrorist groups in Pakistan. Constantly fuelling the most virulent nationalism has enabled both sets of exploiters to drag large parts of their populations into support for their imperialist ambitions.

The use of such nationalisms in conjunction with religious prejudice and racial stereotyping is not new or confined to the peripheries of capitalism. The bourgeoisies of the main capitalist countries have developed this into a fine art. In the First World War both sides portrayed the other as ‘evil ‘ and a ‘threat to civilisation’. In the 1930s both the Nazis and Stalinists used anti-semitism and nationalism to mobilise their populations. The ‘civilised’ Allies did everything to whip up anti-German and anti-Japanese hysteria, which culminated in the cynical use of the Holocaust to justify the bombardment and massacre of an ‘inhuman’ enemy. During the Cold War similar hatreds were cultivated by both blocs to portray the enemy as power-hungry maniacs. And since 1989 the ‘humanitarian’ leaders of the great powers have manipulated and stirred up the growth of the ethnic cleansing, religious and racial hatred that has penetrated so many areas of the planet in a cycle of wars and massacres. At the moment, in ‘civilised’ democratic countries across Europe, we are seeing politicians of the Left and Right fomenting the most crude racism against refugees and other immigrants, in order to justify strengthening state repression, sow divisions in the population and portray the state as the last rampart against invading ‘hordes’.

The creation of the most virulent nationalism and crude racism is an essential part of imperialist mobilisations - not just with today’s developing nightmare in South Asia, but in all the imperialist massacres since before the beginning of the 20th century. In order for any imperialism to wage war it has to portray its rival in practically sub-human terms. “War is methodical, organised, gigantic murder. But in normal human beings this systematic murder is possible only when a state of intoxication has previously been created. This has always been the tried and proven method of those who make war. Bestiality of action must find a commensurate bestiality of thought and senses; the latter must prepare and accompany the former” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet). It should be added, on the question of ‘bestiality’, that most animals only kill for food, some in defence of territory or their young. However “Imperialism, with all its brutal policy of force, with the incessant chain of social catastrophe that it itself provokes, is, to be sure, a historic necessity for the ruling classes of the present world” (ibid). Massive devastation comes from the actual needs of capitalist states trying to defend their interests through imperialist war.

Imperialist barbarism

Today relations between capitalist states take the form of an imperialist free-for-all, a situation unleashed by the disintegration of the Russian and US blocs. In the period of the Cold War the bitter rivalries between nation states were kept in check through the discipline required by each bloc. Today all these ambitions have free play. The 50 year old conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir is not constrained by the discipline of the US bloc but is threatening to escalate to an unprecedented level where the use of nuclear weapons cannot be discounted. This comes after several years of a more or less open war in Kashmir where tens of thousands have already died with the conflict at a level that the rest of the world’s states found ‘acceptable’.

The intensity of the antagonism between these two nuclear powers can be seen by the extent to which the US, the world’s only superpower, appears to be finding it difficult to impose its will on the situation. The US doesn’t want a full blown conflict. It wants to control south Asia, not see it destroyed. But each sides justifies its military build-up with the same justification used by the US for its imperialist onslaught across the globe: ‘the war against terrorism’. The situation expresses the real instability of the world situation. Only a few months after the US made a massive display of force in Afghanistan to compel other nation-states to line up behind it, two of its allies in this war are at each others throats. Disaster is threatened in a region where the US thought it could impose its order through military means.

This is the latest and potentially most devastating in a series of such situations. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has launched massive military operations to show the world that it will not accept any challenge to its leadership. After the 1991 Gulf War, instead of the New World Order came the horror of the war in the Balkans. In 1999 after the US’s show of force against Serbia the European imperialist powers became increasingly open in their opposition to US policies such as ‘Son of Star Wars’. It was in response to this challenge that the US laid waste to Afghanistan, using the convenient justification of 11th September. Now it is faced with two of its ‘allies’ in the region preparing for a conflict that would have horrendous consequences.

Every display of US power, each expression of open belligerence to other states, every time another agreement or weapons treaty is discarded, every increase to the already enormous US military budget - all these measures only add more fuel to the fire of imperialist tensions. All its rivals, whether they are Germany, France or Britain, or regional powers such as Russia, China, India or Pakistan, are being pushed to strike out in an effort to defend their own interests. For India and Pakistan in particular, seeing the US impose itself in the region has left them no choice but to undermine the other in the desperate defence of their own interests.

Nuclear insanity

The ‘great powers’ are certainly very concerned about the possibility of nuclear war breaking out. The whole world situation would be thrown into disarray with every nation-state desperate to defend its position in a situation where the world’s major power was unable to stop two 3rd rate imperialist powers from trying to annihilate each other. However, we should not forget that it is countries such as the US, Britain and France that have the greatest stocks of ‘weapons of mass destruction’. The US, for example, has recently made it quite clear that it now has a ‘first strike’ policy with its nuclear weaponry, ready to act against any other state, regardless of their military status, from impoverished Afghanistan to, ultimately, its great power rivals. US nuclear weapons’ policy follows the logic of imperialism: crush your enemy. And with the US declaring its ‘first strike’ policy, neither India or Pakistan will have any hesitation in using their ultimate weapons.

A massive threat to the working class and the rest of humanity

The campaigns to mobilise the population for war have the aim of destroying any class solidarity between the workers of each country. Workers are exploited and threatened by the same capitalist class, but called upon to massacre each other in the name of the national interest. It is because of the threat from the working class that capitalism feels the need to use all its lies to boost nationalism and throw workers off the path of struggle.

At a local level, in south Asia, the working class is not showing the militancy that could stop a war. Internationally the working class is a spectator as capitalism tears itself apart. If nuclear weapons are used it will not just cause unimaginable millions of deaths, and environmental destruction, it will be the most massive blow against the working class, a setback in the struggle for communism. It would represent a qualitative development in the decomposition of capitalism and would pose the question of whether the working class is going to be able to pose its own alternative. If the ruling class can fight even one war with nuclear weapons it could unleash a deadly and apocalyptic cycle that would ultimately make communism a total impossibility.

And yet the fundamental point remains: the only force that can stop this happening is the international working class, above all that in the main capitalist countries. Through the development of its struggles to defend its own interests it could show the workers on the sub-continent that there is a class alternative to nationalism, religious and ethnic hatred. This places a huge responsibility on the working class of the metropolitan heartlands. It has to see that while it must defend its interests as a class, it also has the future of humanity in its hands. It has to begin the process of political clarification on the nature of the system it faces and the stark alternative it is faced with: struggle as a class or be destroyed as individuals.

Faced with the insanity of capitalism in full decay, workers in the region and around the world must take up the slogan: WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE, your enemy is your national bourgeoisie, not the working class in other countries. Capitalism can only drag us to war and barbarism. The working class struggle is the key to the only alternative: the worldwide communist revolution.

WR, 1/6/02.

The killing and maiming in the Middle East is continuing and escalating. The construction of the huge Israeli wall to keep Palestinians out is destroying the water supply to many people, and will also further damage the economy. It is just one dramatic step in the escalating cycle of violence. After the Israeli offensive against the Palestinian areas, including the near destruction of Jenin, the riposte was bloody and determined. Time and again suicide bombers have entered the towns and cities of Israel, exploding their bombs at bus stops and in restaurants or driving a car filled with explosives into a bus. Men and women going to work, teenagers returning from a trip to the countryside and children going to school have all been slaughtered. And each time Israel has replied in kind, occupying more Palestinian areas, using tanks and planes to shell towns and villages and killing people out looking for food in the mistaken belief that a curfew had ended. All the time it is workers and their families who pay the price, who are considered legitimate targets by both sides, who live in fear, and who struggle every day just to survive. This situation, however, is not some aberration, but is typical of war in this period. Civilian casualties are neither avoided nor accidental but are the main focus of the war.

The responsibility of the great powers

This escalation of the fighting has been matched by an increasingly open antagonism between the US and most major European powers over Washington’s call for the Palestinian leadership to be replaced and its refusal to have any further dealings with Yasser Arafat. This has not stopped them all prattling on about ‘peace’ and ‘conflict resolution’. The Oslo Accords and the Saudi proposals are still bandied about, while the US and the EU have murmured about possible new talks. All of these soothing sounds are meant to convince us of their concern and their commitment to peace and ending the bloodshed. Above all it is meant to preserve the lie that the barbarism that haunts every shattered refugee camp and every mangled bus has nothing to do with them, that it flows from the obtuse, irrational hatreds of those who dress babies as suicide bombers and who shoot children. Nothing could be further from the truth. The whole history of the region has been determined by the great powers. America has long been Israel’s protector, without whom the country would have been destroyed years ago, while the Palestinian ‘liberation’ struggle was a pawn of Russia’s imperialist ambitions during the Cold War. After 1989, Washington seemed able to impose the Pax Americana across the whole region, making overtures to the Palestinians while asserting tighter control over Israel. The latter however, in common with many other countries freed from the grip of the blocs, began to assert its own interests.

In the period since September 11, the US has mounted a global offensive, declaring a state of permanent war and stating that all who are not with it are against it. It has shown a determination to act on its own, as and when it sees fit. Its aim has not really been the so-called “axis of evil” but the rival great powers, in particular Germany, France and Britain, who have repeatedly struggled to assert their own interests and undermine the US. The message was driven home by the war in Afghanistan, during which the US made no pretence of needing any kind of international alliance. This was underlined through its deliberate humiliation of Britain, which, after posturing about its vital role and the professionalism of its military, was left chasing rumours and blowing up empty caves. The will to impose its massive military force without any assistance has been underlined again by Washington’s drive to go to war with Iraq, a war that would have the removal of Saddam Hussein at its heart. America has seized the initiative and, to date, has retained it. It has less need to win countries over since it has been able simply to impose its will on them. Behind this lies its overwhelming military superiority, which gives it the means to wage war around the globe on several fronts at one time. Its contempt for the international bodies that its rivals try to use to contain it was shown again at the start of July when it refused to recognise the new International Criminal Court.

Washington’s change of policy

In the Middle East the US has remained dominant throughout this period. Its major rivals have been unable to mount any real challenge. Arafat may be photographed welcoming various envoys from Europe, but it is always America that he watches and whose words make him respond. Israel still remains dependent on the US. American policy may have become more supportive of Israel’s harsh responses, but it is not Israel that dictates to America, despite the strength of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington. The parameters of the game continue to be defined by the US. On the one hand it continues to fund Israel and supply it with arms, on the other it still retains influence with the Palestinians, the CIA, for example, continuing to advise Arafat on possible ‘reforms’ to his police force.

However, the fact that America is the dominant force does not mean that it controls everything. The corrosive violence that has marred the area for so long continues to get worse and to spread. Arafat, who had been given some power on the basis of his ability to control the militants, has shown himself unable to contribute as America hoped when it gave him its backing.

These are the reasons why President Bush, in his policy speech on the Middle East on 24 June, called on the ‘Palestinian People’ “to elect new leaders, not compromised by terror” and why, a few days later, it was made clear that the US government would no longer have any official dealings with Arafat. By giving its backing to Israel the US is acting in continuity with its ‘anti-terrorist’ crusade - after all Al-Qaida and many similar gangs constantly refer to the situation of the Palestinians. It is also an admission that, whatever they say in their propaganda, there is no possibility of peace within capitalism, only a new stalemate, albeit at a higher level of violence.

However, Washington is no longer aiming for any appearance of a peace process. For all Bush may make pious calls for a Palestinian state in the future, the refusal to deal with Arafat is the refusal to deal with the Palestinians. Full stop. If not Arafat, which faction will they deal with? Hamas? The USA’s new aggressive policy is supporting the crushing, undermining and humiliation of the Palestinian forces that are the only potential clients of rival great powers wanting a foothold in the Middle East.

The American ruling class, like all ruling classes, is not concerned about the death or suffering of innocent people. Indeed, the terror that now hangs over the whole region serves its interests well.

America’s rivals try to fight back

The strength of the US in the Middle East has not prevented its main rivals from trying to undermine its efforts in the region. Leading politicians in France and Germany have openly criticised America’s apparent change of policy. The new French Foreign Minister said, “Only the Palestinians themselves can choose their leaders”, a view echoed by the German Foreign Minister. The Danish Prime Minister declared “We will not demand that Arafat or any other leader in the region is removed” (Guardian 26/6/02).

Britain has joined this criticism, Prime Minister Blair arguing “It is up to the Palestinians to choose their own leaders” (ibid). Cherie Blair said that the suicide bombers’ behviour was understandable because of their desperate situation. This was backed up by foreign secretary Straw a few days later saying much the same thing in more diplomatic language.

As the US has become more aggressive, more vocal in its criticism of Arafat and more tolerant of Israel’s retaliation, so a campaign has been built up on the theme of Bush’s ‘bad leadership’. The Guardian newspaper has been particularly prominent in this. In early June it took up the argument for a peace conference, calling on the US to support it since “unless the US becomes fully engaged, the process will never start” (Guardian, 6/6/02). It also declared that Bush’s speech “ends any remaining pretence of US impartiality” and concluded, “Mr Bush has ... set back the cause of peace. Forget Mr Arafat for a moment. Americans and Israelis also deserve better leaders” (Guardian 26/6/02).

This campaign shows the determination of the other great powers, Germany, Britain and France, to try and maintain a toehold on the region. But it also shows their present weakness. When the US and Israel are imposing their will with massive brute force, they bleat on about a ‘peace conference’ and ‘impartiality’; when Washington’s ally has massive military superiority, they are left trying to curry favour with a Palestinian leader who can only step outside his front door when given leave by his enemies.

The place of the working class

The working class has an interest in all of this. But it does not lie in the hypocritical ‘humanitarianism’ of the governments which have tears in their eyes and blood on their hands. Nor does it lie in the equally hypocritical calls on workers to take sides, to defend Palestinians against Israeli oppression or Israelis against Palestinian terrorism. In Britain it is mostly the former that is peddled by the left under the pretence that the Palestinian ‘liberation’ struggle is somehow progressive and ‘anti-imperialist’. This is nothing more than a trap set for workers who have begun to see through the lies about the good intentions of the ruling class. No. The interests of the working class are diametrically opposed to this. Where the ruling class calls on it to take sides its interests lie in uniting with fellow workers everywhere. Where the bourgeoisie want to obliterate the conflict between the classes, under the false unity of ‘humanity’, the interests of the working class lie in tearing this veil off, exposing the real class antagonism that dominates capitalist society and taking up the class struggle.

WR, 6/7/02

Earlier this year the American ruling class proudly announced the end to the post-September 11 recession it had only recently acknowledged. Very reluctantly, faced with worsening economic statistics, the US bourgeoisie admitted its economy had in fact been in recession since March of 2001. Nevertheless, soon after this sombre admission, the American bourgeoisie precipitously declared the end to the ‘shortest recession in American history’ and announced the beginnings of an economic recovery. Since then, we have seen corporate bankruptcies (including the continuing circus surrounding Enron, which, at the time, was the largest bankruptcy in US history), spiralling redundancies and stock market turbulence which clearly give the lie to health of the US ‘model’.

The impact has already spread through the stock markets of the world. This profound acceleration of the economic crisis of capitalism clearly stems directly from the very heart of the capitalist system, not from the peripheries. Previously the ruling class could say that different aspects of the crisis were expressions of the immaturity of the ‘tiger’ economies, of the difficulties of Russia adapting to ‘market forces’. Japan and other ‘unenlightened’ countries were admonished for their supposedly unique lack of ‘correct’ banking practices (i.e. correct accounting).

The continuing trouble on Wall Street, layoffs that never seem to stop and the American economy’s faltering international competitiveness has made all the pronouncements about the advantages of the ‘American way’ of managing capitalism sound ever more hollow and ridiculous. The WorldCom debacle was the final straw: the American bourgeoisie has had to admit that it may have been too hasty in concluding that the recession was in fact over. As for the boasts about the ‘American model’, there is embarrassed silence.

Furthermore, the damage inflicted by the scandal at WorldCom has precipitated a major crisis of confidence in Wall Street which has spread immediately to the other key international stock markets � London and Tokyo. The stock market index in London has fallen to a level lower than when Labour first took office, destroying billions of pounds worth of ‘value’. Although this value wiped off shares all around the world is ‘only’ paper value, it nonetheless has real effects both on the wider capitalist economy, and even directly on workers since it adds enormously to the problem of the funding of pensions schemes (in the next issue we will deal with this attack in more detail) and insurance policies.

The impact of the Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals on the bourgeoisie is not because the capitalists who speculate on these markets are morally outraged by the massive fraud carried out by WorldCom, rather, they are horrified by the prospect of yet more WorldComs, and even pillars of the ‘old economy’ such as IBM, declaring accountancy errors and exposing the cracks in the edifice of capitalism - an edifice that is held up by a mountainous scaffolding of debt. If new proposals being discussed in Europe for making accountancy practices more ‘transparent’ � i.e. proposals to reduce the amount of actual lying involved in the production of company accounts � were to be adopted, then billions more dollars would be wiped off the value of US companies in particular, because of their very widespread use of the financial technique of stock options.

This is not an expression of a merely contingent situation for capitalism, which can simply be overcome by belatedly instituting a new policy of ‘honesty’ in company reporting. The whole period of rapid ‘growth’ in the world economy � especially the US economy � during the nineties has, as the ICC has consistently pointed out, been built on sand. The implosion of the technology bubble was the first direct, open, confirmation of this. The present loss of confidence amongst the bourgeoisie in their own capital markets simply underlines the incredibly shallow, tenuous nature of all this supposed ‘growth’.

WorldCom, the second largest telecommunications provider in the US with extensive foreign operations, demonstrates - even more dramatically than Enron - the fragility of the current state of the capitalist economy. Recent revelations have shown that since January 2001, WorldCom has systematically hidden more than $3.8 billion in expenditures by classifying normal operating expenses as ‘capital expenditures’. This has allowed the company to spread these costs out over a number years and thus give the impression of making a healthy profit, while in reality it is currently saturated with more than $30 billion in debt. From a high, three years ago, of $64.50 per share, WorldCom stock now sells for less than a dollar. Should WorldCom file for bankruptcy protection, a move a number of analysts see as likely, it would surpass Enron as the largest bankruptcy in American history. As a result of this fiasco, workers have seen their retirement stock portfolios hammered as they are revealed for what they really are: worthless pieces of paper laying claim to fictitious wealth that never really existed.

In these circumstances, how can the bourgeoisie have confidence in the reporting of any of its companies? Lacking this confidence, how does the capitalist know what he is investing in when he hands over his money for shares? In the casino economy, as the ICC has dubbed it, money chases money, with ‘profits’ fuelled by endless speculation. While this underlying reality will not change, the Enron revelations followed so soon by the WorldCom affair, shows even the most hardened ‘bull market’ investor that the reality is simply a pack of cards, waiting to fall. And the bourgeoisie do not invest in order to lose their money.

At the time of the Enron revelations, the American bourgeoisie smoothly tried to play off the disaster as the workings of a few corrupt executives and hyped the need for closer government regulation of corporations. This time around the bourgeoisie has once again tried to play the ‘few corrupt businessmen’ card, promising criminal prosecution of those responsible. Nevertheless, what this ‘scandal’ really reveals is not the rapacious appetite of a few unscrupulous corporate bigwigs, but the utter rot of the capitalist economy after thirty years of open crisis, an economy in which the illusion of health has only been maintained through shrewd accounting manipulations, worthless speculation and ever growing oceans of debt. Already, the WorldCom revelations have been followed by accusations of accounting irregularities at Xerox that overstated company revenue by $6.4 billion. Thus, one of the supposed mainstays of the United States’ post-Second World War economic prosperity finds itself in deep trouble. In the coming period there will undoubtedly be more such ‘scandals’ as the crisis strains the ruling class’s ability to cover up the deepening crisis eating at its very heart.

As capitalism’s crisis intensifies and the working class is faced with accelerating attacks on its working and living conditions (WorldCom already plans to slash a fifth of its workforce, with more layoffs expected), workers must not be taken in by the bourgeoisie’s ‘anti-corruption’ propaganda. All this propaganda emanates from the capitalist state, which tries to give the impression that if it intervenes in the situation then the turmoil in the markets will be smoothed over. As even some capitalist commentators have observed, the state, far from being the least disposed to engage in the manipulation of figures, is at the leading edge of this practice � for instance the constant ‘redefinition’ of the unemployment figures in all countries. In Britain Labour has continued with this process in the same line as the Tories did. The US state tried to mask the reality of the current open recession until it could no longer avoid it. And, in all countries, the state is the biggest liar and manipulator of all.

Although the state must and will intervene in the situation because it is the final bastion of the bourgeoisie and responsible for keeping the economic crisis under some kind of control, in the final analysis, the bourgeoisie cannot stop the crisis, only slow it down. The present emergence of the crisis in an open way is the best evidence of this. It is this kind of open expression of the crisis at the heart of its system that the bourgeoisie has been struggling to avoid for the last ten years, even though it is fundamentally aware that conjuring tricks cannot work for ever. The key reason for this is that the bourgeoisie is aware of the impact this can have on the working class. The economic crisis � along with war � is a key factor in the long term potential for the development of working class consciousness, because it reveals the bankruptcy of the entire capitalist system.

HHP, 6/6/02.

In Argentina in the first five months of 2002 there have been more than 11,000 demonstrations as well as various others forms of mobilisation - rallies, hunger strikes, the blocking of main roads and workers’ strikes. In a very mixed social movement the working class has found it very difficult to defend its particular class interests, to struggle as an independent class when so many other social strata are acting in response to the austerity imposed by the economic crisis hitting the country.

In Germany, where there is open admission that the economy is in recession and official figures for the rising number of unemployed are over 4 million, there has recently been a wave of strikes. There has been a10-day strike in the engineering sector, others among banking staff, print workers, and in Deutsche Telekom. The most significant was a week-long national strike in the 950,000 strong construction industry, the first in the post-Second World war period. With 500,000 construction jobs lost since 1995 it is understandable that there is widespread discontent. Less than half of building workers are in the IG Bau construction union which started the strike initially only with Hamburg and Berlin. In the latter, on the first day, 8000 workers on 400 sites were involved. After 4 days the strike spread to all regions, ultimately involving 32,000 workers on 2800 sites. Even allowing for the role of the unions (set up on the British model by the German state after the war) there is no mistaking the current militancy in the working class in Germany.

In Britain in recent months there have also been a number of struggles simmering. December last year and January this saw strikes in job centres and benefit offices against the removal of safety screens. There has been a series of rail strikes. There was a two-day strike of college lecturers. In March there was a strike of 40,000 London teachers, the biggest in 30 years. In the public sector there has been a ballot on future action for 1.2 million local government workers, giving support for a strike on July 17. There was a strike in the British Museum against job cuts. There has been a demonstration of fire fighters, the biggest since their strike of 1977. There have been demonstrations against cuts by local councils. In the media there has been speculation about the possibility of a “summer of discontent”. Throughout the working class in Britain there is indeed an undercurrent of discontent, which breaks into various forms of action, limited, diverted or defused by the unions.

Many reasons for action

At the beginning of the year the TUC forecast that 150,000 jobs in manufacturing industry would go in 2002. This prediction hardly required rocket science as it is the continuation of a long-term trend - 400,000 jobs, 10% of the manufacturing workforce, have gone during the last three years. The pay deals in manufacturing in decline (low profits, low orders and fierce international competition on prices) are now at a level lower than any since 1980, when manufacturing was in the middle of its worst post-war slump. Meanwhile, although the so-called ‘service sector’ has bigger pay deals it’s often because of the lower starting point - the average annual wage for the thousands of call centre workers, for example, is £13,000.

On top of attacks on jobs and wages there are the attacks on pensions and the decline in the transport system and the health service. Although the Labour government tries to make out that things are improving, or that, at least, they are not as bad as they would have been under the Tories, there are in fact very real material reasons for the working class to struggle.

However, the unions and their left wing friends spend a great deal of time giving workers false goals to pursue. Take the example of nationalisation. Because of the state of rail and bus travel there have been calls for their renationalisation and for more public spending. With the health service there have been many denunciations of the different schemes for its financing (PFI, PPP etc) and demands that it be kept away from profit-making businesses. Against proposals to extend sales of public sector housing there has been a campaign to ‘defend council housing’. State control is presented as the solution to all social problems, real or imagined.

However, the working class’s experience of the capitalist state is unambiguous. The tendency for the state to increasingly intervene in all aspects of economic and social life has dominated the whole period of capitalist decadence since the First World War. The attacks against the working class have been managed by the very state that the left present as the workers’ saviour. Under the last Labour government, for example, British Leyland was declared bankrupt in 1975 and then nationalised with massive state intervention. Labour appointed Michael Edwardes to do the work required by the ruling class. After four years the workforce had been cut by 90,000. Under the Thatcher government the strike of steelworkers in 1980 was against proposals by state-run British Steel for up to 52,000 redundancies. In all the major miners’ strikes since nationalisation (1972, 1974, 1984-85) workers faced the state-controlled National Coal Board.

And yet, when the Post Office says that 40,000 jobs are under threat, with the possibility of another 17,000 to be cut on top of that, the left says that the main problem is the possibility of privatisation. As the capitalist state cuts jobs the left want workers to give their support to that very state.

Tinkering with the unions

That the unions can obstruct the development of workers’ struggles is not a well-kept secret. The left will often blame ‘right-wing leadership’, or say that unions should be more responsive to the ‘rank and file’. Recently a number of left-wingers have been installed in important union offices, and there are further significant union elections to come. As we showed in a recent article in WR 252 (“Unions turn left to derail the class struggle”) the change in union leadership has made no difference to the way that the unions have tried to isolate workers going into struggle.

A new twist has been added to this with recent manoeuvres in the civil servants’ union, the PCS. SWP member Mark Serwotka was elected general secretary, but, just days before retiring leader Barry Reamsbottom was due to go, the “Moderate” faction organised a national executive meeting at short notice. This meeting decided to keep Reamsbottom on for two years, and declared Serwotka’s election “unlawful”. Subsequently a court has declared the Moderates’ meeting to be “unconstitutional” and leftists of all persuasions have launched a campaign over the “coup against union democracy”.

This campaign is aimed at getting workers engaged in the mire of union politics, rather than in organising to defend their interests. Serwotka himself was aware that not everyone has a taste for union machinations, as he wrote in Socialist Worker (1/6/02) “Some people are so angry and disgusted that they say they’re going to resign from the union”. As the Right attacks Serwotka for being a Trotskyist, and the Left denounces the Right for being undemocratic, there are many false trails being laid for workers to follow.

The campaign is also tied up with the unions’ need to distance themselves from the Labour government. The GMB has cut funding to the Labour party, the RMT has withdrawn support from MPs who don’t agree with its policies, and now, in the PCS, a line is being drawn between the ‘moderate’ supporters of Blair and the advocates of a ‘strong, fighting’ union. The unions are posing as the means to oppose the attacks of capitalism.

Across the world the working class is showing that it is not just accepting the economic regime that the ruling class wants to impose. However, its struggles are still contained within the union framework, often drawn into support for the state through anti-privatisation and democratic campaigns. To develop its confidence and take the path towards the extension and self-organisation of its struggles the working class will have to confront all the manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie, from the Right to the Left

Car, 5/7/02.

The World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg from August 26 to September 4 addressed issues that are vital for the survival of the human species, just as the previous summit held in Rio did ten years ago. And just like Rio it will not mark a turning point in the despoliation of the planet but the start of a new descent as capitalism plunges ever further into crisis, dragging humanity with it. Capitalism threatens humanity

The statistics of death, disease and poverty have been repeated so many times and are of such enormity that they threaten to lose all meaning. 3 million people die every year from the effects of air pollution. 2.2 million die from contaminated water. 1.2 billion people live on 70p a day. A child dies every 3 seconds from disease, hunger or war. 1.1 billion people rely on unsafe water. In the 1990s another 2.4% of the world's forests were destroyed, mostly in Africa and Latin America. Half of the world's rivers are polluted. 11,000 species are threatened with extinction. 60% of coral reefs and 34% of all fish species are at risk. Water shortages are predicted to increase as extraction rates go above sustainable levels in major parts of the world. Global warming has reduced the polar ice caps, so much so that in the near future the famous north-west passage will become an open water-way for part of the year. Over the next 80 years sea levels are expected to rise by 44cm. Higher temperatures lead to more evaporation and consequently increased rainfall, while the destruction of the forests makes the consequent floods far more serious. The climatic changes have increased both the number and severity of 'natural' disasters. The recent floods in Europe were the worst for hundreds of years, but are as nothing compared to those elsewhere. In 1991 139,000 people died in floods in Bangladesh. In 1996 100 million people lost their homes or livelihoods in China because of floods. In 1998 the figure was 180 million. In both thousands died. In the same year 10,000 died when Hurricane Mitch tore through Central America. As more of the oceans reach the critical surface temperature of 28�C the number of hurricanes is predicted to increase. Alongside the escalation of 'natural' disasters diseases carried by micro-organisms that thrive in the warmer conditions are escalating. By 2050 it has been estimated that 3 billion people will be at risk of malaria. The bourgeoisie has no solution

On 4 September the conference ended with the adoption of a final statement that spoke of the "deep fault lines that divide human society between rich and poor" and of the need for 'fundamental changes' in the lives of the poor and of the "adverse effects of climate changes" that "rob millions of a decent life" (Guardian 5/9/02). The summit set a target of halving the 1.2 billion without basic sanitation by 2015, providing clean water for half of those without it, of halving the 1.2 billion who live on less than $1 a day, of restoring fishstocks by 2015 and reducing the loss of biodiversity by 2010. The World Trade Organisation will be required to consider environmental issues and an action plan on sustainable consumption is to be published within the next decade. A lot of noise followed about the lack of targets, as had been contained in Agenda 21 adopted at Rio, and 30 countries including the EU pledged themselves to set more precise targets. The reality, as the ten years that followed Rio confirmed, is that targets or not the bourgeoisie is incapable of even slowing the acceleration of the destruction of the environment, let alone halting and reversing the process.

The reason for this was evident throughout the summit when every issue was reduced to the level of grubby deals, of every nation putting its economic interests first. The negotiations over energy are one example: "There were two proposals: The EU, keen to see its strong renewable energy companies expand, wanted a target of 15% renewables by 2015. The US, Japan and Opec countries, who all fear that the rise of renewables will hurt their own strong fossil fuel companies, were opposed to the targets" (Guardian 4/9/02). The negotiations went up to ministerial level and into the final days of the summit and became one element within the overall manoeuvrings, with first one country then another putting forward proposals: "Japan now played its hand. With the EU it was proposing water and sanitation targets; but with the US it was opposing energy targets� The EU, battling to save its targets, held out, but after a 10-hour session the negotiators knew that without Japan they were isolated" (ibid).

This is not some aberration, but a manifestation of the logic, the very essence, of capitalism, as each nation uses the negotiations to defend its interests on the world market. Imperialist confrontation

The presentation - in the European media at least - of the US as the main obstacle to the summit was a constant theme throughout the summit: "If we all lived the way that George Bush jealously protects for the US we would need the resources of three additional planets" (Observer leader, 25/8/02). President Bush's refusal to attend was reported as a "snub" (Guardian 17/8/02), despite the best efforts of Tony Blair, wher energy are one example: "There were two proposals: The EU, keen to see its strong renewable energy companies expand, wanted a target of 15% renewables by 2015. The US, Japan and Opec countries, who all fear that the rise of renewables will hurt their own strong fossil fuel court. This is because its imperialist rivals - which include all of its supposed allies in the democratic west, including Britain -have spent the last decade and more using these as traps to snare American ambitions. The Earth Summit was no exception and in fact went hand in hand with the efforts to use the UN to try and rein back the planned assault on Iraq. The reception given to Bush's representative Colin Powell - a reception that must have had at least the tacit support of the organisers and main participants for it to happen in the conference centre - expressed most publicly the hostile anti-Americanism that had been built up in the months and weeks before the summit as well as during the summit itself.

Britain played an active part in this, although its approach was more discreet. Rather than criticise Bush directly, the press tended to report other people's criticisms. The Guardian, for example, in its report on Bush's decision not to attend, quoted the Greenpeace spokesman in Washington as saying "The fact that President Bush will be on vacation in Crawford speaks volumes for how little he cares for the environment�He's turning his back on the world" (17/8/02). The truth is that all of the heads of state who made such a fuss about going most just showed their faces for a few hours and spoke for a few minutes (the full text of Blair's speech is less than 700 words long). Blair for his part played the role of candid friend to Bush. While his speech in Mozambique, in which he criticised the US for not signing the Kyoto Agreement on climate change, was described as "a calculated rebuff to the American president" (Guardian 2/9/02) it was followed by a declaration of support for a war against Iraq. This two-faced approach is the strategy Britain has pursued with the US for a number of years. The loyal opposition

The Summit wasn't only attended by the world's governments and business leaders; there was also a noisy 'left wing' made up of Non-Government Organisations and environmentalist groups of various degrees of radicality, whose mouthpieces are figures such as Jonathan Porritt, George Monbiot and Naomi Klein. Such elements may attack the summit, they may denounce the politicians and the multinationals with varying degrees of vigour but they share the logic. For Porritt "you'd have to be an insane optimist to have any expectations at all of the World Summit" (Observer 25/8/02). The solution lies in government and industry changing and "some multi-nationals have genuinely become a 'force for good'" (ibid). Monbiot goes further: the last summit was partly responsible for the "environmental catastrophe" of the 1990s (Guardian 22/8/02) and the solution lies in "a global peoples' movement led by the poor world" resulting in "a world parliament" that will "hold government's to account for their actions" (Guardian 22/8/02). For Klein "the entire process was booby-trapped from that start" because it is now in the hands of the big corporations and the solution lies outside: "unlike a decade ago, the economic model of laissez-faire development is being rejected by popular movements around the world" (Guardian 4/9/02). What unites these critics, not only one with another but also with those they are criticising, is the call to ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism.

The fact is that it is not the excesses of capitalism that cause the problem, but capitalist accumulation itself: "Accumulation for accumulation's sake, production for production's sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie�" (Marx, Capital vol. 1, chapter XXIV). Even in its early days capitalism was capable of causing tremendous local destruction of the environment, but this was largely outweighed by the historic potential that capitalist industrialisation was creating for mankind. However, with the decadence of capitalism the process of destruction became qualitatively worse as competition for the world market became more murderous - quite literally more murderous as it overflowed into the orgy of destruction represented by the two world wars and many more local imperialist wars that went on during the twentieth century. Today, when declining capitalism has begun to rot on its feet, its debt-fuelled and increasingly irrational 'growth' has become completely destructive, not only endangering the basis for our future on this planet but causing increasing misery right now. Any apology for capitalism, with the multinationals becoming 'a force for good', as Porritt would have it, or in the hands of corporations that are smaller, as Klein wants, or with Monbiot's 'world parliament', is nothing but a prop for the very system which is pulling the human species towards the abyss.

The working class - a term not mentioned in any of the mountains of articles written - is the only force capable of saving humanity because it is the only force capable of replacing the capitalist mode of production with communism, of replacing competition between national states with a unified world community, production for production's sake with conscious, planned production for need. To do this it will have to take on not only the governments and multi-nationals of the world but also all of their green and radical friends.

North, 7/9/02

Since the spring, the world economy has been the victim of a series of financial tremors: whole states, and some of the developed world's biggest companies, have gone bankrupt, the stock exchanges have rarely been so unstable and fragile. The bourgeoisie's clever economists have trotted out a whole list of explanations for this avalanche of problems: they have 'denounced' the disastrous policies of the IMF, pouring oil on the fire as it came to the 'rescue' of countries in difficulty, the scandal of stock-options encouraging stock market fiddling on a grand scale, the headlong flight into financial speculation and debt by companies, etc.

Obviously, there is a tangible reality to all these elements of capitalism's functioning. But however 'critical' these economists may be of 'bad management', they remain the spokesmen of the ruling class, spreading the illusion that there are remedies to be found. But while their cures may prolong the life of a dying patient, they will never cure it of its mortal sickness.

In fact, we have entered a new phase of capitalism's open recession, which is nothing other than an expression of its historic crisis. The bourgeoisie's pessimistic forecasts for future growth are - with a large degree of understatement - an expression of this reality.

The world proletariat at the heart of the economic storm

The coming recession threatens to be both long and profound. The world working class will bear the cost, in terms of large-scale redundancies and falling wages. The attempts by shaky companies to reduce their debt can only lead to reductions in investment and in wage costs. Stronger companies - whether in the private or the state sector - will inevitably adopt the same measures in order to preserve their own financial health.

The last 18 months have seen repeated announcements of substantial redundancies in every sector of the economy and every size of company. A few figures illustrate the extent of the economic disaster: Hewlett-Packard has cut 4,770 jobs and is preparing for 15,000 lay-offs; Nortel has laid off 59,000 workers since December 2000, and is preparing to sack 7,000 more in one go; WorldCom will lay off 17,000 employees. By themselves, these are only examples: the full extent of the recession is far greater.

We can therefore expect an increase in the rise of unemployment, already revealed in this year's statistics despite the systematic fiddling that these are subjected to by the ruling class, in order to make workers believe that things are not really as bad as they can sense that they are in their own daily lives.

We are at the beginning of a period of brutal attacks on workers' living conditions, and not just in terms of unemployment. Employee shareholding in large companies, and shares-based retirement plans, will become important factors in the pauperisation of the working class. The collapse in share prices has wiped out workers' savings and pensions. The collapse in Vivendi Universal's share price (-70% since January) has affected the savings accumulated by 160,000 employees over as much as 20 years for some. For pensioners, the situation is even worse, especially (but not only) in the US: WorldCom's pension plan has lost 90% of its value.

An unprecedented plunge into economic crisis

The last months' economic tremors did not come out of a blue sky. They represent an acute episode in a 'creeping' - but nonetheless violent - stock exchange crash that has been going on for the last two years: since summer 2000, Europe's stock exchanges have halved in value, while New York's technology stock index has fallen from 5300 to 1300. The US Federal Reserve started the movement in order to put the brake on a speculative frenzy that threatened to run out of control. The crash has been accelerated this year by a series of bankruptcies and the subsequent discovery of financial fiddling on a grand scale in some of the world's most powerful companies. By July 2002, $6.7 trillion had gone up in smoke. Capitalism is balancing on a mountain of debt

In the final analysis, indebted companies can only survive to the extent that they are able to honour their commitments and pay back their debts. This they are finding more and more difficult as it becomes more and more difficult to achieve sufficient sales on the market.

In many cases they have only been able to borrow on the strength of their stock market valuation, seen as a guarantee of the banks' confidence in their health. In order to improve their share value, companies became less and less scrupulous in the dodges they used. Some sold capital just before the year's financial statement in order to show an increase in cash flow� only to buy it back again immediately afterwards. Others, more pragmatically, simply faked the accounts. Today, such 'immorality' on the part of CEO's is the target of outraged denunciation by the media, under orders from the bourgeois state. The cheating that they pretend to discover today was an open secret that served the interests of the whole bourgeois class as long as everything was going ok. It's common practice to find a few scapegoats for the fundamental failings of a system, which only survives by systematic cheating - above all by those self-same states. States are the greatest speculators, and stock market speculation is only a consequence of the crisis of over-production. The less attractive the productive sector becomes for investors, with low and uncertain returns, the more they turn to speculation, which is equally uncertain but which offers higher returns.

Debt can never be a real solution to the world crisis. This was demonstrated at the beginning of the year by the sudden bankruptcy of hyper-indebted countries like Venezuela and Argentina.

The collapse this August of the Uruguayan banking system, and worse still the financial crisis in Brazil, have once again shown that these countries still survive only thanks to massive and repeated injections of dollars, whose interruption inevitably drops them into economic chaos at the mercy of the upheavals of the stock exchange. The only 'cure' able to prevent a total rout in Brazil - an economically central country - was a $30 billion 'recovery plan', in other words a new plunge into still more debt which may put off the day of reckoning but can only make it more painful.

The most developed countries are also in debt, and so confronted by the same contradictions that have turned a country like Argentina into an industrial desert. While their greater strength means that they are not about to go the same way as the latter, these contradictions are going to become an ever more devastating social scourge.

The spectacular financial convulsions of 1987-88 and 1997-98 (the crisis in South East Asia) were comparatively brief and limited in extent, because they occurred at a time of relative (though drugged) economic growth, which the bourgeoisie was still able to maintain. Today's collapse on the world's stock markets and among its biggest companies comes at a time when the world economy is in open recession. Inevitably, this will seriously affect their ability to confront the problem.

Intervention by the state

This does not mean that the state is completely impotent, but its measures to soften the crisis can only aggravate the disease. Some members of the US administration envisage a recourse to budget deficits, which means nothing other than the state itself using debt to hold up an exhausted economy. After proclaiming the victory of 'economic liberalism' behind Reagan and Thatcher, as the only way out of the crisis in the 1980s and 90s, the bourgeoisie is now being forced to return to the 'old methods' of direct state intervention. The effects will be limited, but also damaging since the European states' budgets are already badly in deficit. It will only liberate the inflationary tendencies that they all fear.

While the present deepening of capitalism's crisis will not cause the system's complete collapse, or sudden blockage like that of 1929, the present crash demonstrates once again capitalism's utter bankruptcy as a social and economic system. It cannot be reformed or improved, contrary to what the trade unionists, leftists, and left parties of every description tell us. It cannot be reformed by better accounting methods or improved business morals, any more than by a struggle against globalisation.

The bourgeoisie has no solution to offer to the devastating consequences of its system's crisis. Witness the solution proposed by the 'humanitarians' appointed by our exploiters to handle the monstrous growth of poverty, for example in the one-time Latin American 'miracles' where 44% of the population lives below the poverty line and unemployment has doubled in ten years: a 'new' method of economic exchange, barter. In other words, a return to prehistory and resigned acceptance of generalised poverty!

The working class is confronted by economic crisis and unprecedented attacks looming all over the world. It must become aware that it cannot remain passive and that it must develop its struggles. To fail to take the path of active and resolute resistance against a disintegrating capitalism, is to leave the bourgeoisie's hands free, and to open the road to the unlimited exploitation of the workers and to the unleashing of chaos over the whole planet.

MS, 29/08/02

One year after September 11, what balance sheet can we draw of the USA's 'war against terrorism'?

It is first of all clear that the overthrow of the Taliban regime and the operations against Al Qaida in Afghanistan have resolved nothing: the broad anti-terrorist coalition set up by the White House last year no longer exists - a reality confirmed by Bush's desperate efforts to create a new coalition for the proposed assault on Iraq.

Above all, we have seen a steep rise in military tensions and conflicts - not only the threats against Iraq but also a worsening of the bloody mess in the Middle East and the renewed menace of nuclear war between India and Pakistan.

At the same time the USA has installed its military forces at the heart of central Asia - in Afghanistan, in Tadjikstan and Uzbekistan, and more recently in Georgia, which as a result is under a lot of pressure from Russia which has had to respond to this US advance into its backyard.

All this is part of a much vaster strategic aim - not only to win control of this region but also of the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. And by placing North Korea within the 'Axis of Evil', it is clear that the USA is also issuing a challenge to China and Japan. Above all it is pursuing a strategy of encircling the western European powers, and of blocking the advance of its most serious rival, German imperialism, towards the Slav and eastern regions.

And yet despite this gigantic offensive, we are more and more seeing the decline of American world leadership. The 1991 Gulf war already demonstrated that "faced with the tendency towards generalised chaos that characterises the phase of decomposition, and which the collapse of the eastern bloc has considerably accelerated, capitalism has no option, in its efforts to hold together the different parts of a body which is tending to disintegrate, to resort to the iron corset of armed force. In this sense, the very means it uses to try to contain an increasingly bloody chaos are themselves a major factor in the aggravation of the military barbarism into which capitalism has sunk" ('Militarism and decomposition', International Review 64, winter 1991).

The present situation is more and more confirming the growth of this permanent barbarism in a capitalist world dominated by the war of each against all among imperialist powers large and small.

Military force is the only means the US has to impose its authority. If it renounced the use of its military superiority, this would only encourage other countries to challenge its authority more and more. But at the same time, whenever America does resort to brute force, even if it does momentarily succeed in compelling the other powers to rein in their ambitions, in the long run the latter are only led to seek their revenge at the first opportunity, and to try to further weaken the USA's grip. The first consequence of this situation is that the US bourgeoisie is increasingly obliged to go it alone.

The juggernaut of US imperialism rolls on

The 1991 Gulf war was conducted 'legally' in the framework of UN resolutions; the Kosovo war was carried out 'illegally' but in the framework of NATO; the campaign in Afghanistan was waged under the banner of 'unilateral action' by the USA. All this has served to sharpen the hostility of the other states towards Uncle Sam. It's this contradiction which is reflected in the debates and disagreements that have arisen within the American bourgeoisie.

At the beginning of the second world war we saw disagreements between the 'isolationists' and the 'interventionists' about whether the USA should enter the war. Generally speaking the Republicans were in the isolationist camp whereas the interventionists mainly came from the Democratic Party. In 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbour, which had been deliberately provoked by Roosevelt (see 'The machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie' in International Review 108), enabled the interventionists to carry the day. Today this old split has disappeared. But the contradictions of American policy have given rise to a new internal cleavage that cuts across the traditional parties. Within the American bourgeoisie there is no disagreement about the fact that the US must be able to preserve its world imperialist supremacy. The difference of appreciation bears on whether the USA should accept the dynamic which is pushing it to act alone, or should it try to keep a certain number of allies on its side, even if such alliances can have no real stability? These two positions can be seen clearly with regard to the two main areas of concern: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the plan to intervene against Iraq. In the first case we have seen the USA oscillating between on the one hand total support for Sharon and attempts to get rid of Arafat, to declarations about the inevitability of a Palestinian state on the other. In the aftermath of September 11the USA pursued a policy of almost unconditional support for Israel but it soon became clear that Sharon's ruthless policy of military invasion irritates them. Large sectors of the Arab bourgeoisie - Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria in particular - are drawn towards an alliance with the European powers. The latter in turn have stated their opposition to the elimination of Arafat; and although they have proved themselves incapable of acting as 'peacemakers', they can certainly create all sorts of problems by wielding the weapon of diplomacy.

The most publicised disagreements however are over the planned intervention in Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein, even though they are really about the way to act and when. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfield, Vice President Dick Cheney and security adviser Condoleeza Rice defend the idea that the USA has to intervene alone and as soon as possible, while other eminent members of the Republican 'staff' such as Colin Powell, James Baker and Henry Kissinger (supported by certain business interests who are concerned about the cost of the operation which the US would have to bear alone at a time when the economy is in trouble) are much more reticent, preferring to alternate between the carrot and the stick.

What is at stake in this war? By making a new demonstration of force, the US aims to reinforce its domination of the region and of the entire planet. During the first Gulf war, there was a lot of propaganda talk about overthrowing Saddam; but in the end the USA had to accommodate him for lack of any alternative strong man to prevent the disintegration of Iraq. Today however, the USA has no further use for Saddam to police the region because it is in a position to assume a much more direct military presence there. And despite the difficulties it involves, an attack on Iraq has the merit of dividing the European powers, particularly Britain on the one hand and France and Germany on the other. Although Britain has certainly taken its distance from the USA over this affair, the leading factions of the British bourgeoisie will stand behind the US, not out of any genuine solidarity but because British imperialism has always seen the overthrow of Saddam as a means to restore its influence in what was once a British colony. By contrast, France has, ever since the Gulf war, expressed its opposition to any further military intervention against Iraq and has tried to maintain links with Saddam. Thus it has consistently called for an end to the embargo against Iraq. Germany, for its part, has always sought to affirm its interests in the Middle East through a Berlin-Baghdad land axis via Turkey.

Towards an aggravation of military barbarism

The 'hawks', partisans of a rapid US intervention in Iraq, seem to be winning out, even if Bush has declared that action is not imminent. We are already seeing a marked increase in Anglo-American air raids both in the northern and southern 'no fly zones'; military commanders in the area have openly admitted that these are rehearsals for a bigger assault. The White House is laying down the strategic foundations for an intervention (more than 50,000 US troops are stationed in Kuwait). And while some supporters of the 91war have defected, others have come on board: Turkey, its palms greased with offers of financial aid, has already agreed to serve as a rear base for US troops. The Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain and especially Qatar, will still serve as bases in the immediate region. [1] Jordan will also allow its territory to be used to neutralise Iraq's western frontier, which is closest to Israel. Nevertheless, the enterprise is even more perilous than the operation in Afghanistan, because the US has nothing comparable to the Northern Alliance to do its dirty work on the ground and so spare it any loss of US troops; a bloody invasion that cost it a lot of American lives could result in a reappearance of the 'Vietnam syndrome'. The creation of a broad 'democratic opposition' on the ground, capable of taking over from Saddam Hussein, is far from assured. Another difficulty is that, even more than in Afghanistan, there is a multiplicity of conflicting influences in Iraq. The Kurdish and Shiite minorities are unreliable from the American point of view; the former are highly susceptible to European influence, the latter are too closely tied to Iran. Turkey will also have difficulties staying onside given its sensitivity on the Kurdish question: Saddam Hussein has in fact acted as the gendame of its borders. Also Turkey is increasingly drawn towards the European Union. The other major risk is that the US bourgeoisie will definitively lose its claim to being the peacemaker in the Middle East. Connected to this is the concern that an attack on Iraq will give an impetus to anti-American Islamic fundamentalism throughout the region, above all in the key state of Saudi Arabia.

Thus the prospect we face is a continuation of the warlike policy we have seen in the first Gulf war, then in ex-Yugoslavia, then in Afghanistan, but at a higher level, creating in its wake even more instability and chaos, even more uncontrollable consequences, and in a vast area from the Middle East to Central Asia, and from the Indian sub-continent to South East Asia. All this is a confirmation that the conflicts between imperialist powers in the phase of capitalist decomposition pose a deadly threat to the survival of humanity.

Wim, 7/9/02.

1. As for Saudi Arabia, it views with some concern the prospect of Shiite participation in any future Iraqi government, and has its own 'anti-American' factions to take into account. The USA has taken note of its reticence to serve as a base for American troops by starting to dismantle the Al-Kharg platform, which was used extensively during the 91 war, and transferring it to the new base being built at Al-Udeid, on the eastern coast of Qatar.

The Midlands Discussion Group (MDG) has existed for more than two years now, involving people from Leicester and Birmingham from various political backgrounds - left communist, councilist, anarchist, environmentalist, leftist. The aim of the group is to discuss the proletarian alternative to capitalism, like other discussion groups that exist or have existed in Mexico, India, France, Spain, Switzerland and Australia. Discussion circles: important moments in the development of class consciousness

Discussion circles (DCs) can only be understood in the context of the historical development of class consciousness. They are part of the proletariat's effort to develop its class consciousness through trying to understand the meaning and implications of the crises of capitalism within the framework of the political positions of the proletariat. "Class-consciousness is by nature a political consciousness: a consciousness of the necessity to develop the class struggle against the bourgeois state and the building of communism; a consciousness which involves an understanding of the need for the proletariat to create its own political party to deepen and extend communist consciousness" ('The proletariat: class of consciousness', WR 83). This consciousness does not develop in a mechanical and linear way, but through a very difficult historical process of twists and turns, of advances and retreats. An essential part of this is the subterranean maturation of consciousness. Whilst the mass open struggle of the class is essential for the generation of revolutionary consciousness: "the degree to which mass struggles can give rise to such a consciousness also depends on a prior process of 'semi-concealed' or subterranean maturation within the class - the 'old mole' that Marx talked about... On the broadest level, a subterranean maturation takes place in the mass of workers, in the growing contradiction between the way bourgeois ideology describes reality and the way the workers themselves experience it. Initially this development may remain 'unconscious' to most workers, or take the negative form of disillusionment with bourgeois ideals. But this 'negative' stage is a precondition for the emergence of a more positive and conscious critique when the struggle comes out into the open.

"But the term subterranean maturation doesn't only refer to this semi-conscious form of development. It also takes place through workers reflecting on past struggles, forming discussion circles in order to make sense of their situation, and so on" ('The subterranean maturation of consciousness', WR 73).

In the present historical situation it is important to underline that, with the ever growing imperialist and economic chaos engulfing the world the process of the growth of class consciousness has been extremely difficult, particularly since the collapse of the eastern bloc. The work of discussion circles is thus of real importance to the future development of the proletariat's understanding of its historical role. An open forum for discussion and clarification

The MDG initially began as the Leicester Discussion Group with some people who had been discussing with a long-term contact of the ICC in the area. These discussions had been stimulated by the war in Kosovo. In order to give these discussions a more systematic and fruitful form the ICC suggested that they form a discussion circle. The initial discussions of the LDG were animated by an ICC article which drew the political lessons of a discussion group that had existed in Zurich, Switzerland, in the 1990s. This article explained that, "A circle is an open, but not permanent coming together of workers, who meet because they want to discuss and clarify political questions. They are places which the proletariat creates in order to push forwards its consciousness, above all in times when there is no party and no workers' councils... We consider them to be a concrete expression of the class. They express the consciousness of the class, showing that it is not willing to accept the crisis and the bankruptcy of capitalism without resistance; that it wants to defend itself against the attacks of the capitalist system. Also, they express an attempt to search for ways to fight back and to develop a revolutionary perspective..." (WR 207, 'Discussion circles in the working class: a world-wide phenomenon'). Regarding the function of Discussion circles the article also underlined that, "The goal of a discussion circle is the political clarification of the individual participants. The framework of discussion is a common one, corresponding to the collective nature of the working class. The direction and pace of political clarification however, vary according to each person. Since a circle is not an organisation regrouping with a political platform, a circle is not a permanent or stable entity. Rather, it is a moment of political clarification, allowing the militants, through participation in a collective discussion process, to find out where they stand politically in relation to the major questions of proletarian politics and in relation to the already existing historical and international currents of the marxist proletarian milieu...

"What's proletarian about a discussion circle is not a common 'local' programme but the common will to discuss and clarify. Thus, a discussion circle isn't the same as a political group with a fixed programme. Rather it is a place, a meeting place for political clarification." (ibid.). A positive process of clarification and opening out

Central to the discussions of the MDG has been a determination to better understand the main theoretical and historical questions of the workers' movement and to combine this with a concern to address and discuss international and national events as they have unfolded. Thus, after 11 September 2001 they too discussed the meaning of the events using the leaflets and communiqu�s issued by the ICC and other groups of the Communist Left. This particular meeting saw the attacks as an expression of worsening imperialist tensions. This concern to denounce imperialist war from a proletarian perspective has been a great strength for the group. All the participants have made clear their opposition to the Kosovo, Afghan and all imperialist wars.

The MDG's discussions are planned and comrades prepare presentations, reading lists are proposed for the preparation of the discussions. This systematic organisation of its discussions has allowed the MDG participants to carry out a serious process of clarification. The publication in WR 257 of the presentation for a discussion on the Paris Commune demonstrates the depth and quality of its discussions. Amongst other things, the MDG has discussed: the anti-capitalist movement; the Russian Revolution (which the group sees as proletarian, although there are disagreements on the role of the Bolsheviks and the reasons for its degeneration); and the consciousness of the bourgeoisie focusing on the role of the left against the working class

The confrontation of positions has been strengthened with the involvement of people from different towns and different political backgrounds. This rejection of localism has enabled a wider and deeper process of discussion to take place, and has allowed all of the participants to undergo a process of clarification at different levels.

From its beginning the MDG has made the Communist Left a reference point. It has invited the groups of the Communist Left to participate in its meetings. It has meant the participants have gained not only a better understanding of the positions of the different groups but also the experience of discussing with the political expressions of the proletariat. The ICC has intervened in the group's meetings since its founding, and the Communist Workers Organisation has also intervened more recently. Progress gained through determined political struggle

The MDG has succeeded in fulfilling its central role, that of clarification. But it has had to struggle in order to achieve this. In particular it has had to deal with confusions over its own nature and the role it plays.

The MDG initially based its work on the lessons of the wider experience of the working class, especially that of the Zurich discussion circle. However, the full assimilation of these lessons has been hampered by confusions within the group about its relationship to the ICC. Some elements, whilst initially seeing the need for an open forum, began to see the function of the MDG as being a place for the discussion of the positions of the ICC. This vision tended to see the group as kind of ante-chamber to the ICC. The ICC firmly rejected this vision and has often stressed the need for the group to discuss the wider history of the workers' movement and the positions of other communist organisations.

The ICC has always held the view that discussion circles are places for clarification, not appendages or the property of proletarian political organisations. They include anyone seeking clarification: not just those who agree with the ICC's or any other proletarian organisation's positions. The only reason for stopping someone from attending would be if they wanted to disrupt or take over its work. MDG meetings have been attended by leftists, which has led to a healthy confrontation with bourgeois positions. Far from being a distraction, such discussions have lead to clarification on the nature and role of leftism.

Thus, as is the case with the MDG, discussion circles can be very heterogeneous. But there is nothing wrong with this. To seek to impose political criteria for participation means undermining their fundamental strength: their open nature, because this implies prior agreement on the political criteria - that is, a certain level of clarification - which is to put the cart before the horse. Any attempt to impose such criteria would lead to the freezing of the process of clarification. The political evolution of those who participate in the discussion is a result of the confrontation between different positions.

However, if a discussion circle is not the property of one organisation, neither is it a political group or organisation in its own right. "A political organisation of the proletariat is necessarily an internationally orientated organ, a product of the historical effort of the working class fighting for its programmatic clarity. It doesn't arise locally, but is a direct continuation of the political and organisational traditions of the marxist movement. A circle however, is a phenomenon that is limited geographically and in time. It is restricted to one area. Elements come together in one area in order to discuss matters of relevance to the proletariat and clarify them" (ibid.).

This does not mean that it is not the duty of proletarian political organisations to stimulate the emergence of such groups and to intervene towards them in order to contribute to the most effective clarification. The ICC's defining principles for its intervention are to carry out an "Organised intervention, united and centralised on an international scale, in order to contribute to the process which leads to revolutionary actions of the proletariat" (Basic Positions of the ICC). It is the duty of the ICC and other proletarian political organisations to intervene within discussion circles in order to work towards them having the healthiest proletarian life possible.

The MDG has also had to deal with a certain amount of personal tension in its ranks. However, following some frank discussion all the participants agreed that the interests of the group came first, and that the personalisation of discussion should be rejected.

Since confronting these difficulties the group has flourished. At the beginning of 2002 the MDG held a meeting on proletarian opposition to imperialist war. This drew in people that had not been to meetings before, along with the CWO and the SPGB (See WR 252). Most of these elements have since participated in the discussions of the MDG. Perspectives

In recent months individuals in the group have participated in meetings of the Sheffield No War But Class War; it has contacts with the London NWBTCW Discussion Group; the CWO has participated in its meetings; and the group has held another public meeting on the question of communism, all of which pose questions about activity of the MDG. We will not deal here with the questions of Sheffield NWBCW and the CWO's conception of discussion groups - they will be addressed in a forthcoming articles. What does need addressing is how to maintain and improve the healthy dynamic the MDG has had since last summer.

Central to the development of the group's life is the maintenance of its nature as an open forum for discussion. The importance of this cannot be overestimated. In the present very difficult situation for the proletariat the central need is for reflection upon and discussion of the historical and political questions and challenges facing the working class. The greatest danger for the group is to forget that discussion groups are not permanent political organs of the proletariat but moments in the development of class-consciousness. To seek, even if unconsciously, to turn the MDG into a political group would be a mistake and a failure to understand the nature of discussion circles and the class struggle in the period of decadence.

The holding of public meetings poses important questions. The meeting on proletarian opposition to war was based on the group's unanimous opposition to the Afghan war and defence of proletarian internationalism. The desire to make this opposition widely known was a proletarian response to a vital event. Nevertheless, it contained the potential for confusion on the role of the MDG. The fundamental characteristic of a discussion group is that it is an open place of clarification. To hold regular public meetings would call this into question and expresses an emerging idea of the circle as a semi-political group with its own positions to defend. Whilst most of the participants of the MDG support the positions and intervention of the Communist Left, its role is not to defend these before the class - which is the role of communist organisations - but to provide an area for the confrontation of positions. A recent public meeting on the nature of communism showed the problem: why a meeting on such a question? It is not a pressing immediate question confronting the working class, as it was with the war in Afghanistan. It is a question where there are many positions and ideas amongst the participants and therefore a question to be discussed in the usual way. The comrades need to discuss the danger of mistaking the nature of their role. Warning of such a danger is a vital duty for the ICC because its central concern is to defend the healthy proletarian life of the group.

The Midlands Discussion Group has expressed the wider effort of the proletariat to develop its consciousness. The dynamic that the participants have been able to maintain expresses the political vitality of this group. All of the participants have undergone a real process of clarification in their political understanding. This does not mean that everyone has gone beyond their various political backgrounds, but it does mean that the participants are much clearer on what they defend and don't defend, on how they see their political futures. The MDG is at a very important point in its development: will it continue as a forum of open discussion or will it increasingly solidify into a permanent semi-political organisation? The ICC is determined to do all it can to impulse the former and to struggle against the latter. We urge the MDG and all those interested in it to seriously discuss the analysis we have made.

WR, 4/10/02.

The bourgeoisie's war drums are beating all over the planet. The famous promise made by Bush Senior in 1990 that we were entering a 'New World Order' of peace and prosperity have proved to be a cynical lie; in reality war has become more and more permanent and threatening for humanity. Those who talk the most about 'peace' and 'humanitarianism' and the 'fight against terrorism' are worthy defenders of a system which is dragging the human race towards mass destruction.

Each military conflict, far from bringing peace, leads to even wider and more destructive conflicts. The frightening demonstration of American power in Afghanistan has only served to heighten instability in all the surrounding regions, in particular by intensifying the danger of a war between the two nuclear-armed states of India and Pakistan. And hardly had the American operation in Afghanistan been completed when Iraq became the next target of US threats. Of course there are disagreements between the great powers about military intervention against Baghdad, but it's not because any of them have any concern for saving the Iraqi population from a new bloodbath; it's simply because the imperialist interests of these vultures are increasingly at odds with one another, a reality which contains the seeds of even worse massacres to come.

The hands of all the world's powers and leaders are stained with blood! Not just Bush and Blair, who are calling for a new crusade against Saddam Hussein, eleven years after the slaughter which cost hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. But also the countries and politicians that prattle on about 'international law' and the need for UN approval of any action against Iraq. This opposition, led by countries like France, Germany and Russia, and echoed by the so-called 'doves' in the US and Britain, is simply a new attempt to pursue their own imperialist appetites. Let's not forget that in 1991, France and others were also reluctant to take part, but they ended up doing their bit, not least when all the major powers cooperated in pushing the Kurdish and Shiite minorities to rise in rebellion, only to be crushed by Saddam's elite units, which had been carefully spared by the 'allies'.

And let's also recall that less than six months after the first Gulf war, the same imperialist powers found themselves on different sides of the war in Yugoslavia, instigated by the growing imperialist ambitions of a reunified Germany, which had called on Slovenia and Croatia to proclaim their independence from Belgrade. For the next eight years, in the name of 'humanitarian intervention', Germany, France, Britain, the US and Russia armed and advanced their various pawns, who carried out a ceaseless genocide of the population, reaching its peak with the Kosovo war in 1999.

As in the Gulf war, the hypocrisy of the great powers was limitless. In 1991, as today, Saddam was painted as the great tyrant, the new Hitler, in order to justify military intervention; but those who most pointed the finger at him were the very ones who had set him up in the first place. "He may be a bastard - but he's our bastard" was the cynical description of Saddam by the US during the 80s when he was useful in reining in Iranian ambitions in the region. In Yugoslavia the evil tyrant was Milosevic, now on trial for war crimes; but for most of the war in ex-Yugoslavia he was supported by Britain and France to counter the advance of the Americans and the Germans. War across the planet

The story is the same in the Middle East. We are encouraged by the media to see the conflict there as the result of some blood feud between Jews and Arabs, or of the extremism of Sharon on the one hand and of the radical Islamic groups on the other. And certainly both of these local expressions of capitalism are constantly trying to outdo each other in the pitiless murder of terrorised populations. But once again, behind all the local killers lurk the great powers, who talk peace while aiming to sabotage the interests of their great power rivals through all kinds of intrigues and underhand manipulations.

It's the same in Africa: there are wars all over the continent, and the hand of imperialist powers large and small can be seen in all of them. In Algeria the US has backed the Islamic fundamentalists to weaken France, which props up the military regime; in Rwanda France trained the Hutu death squads which spearheaded the genocide of 1994, while the US and Britain supported the Tutsi rebels of the RDF; when this conflict spilled over into ex-Zaire, nearly all of the local states became embroiled, and once again the bigger powers were stoking the fires in the background.

The war games of decomposing capitalism are being played all across the planet. Countless massacres, stirring up the worst forms of racism and religious fanaticism, deepening the terrible and growing poverty which blights the majority of the world's population - this is the only perspective which the capitalist system can offer us today.

Faced with such a scenario, calls for peace and disarmament are not just empty words, they are more and more being revealed as yet another justification for imperialism. When the USA's rivals paint themselves in 'anti-war' colours, it's only to carry out their own imperialist policy in a different way, given that they cannot compete with the US directly on the military level.

The only force that can block the spiral of war is the class struggle of the international proletariat. This was proved in 1917-18 when the revolutions in Russia and Germany, the mutinies across Europe, forced the bourgeoisie to call a halt to the butchery. It was further confirmed after 1968 when the revival of workers' struggles across the globe was the key factor preventing a third world war between the two great imperialist blocs.

The interests of the working class are directly opposed to the national and imperialist interests of the ruling class. The working class is the first to suffer in imperialist wars - whether as conscripts in the front line, or through the increasing attacks on living and working conditions demanded by the national economy, which is more and more revealed as a war economy. By struggling tooth and nail against these attacks, the working class can become aware of its real strength as an international social force.

Working class internationalism is not some pious wish; it corresponds to the real material interests of the world's workers. The struggle against war starts with the immediate struggle against the economic attacks launched by 'our own' ruling class. But this is the same struggle in all countries, and it can only advance by generalising across national frontiers and transforming itself into a political offensive aimed at the victory of the world communist revolution.

ICC, 5/10/02.

We have already dealt in our press with the so-called "Internal Fraction of the ICC" (IFICC). This is a parasitic group which constituted itself within our organization; under the cover of fine phrases about its desire for "correcting and saving the ICC", its real function has been sabotaging its work and trying to destroy it. The International Extraordinary Conference of the ICC which was held at the end of March 2002 noted that the Parisian elements constituting this supposed "fraction" (which also has an offshoot in Mexico) were deliberately placing themselves outside our organization on a number of counts: their repeated violations of our statutes (in particular the refusal to pay their contributions fully) and their refusal to make a commitment to respect them in the future; their refusal to present their defence before the extraordinary conference; the theft of money and of material of the ICC (internal files of addresses and documents).

As of January 2002, while its members formally belonged to our organisation, the IFICC started systematically pouring out towards the outside calumnies that it had previously only peddled on the inside. Today, through an Internet site (membres.lycos.fr/bulletincommuniste) and the documents that it sends to the subscribers of our press whose addresses were stolen by one of the members of the IFICC, it continues its slanders against the ICC and its attempted destruction of the proletarian political milieu.

We shall not return in this short article to the totality of the lies and calumnies which the IFICC has been spreading against our organisation and its militants. We have already expressed ourselves at some length about this and will return to it later if necessary. We want simply to discuss a "communique", which IFICC seeks to get published "in all the press organs of the proletarian political milieu, including in the publications and on the site of the ICC as a right of reply"(Footnote 1 [107]). The communique affirms: "Following the articles published in the press of the ICC, we deny all the charges made by the ICC against our fraction and its members". In fact, this "denial" is itself only a web of lies. Some examples:

1) Concerning Jonas, excluded from ICC at the beginning of 2002 for "conduct absolutely unworthy of a communist militant": "All the charges which the current leadership of the ICC makes today against his honesty and loyalty to the communist cause are nothing but infamies".

In our official statement published in WR..252, we wrote that one example of behaviour justifying the exclusion of Jonas consisted of "circulating, including outside of the ICC, a whole series of extremely serious accusations against a certain number of its militants, while at the same time he always refused to meet (and to even recognise) the commission (�) charged with examining this type of accusation". And the communique specified: "One of the most intolerable and repugnant aspects of his behaviour is the veritable campaign that he promoted and carried out against a member of the organisation (�) accusing them in the corridors and even in front of people external to the ICC of manipulating his followers and the central organs on behalf of the police force".

It is necessary to note that not one member of the IFICC ever contradicted the facts which are reported here. In the public meetings of the ICC where we had invited the members of the IFICC to come to present their position (in Paris on 4 May 2002 and in Mexico City on 3 August 2002), the latter carefully refused to come to a conclusion about the truthfulness of facts such as these, as requested by the presidium and the participants, or else tried to get out of trouble by lying. In Paris, they courageously left the room en bloc (justifying this "by family obligations"!) after a sympathiser insisted that they pronounce on the question; and in Mexico City a member of the IFICC affirmed that Jonas had actually made this type of accusation but in front of "the appropriate organ".

But perhaps the IFICC considers that for a communist militant to accuse another militant of the organisation of being a cop (according to the expression of Jonas) - and that in the corridors and not in front of the bodies responsible for this type of question - constitutes completely correct conduct? The IFICC should take a position on this and in particular say what it thinks today of the following assertions: "since the beginning of the workers' movement, its political organisations have always acted with the greatest severity (often leading to exclusion) against even well-meaning authors of slanderous accusations against their militants.� any suspicion, even well founded, towards a member of the organisation must be communicated exclusively to a proper body responsible for dealing with this kind of problem (a central organ or a specialised commission) and should certainly not become the object of discussions or speculations within the organisation as a whole. Anybody who acts outside of the formal structures of the organisation to conduct 'his own' investigation into a particular individual or a particular 'collective' on an issue of this kind is making an organisational transgression of the most serious kind, similar to an act of police provocation (even if it is inspired by the best intentions). Therefore it will be dealt with as such".

These passages are extracted from a resolution adopted in January 2002 by a full session of the central organ of the ICC with the full support of the two members of the IFICC who took part in it. Let us note that the passage of our communique on Jonas affirming that he "has behaved in a manner worthy of an agent provocateur" was itself directly inspired by this resolution.

2) Concerning the payment of the dues and the theft of material of the organization: "We have never refused to pay our dues nor, even less, have ever stolen money from the ICC, as it implies constantly. Thus, during the last months of our presence within the ICC, we placed at the disposal of the organisation part of our militant dues and preserved the remainder for the operation of our fraction as is the tradition in the revolutionary movement."

We have never written that the members of the IFICC had "refused to pay their dues"; we simply announced what they recognise in this official statement: they refused to pay the entirety of their dues. It is an old dishonest method this: fraudulently attributing lies to others, in order to better be able to "denounce" them. In addition, under the pen of the members of the IFICC, "tradition in the revolutionary movement" has the flip side of justifying no matter what breach of the organisation's rules of operation (Footnote 2 [108]). This is why the statutes of the ICC specify that: "The fact that members of the organisation defend minority positions does not release them from any of their responsibilities as militants". This is also true for the payment of the entirety of dues, which constitute one of the major responsibilities for each militant. It is necessary to note that the statutes of the ICC were adopted by the totality of the Parisian members of the IFICC and that the Mexican members of the latter affirmed the desire to respect them while part of our organisation, as does any militant who integrates into our ranks. As for the affirmation that the members of the IFICC have never stolen the money of the ICC, this is an enormous lie. Yes or no, have they refused to refund the cost of the air tickets which made it possible for two Mexican members of the IFICC to come to France, not to take part in the extraordinary conference of the ICC of March 2002, as they had received the mandate of their section to do and as they were committed to do, but to take part in a meeting of the IFICC? As we have already written, it would seem that the IFICC endorses this assertion of Goebbels, the person responsible for Nazi propaganda: "An enormous lie carries with it a force which removes doubt".

Before concluding, we would like to comment on the support that the IFICC is receiving today.

The "communique" was published with "its support and its understanding" by a small free sheet entitled Le prol�tariat universal (PU). Pierre Hempel, the person in charge of publication and sole writer of this sheet adds: "� the ICC functioned for20 years with full freedom of internal criticism � it was a time, it is true, when a representative of the old revolutionary tradition - neither sectarian nor intolerant (Marc Chiric) - was still living. This spirit � has fled the ICC. This is why I myself fled this sect in 1996". In July 1984, our comrade MC had written an article (RI No. 123) in connection with the publication by a former member of the ICC, RC, of a small review entitled Jalons, comparable to PU with the difference that it was not free and did not fill its columns with attacks against the ICC nor with gossip worthy of a concierge. On this subject, MC wrote: "This question is of interest largely exceeding the person of this comrade. It touches the essence of what separates marxism from anarchism. Marxism is the theory of a class with associated work, the working class, which tends towards unity, towards a collective activity, the re-establishment of the human community. Anarchism, in all its forms, is the ideology of the lower middle class, the handicraft maker, of individual work, and which aspires to unbridled individualism, to the Ego of Stirner. Comrade RC would like himself to be marxist in theory, but does not manage to remove the mud of individualistic anarchism in practice, which sticks to his skin, like another anarchist who claimed to be carrying out the general strike all by himself".

This appreciation also corresponds rather well to Hempel. Furthermore, MC had severely criticised the individualism of RC as well as that of Hempel in contributions to our internal bulletins. It was also no accident that RC and Hempel followed the same path for a while after the "flight" of the latter from the ICC. This was before, very logically, as incorrigible individualists, they separated. Unable to put up with the discipline of a proletarian organisation, frustrated that we do not recognise his literary talents to the same extent that he does, dissatisfied that we criticised his conduct (criticisms that MC had made or had supported, but which he was no longer prepared to accept after MC's death), Hempel has found nothing better to do than plant his cabbages all alone, justifying his "flight" with the old charge of the parasitic milieu that the IFICC endorses today: our organisation is a sect. That is to say, the classic accusation of bourgeois propaganda against the organisations which fight for the communist revolution, a propaganda to which parasitism contributes its share. As opposed to what Hempel says, and to what the IFICC is now arguing, there has not been any change in the ICC as far as "freedom of internal criticism" is concerned. Hempel was quite able to express his point of view and his disagreements, as were the members who now form the IFICC. On the other hand Hempel - like the IFICC, and whatever their disagreements - still had to respect the statutes of the ICC.

In itself, the type of support which the IFICC gathers in its campaigns says a lot about the role that it now plays, not in the service of the proletariat, but in playing the game of the ruling class.

ICC, September 2002.

(1) We want to make a point of affirming that we do not regard ourselves as being obliged to publish a document of the IFICC as part of a "right of reply". Our press, while it is open to the expression of the disagreements or critiques formulated by readers or by other groups of the proletarian political milieu, does not have the task of conveying the slanders of a parasitic group, aimed not at a "correction", as it claims, but at the destruction of our organisation. It is thus not a question at all of "censorship" on our part against the positions of a group of the communist left, as the IFICC likes to pretend. Still less do we feel any obligation here, given that thanks to the material which its members stole from the ICC, it has the wherewithal to spread its assertions far and wide. Back [109]

(2) See on this subject our article: 'The left fractions and the question of organisational discipline' in International Review No. 110. Back [110]

A week after the Countryside Alliance's march in London (for "Liberty and Livelihood") came the demonstration initiated by the Stop the War coalition and the Muslim Association of Britain ("Don't Attack Iraq - Freedom for Palestine"). The earlier march was characterised as a lot of 'toffs' and Tories coming to town, but not every one there was a big 'fat cat' landowner: some were agricultural workers, some impoverished small farmers and some who've felt the very real decline in rural services. Similarly there were many who went on the 28 September march who were genuinely concerned about the drive towards war and wanted to find a way to express their fears. From the noise and crush of the start at the Embankment to the procession of speakers at the end in Hyde Park many must have wondered what sort of 'anti-war' event they'd got themselves involved in. A policy for imperialism

As with the speeches of union leaders and left-wingers at the Labour Party conference there was a great emphasis on the role of the United Nations. The actions of the US were seen as undermining the UN efforts for 'peace'. In reality the UN, like its predecessor the League of Nations, has been used in the military strategies of the biggest imperialisms. The UN had not been long founded before it was used to co-ordinate the forces arrayed against North Korea and Russian imperialism in the early 1950s. If there are occasions when the UN has expressed a view contrary to the US, then firstly it has been in the interests of other imperialisms and, secondly the US will act unilaterally anyway if it feels the need to. The UN is not a force that's above or against imperialist conflicts - it's an integral part of the way different imperialisms relate to each other. Turning to the UN or ignoring it are both imperialist policies. In Britain at the moment the current emphasis on the UN is being used as a means of advancing the particular interests of British imperialism.

"Don't Attack Iraq" read the placards. On banners and badges US imperialism was marked out as the main enemy. The front page of Socialist Worker headlined with "STOP BUSH. He is the threat to peace. He has got nuclear weapons. His doctrine is imperialism". On posters and in leaflets from a range of groups the implications of this were spelt out. The British government should not support American belligerence. No one seemed under any illusion that a demonstration through London would influence American foreign policy, but the spirit of much of the material produced for the march showed that there were some who thought that the British government had to make itself "accountable" to "democratic protests".

In reality the British state determines its military actions according to its imperialist needs. More to the point, the demand for Britain to act independently from the US actually corresponds to a policy within the British ruling class. They know there are occasions when British imperialism's interests will coincide with aspects of US policy, but they want at all times to ensure that Britain's particular interests come first.

The fact that there are states in Europe which oppose the strategy of US imperialism is easily understood - as that strategy is directed against them! Socialist Worker reported the re-election of Schr�der in Germany as "bad news for George Bush and the warmongers". But it had to admit that this was "partly a reflection of the fact that German big business does not believe its interests will be advanced by a US victory in the Middle East". So in fact the election of Schr�der corresponds to the interests of 'the warmongers' (of the German ruling class), in the same way that the military stance of the Blair government is determined by the needs of British imperialism. Marching to war

On the demonstration the abstraction of 'Freedom for Palestine' was made very concrete. Demands for a Palestinian state, for a state 'between the river and the sea', for the 'return of land' are imperialist. The fact that the conflict in Palestine/Israel is currently between suicide bombers and a state armed with nuclear weapons and all the latest military technology does not alter this. The pro-Palestine demands are one side of an imperialist conflict in which workers, poor peasants and people from the refugee camps are used as soldiers for the cause of the Palestinian bourgeoisie (and any imperialism that feels it can use the Palestinian cause). This is not a hypothetical situation but a conflict that has in various stages gripped the region for decades and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands. The 1948-49 war, the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 and the subsequent years of attrition, the Jordanian attack on the Palestinians in 1970, the war of 73, the Syrian invasion of the Lebanon in 75-76, the Lebanese 'civil war' of 1975-1990 including the Israeli invasions of the south of the country, the 'Intifada' of the last two years - this is the continuing conflict that the organisers of the march support. The demand for a Palestinian state (supported by all major imperialisms) is no less reactionary than the insistence that the Israeli state has a 'right to exist'. Both calls are for the mobilisation of the exploited and oppressed in the service of their class enemies.

While the organisers found those dressed as suicide bombers just too blatant for a 'Stop the War' march, Islamic 'jihad' militants were omnipresent. A contingent wearing uniform T-shirts saying "Reject Western solutions" was marshalled round orange banners expressing support for various imperialist causes related to the Middle East.

While the dominant note of the march was a plea for there to be no attack on Iraq, there were the usual leftist calls for the actual defence of Iraq, even for the 'victory' of Iraq. Again, this amounts to a demand that workers abandon any thought of the defence of their own interests so that they can enter the military service of their exploiters. The proponents of this line of thought always make a distinction between 'military support' for Iraq going alongside 'political opposition' to Saddam's regime. This distinction is meaningless from the point of view of class realities. For the ruling class at war 'military support' is all it actually requires in its defence. For the working class anything that mobilises it in the defence of its exploiters can only serve the interests of the ruling class. For class opposition to war

A year ago with the demonstrations around the war on Afghanistan there were many elements wanting to defend a class position against the 'war against terrorism', and a certain amount of co-ordination and joint activity between different groups and individuals took place. This was not the case with the 28 September demonstration. This was a much bigger demonstration, with a more clearly pro-war atmosphere, but it was political dispersal that further undermined the impact of a proletarian stance. This time there were separate leaflets from the 'No War But The Class War' groups in London and Sheffield, and a general lack of co-ordination which saw these two groups in different parts of the march. Furthermore, the focus of both these groups, and of the IBRP which has a major influence on the Sheffield group, on finding a place within the march added to the difficulty of making a distinctive proletarian intervention. We will take this problem up in more depth next issue.

A year ago delegations from the organisations of the communist left, the ICC and the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, were able to get together with some from the London 'No War But the Class War' group at the end to attempt an impromptu meeting in opposition to the official platform. Whatever the difficulties and weaknesses of that attempt, we must not underestimate the importance of working together to give the small internationalist voice the greatest possible impact. Nothing of the kind happened this time.

While the intervention of revolutionaries was swamped at this demonstration, and will continue to be very difficult to raise at such events in future, we will continue to participate in meetings wherever working class opposition to war may be discussed, to relate to any current that puts forward the need for the class war as the only way to oppose imperialist war, and ensure that our press shows what's at stake in the current proliferation of military conflicts.

Only the international revolution of the working class can put an end to the capitalist system that engenders imperialist war. While capitalism's spectacular demonstrations make all their noise, the work of revolutionaries, the discussions in the working class, the evolution of class consciousness continue, as part of the only movement that can really end war.

Car, 2/10/02.

We are told that terrorism is a threat to civilised values; that all freedom-loving and civilised nations must unite against it. In truth, the multiplication of terrorist attacks, from New York to Moscow, from Bali to Tel Aviv, reveal how absolutely rotten present day civilisation has become.

Terrorism was once - at best - a misguided response of the oppressed against the rich and powerful. Today it hafs become a major weapon in the arsenal of the state - an instrument of imperialist politics, of inter-capitalist war. Terrorism today is not only an arm of weak and 'failed' states like Afghanistan under the Taliban, or Iran under the Mullahs, or occupied Chechnya, not only of aspiring would-be states like the Palestinian Authority or the IRA, but also and above all, of the world's most powerful, most democratic, most civilised states.

• Of France, for example, which has links to the Basque terrorists of ETA, and is even more notorious for its sponsoring and training of the Hutu death squads which massacred hundreds of thousands of Tutsis in Rwanda.
• Of Germany, which armed the Croatian ethnic cleansers in Bosnia or the Albanian UCK in Kosovo.
• Of Great Britain, whose secret services are involved in a dark web of intrigue with the paramilitary loyalist killers in Ulster.
• And last but not at all least, of the USA, which uses the IRA to prod at Britain's flank, which has set up veritable universities for training Latin America's covert death squads, and which created Osama bin Laden in its war against the USSR.

In short, every capitalist state, involved in an insane war of each against all, no longer has any hesitation in employing the most insidious, ruthless and murderous methods in the defence of its national interests. And the victims of these methods are always the civilian populations - whether, like the Palestinians, they are blown apart by the missiles and shells of official armies, or, like the Israelis, by suicide bombers manipulated by shady terrorist gangs which in turn act in the interests of various regional or global powers. The chief victims of the September 11 attacks in the USA were the mass of employees working in the vertical factories of the World Trade Center. The majority of the victims of the USA's brutal response in Afghanistan were unwilling conscripts in the Taliban armies, civilians buried under the rubble left by US 'smart' bombs, or starved to death in panic flight from the cities and farms. Today the US prepares another war against another sponsor of terrorism, Saddam Hussein, and once again the principal victims will be Saddam's own principal victims - the exploited and the oppressed of Iraq. At the moral level there is absolutely nothing to choose between the terrorist gangs and the official masters of state violence. Between Hamas and Sharon. Between Bush and bin Laden. Between Tony Blair and Saddam Hussein. The sinister conspiracies of imperialist states

But there is more and there is worse. Not only do all the civilised states use terrorist groups and terrorist methods against the populations of rival states. There is growing evidence that they are perfectly prepared to turn their own populations into hostages and victims of terrorist attacks.

September 11

The notion that the US state 'allowed' September 11 to happen in order to whip up support for its global 'war against terror' - a war planned long in advance of the assault on the Twin Towers - is no longer in the domain of outlandish conspiracy theory. The Observer (27.10.02) published a four page feature by Gore Vidal cataloguing the succession of 'errors', 'breakdowns in communication' and 'failures to act' by the US military and security services which add up to a case so damning that mere incompetence or negligence cannot explain it. The German weekly Die Zeit published an article on the same subject, concluding that "the American investigators knew that terrorist attacks were being prepared, but they let the suspects act�" (cited in Le Monde, 5 October). As Vidal notes, there is a historical precedence for exactly such intrigues: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which again was 'allowed to happen' so that the US could mobilise a reluctant American population for war.

Bali

As we show in the article on page 4, there are equally suspicious circumstances surrounding the terrorist bombings in Bali, which left nearly 200 dead and many more gravely injured. Our article focuses on the 'benefits' these events can provide to Australian imperialism, but it also points out that behind Australia stands the USA, which in addition has plans to establish a much more direct presence of its own in the region. In the period leading up to the bombings, there were a number of visits to Indonesia by top US officials, including Colin Powell and the director of the FBI; moreover, well-known 'hawks' like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. have been demanding an official resumption of US military aid to Indonesia, which was suspended in 1992 following massacres by the Indonesian forces in East Timor. In October the issue was debated in Congress, having received a letter from Indonesian human rights organisations opposing the resumption, given that there was no improvement in the country's human rights record. The letter also argued that the threat of terrorism - which the Bush administration was citing as the main reason for unblocking restrictions on military aid - was "very much exaggerated".

Add to this the fact that there have long been very tight connections between the radical Islamist groups and the Indonesian secret services and military forces, then suspicions can only increase that the bombings are extremely 'timely' for US imperialism, enabling it to strengthen its arguments in favour of military aid, of using Australia as a local gendarme, and of establishing a much more direct presence itself. This would allow the US to impose its version of 'stability' on a political entity which is vital strategically but divided up into a myriad of islands, many of which are agitating for independence from Jakarta; at the same time a direct military presence in the region would allow the US to begin the effective encirclement of its principal imperialist rivals in the region, China and Japan. Little wonder that the Bush administration wants to blame the bombings on groups linked to al Qaida and thus integrate its Indonesian strategy into the global 'war on terrorism'.

Moscow

In a parallel way, there is every reason to suppose that Russian imperialism will be the first to profit from the recent terrorist crimes in Moscow. The fact that 40 heavily armed Islamic fighters found it so easy to drive through Moscow and take over a theatre in the centre of the city already poses serious questions, especially when we recall that the most recent Russian offensive in Chechnya was justified as a response to a previous terrorist outrage: the mysterious bombings of apartment buildings in the capital which killed hundreds of workers; to this day there are plenty of reasons to think that these bombings were a provocation by Russia's secret services. If the Russian forces again step up their bloody 'pacification' of Chechnya, this would only make it more likely that the hostage crisis in Moscow was indeed "our September 11" as Russian politicians put it.

The comparisons with September 11 have another purpose, as do the efforts to find links between the Chechen gangs and al Qaida: Putin's regime is very anxious to get the Americans to recognise the Chechen war as the equivalent of the USA's 'war on terrorism'. In other words, he wants some underhand deal whereby Russia will not act as too much of an obstacle to US military adventures like the proposed attack on Iraq, if the US keeps quiet about Russian atrocities in Chechnya. He has good reason to put his hopes in such a deal; two years ago, when the Russian offensive was at its bloody height, both Clinton and Blair made it plain that they supported Putin, since they had no wish to see a succession of independence movements pulling the Russian Federation to pieces; and already both the US ambassador in Moscow and Tony Blair have expressed their approval of Russia's handling of the latest crisis, despite the high death toll among the hostages.

What the outcome of the crisis really showed is that the Russian state cared as little for the fate of the hostages as did the Islamist terrorists who were no doubt ready to slaughter them all. The revelation that the vast majority of the hostages who died were killed by the opiate gas used to prepare the storming of the theatre; the failure to provide adequate emergency aid to the victims of the gas; the refusal even to release details of the gas to medical staff so that they could treat the victims with a suitable antidote�all of this was testimony to the brutal indifference of the Russian state to the welfare of its own citizens.

The media in the west has blamed this on the fact that Russia still hasn't completely thrown off its 'Communist' habits. It's quite true that the corpse of Stalinism still infects the structure of the present regime. But when it comes to the state callously sacrificing its own citizens in order to advance its imperialist interests, Russia is a rather crude amateur compared to the professionals in the democratic west.

The truth is this: in all countries, the proletarians and the oppressed are permanent hostages of capital, which in its death throes is spreading war and chaos across the planet. Today, no less than at the time of the Cuba crisis which took place precisely 40 years ago, capitalism holds a gun to the head of humanity. And there are no 'special forces' waiting in the wings to set us free. The proletariat must itself break the chains that bind it, by waging a revolutionary struggle against this entire system of war and terror.

WR, 2/11/02.

When horrific terrorist outrages occur, it's useful to ask who benefits from them. The answer usually sheds light on who could be responsible for these deeds. The Bali bombing on 12 October is no exception to this rule. The accused Indonesian Islamists certainly do not benefit from the Bali bombing. Abu Bakar Bashir, spiritual leader of one of the country's principal Islamist organisation, has been arrested and faces a possible death penalty for alleged complicity. New 'anti-terrorist' laws have been announced in Indonesia, after these were demanded by Australia in the wake of the bombing. Some 400 Australian Federal Police and some FBI agents have rushed to Bali and are working in 'partnership' with Indonesian police investigating the bombing. Australia has also donated A$10 million in 'counter-terrorism aid' - allegedly to assist Indonesia to build an effective 'counter-terrorism' capacity, but really to institutionalise an Australian security presence there and to bring Indonesia closer to Australia's expanding sphere of influence.

To ask the question of who benefits is to answer it. The answer is clearly neither the Islamists nor even the Indonesian state, but, most directly, Australia, but also, indirectly, the United States. The bombing provides Australian imperialism with a golden opportunity to impose itself directly on Indonesia in an unprecedented manner. And back in Australia, the bombing has provided the most warlike fraction in the bourgeoisie with a very big stick to cow and morally blackmail workers not convinced of the need to wage all out war on Iraq in the near future. A relentless media campaign from the bombing onwards keeps the horror of this outrage constantly in public consciousness, accompanied by injunctions to "get the bastards who did this" (Prime Minister Howard's words) and to enthusiastically prosecute the 'War on Terror'.

Opinion polls taken just before the Bali bombing indicated that a majority of the population did not support a new Gulf war. Although new polls have not been taken since the bombing, it is clear that there has been a certain shift in opinion in favour of war. A majority of workers probably still do not support the war, but the number who do has probably risen.

So who did carry out the Bali bombing? Given the facts stated above -and the precedents of Pearl Harbor and the US World Trade Center attacks, it is quite possible that this horrendous crime was at least perpetrated with the full knowledge of the Australian and US bourgeoisies, in order to obtain the political results listed above. Was it carried out by Islamists as the bourgeois media alleges? Possibly - but then, the Australian and US bourgeoisies, not to mention the Indonesian bosses, have been manipulating various Indonesian Islamist fractions since at least the 1950s. In Indonesia's recent history, Islamist fractions have been used to first bring the last Indonesian President, the 'moderate' Islamist Abdurrahman Wahid, to power in October 1999 and then to help throw him unceremoniously out again less than 2 years later.

Furthermore, there is something decidedly fishy about the wealth of information now flooding out of the Australian media - most of it openly acknowledged as being from 'security specialists', if not from actual intelligence agencies. These include extremely detailed accounts of numerous alleged meetings of Islamist terrorist leaders in South-East Asia, to plot various atrocities. According to Australia's most respected current affairs programme Four Corners on 28 October, one such meeting was held in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur in January 2000. According to Four Corners:

"The CIA got wind of it ahead of time and tipped off Malaysian intelligence, which carried out video and photo surveillance. The meeting was attended by some of Osama bin Laden's most trusted operatives, including two of the hijackers who would die in the September 11 attacks on the United States.

"The gathering was hosted by Hambali [who is now accused by Australia of being Osama bin Laden's chief lieutenant in South-East Asia], who'd come from Indonesia. Bin Laden's man in Manila, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, was there as well. Among the others present were the September 11 hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who were at the controls of the plane that hit the Pentagon. Also there was another al-Qaida bomber later accused of the attack in Yemen on the warship 'USS Cole'".

The meeting is thought to have been a key planning session for those attacks.

The purpose of these claims by Four Corners was to garner support for Australian imperialism's new imperialist ventures in Indonesia, as well - in a turnaround from its attitude prior to the Bali bombing - to build support for the US push for war against Iraq. But perhaps Four Corners tells us too much. For, if the CIA had indeed got wind of the Kuala Lumpur meeting ahead of time (and the meeting did actually take place), why did it not intervene to have the terrorists plotting against it arrested and nip these plots in the bud? Of course, it could be that the meeting did not take place at all, and that this is just one more strand in the mendacious web being woven by the pro-US bourgeoisie to transfer real working class hostility to its war plans into enthusiasm for new imperialist war. But if Four Corners is actually telling the truth, it surely lends considerable weight to the argument that the Bali bombings were carried out with the full knowledge of the Australian and US bourgeoisies, in order to benefit from the bombing's political fallout.

Other evidence tends to support this last, chilling conclusion. Despite claims by Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer that warnings were given to Australians intending to travel to Bali before the bombing, cautioning them against the strong possibility of terrorist attacks on that island, this is simply a lie. Downer's department issued travel advice on 20 September, warning of such a danger in Jakarta - but adding in bold type that tourist services in Bali were 'operating normally'. A further statement, issued this time by the Australian Embassy in Jakarta on 3 October, repeated the earlier advice.

This also fits into a pattern. Just as US governments were warned before both Pearl Harbour and September 11 that massive attacks were imminent, so it appears that the Australian Government knew what was afoot in Bali but sat on its hands, in order to make political gains from the ensuing carnage.

The upshot of all this is that Australia now has the biggest presence in Indonesia since that country's independence in the 1940s. Australia's Prime Minister John Howard has been able to cobble together a new 'anti-terrorist' alliance with Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia. The new alliance is officially intended to guarantee the safety of regional trade against terrorist attacks. But there can be no doubt that this scheme will be used to force more active support for the US' war plans. This will be particularly useful against Malaysia (whose fiercely nationalist President has denounced the US war drive against Iraq) and Indonesia (whose current President, Megawati Sukarnoputri, has tried to balance between Islamist forces opposed to the US war plans and pro-US elements in another section of the local bourgeoisie). Howard will visit the Philippines and Vietnam in the New Year, to twist these countries' arms to be more active at the regional level in the 'War on Terror'.

The various Asian and Western governments involved and the assorted Islamist fractions are all equally reactionary. Neither 'democracy' (or 'anti-terrorism') nor the US' 'War on Terror' will put an end to the fundamental cause of terrorist atrocities such as the Bali bombing, for the simple reason that it is decomposing capitalism which is producing such massacres across the globe. Just like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, the forces most likely to have been behind the Bali atrocity are former clients of the United States. And just as in the cases of Pearl Harbour and September 11, the country whose citizens were the main victims of this particular massacre (Australia) almost certainly conspired to stifle warnings of the impending atrocity from reaching the light of day. In other words, whatever the particular details, innocent people are once again the victims of decomposing capitalism, which is everywhere and in all its forms (Third World, terrorist and democratic) prepared to commit the most horrendous deeds to extend its bloody rule.

Dawson, 29/10/02.

In the last two issues of World Revolution we have published articles concerning discussion groups: in WR 257 we reproduced a text on the Paris Commune of 1871 that introduced a discussion in the Midlands Discussion Group; in our previous issue, WR 258, we published a brief history of the MDG [111]. In the following article we want to look at some more general aspects of what a discussion group is, what function it fulfils and what in our view a discussion group is not, and what objectives it shouldn't try to serve.

In our previous articles we have explained the context in which discussion groups emerge. The MDG was first formed in the wake of the NATO intervention in the Kosovo war, reflecting a need to clarify, in the face of all the justifications by different sectors of the bourgeoisie, the nature of the war and the working class response to it. Discussion groups have emerged in other countries around different events or sometimes have been created without a specific impetus. In our view these groups are one aspect of the coming to consciousness of the working class in a period that is historically favourable to the development of class confrontations. This phenomenon also reflects the relative weakness of the forces of revolutionary organisations, since they tend to emerge in countries or regions where the latter are absent or lack a regular presence. The emergence of discussion groups in the recent period also corresponds to another factor: despite the undefeated nature of the working class today, the period since 1989 and the collapse of Stalinism has led to a profound disorientation within proletarian ranks that echoes the bourgeoisie's deafening propaganda campaigns about the death of communism and marxism and the disappearance of the working class, and the growth of all sorts of radical campaigns along populist lines (the so called anti-capitalist one for example) and the development of anarchist trends that reject a clear class perspective.

The appearance of discussion groups are also a reaction to this disorientation and an attempt to overcome it.

Discussion and class consciousness

Human consciousness is essentially a product of social interaction and language has been its main vehicle. Discussion, the debate of different ideas and thoughts between individuals, is in turn a powerful driving force for the development of consciousness, for the clarification of human goals and objectives, and is therefore indissolubly linked with human action and practical activity.

The discussion of working class interests and aims represents a particular development of consciousness corresponding to a particular phase of human history.

The working class, in distinction from all previous revolutionary classes, has no economic or institutional power within the old society and so its main weapons of social transformation are consciousness and organisation. In addition, as a non-exploiting revolutionary class it has no new relations of exploitation to create; thus its consciousness tends toward dispelling all the mystifications that the bourgeoisie has used to its advantage. It must also extend class consciousness to the whole of the proletariat whereas previous revolutionary classes have left the theoretical and political defence of their interests to a minority of intellectual specialists.

In contrast with previous exploited classes, working class consciousness cannot limit itself to the immediate struggle of any particular moment but has to be historical and global. Discussion about the future, even the distant future, is extremely concrete and practical for the working class.

A gigantic task! Proletarian consciousness must become historically precise and accurate enough to be a principal means for the overthrow of capitalist society, and it must extend throughout the whole class.

We don't of course expect discussion groups to take this entire work on their shoulders, but it indicates the seriousness and importance of their work. It shows that they are not 'talking shops' and correspond to a real need in the proletariat. The revolutionary nature of class consciousness means that these groups are far from academic in preoccupation, since academicism is not synonymous with discussion without an immediate practical outcome, but means trying to stand above classes and pretending to have an objectivity that is really the defence of the status quo. Thus the activist denial of the role of discussion groups as 'academic' expresses an ignorance of what the working class must become; which is why, when activists wax theoretical, it is they who fall into academicism.

The ICC, basing itself on the above conception of class consciousness, has always insisted therefore that discussion groups take themselves seriously and thoroughly prepare for discussions: the quality and coherence of the text on the Paris Commune is an indication that the discussion group is not about talking for the sake of it. The ICC has also insisted, not always successfully, on the need for a systematic study and discussion of the history of the workers' movement within the discussion groups, since this is the only sure means of arriving at a self-awareness of the working class.

Discussion groups are not schools of the party

If the preparation for discussion requires serious study of the workers' movement and its theoretical riches, this doesn't imply that they are a forum of pedagogy where the political organisation or party is the teacher of unquestioned truths. On the contrary the revolutionary nature of class consciousness demands that all militants have a highly critical attitude to the patrimony of the revolutionary movement, must question everything, express their doubts and arrive at a solid conviction in class positions instead of a passive consumption of them. This is why the ICC believes that the discussion group should be open to all those, irrespective of their political persuasion, who want to discuss class politics, and has opposed a political delimitation of the discussion group. In the MDG it successfully opposed the attempted exclusion of those who considered themselves to be councilists, sympathisers of ecologism or the cooperative movement.

Nor does the ICC consider that the discussion group is a sort of 'transmission belt' to the party, a kind of political group that is easier to get into than the party because it has less of a programme to agree with. Such a conception falls between two stools; neither fulfilling the tasks of a discussion group which is to explore class consciousness in depth, nor the tasks of a real political organisation which has to delineate itself completely from bourgeois ideology and opportunism as a whole.

In our opinion the Sheffield No War But The Class War group (NW), influenced by the proletarian group, the Communist Workers Organisation, has fallen into this conception since it has defined itself according to a mini-platform of seven points, which on the one hand limit the group as a forum for discussion, and on the other give it political tasks that it is poorly equipped to carry out. In particular, as the last Stop the War march in London showed, it made the group particularly vulnerable to the leftist carnival around this effectively pro-war parade (see WR 258). The Sheffield NW group unfortunately participated in a march where its slogans of proletarian internationalism were drowned out by the deafening chants of 'Allah Akbar' from the reactionary Islamist supporters of a Palestinian state and of Iraq.

The temptation for a discussion group to try and become a political group is very strong today. But rather than a 'natural' tendency, this expresses a widespread disorientation in the proletariat as a whole about the conditions for the creation of the revolutionary vanguard. The latter is a historical product and must be in continuity with the revolutionary parties of the past; it must be a part of a trend towards the centralised international unity of this vanguard since the working class has no local or national interests. Its platform and statutes must therefore be highly developed. Moreover, it must be able to accurately analyse the conditions and balance of class forces within which it operates. The Sheffield NW group is not only ill-equipped at the programmatic level to carry out this political role, but seems to have also significantly overestimated the possibilities of its influence in the current conditions.

While the MDG hasn't fallen into this trap of trying to become a political group, its preoccupation with having public meetings imply a political unity that it can't have.

Discussion groups, like revolutionary organisations, must modestly carry out what is possible in the present period and beware falling into the trap of localism and activism, the privileged terrain of leftism and opportunism. [1]

No doubt our differences with the CWO about discussion groups reflect wider differences between our organisations on the questions of class consciousness and the role of the party which we will touch on below. But there is a fundamental agreement between us on the indispensable role of the party within the development of class consciousness and the need for the discussion groups to be open to their intervention. That's why whatever differences that might exist, the Sheffield NW group has been open to the participation of members of the MDG and of the ICC, and the meetings of the MDG open to the interventions of the CWO.

If there is a danger of discussion groups losing their compass as a result of trying to be political groups, there is a far greater and more immediate danger of losing their class identity, a danger which has at times taken the form of efforts to exclude the intervention of revolutionary organisations. And we don't say this out of self-interest!

Discussion groups and the intervention of revolutionaries

The liberation of the working class is the task of the working class itself, said Marx, in helping to construct the Ist International. He meant that the working class had to become politically independent of all bourgeois parties and form its own political party. Anarchism has always given a different spin to this famous slogan: the working class liberates itself without a party, and without politics, which can only be the expression of the ultimate evil of 'authority'. For anarchism (in all its various guises) class consciousness and therefore discussion can only develop autonomously from the political organisations and their 'dogmatism'. This way of thinking can only, if it is taken to its logical conclusion, close up the discussion group in a clique defined by personal interests and deliberately prevents the quest for clarity and coherence that is an essential component of the development of class consciousness. [2]

The latter inevitably has a political character because it expresses the historical process by which the proletariat overthrows the bourgeois state and installs its own class dictatorship. The formation of a class political party is therefore an indispensable expression of class consciousness, indeed its highest expression, since it must delineate in a global and historical way the parameters of the proletariat's interests and goals. However, given the mass character of the proletarian revolution, the party cannot be the 'general staff' of the working class, as Zinoviev proclaimed at the 2nd Congress of the Communist International. The party doesn't take power on behalf of the working class.

The existence of discussion groups is an expression of the fact that the party is not the sole repository of class consciousness.

Nevertheless the development of the latter can only proceed along certain common political bases that are shared both by discussion groups and the revolutionary organisation: separating the latter two expressions of class consciousness inevitably puts these common bases in question.

A concrete example of this danger is provided by the evolution of the London No War But The Class War group that first appeared at the time of the Kosovo war and subsequently excluded the ICC from its discussions (see WR 228, October 1999, 'Political parasitism sabotages the discussion'), even though the ICC had up till then been the most intransigent defenders of internationalism within the group against the 'right of oppressed nations to self-determination', and the need for a militant discussion instead of academicism and activism. The justification for this expulsion - narrowly agreed to by the group - was the supposed dogmatism and domineering tendencies of the ICC in the discussion.

The London NW resurfaced after the September 11th attacks and the preparation for the US war in Afghanistan. Again we participated in this group, believing that it could be a forum for class debate. The CWO also took part in the discussions. But now, once again, the ICC has been excluded, and seemingly also the Sheffield NW group from their deliberations.

But this time there has been even less attempt to explain the reason for the exclusion, which was realised by simply no longer informing us and the Sheffield group of where their meetings were to take place, nor supplying information about their discussions.

We think that behind the accusations of 'dogmatism' there is the attempt to portray the revolutionary organisation as intolerant of opposing points of view, when in fact the ICC wants to see the widest possible debate of different viewpoints. In reality what the London NW group wants, by excluding revolutionary organisations, is the freedom to express incoherent points of view without being criticised for it, a closed environment where discussion is simply the exchange of individual opinions instead of the search for a common clarification. They are looking for personal autonomy not class autonomy, the right to one's own consciousness instead of class consciousness.

The consequences of such a policy, which is certainly influenced by political parasitism, is not only a short circuiting of political discussion, but also a betrayal of their supposed class opposition to imperialist war, and a growing espousal of the worthy pacifist sentiments of the leftist coalition that they claim to oppose [3]. Not surprising the London NW group also ended up traipsing behind the pro-war march, but unlike the Sheffield group is cutting itself off from the means of correcting such errors.  

Como, 2/11/02.

1. Its worth noting that while the CWO sees, mistakenly in our view, the possibility of creating a broad internationalist anti-war coalition of various disparate forces, it presumably still doesn't accept the necessity for the existing groups of the communist left to make common statements against imperialist war, as the ICC proposed to it, without success, at the time of the war in Kosovo.

2. The predominance of personal interests over the political needs of discussion, can threaten the existence itself of a discussion group, as the MDG discovered, (see history of the MDG in WR258).

3. See the London NW leaflet given out at the march 'War, what is it good for?', which fails in the crucial task of criticising the 'pacifist' (in fact, pro-war) ideology of the Stop the War Coalition and other sponsors of the march.

Communist Workers Organisation: P.O. Box 338, Sheffield S3 9YX

Sheffield No War But the Class War: [email protected] [112]

Midland Discussion Group: c/o Little Thorn Bookshop, 73 Humberstone Gate, Leicester

London No War But The Class War: [email protected] [113]

For the first time in 25 years there is the threat of a national fire-fighters' strike. This prospect has been the focus of workers' attention in Britain for months. As with nurses and ambulance workers, fire-fighters are respected by other workers for doing an important job which can involve saving lives. This strong feeling of support for the fire-fighters has tended to take the form of sympathy for a 'special case'. The work of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) has helped undermine prospects of sympathy being transformed into real working class solidarity. Attacks on the fire-fighters

At present a full-time fire-fighter, after four years, earns £21,531, and receives no extra pay for extra hours or overtime. The union demands are for a 40% pay rise to £30,000, for the same rate for those who do not work full time, but do other jobs and can be called on when necessary (the 'retained' fire-fighters), and the Emergency Control Staff and for a future pay formula. What the union has put forward has got a positive response from the membership, but in reality these demands are aimed at dividing the workers

The desire for equal pay levels is a mark of real solidarity among workers, and the 9-1 ballot for strike action shows that the fire-fighters realise they have to fight to defend their interests, to improve their pay and conditions. However, the level of the pay demand has acted as the pivot for a formidable deployment of forces against the fire-fighters and the rest of the working class.

The government has used the 40% pay claim to launch a vicious attack on the fire-fighters in order to set other workers against them. In Blair's words: "No government could yield to that without putting up people's interest rates and their mortgage rates and causing havoc across the public sector, because other people in the public sector would say: If they are getting 40 percent, I want 40 percent.". Right from the beginning there is the propaganda that a pay increase for one sector has to lead to economic hardship for other workers - rather than the truth that workers' impoverishment comes from the crisis-ridden nature of the capitalist mode of exploitation.

The government has also denounced the fire-fighters for putting the public at risk, and used this as a justification for the use of the army to break possible strike action. Just as the Labour government did in 1977.

In addition, the government, along with all the media, has constantly been comparing today's situation to that of the 'winter of discontent' of 1978-79. The message being put across is that workers' militancy can only lead to workers being worse off - just look at what happened then: workers' struggles led to 18 years of Thatcherism. This message was also pushed during the council workers' strike in the summer. It is a very poisonous campaign because it reinforces the widespread feeling in the working class that it is not able to do anything to defend itself. This is a disorientation that has dominated the working class for more than a decade, and is particularly dangerous because many workers under 35 years old won't remember the important struggles of the 70's and 80's.

We do not have space to go into detail about the real nature of the 'winter of discontent', apart from to say that it was not the workers who brought Thatcher to power, but the ruling class who needed to replace the increasingly threadbare Labour Party, whose image as a 'workers' party' was wearing very thin due to its massive attacks against the working class. False friends

Adopting a more 'conciliatory' stance for the government we have seen the intervention of the Deputy Prime Minister (and veteran trade unionist) John Prescott. Union and local authorities (who run the Fire Service) have begun negotiations and made 'progress' (at time of writing). Prescott let it be know that there was more money for pay but "In reality, 40% was just too high". This was a very clever move because the talks were halted with the bosses having offered a 16% rise (with 'strings' of course). The union leadership went back to 'consult' the membership about calling off the proposed 8-day strike in the first week of November, in order to allow more talks. The only aim of this 'consultation' was to create division among the fire-fighters with all the false alternatives (stick to the 40% claim, accept the 16% offer, continue negotiations, go ahead with the strike etc).

The image of the FBU is of a 'militant' union. Its leader, Andy Gilchrist, appears to be the model of a real fighting trade unionist. On the FBU's website it states that "the Fire Brigades Union is part of the working-class movement and, linking with the international trade union movement, has as its ultimate aim the bringing about of the Socialist system of society". This 'radicalism' has been reinforced by Gilchrist's apparent 'intransigence' in the defence of his members interests, and the attacks on him by Blair and throughout the media.

However, behind the image, the FBU is the same as any other union, existing to control the struggles of the working class. Central to this control is the attempt to divide and rule. This was well demonstrated in the initial reports of the fire-fighters' response to the leadership's proposal to suspend the strike. Powerful divisions were created amongst the fire-fighters. These divisions were planned by the union, which knew that for many fire-fighters the link to the increase in pay for retained and control room staff was more important than the 40% pay demand. The fact that the bosses have agreed to this link, along with the rumoured 16% offer, has been an ideal way of sowing division. Some fire-fighters are for settling, while others will be for continuing the strikes (or the negotiations) because the deal offered is tied to 'modernisation' measures, that is, cuts and other measures which mean higher levels of exploitation.

These divisions have been exacerbated by the differences between 'militant' and 'moderate' regional union bodies putting forward differing recommendations - for or against calling off the strikes, whether to focus on non co-operation with future reviews of pay and conditions, whether to concentrate on demonstrations or other local initiatives. The fire-fighters are divided between 'militant' and 'moderate' regions, stations and individuals, as the union shows its effectiveness in policing the workers and thereby defending the national capital.

The fire-fighters are caught between the hammer of the government and the anvil of the unions. The government has made an offer, but with 'strings attached', while the union sows divisions among the workers with the false alternatives of negotiations or strikes or strikes under certain conditions etc.

This situation reflects the wider problems facing the working class. There is a general discontent faced with the mounting attacks on living and working conditions, but also wide-ranging illusions that somehow the unions will defend workers interests. These illusions have recently been reinforced by the election of more 'militant' figures to the leadership of several major unions. The current campaign of attacks on the fire-fighters shows that holding such illusions can only lead to workers being defeated.

The fire-fighters have been set-up - the 40% demand, the months of union/government preparation, the campaign about the 'winter of discontent'. In particular, the question of sympathy for the fire-fighters as a 'special case' - because they do a very dangerous job - has been used to separate and isolate them from other workers. Instead of seeing that the whole working class face the same attacks we have had the barrage of propaganda comparing different pay rates. This is an essential part of the union work of encouraging this sectoral isolation. The only way that workrs can defend their interests in the long term is to extend their struggles. In order to prepare the ground for this there is an urgent need for reflection and discussion throughout the working class - on the means of struggle and the union obstacles that have to be overcome.

Phil, 2/11/02.

In Britain 52,000 firefighters are pitched against a government determined to hand out a defeat that will be held up as an example to the rest of the working class. The stakes are plain: defeat for the firefighters will not only mean they won't have caught up on all the years their pay has lagged behind, but also draconian attacks on their working conditions in the name of modernisation and a 20% cut in the workforce. This struggle has important implications for the rest of the working class because the defeat of the firefighters will have a powerful impact on the whole working class's confidence in its ability to defend itself. This is all happening at a time when massive lay-offs and attacks in the manufacturing and financial sectors are spreading throughout the working class.

The Labour government has made no bones about its resolve to defeat the firefighters and portray them as enemies of the people. As Tony Blair insisted: "This is a strike they cannot succeed in. The consequence of succeeding is not a defeat for the Government. It would be a defeat for the country."

Blair and Co have also has unleashed a torrent of attacks on the firefighters. Ministers portray them abusing their shift system (which involves doing 4 day and night shifts together), because some have a second job in order to make ends meets. Firefighters are accused of being sexist and racist because there are only a few black and women firefighters. There is also a never ending comparison of the 'brave' soldiers 'gallantly' struggling to save lives, and the workers on the picketlines.

This open abuse of the firefighters and the government's determination to 'take them on' has been compared to Thatcher 'taking on' the miners in 1984/85. And indeed there are comparisons. As in 84, today the government has planned for a showdown with an important section of the working class. They want to inflict a crushing defeat on a group of workers who are respected and supported in the working class in order to deliver a message to the whole working class: struggle does not pay. As with the NUM, the Fire Brigades Union is presented as the enemy. Now, as in 84, there is a second prong to the attack: to boast the image of the unions as defenders of the working class. However, in 1984 the working class in Britain and internationally was in a period of rising class struggle, whereas today the working class is still trying to overcome a decade of disorientation and loss of confidence in itself as a class, something that the ruling class is seeking to reinforce. The less the self-confidence of the workers, the more they feel constrained to turn to the unions to defend them against the attacks they face.

The ruling class know that the deepening world recession is going to mean it will not be able to disguise its growing attacks behind the mask of a so-called economic boom. It sees that there is a growing discontent in the working class: council workers, teachers, college lecturers, health workers, and transport workers have all been involved in disputes at the same time as the fire strike. The government - and union - have prepared the ground to take on the firefighters by ensuring that these disputes have either been settled, like the health workers, or been worn down by a series of one-day strikes, like the teachers and council workers in London. In addition the tube workers' ballot around safety issues directly linked to the fire strike has been called off. This is intended to further isolate the firefighters and undermine class solidarity, again making the union appear to be the only defence workers have. Ideological division of labour

The government and 'rightwing' parts of the media have certainly demonised the FBU and Gilchrist, its leader. There have been warnings about a new 'winter of discontent' and comparisons between the FBU to the NUM - Blair describing Gilchrist as a 'Scargillite'. The Sun accused the FBU and other 'militant' unions of wanting to go back to the 70s. Such attacks reinforce their radical image. This campaign also promotes the myth that in the 70s and 80s the unions were militant and helped the working class hold the government over a barrel, when in reality it was the unions which held the workers in check for the ruling class.

On the other hand, the 'leftwing' of the media: the Mirror, Guardian and Independent pretend to support the firefighters, more or less critically. They give out the message that moderation and negotiation are the way forwards, but "Tony Blair doesn't want to listen. Doesn't want to negotiate. Doesn't want a settlement. He is after total victory. That is no way to treat any group of decent workers" (The Mirror, 26.11.02).

In their different ways all the forces of the ruling class are seeking to push the firefighters and the working class into the arms of the unions. FBU plays its part in the attack

As with the NUM in 84, for all its 'radical' image the FBU is playing its full part in this attack. It pushes the idea that the firefighters can win on their own if they are determined enough and if they can keep 'public support'. This illusion played an important part in the defeat of the miners' strike, in circumstances that were much more favourable than those faced by the firefighters today. No section of the working class can win on its own. 'Public opinion' is a trap. It is the solidarity of the working class that matters, which is not a question of financial help but of seeing that firefighters are part of the working class with the same interests and demands as other workers.

The FBU has also carefully manipulated its 'militant' image to isolate the firemen. For months Gilchrist has defended the need for a 40% rise, based on the premise that firefighters are professionals, separate from the rest of the class. This has made it appear that the FBU is determined to defend its members' interests. Once the strikes began the 40% demand disappeared into thin air, to be replaced by the acceptance of a 16% rise over 3 years (essentially the original 4% offered by the employers plus the next 2 years pay increases added on), this being largely financed by modernisation, that is to say attacks on conditions and jobs. The government rejection of this deal was not due to its determination to defeat the union, but in order to further strengthen the FBU's hold over the workers. The government's intransigence makes the union look militant and the strike seems to be about the defence the FBU.

The firefighters have been set up by the government and unions. What all workers need to understand is that the unions are as much the enemy of the working class as the government and media. This does not mean workers should not struggle, but that we have to learn the lessons of all our defeats in order to avoid them in the future.

Phil, 30/11/02.

In October the ICC held a public meeting in Moscow to present our pamphlet on the decadence of capitalism, recently published in the Russian language.

This meeting and the publication of the pamphlet in Russian are an expression of the emerging revolutionary milieu in Russia, which the ICC has written about extensively (see for example International Review 111).

The understanding that capitalism entered its phase of decline at the beginning of the 20th century was and is a crucial question for revolutionary marxists. It was this understanding that underpinned Rosa Luxemburg's Junius Pamphlet (1915) when she wrote:

"� ours is the necessity of Socialism. Our necessity receives its justification with the moment when the capitalist class ceases to be the bearer of historic progress, when it becomes a hindrance, a danger, to the future development of society. That capitalism has reached this stage the present world war has revealed."

(Rosa Luxemburg, Junius Pamphlet - The crisis in the German social democracy, February -April 1915, Merlin Press, p 130).

And she continues:

"This brutal triumphant procession of capitalism through the world, accompanied by all means of force, of robbery, and of infamy, has one bright phase: it has created the premises for its own final overthrow, it has established the capitalist world rule upon which, alone the socialist revolution can follow" (Ibid).

From this method Rosa Luxemburg makes an historical analysis of the national question:

"Imperialism is not the creation of any one or of any group of states. It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole � From this point of view only is it possible to understand correctly the question of 'national defence' in the present war" (Ibid).

This is the same method that was used by other revolutionary marxists at the time of the outbreak of the first imperialist war. The 3rd International also adopted this method in 1919, with its notion of an epoch of wars and revolutions.

It is this method that the ICC is carrying on in its pamphlet on the decadence of capitalism. The main aim of the presentation by the ICC at the public meeting in Moscow was to show how this concept of decadence is a cornerstone of communist positions of yesterday and today. Only from this point of view is it possible to understand the changing conditions which inevitably influence the positions of communists, on the national question, on the unions question, on the question of parliamentarism, on the general conditions of the workers' struggle, on the role of revolutionary minorities, etc.

But although the understanding of decadence is a cornerstone of marxist positions today, it is not shared by all the groups and elements of the proletarian political milieu today or in the past (Bordigist groups and councilist groups have both tended to reject the concept of decadence).

We are also seeing today a tendency within the proletarian political milieu to abandon the concept of decadence - recent statements by the IBRP are highly significant in this respect. It is no wonder that the same questioning appears in the Russian milieu. We have already taken up this question in the International Review 111 in answer to the MLP (Marxist Labour Party) and the International Communist Union.

Although these doubts about decadence were not expressed openly at the meeting, a number of questions posed and positions expressed, particularly on the national question and the question of war, revealed a lack of understanding of the concept of decadence; and if there is an understanding of decadence it is placed not at the beginning of 20th century, as Rosa Luxemburg (and the ICC) put it, but at the end of the 20th century with 'globalisation' or the introduction of the microprocessor.

One question posed after the introduction to the ICC was the difference between Lenin's concept of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism and the concept of decadence. Our reply was that there were differences at the time between Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and Bukharin, although all of them began from a proletarian point of view. Rosa Luxemburg was the clearest and showed the underlying link between the tendency to overproduction and the imperialist quest for new markets and fields of investment. Bukharin in his Imperialism and World Economy was able to show the development of state capitalism and its consequences. Both Rosa Luxemburg and Bukharin had the same basic method: to view capitalism as a totality and so to draw out its most global implications for the proletarian movement:

"Just as it is impossible to understand modern capitalism and its imperialist policy without analysing the tendencies of world capitalism, so the basic tendencies in the proletarian movement cannot be understood without analysing world capitalism" (Imperialism and world economy, N. Bukharin, Merlin Press, 1976, p 161).

Several of the participants at the meeting stated that they still supported the position of Lenin on the right to national self-determination. The ICC showed with the examples of China, Turkey and Finland how the mistaken policy of Lenin led to massacres of the proletariat, although is was Stalin who directed the policy in China and for very different reasons.

The example of Finland, which was one of the few countries to be 'liberated' by the October revolution, is interesting. Granting national independence to Finland only resulted in boosting democratic illusions within the Finnish workers' movement, and thus delayed the revolutionary preparation of the Finnish proletariat for the inevitable confrontation with the bourgeoisie. We should also note that as soon as it was let loose from the grip of the tsarist regime, the Finnish bourgeoisie rallied to German imperialism to get help to crush the coming proletarian revolution in Finland. The crushing of the revolution in Finland was extremely brutal and the next congress of the Communist International passed a resolution condemning the white terror of the bourgeoisie.

Another important question discussed was the position of the communist left on democracy. The ICC developed the left communist position against the united front, the imperialist nature of the second world war, the trap of democracy of Spain 1936, and in general the false alternative between fascism and anti-fascism. It is obvious that there are deep confusions in the milieu in Russia on this question, especially on the nature of the second world war, where the Stalinist myth of the Great Patriotic War still exerts an influence. There were some participants that defended the idea of a war of 'humanity against barbarism' or of a war to 'defend civilisation'. Against these illusions comrades from both the Group of Revolutionary Proletarians-Collectivists (GRPC) and the Revolutionary Anarcho-Syndicalists (RAS) group in Moscow, together with the ICC, strongly criticized this subtle defence of the 2nd world war and clearly declared it to be an imperialist war.

A more heated debate occurred in relation to the war in Chechnya. At the meeting there were participants who were involved in the work of giving humanitarian aid to the Chechnyan population. One argument was that it was a way to come closer to the Chechnyan workers, to 'create an audience'. There was much focus on 'what to do today, concretely'. On this there were several replies by comrades from the RAS and GRPC as well as the ICC. Although not against expressing human solidarity as such, these interventions criticised the illusion that this is a means for the revolutionary struggle. Firstly because capitalism will continue to create more and more misery and barbarism and no amount of humanitarian aid can counter-act that; and secondly because the only real help to the Chechnyan workers and population is the development of the struggle by the Russian workers against their own bourgeoisie, and ultimately the taking of power by workers in Russia and world wide to stop the imperialist slaughter. As Lenin said "turn the imperialist war into a civil war".

There is an illusion among many elements in this milieu, who want to take an internationalist position on the war, but who tend to weaken this by using humanitarian aid as a means to struggle, and so confuse the task of revolutionaries and dilute the internationalist position on the imperialist nature of the war in Chechnya. This is an expression of opportunism, a tendency to capitulate to the immediate fact, to seek immediate and false victories and solutions to problems that can only be solved on a world historic level.

The meeting in Moscow was a long and very animated meeting, showing the interest and militant attitude and concern among the emerging proletarian elements in Russia to better grasp the positions of the communist left. But this milieu is also very heterogeneous and dispersed, facing great difficulties both materially and ideologically, and confronted with the weight both of the Stalinist counter-revolution and the 'modern' period of decomposition. It is important that a framework is created for the systematic spreading and confrontation of positions within this milieu, to overcome the dispersion and weaknesses.

The tasks confronting this new milieu are of considerable importance. Its emergence is a confirmation of an international tendency towards the development of new revolutionary forces, but it is of particular significance that it is taking place in the 'motherland' of the world revolution.

Anders, 1/11/02.

In its number 463 (August-September 2002), the newspaper Le Proletaire, organ of the Parti Communiste International (PCI) [1] published an article entitled: 'In connection with the crisis in the ICC' which deserves a certain number of corrections. Initially, the article affirms that one of the members of the so-called 'Internal Fraction' ('IFICC') which had been constituted in the ICC [2] "is denounced ... as a probable 'agent provocateur'." Here is what we wrote in World Revolution 252 concerning the exclusion of Jonas (to which Le Proletaire refers implicitly):

"One of the most intolerable and repugnant aspects of his behaviour is the veritable campaign that he promoted and carried out against a member of the organisation, accusing them in the corridors and even in front of people external to the ICC of manipulating his followers and the central organs on behalf of the police force. Today, Jonas has become a keen enemy of the ICC and is behaving in a manner worthy of an agent provocateur. We don't know what his underlying motivations are, but what we are quite sure that he represents a danger for the proletarian political milieu."

It is clear that the behaviour of Citizen Jonas is more than disconcerting and all the militants of the ICC are convinced that his actions aim at destroying our organisation or at least at causing it as much damage as an agent provocateur could have done [3]. However, all readers will have been able to read that "We don't know what his underlying motivations are" and will be able to thus note that we have never said that Jonas is a "probable agent provocateur". Such a charge, even in the form of assumption, is extremely serious and even if the revolutionary organisations can be moved to bear it against one their former members, it can be only following a very thorough investigation. It is because of that, moreover, that our Extraordinary Conference, which took place last spring, elected a special Commission to continue investigations regarding Jonas. As for the PCI, we think that it would have done better to limit itself strictly to what we really wrote so far, rather than devoting itself to extrapolations which lead to a falsification of our claims.

In addition, the PCI says to us that: "It is obviously out of the question that, as we have been asked to do, we give an opinion for one or the other camp - whether for the dissidents in the name of democracy, or for the majority in the name of the 'defence of the organisations of the proletarian milieu'" This sentence calls for several remarks. Initially, as it is formulated, it makes you think (even if it is not said explicitly) that the ICC, like the 'IFICC' , has asked the PCI to take its side. Nothing is more false. The 'IFICC' actually demanded of the PCI, in a letter that it addressed to it at the same time as to other groups of the communist left, on 27 January 2002, to take a position in its favour against the ICC:

"Today we see only one solution: for us to address you so that you ask our organisation to open its eyes and to rediscover its sense of responsibility Because we are in disagreement, today the ICC has done everything it can to marginalise us and demolish us morally and politically." [4]. However, on 6 February 2002, we actually sent a letter to the PCI, as to other organisations of the communist left (IBRP [5], PCI Il Programma Comunista, PCI Il Partito) concerning the 'IFICC'. But contrary to what is alleged by 'the Fraction', our letter by no means asks the recipient groups to give an opinion for one camp against the other; its objective is to rectify a certain number of lies and calumnies against our organisation which were contained in the letter of the 'Fraction' of 27 January. That said, the principal remark that we should make about the PCI's assertion that "it is obviously out of the question" for it to give an opinion for one or the other camp, is that it is contradicted immediately afterwards. Indeed, one can read some lines further on:

"That however does not prevent us from raising the methods employed by the ICC in response to its current dissidents, which undoubtedly do not go back to yesterday and are unfortunately too well known: 'criminalising' opponents by defamatory charges in order to isolate them completely, to counter any possible doubt or any request for political explanation on behalf of the militants by the creation of a climate of a 'fortress under siege' which makes it possible to mobilise them 'in defence of the organisation' against opponents who end up being depicted as being in the service of the bourgeoisie. These processes of sinister memory were never employed either by Marx or by Lenin; they are in fact characteristic of organisations gangrened by opportunism and/or beset by serious contradictions between their analyses and reality. They would be deadly in a revolutionary party because they inevitably destroy the political homogeneity which constitutes its cement. Whatever might be believed, a system of militarist bureaucratism can only end up choking internal political life. This tends to prevent one from facing and solving the political problems that cannot help but be posed to revolutionary militants, and transforms them into simple parrots. The political questioning that is driven back, however, inevitably continues to act underground and finishes up sooner or later reappearing with all the more virulence, in the form of destructive organisational crises."

In fact, the PCI, which claims to have read "the material published by the two sides", espouses almost to the letter the libellous theses spread by the 'IFICC' and thus clearly takes position in favour of the latter against the ICC.

The internal regime of communist organisations

We should salute the fact that today the PCI affirms that "a system of militarist bureaucratism can only end up choking internal political life, this tends to prevent one from facing and solving the political problems that cannot help but be posed to revolutionary militants, and transforms them into simple parrots"

This is an idea that our current has never tired of repeating in answer to the conceptions of the PCI. In 1947, our comrades of the Gauche Communiste de France (Communist Left of France - political ancestor of the ICC) had the following to say about the organisational ideas of the PCI:

"On this common basis [the criteria of class and the revolutionary programme] tending towards the same goal, many divergences always emerge along the road. These divergences always express either the absence of all the elements for an answer, or the real difficulties of the struggle, or the immaturity of thought. They can neither be conjured away nor prohibited, but on the contrary must be resolved by the experience of the struggle itself and by the free confrontation of ideas. The regime of the organisation, therefore, consists not in stifling divergences but in creating the conditions for their solution. That is to say, to promote, to bring them into the light of day, instead of allowing them to develop clandestinely. Nothing poisons the atmosphere of an organisation more than when divergences remain hidden. Not only does the organisation thereby deprive itself of any possibility of resolving them, but it slowly undermines its very foundations. At the first difficulty, at the first serious reverse, the edifice that one believed was as solid as a rock cracks and collapses, leaving behind a pile of stones. What was only a tempest is transformed into a decisive catastrophe" (Internationalisme 25, 'Discipline our principal strength', republished in International Review 34).

At the beginning of 1983, we used the same language in response to the crisis which the PCI had just undergone:

"Where then is this famous 'monolithic bloc' of a party? This party without faults? This 'monolithism', asserted by the ICP [PCI], has only ever been a Stalinist invention. There never were 'monolithic' organisations in the history of the workers' movement. Constant discussion and organised political confrontation within a collective and unitary framework is the condition for the true solidarity, homogeneity and centralisation of a proletarian political organisation. By stifling any debate, by hiding divergences behind the word of 'discipline', the ICP has only compressed the contradictions until an explosion was reached. Worse, by preventing clarifications both outside as inside the organisation, it has numbed the vigilance of its militants. The Bordigist sanctification of hierarchical truth and the power of leaders has left the militants bereft of theoretical and organisational weapons in the face of the splits and resignations. The ICP seems to recognise this when it writes:

'We intend to deal [with these questions] in a more developed way in our press, by placing the problems which are being posed to the activity of the party before our readers'" ('The International Communist Party (Communist Programme) at a turning point in its history', International Review No. 32).

When we defended these ideas, the PCI did not have enough scornful words to stigmatise our 'democratism' [6] but by comparing what we wrote 50 years and 20 years ago with what the PCI says to us now, one can only be struck by the similarity of the ideas. In fact, it is almost a carbon copy. One can at least deduce one thing from this: the comrades of the PCI, in spite of their great speeches on 'invariance', were able to hear our arguments. We will not ask them for any royalties. However, we think that, more than our own arguments, it is the lasting reality of the facts, and particularly the dramatic collapse of the PCI in 1982, which is the decisive element that has allowed a handful of militants reclaiming the positions of Bordiga to understand the nonsense of certain 'invariant' dogmas about the alleged 'monolithism' of the party [7].

However, we maintain today what we say 20 or 50 years ago and we categorically reject the charges of the PCI concerning our alleged "methods in response to our current dissidents". Today, like yesterday, we consider that the political dissensions which emerge in the organisation must be regulated by wide-ranging centralised debate and not by administrative or 'bureaucratic' measures. Just like 20 years ago, we make and apply the following rules in the face of the divergences which can emerge in our organisation:

"- having regular meetings of the local sections, and putting on the agenda of these meetings the main questions being discussed in the organisation: in no way must this debate be stifled; - the widest possible circulation of various contributions within the organisation through the appropriate instruments [the internal bulletins]; - rejection of any disciplinary or administrative measure on the part of the organisation with regard to members who raise disagreements" ('Report on the Structure and Functioning of the Revolutionary Organisation', adopted by the Extraordinary International Conference of January 1982, published in International Review No. 33).

However, like 20 years ago, we consider respect for the following rules to be indispensable: "- rejection of secret and bilateral correspondence which, far from allowing debate to be more clear, can only obscure it by giving rise to misunderstandings, distrust and the tendency towards the constitution of an organisation within the organisation; - respect by the minority of the indispensable organisational discipline.

While the organisation must prohibit the use of any administrative or disciplinary means in the face of disagreements, that doesn't mean that it cannot use these means in any circumstances. On the contrary, it is indispensable that it resorts to measures such as temporary suspension or definitive exclusion, when it is confronted with attitudes, behaviours or actions which constitute a danger to the existence of the organisation, to its security and its capacity to carry out its tasks.

Moreover, it is important that the organisation takes all the measures necessary to protect itself from attempts at infiltration or destruction by agents of the capitalist state, or by elements who, without being directly manipulated by these organs, behave in a way likely to facilitate their work. When such behaviour comes to light, it is the duty of the organisation to take measures not only in defence of its own security, but also in defence of the security of other communist organisations." (ibid.).

The exclusion of Jonas and the sanctions against members of the 'Fraction'

It is thus in strict application of these principles, and not to "criminalise opponents by defamatory charges in order to isolate them completely" that the ICC decided in early 2002 to exclude the element Jonas and to publish a communiqué in the press about it. We acted in exactly the same way in 1981 with regard to the individual Chenier, who had entered our organisation a few years before. Only a few months after being expelled, Chenier began an official career in a trade union and the Socialist Party (i.e. in the party that was running the government at this time), for whom he had probably been working secretly for a long time. It is clear that the communiqué that we published in our press about this person from then on prevented him from continuing the destructive work he had been doing for several years in the ICC and other organisations he had passed through, notably the PCI. If the latter had taken the trouble to make public its own decision to expel Chenier and the reasons for doing so (which we only learned about from a militant of the PCI after Chenier had been expelled from the ICC), it is obvious that we would never have allowed such an element to enter into our organisation. It was precisely for this reason that we put our readers on their guard against Jonas, who "represents a danger for the proletarian political milieu" just like Chenier had done, even if his motivations may have been different.

Similarly, the disciplinary measures we took towards other members of the 'IFICC' had nothing to do with a will to stifle debate. The opposite is the case: it was because these militants had since the beginning of the debate refused to engage in the discussion (because they knew they did not have serious arguments that could have convinced the militants of the ICC) that they systematically violated the statutes of the organisation. The disciplinary measures that the ICC could not help but impose served as a pretext to create scandals and loud claims that "The ICC is doing everything it can to marginalise us and demolish us morally and politically".

The PCI should say whether it is an example of 'militarist bureaucratism' to take disciplinary measures when militants, among many other infractions: - refuse to be present at meetings in which they have a responsibility to participate; - violate decisions adopted unanimously by the organisation (including by themselves); - organise secret correspondence and meetings with the aim, explicitly recognised among themselves, of plotting against the organisation and waging campaigns of slander against certain of its militants; - refuse to pay their dues in full; - steal the list of our subscribers' addresses, the notes of meetings of the central organs (in order to use them in a fraudulent way), as well as the money of the organisation.

It was not because a 'liquidationist leadership' (to use the terms of the IFICC) has created "a climate of a 'fortress under siege' which makes it possible to mobilise the militants 'in defence of the organisation' against opponents", as the PCI puts it, that our Extraordinary Conference unanimously ratified the sanctions against Jonas and the other members of the so-called 'Fraction'. It was quite simply because ALL the militants of the ICC, apart from the members of this 'Fraction' had been convinced of the necessity for such sanctions faced with an accumulation of evidence of deliberately destructive activity by these elements. The militants of the ICC are neither parrots nor zombies. If some amongst us have decided to trample on the principles which they had hitherto defended by blindly following a particular individual (for reasons of affinity, wounded pride, attempts to settle personal scores, or because of a loss of conviction), all the others rejected such behaviour and were able to make up their minds about this without anyone forcing their hand.

In the second part of this article, which will appear in the next issue of WR, we will see that the PCI has let itself be dragged by the 'IFICC' into also throwing out ant-ICC slanders.

ICC.

Notes

1. This is the PCI which also publishes Il Comunista in Italy, not to be confused with the PCI which publishes Il Programma Comunista and Cahiers Internationalistes in France, nor with the PCI which publishes Il Partito Comunista and La Gauche Communiste. Each of these three PCIs claims to be the true one, representing the current of the communist left of Italy animated by Amadeo Bordiga after the Second World War.

2. See on this subject our articles 'The International Extraordinary Conference of the ICC', 'Public Meetings on the Defence of the Revolutionary Organisation' and '"Internal Fraction" of the ICC: Serving the Bourgeoisie Admirably' in WR 254, 255 and 258 respectively, as well as 'The Fight for Organisational Principles' in International Review No. 110.

3. See on this subject our article 'Revolutionary Organisations Struggle against Provocation and Slander' in WR 252.

4. In spite of this letter, the IFICC has the gall to write in its Bulletin No. 13: "we want to affirm that, on our part, we never asked anybody to take sides between the ICC and Fraction". It is indeed a new shameless lie of the 'IFICC' in the tradition of this regroupment which seems to have endorsed the motto of Goebbels, head of Nazi propaganda: "a lie a thousand times repeated becomes a truth".

5. The IBRP (International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party): a group laying claim to the Italian communist left, consisting of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista in Italy and the Communist Workers' Organisation in Britain.

6. It should be noted that these attacks were primarily carried our in a verbal way by the militants of the PCI and that one finds very few examples of it in its publications. Indeed, at that time, whereas the PCI represented the most significant organisation laying claim to the communist left on an international scale and while it affected a transcendental disdain with regard to the ICC, its press did not condescend to polemicise with ours, unless in an exceptional way. This is not the case any more today, which obviously we salute, except when this polemic is based on unfounded rumours and not on realities.

7. Nevertheless, the comrades of the PCI always seem to themselves assert this 'monolithism', resulting in the exclusion of 'dissidents'. Evidence of this can be found in the article that Le Proletaire published recently, 'In memory of Suzanne Voute': "Marginalised in the Party, Suzanne consequently ceased her participation in the press and the central bodies. Increasingly reticent in the activity which was undertaken, she fell into open opposition at the end of the sixties, when the first signs of a new political crisis started to appear, accusing the Party of having fallen into activism and the leadership of having become the agent of opportunist influences. The divergences were such that they pushed Suzanne and the comrades who followed her to constitute a kind of fractional group inside the Party. The impossibility of joint work and the wish on her part and by the militants who shared her views not to leave the organisation in spite of the political rupture led to the decision to exclude them in 1981." (Le Proletaire 461, March-April 2002). We want to raise the point here that, even according the statements Le Proletaire, the exclusion of Suzanne Voute was based on the fact that she expressed dissensions with the view of the PCI at that time and not on her behaviour within the organisation. Le Proletaire could, however, tell us whether Suzanne, for example, said in the corridors or outside the organisation that such and such a PCI militant was a 'cop', etc. As for the ICC, the only exclusions which it has pronounced have followed the description of "behaviour unworthy of a communist militant" (Chenier in 1981, Simon in 1995, Jonas at the beginning of 2002). Concerning the exclusion of Jonas, that we pronounced only recently (since, as opposed to what they say, the other members of the 'Fraction' were not excluded), the criterion selected had nothing to do with 'political divergences' which they never expressed in any case, but on the fact, as stated above, that he was "behaving in a manner worthy of an agent provocateur".

We are publishing below some extracts from a letter to our publication Révolution Internationale in France. The writer of the letter is very preoccupied with the question of the emancipation of women. It is followed by our response.

"(...) In the country of the 'Rights of Man', as perhaps in certain other states, all of social organisation centres around the man (...) The spaces for women, feminine style clubs or women's assemblies of yesteryear or of the time of Rosa Luxemburg have been suppressed (...) Under the pretext of a generalised mixture, women have been put out to pasture because when they change towns or countries and when they don't have work, the spaces for women which would allow them to regain confidence in themselves are practically non-existent. A good number of women have had to 'accommodate themselves' to this fact as well as they can and have ended up by hiding their condition (...) One could say that the woman remains the proletarian of the man even if the bourgeois institution of marriage has gone out of fashion. One escapes the conjugal duty which is synonymous with conjugal prostitution for a dissolution where the communion between beings can no longer exist as long as inequalities of all kinds have not been abolished and therefore as long as human relations are relations of possession and slavery. To rid ourselves of this it is necessary perhaps (...) for women to again find the space for women; without that we will never reach a true communism. Does capitalism have a masculine origin? I don't think so, but some have had every interest in exploiting the desire for domination of one sex over another in order to maintain themselves in power."

Our Response

Our reader raises a question which has preoccupied the workers' movement since its origins; but it can only be understood as a problem of humanity, and not as a particular question. In the Paris Manuscripts of 1844, Marx posed the question like this: "The immediate relation of man to man is the relation of the man to the woman (...) It allows a judgement on the whole degree of human development. From the character of this relationship, one can conclude up to what point man has become for himself a species being, human and conscious of his destiny." This vision was taken up and developed in the whole evolution of marxist thought and through revolutionaries in the 19th century who took an interest in the question of the oppression of women in capitalist society (Bebel, Engels, Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, Alexandra Kollontai and Lenin).

Feminism: an ideology in the service of the bourgeoisie

Close to two centuries after marxists had posed this question of the oppression of women, it still remains topical. Witness its particular barbarous forms in the Islamic states, inflicting on women the obligation to wear a veil (even forbidding women to work or get an education) or in numerous countries where they are the victims of the worst sexual mutilations. And the intervention of the great western democracies will certainly not resolve this problem, as we were supposed to think from the outburst of bourgeois propaganda at the time of the fall of the Taliban and the 'liberation' of Kabul by the civilised world. In these same countries of the 'civilised' West, with the proliferation of networks of prostitution, a growing number of young girls hardly out of infancy (often of African origin or from the countries of the old eastern bloc) are forced, due to the lack of work, to sell their bodies in order to survive and escape poverty. Although today, with the development of capitalism, women have been integrated into production, although they have acquired the right to participate in the management of public affairs (and even take the reins of government), the oppression of women still remains a reality. But this reality doesn't find its source in the 'natural' and 'biological' domination of one sex over the other.

Only marxism with its scientific, historical materialist and dialectical method can explain the origin of this oppression; and above all it alone provides a way of resolving this problem.

As Marx and Engels showed, the institutions and foundations of bourgeois order have a history. They emerged through a long and tortuous process linked to the evolution of human society. They found their sources in the basic economics of the social relations of production and in the appearance of private property. In the framework of this response we can't lay out all the arguments developed by marxism in the 19th century. We refer our readers to Engels' book The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State which analyses very thoroughly this historical evolution, as well as two articles from our series on communism, in International Review 81 and 85.

Although our reader raises what has been a fundamental question for the workers' movement, the approach she takes in order to respond to it, is, with a certain naivety, identical to that of the 'feminist' movement which flourished at the end of the 60s, notably in the United States. According to feminist ideology, the oppression of women in bourgeois society (as in all class societies) finds its origins in the "desire for domination of one sex over the other". This is not only false but dangerous. Such a vision leads her to put forward a totally erroneous response: women must claim "spaces for women, without which we will never reach a true communism". For marxism, the history of humanity is the history of the class struggle and not the struggle of the sexes. Contrary to the feminist vision (which is nothing other than a variant of leftism, not unlike anti-racism) marxism has always fought all the divisions that the bourgeoisie is permanently trying to impose on the only class capable of building a real communist society on a world scale: the proletariat. Because what constitutes the strength of the working class, and will determine its capacity to overthrow bourgeois order, is first and foremost its capacity to defend its class unity and fight the divisions (racial, national, sexual) that the bourgeoisie tries to introduce into its ranks.

In other respects, our reader correctly recalls the existence of assemblies and clubs at the time of Rosa Luxemburg. First of all we should specify that it's not a question of inter-classist associations indiscriminately regrouping the worker and the wife of the boss, but organisations of 'socialist women' (1). But what was still valid at the end of the 19th century, in the ascendant period of capitalism, is no longer so today. At a time when capitalism could still accord significant reforms to the exploited class, it was legitimate for revolutionaries to put forward immediate demands for women, including the right to vote, while warning against any inter-classist illusions (2). It is in this context that the social democratic parties had to support the specific claims of women, inasmuch as they did not immediately liberate them from capitalist oppression but strengthened the proletariat by integrating women workers into the general struggle against exploitation and for the overthrow of capitalism.

So, even in this epoch where the demands of women had a meaning from the point of view of the proletarian struggle, and contributed to the strengthening of the workers' movement, marxists were always opposed to bourgeois feminism. Far from contributing to the unification of the working class, it could only sharpen divisions within it while favouring inter-classist ideology and leading it off its class terrain.

With the entry of capitalism into its period of decadence all struggles for reform were rendered obsolete and a specifically women's movement could only be recuperated by the dominant class and play into the hands of the bourgeois state.

In the final analysis, the "spaces for women" wished for by our reader risk being a new ghetto isolating those workers from the rest of the proletariat, just like 'immigrant movements' tend to cut off immigrant workers from the general combat of their class. Marxism alone provides a response to the problem of the oppression of women

Our reader also affirms that in capitalist society "the woman remains the proletarian of the man even if the bourgeois institution of marriage has gone out of fashion". This affirmation contains a correct idea that Marx and Engels had put forward as early as 1846 in The German Ideology: "The first division of labour is that of the man and woman for procreation". Subsequently, Engels added that "the first class opposition which manifests itself in history coincides [our emphasis] with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in the conjugal relation, and the first class oppression with the oppression of the feminine sex by the masculine sex".

And it is precisely from the fact of this historic coincidence that he tried to understand the link between the antagonism of the sexes in the monogamous marriage and the appearance of a society divided into classes. The discovery of private property constituted the key to the whole marxist vision, which is the sole method that allows an understanding of the material and economic roots of the oppression of women. In his study on the origins of the family, Engels writes: "The modern conjugal family is based on the domestic slavery, acknowledged or hidden, of the woman, and modern society is a mass which is composed exclusively of conjugal families, like so many molecules. In our days, the man in the great majority of cases must be the supporter of the family and must feed it, at least in the possessing classes; and that gives him a sovereign authority that no juridical privilege needs to support. In the family, the man is the bourgeois; the woman plays the role of the proletariat."

But this formulation of Engels, that our reader takes up (and that feminist ideology deprives of its context in order to exploit and distort it) has nothing to do with a 'sexist' approach. What Engels is trying to show is that, essentially with the appearance of private property, the individual, monogamous family became the prime economic entity of society; in other words, the sexual division of labour contained the germ of the future antagonisms between the classes. Thus Marx could affirm that the patriarchal family came out of the "great historical defeat of the feminine sex"; the overthrow of maternal right "contained in miniature all the antagonisms which, subsequently, developed throughout society and its state".

Marx and Engels thus clearly demonstrated that the oppression of the feminine sex made its appearance in the history of humanity with the rise of monogamy (and its corollaries, adultery and prostitution). This constituted the prime form of family based not on natural conditions, but on economic conditions, that's to say the victory of private property over primitive and spontaneous common property: "Sovereignty of the man in the family and the procreation of children which can only be his and who were destined to inherit his fortune, such was frankly proclaimed by the Greeks as the exclusive objective of conjugal marriage (...) Monogamy is born from the concentration of important riches in one hand - the hand of a man, and from the desire to bequeath these riches to the children of this man and no other. For that, the monogamy of the woman is necessary, not that of the man" (Engels). Thus, contrary to the approach of our reader and of feminist ideology, marxism shows that the inequality of the sexes that we have inherited from previous social conditions is not the cause, but the consequence of the economic oppression of the woman; this oppression emerged with the appearance of private property. This came first of all within archaic societies which, through the accumulation of riches and the development of the means of production, subsequently gave way to a society divided into classes. If woman thus became "the proletarian of the man", it's not because of the will power of the masculine sex, but because, with the patriarchal family (which appeared as a historical necessity allowing humanity to pass from the savage state to 'civilisation'), and more so with the individual, monogamous family, the control of the household lost the public character that it had in the old domestic economy of primitive communism. Whereas in these archaic societies the domestic economy was a "public industry of social necessity" entrusted to women (in the same way that procuring basic necessities was left to men), in the monogamous, patriarchal family it became an "individual service". From here on, the woman was removed from social production and became an "early servant" (Engels). And it was only with the appearance of large-scale industry in capitalist society that the door to production could again be open to the woman. It's for this reason that marxism has always proposed that the condition for the emancipation of woman is to be found in her integration into social production as a proletarian. It is in her place within the relations of production, and in her active participation, as a proletarian, in the united struggle of the whole of the exploited class, that the key to the problem is to be found. It is solely by posing the question in terms of classes and from a class point of view that the proletariat can provide an answer.

By overthrowing capitalism and constructing a truly world communist society, the proletariat will have, amongst other things, to re-establish the socialisation of domestic life by developing it on a universal scale (notably through the taking charge of the education of children by the whole of society and not through the family cell conceived as the prime economic entity). Only the world proletariat, by breaking the shackles of the means of production as private property, will be able to initiate a gigantic leap in the productive forces, definitively put an end to scarcity, and take humanity from the reign of necessity to the reign of freedom. Thanks to the building of a new society based on abundance, the proletariat will thus achieve its historic mission as the gravedigger of capitalism by finally realising the old dream of humanity that primitive communism was not capable of achieving.

Contrary to the erroneous vision of our reader, the emancipation of women will not be the work of the struggle of women, with their specific claims, but of the whole working class. Forced to sell its labour or prostitute itself in order to survive (and in decadent capitalism prostitution is not moreover only the 'prerogative' of women), the proletarian, man or woman is, in a system based on the search for profit, nothing other than a commodity.

The oppression of women is an integral part of the exploitation and oppression of a social class deprived of all means of production; it will be ended by the revolutionary action of this class, which can only liberate itself by liberating the whole of humanity from the yoke of capitalist exploitation.

Louise

Notes

(1) We should also point out that, contrary to her friend Clara Zetkin who was the president of the socialist women's movement and editor-in-chief of the socialist women's newspaper Die Gleichheit (Equality), Rosa Luxemburg was never herself involved in this activity. All her energy was devoted to the combat for revolutionary marxism against reformism. As to Clara Zetkin herself, her name in history, much more than her 'feminist' activity, remains attached to her combat, notably at the side of Rosa, Karl Liebknecht and Leo Jogisches, against the imperialist war of 1914 and for the foundation of the Communist Party in Germany.

(2) In this same epoch, certain countries were the theatre of bourgeois campaigns for the right of women to vote. In Britain, the country most affected by this movement, this demand was supported from the beginning by the bourgeois philosopher John Stuart Mill and the Conservative Prime Minister, Disraeli. The wife of Churchill was an also an old suffragette: that tells you that there was nothing specifically proletarian about this demand!

Believing what the "IFICC" says in connection with the "Stalinist methods of the ICC" (and having apparently forgotten the sentence of Lenin: "Whoever believes the word of another is an incorrigible idiot"), the PCI continues on this topic: "It is inevitable that the climate which is created in the ICC is reflected on the outside. Thus, one of our comrades who had had the misfortune to criticise such methods in a public meeting of this organisation (while reaffirming that he did not in any way defend the Fraction), saw himself consequently informed of the 'rupture of any political relations' with himself. The significance of this curious declaration appeared a few days later, when he was insulted and jostled during a sale by an ICC militant. We do not want to attach a disproportionate importance to this incident, which is perhaps due to the excitement of local militants. But it must be clear that we do not intend to let the limits of our criticism be dictated to by anyone, and by any measures of intimidation, including physical. 'Learn from what we say, it shall not be repeated!'"(note 1) [117].

Just as the PCI should have obtained better information before blowing the same trumpets as the "Fraction", it would have done better not to believe the word of its Toulouse militant, W, in connection with the incidents which occurred between him and our militants. One thing first of all: we have always and in all places expressed a fraternal attitude towards the militants of the PCI. And this for the good reason that we consider that this organisation, in spite of its Programmatic errors, belongs to the camp of the working class. The reciprocal case was not always true. Thus, in 1979, when the militants of the PCI were involved in supporting the movement of the residents of immigrants' homes, SONACOTRA, and were acting as stewards at street gatherings and demonstrations alongside Maoist militants of the UCFML, they used physical threats to prevent militants of the ICC from speaking and distributing our press. It is true that, at that time, the PCI was dominated, in particular in France, by a leftist and third-worldist current which was going to split a few years later by taking with it the cash box and other material means. The current militants of the PCI criticised this third-worldist tendency, but to our knowledge they never condemned the behaviour of the members of the PCI of the time who had prevented the expression of internationalist positions within a working class struggle, to the great satisfaction of the UCFML Stalinists.

Concerning W, a member of the PCI in Toulouse whom we have known for a long time, we expressed the same fraternal attitude towards him as to other members of the PCI when he returned to this city after several years of absence. We proposed that he should exhibit the press of the PCI in our public meetings and always invited him to speak at them. In the same way, we encouraged the members of a discussion circle in which we participate to also invite the PCI, i.e. W, so that he could present its positions to it. For a whole period, moreover, his own attitude with regard to our militants was also cordial and he was always determined to engage in long discussions with them.

Since the beginning of this year W's attitude has changed completely:

• At the 12 January 2002 meeting of the discussion circle, he accused our two militants present of being anti-Semites (note 2) [118].
• A few days after, when one of our militants had sought explanations from him during a press sale at a market, he reiterated the same charges, more particularly towards one of our comrades, putting forward during this discussion only the "argument" that he "knew what he was talking about since he has known him for a long time" (indeed they went to college together); he equally accused the militants of PCI-Programma Comunista of being not very commendable people.
• At the meeting on 16 February, the members of the discussion circle again asked him for explanations of his charges and he then left the meeting, after having again uttered insults affirming that we were "all in the same bag".
• Just before our public meeting of 1 June which was to proceed in the back room of a cafe, he started by making a scandal in the main room by claiming that we owed him some money - and in front of the customers and with the risk of us being prohibited from meeting by the owner of the cafe.
• During the public meeting itself he read a statement which he proposed to also circulate within the other groups of the communist left as well as within the Trotskyist group Lutte Ouvri�re (!), in which he accused the ICC of "Stalinism" for having excluded "as usual" the "experienced comrades". He referred to the "IFICC" as well as the booklet What Is Not To be Done- a collection of calumnies against our organisation published at the end of the nineties by the "Circle de Paris", a parasitic regrouping of former militants of the ICC, none of whom was excluded but whose organisational anarchism had made their presence in a centralised communist organisation "unbearable" to them.
• At the end of this meeting, he launched a new slander, claiming one of our sympathisers "had stolen a booklet of the PCI". (!)
• >On 9 June a delegation of our organisation went to find him to say that, taking into account the attitude which he had adopted in the cafe back room, endangering the meeting place, (note 3) [119] and the insults which he would not cease using against our militants, we no longer want to have relations with him.
• On 7 July when our comrades took out publications in order to begin a sale at a market, he came to insult them, regaling them as "Stalinist" and as "fascists"; one of our comrades asked him to keep silent but he simply voiced his insults more and more extremely, obviously provoking a crowd; our comrade then asked him to leave, in a very firm tone but without "jostling him" as the le Prol�taire article claims.
• At our public meeting of 14 September, a sympathiser of the PCI asked us whether he could exhibit the press of this organisation in the conference room; we answered that not only could he do so but that we encourage it; this is truly proof that our attitude of firmness towards W results only from his unacceptable behaviour and by no means out of hostility towards the PCI as such.
• On 13 October, at the market where he sold the PCI's press, W insulted two of our sympathisers by assailing them as "bitches" at the moment when they passed in front of him. In spite of the policy of openness that we apply towards the other groups of the communist left, it can happen that one or other of our militants loses their calm and makes provocative remarks.(note 4) [120]. However, in this precise case, there were neither provocative remarks, nor "excitement" from our militants and if anybody made provocative remarks, and indeed on more than one occasion, it is certainly this PCI militant. We do not know what explains his attitude during the last year: is it the result of the tonality of the discussions within the PCI or rather of a certain "excitement" (according to the terms of le Prol�taire) specific to W?(note 5) [121].

In the same way, we regard as probable that W gave a version of the facts to his organisation different from that which we have just revealed. It is thus the word of our militants (and our sympathisers) against that of the militant of the PCI. However, we are sure of what we put forward and we can prove it because most of W's intrigues which we reported took place in the presence of several people external to the ICC, who will be able to testify. We think that there should be a confrontation in front of the other militants of the PCI, between their militant W and our comrades as well as the people external to the ICC who witnessed incidents that we have described. We are prepared, if necessary, to call for the constitution of a special commission of militants of the communist left charged to shed light on these facts. We are particularly determined that the truth is clarified on this question because our organisation is today the target of a campaign of unprecedented slander by the small group of former militants who constitute the "IFICC", animated by an element whose behaviour is disturbing and dangerous for the groups of the communist left. And most lamentable, in this business, it is that a group such as the PCI is contributing its share to this campaign, in spite of its stated wish "not to take sides", in particular by describing incidents of which it clearly it has an erroneous knowledge. The use of the PCI's article by the "Fraction"

We did not have to wait long for the effects of the PCI's article; immediately after its publication, it was reprinted on the Internet site of the IFICC, accompanied by a statement where we can read: "First of all, we condemn the current attitude of the ICC and make a point of dissociating ourselves completely from its present methods. We solidarise ourselves with the PCI militant who is the victim of this aggression. Independently of the political support that we bring to the PCI comrades, we feel a painful shock vis-�-vis this new episode: it says much indeed, on the state of disarray and disorientation of the members of the ICC; it is significant of the profundity of the sectarian drift which has seized hold of the ICC so quickly � One would be wrong to trivialise this incident or to analyse it as the unhappy provocative remarks of a militant. Indeed, it is only the latest illustration of an opportunist and sectarian dynamic, which openly developed initially within the ICC the day after its 14th congress (May 2001), and after the open explosion of its organisational crisis, then publicly with respect to the members of the ICC who were opposed to this new policy, and today with respect to the whole political milieu which is seen as a class enemies � we welcome this article which denounces the bureaucratic measures and intimidation which were established inside the ICC. These were never the attitude and the practices of Marx, nor of Lenin, nor of any proletarian organisation."

We will not make additional comments on the prose of the IFICC, which is quite in line with its preceding writings. We would like simply to point out the immense hypocrisy of the sentence "we feel a painful shock vis-�-vis this new episode". Actually, the attitude of members of the "IFICC" that we encountered a few days after the publication of the le Prol�taire article speaks for itself: it was not "pain" which one could read on their face, but open jubilation.

If the PCI militants sincerely did not wish "to take sides", it must be said that they singularly failed to achieve their aim.

In our official statement on the exclusion of Jonas, we wrote, as we already stated above: "what we are sure of is that he (Jonas) represents a danger to the proletarian political milieu". This assertion has been fully confirmed by the political manoeuvres that Jonas and his "Fraction" have carried out towards the groups of the communist left. After having refused to defend himself by appealing in front of a jury of honour, Jonas used his "Fraction" to try "to implicate" the IBRP and to push it to take part in the campaign of slanders against the ICC. As we wrote it in WR 255 [122], "publishing the discussion between the IBRP and the 'Fraction' can only have the aim of discrediting the IBRP in the proletarian political milieu. And this is indeed Mr Jonas' aim: to lure the IBRP into a trap and to discredit it while spreading all kinds of suspicion between the groups of the communist left."

Today, it is the turn of the PCI to let itself be enrolled in Mr Jonas' "fraction" war against the ICC. By involving the groups of the communist left in its campaigns against the ICC, Jonas, with the support of his faithful, does nothing but continue the wretched policy outside - a perfectly conscious, deliberate and planned policy - that he carried out inside the ICC when he tried to sow suspicion among militants, to line them up against each other. (note 6) [123] Why does the PCI play the "Fraction's" game?

The questions remains: why the did PCI show such kindness towards the "Fraction"? Why was it in a rush to publish a time-consuming article taking the side of the "fraction" and carrying serious charges against the ICC, without asking us for more details as we proposed to them in our letter of 6 February 2002, which finished as follows: "We are obviously at your disposal to give you more elements on this business if you wish it." Why did it believe the word of its Toulouse militant and report his statements publicly, without even asking us for explanations?

We understand that the "IFICC", as soon as it noted the le Prol�taire article, and without knowing any of what had gone on, rushed like a flock of vultures to "solidarise ourselves with the PCI militant who is the victim of this aggression" and to conclude that this incident was "the latest illustration of an opportunist and sectarian dynamic which openly developed initially within the ICC � and today with respect to the whole political milieu, seen as class enemies". For Jonas and his acolytes, anything that throws mud on the ICC is good. But what happened to the PCI?

Has this organisation been influenced by the seduction campaigns that the "IFICC" launched in the direction of the groups of the communist left in order to "put them in its pocket" against the ICC? Several militants of the PCI can certainly bear witness to the existence of such a campaign, following the readers' meeting held by this organisation on 28 September in Paris. In this meeting devoted to the Palestinian question, a militant of the PCI started by presenting the traditional position of his organisation (which one can find in a long article of le Prol�taire No. 463, "Aux prol�taires Isra�liens, Aux prol�taires Palestiniens, Aux prol�taires d'Europe et d'Am�rique" [To the Israeli proletarians, the Palestinian proletarians, the proletarians of Europe and America"]). The ICC militants present had, in their turn, presented their own position, criticising that of the PCI. And it was precisely during an intervention of one of our comrades, that Sarah, representing the "IFICC", interrupted twice, saying in substance to him "but it's not what the PCI says", to which our comrade answered, twice, that the PCI was big enough to correct itself if it were necessary. On the other hand, it did not at any time say one word to defend the ICC's position on the national and colonial question (which the "IFICC" still claims to defend). It was only at the end of the meeting, and after doffing her cap to the PCI's presentation on the Palestinian question (even if she did pay lip service to the idea that she had some disagreements with it), that Sarah made an intervention, but on a subject that was not directly on the agenda: the situation in Argentina. And this intervention was devoted to vehemently denouncing "the indifference" of the ICC in connection with the movements which had occurred in this country at the end of 2001. It should besides be noted that she did not say a word of criticism on the article published in le Prol�taire No. 460 ("Les cacerolazos ont pu renverser les pr�sidents, Pour combattre le capitalisme, il faut la Lutte Ouvri�re"/"The cacerolazos could overthrow presidents. To fight capitalism, workers' struggle is necessary") - an article which presents an analysis very close to ours (see "Argentine, Une manifestation de la faillite du capitalisme", in R�volution Internationale No. 319). The reference to "the indifference" of the ICC was obviously a bait, since this exactly how the PCI often qualifies our position on the national question. Truly, Sarah's seduction manoeuvres were so crude and demagogic that we can hardly believe that they could have an impact on PCI militants. A serious communist militant is not like a crow in his tree and when someone tries to flatter him - like Reynard the fox in the fable - as did the IFICC's representative, his normal reaction would surely be scepticism and prudence, not to release his cheese to the first parasite that comes along!

For this reason, there surely exist other causes of the benevolence expressed by the PCI towards the "IFICC". One of these causes is perhaps that the militants of the PCI, traumatised by the internal functioning which has existed in the past in the Bordigist organisations where "monolithism" was the official rule, are now tending spontaneously to take the side of those who are presented as "oppressed by the Stalinist methods of the ICC", without seeking to know any more. In fact, their reaction would be a little on the same model as that of the councilists who, because the Communist Parties became the enemies of the proletariat, deduce from this that every party is doomed to betray and that it is thus necessary to reject in principle every proposal to constitute a revolutionary party. But there is probably another reason, more fundamental, for the method of the PCI. This is that, like all the other PCIs (Programma and il Partito) it considers that it is The Party, all the other groups of the current of the communist left being only usurpers. The Bordigist conception, contrary to that of the ICC and the Italian Left of the period of Bilan, considers that only one revolutionary organisation can exist in the world. The logical consequence of this vision is to place the ICC and the "Fraction", which officially defend the same position, on the same level. And this is what the PCI claims to be doing in its article. But if it actually takes the sides of the "Fraction", as we saw, it is because the conception of "the PCI alone in the world" leads to the vision that the only relationship able to exist between two organisations claiming to be of the communist left are relations of competition. This leads to the idea that anything that can discredit the other organisations is positive, since this "makes room" for its own organisation. If the "IFICC" can create problems for the ICC, considered by the PCI as a competitor, and discredit it, it is all to the good. Such is probably the logic, even if it is not completely conscious of it, which explains the spontaneous access of sympathy towards the "IFICC" by PCI militants.

In 1978, when the PCI had been invited to take part in the second conference of the groups of the communist left, it announced its refusal with an article published in Programma Comunista (note 7) [124] under the elegant title of "The fight between fottenti and fottuti" (literally, between "fuckers and fucked"). For the PCI, this conference did not have any another significance than to allow each group to try "to kiss" the others. That's the vision which this organisation had of the relationship between groups of the communist left.

The PCI of today does not use this same language and it has criticised some of its past errors. However, we think that there still remains an effort for it to make, to free itself completely from the logic of "fottenti" and "fottuti" knowing that, until now, it has never made the least criticism of the conception expressed by the not very glorious article of Programma Comunista. In any case, even if the PCI did not intend to be the "fottento" of the ICC, it is certainly going the right way about becoming the "fottuto" of Jonas and his "fraction"!

ICC (21 October 2002).

Notes

1. This is an updated version of a French expression of archaic origin, clearly indicating a threat. [Translator's note]. Back [125]

2. It is necessary to measure the gravity of such a charge against communist militants, especially after the campaigns orchestrated by the bourgeoisie assimilating the communist left, which refused to go into anti-fascism during the second world war, to the "revisionist" schools who call into question the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis and feed the propaganda of the extreme right. A few years ago, when the PCI had undergone an attack on this question (owing to the fact that it had published the excellent booklet Auschwitz or the Grand Alibi), we obviously gave it our full solidarity. Back [126]

3. In Toulouse, since the explosion of the AZF last year, it is extremely difficult to find conference rooms.Back [127]

4. Thus, at the time of the Lutte Ouvri�re f�te of Spring 2000, one of our militants, Juan, today an eminent member of the "Fraction", was shown to be very aggressive (and, moreover, publicly in the eyes of the militants of LO who attended the "spectacle"), towards an old comrade who wanted to leave our organisation with the prospect of integrating into the IBRP. We had asked him to calm down and thereafter we criticised his inadmissible behaviour. At the same time, we apologised to the comrade who had been insulted and who assumed that Juan's aggressive behaviour reflected a certain "sectarianism" on our part towards the IBRP. It is also the same Juan who threw himself furiously onto one of our comrades and kicked him when a delegation of the ICC presented itself at the home of a member of the "Fraction", to make an inventory of the documents belonging to the ICC which were stored at his place. This physical aggression towards our militant followed upon a provocation by Jonas. Indeed, although he had no need to take part in this inventory, Jonas was present (to our great surprise!) and openly took notes of the discussion between our comrades and the members of the IFICC. It was after one of our comrades had taken the bit of paper on which he had written from the hands of Jonas (without even touching him) that Juan threw himself violently on our militant. Back [128]

5. In support of this assumption, there is in particular his obsession, without trace of proof, about the alleged "the anti-Semitism" of some of our militants and the crude insults which he addresses to our militants and sympathisers. Back [129]

6. Moreover, as if by chance, it was after the publication of this article of le Prol�taire, that Jonas finally left the shadows, as witness the fact that he that he found the audacity to sign a "contribution" (on the elections in Germany) published on the Internet site of the IFICC (whereas during the three decades that he was in the ICC, he never made the least written contribution to debates). Convinced that he now has "allies" among the groups of the communist left, the �minence grise of the IFICC can from now on give himself respectability by making his first "public" appearance through this article (even if he remains comfortably installed in his slippers and prefers to send his friends of the IFICC to public meetings of the PCI). For our part, we still demand that Jonas call upon a jury of honour. As long as such a jury has not ruled on his case, we consider that this individual does not have any speaking rights in the proletarian political milieu. Back [130]

7. Which was its newspaper in Italy before the split between Il Comunista and Programma. Back [131]

George Bush Senior promised a New World Order. At the start of the 1990s, with the Berlin Wall down, there were no longer two great military blocs facing each other, and we were told that the threat of war had faded. That was a lie. The reality has been a proliferation of military conflicts across the face of the planet.

We have seen the massive destruction in the Gulf War of 1991, and the subsequent bombings of Iraq by the US and Britain that have continued ever since. In Europe the great powers came into conflict in the wars in ex-Yugoslavia. Across the Caucasus big and small powers committed their atrocities, still continuing to this day in Chechnya. In Afghanistan, the terror bombing started by the US at the end of 2001 was just the latest stage of a series of armed conflicts underway since the 1970s. There has been no interruption in the exchange of fatal blows in Israel/Palestine. Throughout Africa (Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Congo, Liberia, Ivory Coast, and Sudan to cite only the ten most familiar areas) devastating wars between various factions and states have worsened the desperate situation in debt-ridden countries already scarred by poverty, famine, disease. Between India and Pakistan there is a stand-off between nuclear powers. The New World Order has turned out to be one of growing military confrontations. Justifications for war

With the increasing threat of war on Iraq all sorts of false ideas are being put forward again on what is responsible for the growth of military barbarism. For Bush and Blair there are wars which are justified and necessary. The ruling class in the US, with its 'war against terrorism', says it is mounting a defence of freedom against 'rogue states'. In Britain, the government says it will not shrink from the use of nuclear weapons against countries that don't respect international conventions and illegally manufacture 'weapons of mass destruction.'

On the other hand, there are countries such as France and Germany, which support humanitarian wars or wars for the liberation of oppressed peoples, but not, of course, for oil or for sordid financial profits. Such countries are major imperialist rivals of the US, and it should be expected that they would want to hold Bush and Co responsible for the plunge into war - and to be critical of wars that serve the interests of US imperialism against the major European powers.

In reality wars are neither 'decent' nor 'dirty'. Every country and every war is imperialist, regardless of the hypocritical justifications that the ruling capitalist class can dig up for their military adventures (or to condemn their rivals). Against Iraq, for example, there is an insistence that war will be justified because of Saddam's possession of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. Yet those who condemn Iraq are countries such as Britain and the US, which not only maintain the biggest arsenals of such weaponry, but also spent years helping Iraq acquire the same technology during its 1980s war with Iran. The lies of pacifism

The fact that capitalist states are more and more compelled to use force of arms to defend their interests, as has been so clearly shown over the last ten years or so, is an illustration of a fundamental aspect of the decadence of the capitalist system. As the world economic crisis gets an ever tighter grip, each national capital is driven into more and more irrational military adventures. It's not 'evil' in the hearts of the ruling class that drives them to take up arms in conflict with their rivals; it is the very nature of capitalism. It is not because of a crisis in particular industries, or the appetites of investors in certain sectors. Imperialist wars are bred by the historic crisis of a system that has nothing else left to offer humanity.

Many people are deeply concerned about the drive to war, but the 'anti-war' propaganda they come up against conceals the nature of a society in which war has become endemic. This has always been the way with pacifism, trying as it does to convince us that there can be peace within capitalism, that imperialist war can be avoided or, at least, kept within civilised boundaries.

Typical of the mystifications put forward by pacifism is that it's the US which is the main problem, the most dangerous force on the international scene. It is definitely the greatest military power by far, but that shouldn't for one moment be used to detract from the threat posed by any and every other country and capitalist faction in the world today. Anti-Americanism always has a basis in the nationalism of other powers. The leading rivals of the US are the first to point to the chaos it leaves in its wake, while pursuing their own imperialist interests with every political, diplomatic and military means at their disposal. At a lesser level, there have been a heap of very minor powers fighting over the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but that hasn't lessened the suffering of people there. It is the decadence of capitalism that lies behind imperialist conflicts, not the difference in military capacity between different powers.

A further weapon in the pacifist armoury is the myth of the United Nations. If only the UN could exert its authority, we are told, then wars could be avoided, or at least kept under control. Surely no one needs to be reminded of the many occasions when countries just take unilateral action regardless of the view of the other countries of the UN. But, more importantly, the UN has never been anything more than an arena in which the major imperialist powers continue their conflicts. If the UN ever takes action it's going to be in the interests of one of the big powers. Importance of the working class struggle

What all the pacifist illusions have in common is the idea that somehow the good will of decent people can triumph over increasingly pervasive militarism. The drive to war is inherent in the capitalist system, not just the product of grasping leaders or immoral regimes, and so it can only be stopped by the overthrow of that system. This is the task of the working class, which is the only force in society capable of really opposing the drive to imperialist war.

Even when the working class is not involved in widespread struggles the ruling class cannot afford to forget its potential. This was clearly shown by the international wave of workers' struggles - strikes, demonstrations, mutinies and insurrections, and the revolutions in Russia and Germany - that brought an end to the First World War and put the whole capitalist social order in question. The working class remains the only international class with no national interests to defend. To understand this means resisting all the propaganda of the ruling class. Only the struggles of the working class have the potential to develop into a force that can destroy capitalism!

Against the open militarism that calls for workers to sacrifice themselves in imperialist wars!

Against the pacifist illusions that undermine the capacity of the working class to understand the true nature of capitalism!

Against the humanitarian lies that are used as so many justifications for war ('the war to end war', 'against terror', 'against militarism', 'against weapons of mass destruction')!

Workers have no country!

WR 1.2.03

We offered this text as a contribution to the discussions at an Anti-War Day School organised by Disobedience in January, in which we participated. It is an appeal for a discussion based on the historical experience of the working class, in particular its revolutionary minorities. The issues raised were similar to those at the Zero War conference held in Australia in December.

With dozens of wars taking place across the world and the growing mobilisation by the US and the UK for an attack on Iraq, there is a greater need than ever to be clear about what "revolutionary opposition to war" actually means. In Disobedience's proposal for an Anti-War Day School there is the suggestion that "theory should inform our practice". There is only one way that practice can be informed by theory: by drawing on the lessons of proletarian history. Against pacifism and protest stunts

Revolutionaries have always opposed pacifist ideology. Against sentimental appeals for universal harmony, they insisted on an internationalism that was based on the common struggle of the working class against the ruling class and all its governments.

At the beginning of the 20th century, against attempts to smuggle pacifist conceptions into resolutions of the Second International, revolutionaries such as Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin insisted that the workers' struggle was not just against the outbreak of war but should "profit in any way possible from the economic and political crisis to rouse the people and in this way hasten the collapse of capitalist domination". War was not only to be denounced, but also to be seen as a factor that could provoke proletarian revolution.

Today, there is no mass, permanently organised workers' movement. Instead, revolutionaries are confronted with a 'Labour Movement' which is really the left wing of capitalism. In the face of war, the capitalist left is given the job of organising pacifist fronts like the Stop the War Coalition (STWC). The STWC's main function is to prevent the development of a revolutionary opposition to war:

• by spreading illusions in a "peaceful" and "legal" capitalism
• by selling "alternative" ways of supporting war (war is OK if the UN backs it, war is OK if it's an anti-US war by "oppressed nations", etc).
• by providing a falsely "practical" method of opposing war which can mobilise hundreds of thousands and make any class opposition look puny and insignificant.

The problem with many who are critical of the STWC is that too often they still buy the argument that "at least it's doing something" and end up either tailing along in its demonstrations, or trying to devise radical-looking "protest" stunts which substitute themselves for the real development of the proletarian movement.

However unfashionable it may sound, the fact remains that the bourgeoisie's drive towards war can only be blocked and ultimately stopped by the massive struggles of the working class. Working class resistance and the overthrow of capitalism

The experience of the First World War, which was brought to an end by a wave of revolutionary working class struggles, is still profoundly relevant today. The working class went from being divided and mobilised in the massive slaughter between nations to fighting against the governments that had mobilised it. Capitalism everywhere was under threat. In 1919 Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, was moved to write that "The whole existing order in its political social and economic aspects is questioned by the masses of Europe from one end of Europe to the other."

Today the situation is different. The working class in Europe is not enlisted in capitalism's armies, but also there are no widespread workers' struggles. However, it is only on the basis of defensive struggles, resistance against the attacks of the ruling class today, that we can see the possibilities of a struggle to overthrow the bourgeoisie tomorrow. The essential role of revolutionary organisations

While it is necessary to reject forms of activity that link up with leftist campaigns such as the STWC and stunts that are just a more "radical" form of pacifism, it is also possible to show the very positive role that revolutionaries can play, even if they are a tiny minority.

In the First World War, for example, the Spartakusbund in Germany insisted that only a world proletarian revolution could put an end to world war, and in Russia the Bolsheviks called for the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war. Along with the propaganda and agitation in the working class there were also attempts to bring together the very small numbers defending a revolutionary position.

The conferences of Zimmerwald (1915) and Kienthal (1916) involved very few people and only a small Left minority which defended the positions which would eventually form the bases for the foundation of the Communist International. For the most far-sighted elements what was necessary was the defence of internationalist, class positions against the imperialist war. Above all, revolutionaries tried to ensure that their voice could be distinguished from others, in particular those social democratic, anarchist and trade unionist organisations who now served the war effort. Today, while the situation is different there is a similar need for revolutionaries to ensure that they have a distinct presence.

Revolutionaries, for example, have no part to play on pacifist demonstrations, which have more and more shown themselves to be not anti-war but pro-war rallies. But they do have a responsibility to ensure that a position for class war and against imperialist war is made as loudly as their limited forces allow at such gatherings. Where leftism and pacifism are mobilising for the ruling class, revolutionaries have to put forward the need for workers to defend their own class interests, to discuss among themselves, reflect on what's at stake in their struggles and prepare for the massive movements that will be necessary if capitalism is to be overthrown. Necessity for proletarian debate

The revolutionary opposition to the First World War was led not by loose associations of individuals but by revolutionary political organisations that were formed around a clear communist platform. The same is true for the much smaller minorities who continued to defend internationalism during the second imperialist slaughter. Today it remains the case that revolutionary clarity - on war or on any other issue - requires a revolutionary organisation to defend and develop it. At the same time, in Britain, as elsewhere we are seeing the emergence of a large number of groups and circles which have been seeking to discuss the question of war from a working class position. Such groupings can make an important contribution to the development of revolutionary consciousness but they are also subject to all kinds of dangers:

• discussing without perspective and without reference to the historical experience of the working class
• falling into activism and offering themselves as an easy option to the difficult task of building a communist organisation.

For any group that wants to discuss the question of war (or, for that matter, anything else that affects the working class) certain points should be taken as fundamental:

• groups should be open to all those interested in the fight against war on a working class basis;
• there should be no exclusions on the basis of secondary political differences, personal antagonisms, or the reluctance to engage in debate with existing revolutionary political organisations.

Discussion is the life-blood of the working class, and anything that is an obstacle to its development should be condemned. The ruling class is organising for war; the least that revolutionaries can do is organise discussions that can play a part in the development of workers' struggles.

WR, January 2003.

As the US and Britain send massive military forces to the Gulf, police in London have arrested people alleged to have handled the chemical weapon ricin. This is part of the British state’s participation in the ‘war against terrorism’. They whip up fear and anxiety over the existence of previously little known substances, and present the capitalist state as a protector against ‘alien forces’ that have insinuated themselves into British society. Against the scare stories of the media, the following article sets out the marxist framework for understanding what terrorism really is.

Since the end of the 1980s, terrorism has regularly been at the forefront of the international situation; and for the bourgeoisie of the big powers it has become “Public Enemy No.1”. In the name of the fight against the barbarity of terrorism, the two main powers which were at the head of the Western and Eastern blocs, the United States and Russia, have unleashed war in Afghanistan and Chechnya.

Terrorism is not a method of the working class

Generally speaking, classical terrorism could be defined as the violent action of small minorities in revolt against the overwhelming domination of the existing social order and its state. It is not a new phenomenon in history. Thus, at the end of the 19th century, the Russian Populists made terrorism their main instrument in the combat against Tsarism. A little later, in countries like France and Spain for example, it was taken up by certain sectors of anarchism. Throughout the 20th century, terrorism continued to develop and frequently accompanied movements for national independence, as we saw with the IRA, the ETA of the Basque country, the FLN during the war in Algeria, the Palestinian PLO, etc. It was even used following the Second World War by certain sectors of the Zionist movement who were seeking to set up the state of Israel (Menachem Begin, one of the most celebrated Prime Ministers of Israel - and a signatory to the Camp David accords of 1979 - had, in his youth, been one of the founders of the Irgun, a Jewish terrorist group which shot to fame through its attacks against the British).

Thus terrorism has not only been able to present itself (above all at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries) as a means for the struggle of the oppressed against the domination of the state; it has also been (principally in the 20th century) a favourite instrument of nationalist movements aiming to set up new states. It is clear that there is nothing in common between these latter forms of terrorism and the struggle of the proletariat, since the proletariat, whose very essence is internationalist, has no reason to participate in the creation of the bourgeois entities that are national states.

This said, is it still possible to resort to acts of terrorism in order to carry out the struggle against the bourgeois state? The question is worth posing since, as well as certain anarchist movements which say they are fighting for the emancipation of the working class, some groups laying claim to the communist revolution have taken up terrorism, claiming that it can be an arm of combat of the working class; and as a result they have sometimes drawn groups of sincere workers behind them. This was notably the case during the 1970’s with the Red Brigades in Italy.

In reality this terrain of violent struggle by armed minorities is not that of the working class. It is the terrain of the desperate petty-bourgeoisie, that’s to say a class without a historic future which can never raise itself to mass actions. Such actions are the emanation of individual will and not of the generalised action of a revolutionary class. In this sense, terrorism can only remain on an individualist level. “Its action is not directed against capitalist society and its institutions, but only against individuals [or symbols such as the Twin Towers, a symbol of the economic power of the United States] who represent this society. It inevitably takes on the aspect of a settling of scores, of revenge, of a vendetta, of person against person and not a revolutionary confrontation of class against class. On a general level, terrorism turns its back on the revolution which can only be the work of a definite class, which draws in the broad masses in an open and frontal struggle against the existing order and for the transformation of society” (International Review no.15, “Resolution on Terror, Terrorism and Class Violence”)

Thus, the proletariat can never develop its struggle against capitalism through the conspiratorial and individualist methods of terrorism. As a practice terrorism reflects its content perfectly: when it is not an instrument of certain sectors of the bourgeoisie itself, it is the emanation of layers of the petty bourgeoisie. It is the sterile practice of impotent social layers without a future.

Terrorism: an instrument of manipulation by the bourgeois state

The ruling class has always used terrorism as an instrument of manipulation, as much against the working class as in its own settling of internal accounts.

From the fact that terrorism is an action which is prepared in the shadows of a tight conspiracy, it thus offers “a favourite hunting ground for the underhand activities of agents of the police and the state and for all sorts of manipulations and intrigues” (ibid.). Already last century, the terrorist actions of the anarchists were used by the bourgeoisie to strengthen its state terror against the working class. There is the example of the “Villainy law” voted by the French bourgeoisie following the terrorist attack by the anarchist Auguste Vaillant who, on December 9 1893, threw a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies, wounding forty people. This attack had been manipulated by the state itself. In fact, Vaillant had been contacted by an agent of the Ministry of the Interior who, passing himself off as an anarchist, had lent him money and explained how to make a home-made bomb (with explosives and nails) – one which would be both ear-shattering and not too murderous. [1] [132] Given that the left wing of the bourgeoisie (notably the radicals, spurred on by the Socialist group represented in Parliament by Jaures), inevitably opposed restrictions on the right of association, the most reactionary sectors of the bourgeoisie, acting with an incredible machiavellianism, got around the rules of the democratic parliament in order to get measures adopted against the working class. The attack by Auguste Vaillant thus served as a pretext for the ruling class to immediately vote for exceptional measures against the socialists, repressing the freedom of association and of the press.

Similarly, in the 1970’s, the massive anti-terrorist campaigns orchestrated by the bourgeoisie following the Schleyer affair in Germany and the Aldo Moro affair in Italy served as a pretext for the state to strengthen its apparatus for the control and repression of the working class.

It was subsequently demonstrated that the Baader Gang and the Red Brigades had been infiltrated by, respectively, the secret services of East Germany, the Stasi, and the secret services of the Italian state. These terrorist grouplets were in reality nothing other than the instruments of rivalry between bourgeois cliques.

The kidnapping of Aldo Moro by a raid of military efficiency and his assassination on May 9 1978 (after the Italian government had refused to negotiate his freedom) wasn’t the work of some terrorist fanatics. Behind the action of the Red Brigades, there were political stakes implicating not only the Italian state itself, but also the big powers. In fact, Aldo Moro represented a faction of the Italian bourgeoisie favourable to the entry of the Communist Party into the governmental majority, an option to which the United States was firmly opposed. The Red Brigades shared this opposition to the policy of the “historic compromise” between Christian Democrats and the CP defended by Aldo Moro and thus openly played the game of the American state. Moreover, the fact that the Red Brigades had been directly infiltrated by the Gladio network (a creation of NATO whose mission was to set up networks of resistance should the USSR invade Western Europe) revealed that from the end of the 1970’s, terrorism had begun to become an instrument of manipulation in imperialist conflicts.

Terrorism: an arm of imperialist war

During the 1980’s, the multiplication of terrorist attacks (such as those of 1986 in Paris) executed by fanatical grouplets commanded by Iran, brought forward a new phenomenon in history. No longer, as at the beginning of the 20th century, were terrorist actions limited to those led by minority groups, aiming for the constitution or the national independence of a state. Now it was states themselves which took control and used terrorism as an arm of war against other states.

The fact that terrorism has become an instrument of the state for carrying out war marked a qualitative change in the evolution of imperialism.

In the recent period, we can see that it is major powers, in particular the United States and Russia, which have used terrorism as a means of manipulation in order to justify their military interventions. Thus, the media itself has revealed that the bombings in Moscow of summer 1999 were perpetrated with explosives made by the military and that Putin, the boss of the FSB (ex-KGB) at the time, was probably in command of them. These attacks were a pretext to justify the invasion of Chechnya by Russian troops.

Similarly, as we have fully analysed in our press, the September 11 attack against the Twin Towers in New York, served as a pretext for the American bourgeoisie to launch its bombs on Afghanistan in the name of the fight against terrorism and against “rogue states”.

Even if the American state didn’t directly organise this attack, it is inconceivable to imagine that the secret services of the leading world power were taken by surprise, just like any banana republic. It is more than likely that the American state let it happen, sacrificing its Twin Towers and close to 3000 human lives.

This was the price that American imperialism was ready to pay in order to be able to reaffirm its world leadership by unleashing the “Unlimited Justice” operation in Afghanistan. What’s more, this deliberate policy of the American bourgeoisie is not new. It was already used in December 1941 at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor [2] [133] to justify the USA’s entry into the Second World War; and, more recently, at the time of the invasion of Kuwait by the troops of Saddam Hussein in August 1990 [3] [134] in order to unleash the Gulf War under the aegis of Uncle Sam.

But this policy of “non-interference” no longer consists, as in 1941 or in 1990, of letting the enemy attack first according to the classic laws of war between states.

It is no longer the war between rival states, with its own rules, its flags, its preparations, its troops, its battlefields and armaments, which serve as the pretext for the massive intervention of the big powers.

Now it is blind terrorist attacks, with their fanatic, kamikaze commandos directly striking the civil population, which are then utilised by the big powers in order to justify letting loose imperialist barbarity.

The use and the manipulation of terrorism is not only the work of small states such as Libya, Iran or others in the Middle East. By sweeping away the classic rules of war, it has become the common practice of all nations, big and small; and terrorism as a means of war between states has now become one of the most crying manifestations of a capitalist system rotting on its feet.

Terrorism, an expression of the decomposition of capitalism

Today, terrorism is inseparable from imperialism.  The form that imperialist war is taking now is the result of the world disorder which capitalism entered with the collapse of the eastern bloc and the dislocation of the western bloc. This event, as we have showed, spectacularly marked the entry of capitalism into the ultimate phase of its decadence, that of decomposition. [4] [135]

Since we developed this analysis in the middle of the 1980’s, [5] [136] this phenomenon has only widened and intensified. It is characterised by the development of terrorism on a scale unprecedented in history.

The fact that this “arm of the poor” is now utilised by the big powers in defence of their imperialist interests on the world chessboard is a particularly significant expression of the decomposition of society.

Up to now the ruling class has succeeded in pushing obvious manifestations of the decadence of its system to the peripheries of capitalism. Thus the most brutal manifestations of the economic crisis of capitalism had first of all affected the countries of the periphery. In the same way that this insoluble crisis has now begun to come back home with force, hitting with full strength the very heart of capitalism, the most barbaric forms of imperialist war now make their appearance in the great metropoles such as New York and Moscow.

Moreover, this new expression of imperialist war reveals the suicidal dynamic of a bourgeois society in full putrefaction. In fact, the use of terrorism as an arm of war is accompanied by the acceptance of sacrifices. Thus it is not only the kamikazes who sacrifice lives in the image of a world which is killing itself, but equally the ruling class of the states struck by terrorist attacks, such as the American bourgeoisie. Doesn’t the broadcasting on all the screens of the world of the images of the Twin Towers collapsing like a house of cards convey to us the vision of a world heading towards the apocalypse? By allowing the September 11 attacks to happen, the first world power deliberately decided to sacrifice the Twin Towers, a symbol of its economic supremacy. It deliberately sacrificed close to 3000 American citizens on its own national soil. In this sense, the dead of New York have not only been massacred by the barbarity of Al Qaida; the deed was also done with the cold and cynical complicity of the American state itself.

Beyond the human lives involved, something that the bourgeoisie has never worried about, it is above all on the economic level that we can measure the sacrifice that the American state was ready to make in order to justify its enormous demonstration of force in Afghanistan. For that, Uncle Sam was ready to pay (and above all to make the working class pay) for the reconstruction of the World Trade Centre and for all the economic and social disorganisation caused by the collapse of the Twin Towers.

The use of terrorism as an arm of imperialist war in the present historic period of the decomposition of capitalism, reveals that all states are “renegade states” led by imperialist gangsters. The sole difference which distinguishes the big gang leaders, such as the American Godfather, and the second-rate gangsters who set off the bombs, lies in the means of destruction they have at their disposal.

In New York, Moscow, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Middle East, Bali, it is the civil populations that are today terrorised by the murderous madness of capitalism.

This situation constitutes an appeal to the responsibility of the world proletariat. The latter is the sole force in society capable, through its revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of capitalism, to put an end to war, massacres, and to capitalist terror in all its forms.

Louise, December 2002.

The looming war against Iraq, coming after the wars in ex-Yugoslavia and Afghanistan is causing great concern, particularly in the working class. Young men and women, dragooned into the armed forces by economic conscription, are being sent to the Gulf, while the rest of the working class pays the cost of the war through increased taxes and exploitation. Much of the concern and unease is focused on the aims of the war, particularly the idea that the US is going to war in order to gain control of Iraq's oil supplies. This is an idea encouraged by the Left, particularly in the Daily Mirror, which has consistently linked the war to oil: through TV advertisements, on its front pages etc. Left-wing groups such as the Socialist Workers Party, also say the same thing, in more 'radical' language.

The Daily Mirror (25/1/03) report that Exxon Mobil was to have pole position for control of the Iraq oilfields after the war, and it's report that the British army is to 'take' the oilfields to mask the fact that the US will control them, certainly suggest this. We heard the same arguments during the 1991 Gulf war. That war saw the destruction of the Kuwaiti oil fields, and Iraqi oil production being curtailed by sanctions. This time the US will certainly occupy Iraq and gain control over its oil production, and US oil companies will certainly cream off a nice profit. But this short term profit is overshadowed by the overall cost to US capitalism of the war, its preparation - which includes billions of dollars in 'aid'/bribes to countries in the region to either stay out of the war or support the US - the billions used to reduce Iraq to rubble, and the hundreds of billions that the US spends on armaments each year.

Oil is certainly an important element in this war, but not because of the involvement of US oil companies. Its importance lies in geopolitical strategic significance. Oil is "a strategic material the lack of which is a fatal blow to an economy, or leaves it incapable of waging war" (Why Wars? Jeremy Black, 1996). Whoever controls the world's oil supplies will have a major strategic advantage over its imperialist rivals. US imperialism's occupation of Iraq will not only give it direct control over its oil supplies but will enable it to apply direct military pressure on all the major producers in the region, as well as control the supply of oil to the rest of the world from this region. For example, Japan depends on the Middle East for 95% of its oil, Asia as a whole has a 75% dependency, and Europe though less dependent still gets 25% from there. The US, in contrast, meets 82% of its own energy needs.

This would appear to back up the 'war for oil' arguments, because the US will control oil production, supply and reserves. Iraq has 11% (15 billion tons) of the world oil reserves. This begs the question of why the US didn't capture Iraq in 1991, when it had much more international support than now. In fact oil was only part of the wider strategic game that was being played out in the Gulf. As the ICC said at the time: "By flaunting its military might, the US demonstrates the others' relative weakness. Right from the start, the US sent troops without waiting for its 'allies'' agreement; the latter were forced to rally round under pressure rather than out of conviction. As long as the action against Iraq takes the form of an embargo or diplomatic isolation they can pretend to play minor roles, and so insist on their own minor individual interests. By contrast, a military offensive can only emphasize the enormous superiority of the US, and its allies' impotence" (International Review 64, 1991).

The 1991 war enabled the US to strengthen its military presence in the region under the justification of 'containing' Saddam. This also increased their control over oil supplies, while it imposed a physical barrier to its major rivals. Not only could the US shut off the oil supplies needed for the German, French, British, Russian and Japanese economies (and war machines), but it also exposed their military puniness compared to the US, and severely limited others' access to this vital strategic region (along with its markets).

In the 12 years since, these rivals have not meekly submitted to the Pax Americana but have increasingly opposed the US - in ex-Yugoslavia, Africa, the Middle East and throughout the rest of the world. German, French and Russian imperialisms have all established commercial links with Iraq in defiance of the US. These links include access to Iraqi oil and markets. Faced with this undermining of their global leadership the US has had to resort to increasing use of military power to slap down its rivals: 1999 in Kosovo, 2001/2 in Afghanistan and now the prospect of the occupation of Iraq, followed by who knows where next. Iran?

The Mirror, the SWP and the array of 'intellectuals' such as Gore Vidal and George Monbiot, that put forward the 'war for oil' argument, all hide the depth of the imperialist conflict between the great powers. They all present US policy as being due to Bush and his administration's links to the oil industry. They say that the imperialist policy of the US, the world's superpower, is determined by the needs of one industry. Underlying this argument is the idea that Bush is somehow more of a hawk than Clinton ever was.

The fact that Bush and his team have strong links to the oil industry does give US imperialism's rivals something to attack them with. But the Bush administration's imperialist policy is fundamentally no different from that pursued by the Clinton administration or, indeed that of Bush Senior. In the 1992 Defence Planning Guidance, written by Donald Rumsfeld when he was in the State Department, there is a stark statement of US imperialist strategy. "To prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat of the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union�These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia � the U.S. must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests � in the non- defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order�we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role". The same strategy was defended by the Clinton administration in the 1997 National Military Strategy. "The United States will remain the world's only global power for the near-term, but will operate in a strategic environment characterized by rising regional powers, asymmetric challenges including WMD, transnational dangers, and the likelihood of wild cards that cannot be specifically predicted". This has been continued by the Bush administration "Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States" (National Security Strategy, 2002). Bush is thus not defending the oil industry but the continuity of US imperialist strategy.

Strategic role of oil

During World War Two Britain and America fought a bitter diplomatic and commercial struggle over control of the Middle East oil fields. The US plan to control the oilfields deprived British imperialism of an essential part of its war machine. As Churchill complained to Roosevelt (in 1944) "There is apprehension here in some quarters that the United States has a desire to deprive us of our oil assets in the Middle East on which among other things, the whole supply of our navy depends" (quoted in The Politics of War, Gabriel Kolko 1968). Despite the 'special relationship' of the time the US used oil to help reduce British imperialism to a secondary power.

The occupation of Iraq is part of a similar strategy. According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, elder statesmen of US imperialism, "A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa's subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world's central continent" (The Great Chess Board, 1997). Thus, through controlling Iraq the US can tighten the belt that is encircling its major rivals, especially the European powers. It has already established a military presence in the Central Asian republics, in Afghanistan, in the Caucasus, the Far East and the Balkans, in the 1990s through such interventions as the war in ex-Yugoslavia and, more recently, through the 'war on terrorism'. This encirclement by the US is placing great obstacles in the way of the other major powers. It is preventing their exploitation of the oil supplies and other raw materials and markets in many of these regions, as well as hindering the access to oil supplies that are vital to the war machines they are trying to develop in competition with the US. But above all, this encirclement is undermining the capacity of the US's rivals to pursue their overall imperialist ambitions in vital strategic regions of the globe, driving them behind their own frontiers. This is just what the US did to the British Empire and to the USSR.

Confronted with the US's offensive the other major powers will not meekly submit, but will be forced to do all they can to stop or undermine the assertion of US dominance. This resistance can only further destabilise the world. The US bourgeoisie recognises this. The National Defense University's Strategic Assessment 1997 warned that the use of military power to maintain US world leadership "may lead others to believe that their interests are at risk, in which case they may decide they have no choice other than the use of force" (quoted in Foreign Policy in Focus Vol. 4, No. 3, January 1999).

The Left's presentation of the war on Iraq as being for the profits of the US oil industry acts as a smokescreen to hide the real depth of imperialist tensions. This lie is used to push pacifist illusion that capitalism would be peaceful if it was not for the nasty Americans and their oil companies. This lie disarms the working class when it is faced with a worsening spiral into military barbarism.

Phil, 30/01/03.

Sixty years ago, in January 1933, an event of historic importance struck capitalist civilisation: the arrival of Hitler to power and the installation of the Nazi regime in Germany. To listen to the bourgeoisie, fascism was brutally imposed on capitalist society, forced onto its reluctant body. Not for a moment does this lie stand up to the test of historic facts. In reality, Nazism in Germany, as fascism in Italy, is the organic product of capital. The victory of Nazism came about democratically. As to the repugnant racism, the nationalist hysteria or the barbarity which, again, according to the democratic bourgeoisie, characterises the fascist regimes, they are not at all specific to these regimes. They are, on the contrary, the product of capitalism, in particular in its phase of decadence, and the attributes of all factions of the bourgeoisie be they democratic, stalinist or fascist.

The terrible reality of the holocaust is often used, by appealing more to the emotions than to objectivity, in order to back up the idea of a nature of fascism which basically differentiates it from capitalism in general and democracy in particular. The examination of the facts themselves show that barbarity is not exclusive to fascism but that capitalist democracy, so quick to denounce Nazi crimes, is directly responsible for millions of deaths and of equivalent suffering for humanity (the bombings of Dresden and Hamburg, atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The height of this criminal cynicism reaches the point of the categorical rejection by the democratic powers, notably Britain and the US, of any proposition aimed at freeing several hundreds of thousands of Jews from Hitler's camps. Moreover, contrary to the official propaganda claiming that the extermination camps weren't known about until the end of the war, the major Allied states were perfectly well aware of their existence from 1942 (see our pamphlet in French "Fascisme et democratie, deux expressions de la dictature du capital").

The victory of Nazism in Germany

The lie that the ruling class didn't know the real plans of the Nazi Party, in other words that they fell into a trap, doesn't for one moment stand up to the evidence of the historic facts. The origin of the Nazi Party has its roots in two factors which were to determine the whole history of the 1930s. On the one hand the crushing of the German revolution opened the door to the triumph of the counter-revolution on a world scale, and, on the other hand, German imperialism was still suffering from its defeat in the First World War. The early Nazi Party's objective was to finish off the crushing of the proletariat in order to reconstitute the military forces of German imperialism - on the basis of the terrible bloodbath inflicted on the working class in Germany by the Social-Democratic Party (SPD) of Noske and Scheidemann. This objective was shared by the whole of the German bourgeoisie, despite real divergences as much on the means to use as on the most opportune moment to implement them. The SA, the militias upon which Hitler depended in his march towards power, were the direct heirs of the Freikorps which had assassinated Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and thousands of other communists and militant workers. The majority of the SA leadership began their careers as killers in this same Freikorps. They were the 'White Guard' used by the SPD in power to crush the revolution in blood, and all with the support of the victorious democratic powers. The latter moreover, while disarming the German army, always took care that these counter-revolutionary militias had enough weaponry to carry out their dirty work. Fascism was only able to develop and prosper on the basis of the physical and ideological defeat inflicted on the proletariat by the left of capital, which alone was in a position to stem and then defeat the revolutionary wave which overwhelmed Germany in 1918-19. This is what the General Staff of the German army understood completely in giving a free hand to the SPD in order to deal a decisive blow to the revolutionary movement which was developing in January 1919. And if Hitler didn't follow up his attempted putsch in Munich, 1923, it's because the most lucid sectors of the ruling class judged it premature to put the Nazis in power. It was necessary, first of all, to complete the defeat of the proletariat by using the card of democratic mystification. This was far from being exhausted and still benefited, through the Weimar Republic (although presided over by the Junker Hindenburg), from a radical gloss, thanks to the regular participation, in successive governments, of ministers coming from the so-called 'socialist' party.

But, as soon as the proletarian threat was definitively exorcised, the ruling class - and we want to emphasise this - in its most classic form, through the flower of German capitalism such as Krupp, Thyssen and AG Farben, swung behind the Nazi Party with all its forces in its victorious march to power. The will of Hitler to bring together all the forces necessary for the restoration of the military power of German imperialism corresponded perfectly to the needs of the national capital. The latter, beaten and plundered by its imperialist rivals following the First World War, could only attempt to reconquer lost ground by engaging in a new war. Far from being the product of a so-called congenital Germanic aggressiveness which found in fascism the means of unleashing itself, this will was only the strict expression of the laws of imperialism in the decadence of the capitalist system as a whole. Faced with a world market which was entirely parcelled up, these laws leave no other solution to the injured imperialist powers in the carving up of the 'imperialist cake' than that of trying, by engaging in a new war, to grab the largest part. The physical defeat of the German proletariat, and Germany's status as a ransacked imperialist power following its defeat in 1918, made fascism - contrary to the victorious countries where the working class hadn't been physically crushed - the most appropriate means for German capitalism to prepare itself for a second world war. Fascism is only a brutal form of state capitalism which was about to strengthen itself everywhere, including the democratic states. It is the instrument of the centralisation and of the concentration of the whole of capital in the hands of the state faced with economic crisis, in order to orient the whole of the economy towards the preparation for war. It was thus with the total endorsement of the German bourgeoisie, that Hitler came to power. In effect, once the proletarian threat was definitively removed, the ruling class no longer had to preoccupy itself with maintaining the whole democratic arsenal, following the process that was already underway in Italy. There is no antagonism between Nazi barbarity and the values of democracy

'Yes, perhaps...' we're told, 'but aren't you making an abstraction of one of the traits which distinguishes fascism from all the other parties and fractions of the bourgeoisie, that is its inherent anti-semitism, when it is exactly this characteristic which provoked the holocaust?' It is this idea which is defended by the Trotskyists in particular. The latter in effect, formally recognises the responsibility of capitalism and of the bourgeoisie in general in the genesis of fascism, only to immediately add that this latter is, despite everything, much worse than the democratic bourgeoisie, as the holocaust shows. For the Trotskyists, confronted with this ideology of genocide, there's no hesitation in choosing the camp of anti-fascism, that of the Allied imperialisms. It is this argument, along with that of the defence of the USSR, which has served to justify their betrayal of proletarian internationalism and their passage into the camp of the bourgeoisie during the Second World War, on the side of the Allies against the Axis powers. It is perfectly logical to find today in France for example, the Trotskyist groups - the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire and its leader Krivine with the discrete but very real support of Lutte Ouvriere - at the head of the anti-fascist and 'anti-negationist' crusade, defending the vision according to which fascism is the 'absolute evil' and, from this assertion, qualitatively different from all other expressions of capitalist barbarity. Faced with this, the working class must be in the vanguard of the combat and defend, even revitalise democracy.

That the extreme right (Nazism in particular) is profoundly racist has never been contested by the Communist Left, nor moreover has the dreadful reality of the death camps. The real question lies elsewhere. It consists of knowing if this racism and the repugnant designation of Jews as scapegoats, responsible for all evil, could only be the particular expression of fascism, the evil product of sick minds, or if it is not rather the sinister product of the capitalist mode of production confronted with the historic crisis of its system, a monstrous but natural offspring of nationalist ideology defended and propagated by all fractions of the ruling class. Racism is not an eternal attribute of human nature. If the entry of capitalism into its decadence exacerbated racism to a hitherto unknown degree in the whole history of humanity, if the 20th century is a century where genocides are no longer the exception but the rule, that is not due to some perversion of human nature. It is the result of the fact that, faced with the now permanent war that each state must prepare for in the framework of a saturated world market, the bourgeoisie, in order to be able to support and justify this permanent war, must, in every country, strengthen nationalism by all means. What is more favourable, in fact, to the spread of racism than this atmosphere, so well described by Rosa Luxemburg at the beginning of her pamphlet denouncing the imperialist carnage of the First World War: "(...) the population of the whole town changes into a mob, ready to denounce anybody, molesting women, shouting: hurrah! and reaching paroxysms of delirium by starting crazy rumours: a climate of ritual crime, an atmosphere of pogrom where the sole representative of human dignity was a policemen on the corner of the street". She continues saying: "Defiled, dishonoured, wading in blood, covered in filth, here's how bourgeois society presents itself, this is what it is..." (The Crisis of Social-Democracy). One could use exactly the same terms to describe the multiple scenes of horror in Germany during the 1930s (looting of Jewish shops, lynchings, children separated from their parents) or evoke, amongst other things, the atmosphere of pogrom which reigned in France in 1945 when the stalinist paper of the PCF was odiously headlined "To each his Boche!" No, racism is not the exclusive prerogative of fascism, no more than its anti-semitic form. The celebrated General Patton of the democratic United States of America, the very person who was supposed to free humanity from 'the vile beast', declared at the time of the liberation of the camps that: "The Jews are worse than animals"; whereas the other great 'liberator', Stalin, himself organised a series of pogroms against the Jews, the Gypsies, the Chechens, etc. Racism is the product of the basic nationalist nature of the bourgeoisie, whatever the form of its domination, 'totalitarian' or 'democratic'. Its nationalism reaches a culminating point with the decadence of its system.

When the proletariat is absent from the scene of history, capitalist barbarity knows no limits

The only force that can oppose this nationalism which oozes from every pore of rotting bourgeois society, i.e., the proletariat, was beaten, physically and ideologically defeated. Arising from this, Nazism, with the consent of the whole of its class, could rely particularly on the latent racism of the petty-bourgeoisie to make this, under its anti-semitic form, the official ideology of the regime. Once again, although the professed anti-semitism put into practice by the Nazi regime was irrational and monstrous, it cannot be explained alone by the madness and perversity - in other respects quite real - of the leading Nazis. As the pamphlet published by the PCI, "Auschwitz or the great alibi" , very correctly underlines, the extermination of the Jews "... took place not at any moment, but in open crisis and imperialist war. It is thus inside this gigantic enterprise of destruction that one must explain it. The problem is found from this clear fact: we no longer have to explain the 'destructive nihilism' of the Nazis, but why the destruction is concentrated in part on the Jews".

In order to explain why the Jewish population, even if it was not alone, was designated first of all for general prosecution, then exterminated en masse by Nazism, it is necessary to take two factors into account: the needs of the German war effort and the role played in this sinister period by the petty-bourgeoisie. The latter was reduced to ruin by the violence of the economic crisis in Germany and sunk massively into a situation of lumpen-proletarianisation. From here, desperate and in the absence of a proletariat which could provide an antidote, free range was given to the most reactionary prejudices characteristic of this class without a future, and, encouraged by the fascist formations, threw itself, like a furious beast, into racism and anti-semitism. The 'Jew' was supposed to represent par excellence the 'stateless person' who 'sucked the blood of the people'; he was designated as responsible for the misery to which the petty-bourgeoisie had been reduced. This is why the first shock troops used by the Nazis came out of the ranks of a petty-bourgeoisie which was about to go under. And this designation of the 'Jew' as the enemy par excellence also had the function of allowing the German state, thanks to the confiscation of Jewish goods, to scrape together funds to contribute to its military rearmament. At the beginning, it had to do it discretely in order not to draw the attention of the victors of the First World War. The deportation camps, initially, had the function of furnishing the bourgeoisie with free labour, entirely dedicated to war preparation.

It is in the name of Nazi barbarity that the democratic Allied forces try to justify their part in a war marked out for its massive butchery and other crimes. Far from avoiding a future of new holocausts, the defence of democratic values by the ruling class can only help perpetuate a capitalist system the survival of which will mean the further accumulation of massacres and genocide.

RI, February 2003.

We are publishing here an item of correspondence received from a comrade who read our article How Australian imperialism benefits from the Bali massacre [145] from World Revolution 259, November 2002. This article is reprinted below and our reader's comments appear in red. Click here [146] to read our reply.

How Australian imperialism benefits from the Bali massacre

When horrific terrorist outrages occur, it's useful to ask who benefits from them. The answer usually sheds light on who could be responsible for these deeds. The Bali bombing on 12 October is no exception to this rule. The accused Indonesian Islamists certainly do not benefit from the Bali bombing. Abu Bakar Bashir, spiritual leader of one of the country's principal Islamist organisation, has been arrested and faces a possible death penalty for alleged complicity.

Abu Bakar Bashir was not at the time arrested for complicity in the Bali bombings. At the time he was under arrest for suspected involvement in 3 church bombings in 2000.

New 'anti-terrorist' laws have been announced in Indonesia, after these were demanded by Australia in the wake of the bombing. Some 400 Australian Federal Police and some FBI agents have rushed to Bali and are working in 'partnership' with Indonesian police investigating the bombing.

There were no where near as many as 400 AFP agents deployed in Indonesia.

Australia has also donated A$10 million in 'counter-terrorism aid' - allegedly to assist Indonesia to build an effective 'counter-terrorism' capacity, but really to institutionalise an Australian security presence there and to bring Indonesia closer to Australia's expanding sphere of influence.

What exactly is wrong with providing funds to nearby country that is in desperate need to police its own population?

To ask the question of who benefits is to answer it. The answer is clearly neither the Islamists nor even the Indonesian state, but, most directly, Australia, but also, indirectly, the United States. The bombing provides Australian imperialism with a golden opportunity to impose itself directly on Indonesia in an unprecedented manner.

How exactly?

And back in Australia, the bombing has provided the most warlike fraction in the bourgeoisie with a very big stick to cow and morally blackmail workers not convinced of the need to wage all out war on Iraq in the near future. A relentless media campaign from the bombing onwards keeps the horror of this outrage constantly in public consciousness.

I wouldn’t call it a campaign, as there was barely any coverage on television for the first days after the bombings. Sure it got an extensive workout in local media in the days following, but why wouldn’t it? With, at that time, hundreds of Australians missing, it seems only natural that local media attention would be primarily occupied with the bombings.

Accompanied by injunctions to "get the bastards who did this" (Prime Minister Howard's words) and to enthusiastically prosecute the 'War on Terror'.

John Howard has never said this in relation to the Bali bombings. His response to the bombings was calm and he never made a claim to “get the bastards who did this” (although if he did, please provide me with a link to mainstream news web site that reported this).

Opinion polls taken just before the Bali bombing indicated that a majority of the population did not support a new Gulf war. Although new polls have not been taken since the bombing, it is clear that there has been a certain shift in opinion in favour of war.

As of last Saturday (January 18), only 6 percent of the population of Australia supported a war that was not backed by the UN, hardly a “certain shift in opinion in favour of war”.

A majority of workers probably still do not support the war, but the number who do has probably risen.

So who did carry out the Bali bombing? Given the facts stated above - and the precedents of Pearl Harbor and the US World Trade Center attacks, it is quite possible that this horrendous crime was at least perpetrated with the full knowledge of the Australian and US bourgeoisies, in order to obtain the political results listed above. Was it carried out by Islamists as the bourgeois media alleges? Possibly - but then, the Australian and US bourgeoisies, not to mention the Indonesian bosses, have been manipulating various Indonesian Islamist fractions since at least the 1950s.

“Indonesian bosses” have been in cahoots with fanatical Muslims for years.

In Indonesia's recent history, Islamist fractions have been used to first bring the last Indonesian President, the 'moderate' Islamist Abdurrahman Wahid, to power in October 1999 and then to help throw him unceremoniously out again less than 2 years later.

Furthermore, there is something decidedly fishy about the wealth of information now flooding out of the Australian media - most of it openly acknowledged as being from 'security specialists', if not from actual intelligence agencies. These include extremely detailed accounts of numerous alleged meetings of Islamist terrorist leaders in South-East Asia, to plot various atrocities. According to Australia's most respected current affairs programme (and one of the most unwatched, like the television network it is shown on) Four Corners on 28 October, one such meeting was held in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur in January 2000. According to Four Corners:

"The CIA got wind of it ahead of time and tipped off Malaysian intelligence, which carried out video and photo surveillance. The meeting was attended by some of Osama bin Laden's most trusted operatives, including two of the hijackers who would die in the September 11 attacks on the United States.

"The gathering was hosted by Hambali [who is now accused by Australia of being Osama bin Laden's chief lieutenant in South-East Asia], who'd come from Indonesia. Bin Laden's man in Manila, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, was there as well. Among the others present were the September 11 hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who were at the controls of the plane that hit the Pentagon. Also there was another al-Qaida bomber later accused of the attack in Yemen on the warship 'USS Cole'".

The meeting is thought to have been a key planning session for those attacks.

The purpose of these claims by Four Corners was to garner support for Australian imperialism's new imperialist ventures (what ventures?) In Indonesia, as well - in a turnaround from its attitude prior to the Bali bombing - to build support for the US push for war against Iraq. But perhaps Four Corners tells us too much. For, if the CIA had indeed got wind of the Kuala Lumpur meeting ahead of time (and the meeting did actually take place), why did it not intervene to have the terrorists plotting against it arrested and nip these plots in the bud?

There is no way it would have been approved by Malaysian authorities, who are deeply anti-West, although are only too happy to put their hands out for foreign aid mainly of the Australian government.

Of course, it could be that the meeting did not take place at all, and that this is just one more strand in the mendacious web being woven by the pro-US bourgeoisie to transfer real working class hostility to its war plans into enthusiasm for new imperialist war. But if Four Corners is actually telling the truth, it surely lends considerable weight to the argument that the Bali bombings were carried out with the full knowledge of the Australian and US bourgeoisies, in order to benefit from the bombing's political fallout.

Other evidence tends to support this last, chilling conclusion. Despite claims by Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer that warnings were given to Australians intending to travel to Bali before the bombing, cautioning them against the strong possibility of terrorist attacks on that island, this is simply a lie. Downer's department issued travel advice on 20 September, warning of such a danger in Jakarta - but adding in bold type that tourist services in Bali were 'operating normally'. A further statement, issued this time by the Australian Embassy in Jakarta on 3 October, repeated the earlier advice.

I can’t verify that, although it is likely this is the case since Bali is mainly a Hindu populous, and the local population is extremely friendly towards Westerners.

This also fits into a pattern. Just as US governments were warned before both Pearl Harbour and September 11 that massive attacks were imminent, so it appears that the Australian Government knew what was afoot in Bali but sat on its hands, in order to make political gains from the ensuing carnage.

You tell me how the Australian Government could gave responded practically to intelligence that there is a threat to “bars, clubs, hotels, places of worship or any other place where Westerners would gather” (however it goes) in Indonesia?

The upshot of all this is that Australia now has the biggest presence in Indonesia since that country's independence in the 1940s.

If Australia really wanted revenge, wouldn’t it (with the help if it's allies) just launch a military attack on Indonesia?

Australia's Prime Minister John Howard has been able to cobble together a new 'anti-terrorist' alliance with Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia.

Any leader with half a brain would do the same no matter what their own political views are. In fact, the US has been helping the Philippines bomb the Philippines to remove Muslim fanatics. I would hardly call any deal done with Malaysia an alliance. The Government of that country has continued with their anti-Western rhetoric, which will lead to only further problems again. What hypocrites the Malaysian Government can’t get enough of Australian funds let alone continues with anti-Australian rhetoric.

The new alliance is officially intended to guarantee the safety of regional trade against terrorist attacks. But there can be no doubt that this scheme will be used to force more active support for the US' war plans. This will be particularly useful against Malaysia (whose fiercely nationalist President has denounced the US war drive against Iraq) and Indonesia (whose current President, Megawati Sukarnoputri, has tried to balance between Islamist forces opposed to the US war plans and pro-US elements in another section of the local bourgeoisie). Howard will visit the Philippines and Vietnam in the New Year, to twist these countries' arms to be more active at the regional level in the 'War on Terror'.

Hardly twisting arms, but any leader of any country that faces the threats that Western nations currently do and does nothing about it is a few tacos short of a combination plate.

The various Asian and Western governments involved and the assorted Islamist fractions are all equally reactionary. Neither 'democracy' (or 'anti-terrorism') nor the US' 'War on Terror' will put an end to the fundamental cause of terrorist atrocities such as the Bali bombing, for the simple reason that it is decomposing capitalism which is producing such massacres across the globe. Just like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, the forces most likely to have been behind the Bali atrocity are former clients of the United States. And just as in the cases of Pearl Harbour and September 11, the country whose citizens were the main victims of this particular massacre (Australia) almost certainly conspired to stifle warnings of the impending atrocity from reaching the light of day. In other words, whatever the particular details, innocent people are once again the victims of decomposing capitalism, which is everywhere and in all its forms (Third World, terrorist and democratic) prepared to commit the most horrendous deeds to extend its bloody rule.

I was only pointing out factual inaccuracies within the article, so I’ll just leave this alone.

J, January 03.

In January the ICC participated in an Anti-War Day School organised by Disobedience, which belongs to the same milieu as the No War But The Class War (NWBTCW) group in London. The group states in a broadsheet given out at the February 'Stop the War' demonstration that "To say No War But the Class War! means that we don't take sides between America and Iraq, Iraq and the Kurds, America and France...Rather we make sides, by asserting that the dispossessed, the workers, the poor of all nations have one enemy - the exploiters who dispossess them, who make them work, who make them poor". In the present circumstances, with the progression of wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and soon Iraq, the importance of even a small milieu opposing war on a working class basis should not be underestimated. For this reason we produced a contribution to the discussions at the Day School (see WR 261) emphasising the historical experience of the working class in opposition to war.

The most important point to come out of the experience of this Day School, is that only by drawing on the historic experience of the working class in its struggle against war, defended by the Left Communist groups, can we really put forward the perspective of a class opposition to imperialist war. This is because the intervention of these groups stems from a coherent platform that integrates the historical experience of the working class. Unfortunately there is a tendency in this milieu to cut all contact with the groups of the Communist Left, as shown by the fact that the London NWBTCW group will not give the dates or times or venue of its meetings to either WR or Sheffield No War But the Class War in which the Communist Workers Organisation has a major influence.

The danger of stunts

The intervention posed by the Disobedience group resolves itself largely into a discussion on 'stunts' that do not even take the workers on demonstrations as their point of focus. For instance, one orientation put forward at the day of study was for people to go to the US's British airbases and cut the perimeter wire, in order to go into the airbase and create a nuisance. The important point about this kind of proposal is not just that it will have no conceivable impact on what the bourgeoisie is doing, but that it is not orientated towards an intervention in the working class.

As with the Zero War conference in Australia, which raised many similar issues, there was a preoccupation with such stunts, despite the serious discussion:

"The conference now departed from the mortal world, as the majority of participants appeared to ascend into a sort of magical world in which even the most fanciful and adventurist 'direct action' schemes were portrayed in all seriousness as realistic - not to mention 'revolutionary'. The most nonsensical - and perilous - stunts were proposed." (WR 261).

At first sight these actions may seem to indicate revolutionary zeal, but, as we said in our contribution to the discussion, "The problem with many who are critical of the STWC is that too often they still buy the argument that 'at least it's doing something' and end up either tailing along in its demonstrations, or trying to devise radical-looking 'protest' stunts which substitute themselves for the real development of the proletarian movement."

This desire to 'do something' expressed itself in the Day School in two ways that both lead to a loss of any sense of the slow development of the struggle of the working class, the only force that can really stop war and put an end to the capitalist system. The first presentation given at the day of study was a review of the 'achievements' of previous anti-war movements. This was presented in a quite uncritical way and emphasised the size of the movements rather than making a critique of their class character.

A fundamental problem with this milieu is that it has no real concept of the class struggle - typical of the autonomists, modernists, anarchists and libertarians in such groupings. They see things in terms of their own 'individual' struggle. This was exemplified by one handout at the day of study that explained what the author meant by class struggle. This suggested that people take jobs in the defence sector so that they could engage in sabotage of the war effort. In other words, the class struggle is understood as individual acts of sabotage.

Therefore intervention becomes simply a matter of will. The overall state of the class struggle does not provide the context within which we can understand our intervention. In response to this we pointed out that the working class currently faces enormous difficulties and that while this makes intervention against war on a class basis very hard it is the only basis on which we can go forward.

The open defence of imperialism at the day of study

One of the sessions at the day of study was run by an element called Karvee (we are not sure of the spelling). He has also at times referred to himself as the 'Melancholy Troglodyte'. He advocated supporting certain bourgeois groups in the Middle East - Kurdish Maoist groups. He said that these groups had arrived at a class position because they opposed both Saddam and the US. Since they are Kurdish nationalists no doubt they do 'oppose both sides' in some sense.

His view is that if the 'bourgeoisie is weak' then a renewed assault on Iraq would open the door to the 'formation of soviets' - that is to the Kurdish nationalists. In terms of practical proposals he proposed that the Disobedience group should send a message of solidarity to these groups, and that the group should send people to the Middle East in the aftermath of the conflict. He emphasised that he was not speaking of 'revolutionary tourism', but was not very specific as to what people were supposed to do when they got there (assuming the US did not take them off to Cuba, or the nationalists didn't shoot them).

The ICC pointed out that what was being suggested was to send messages of solidarity to bourgeois imperialist gangs in Iraq and Iran. However, the majority at this session were not convinced of the need to oppose such groups.

It is not as strange as it seems to have bourgeois positions in support for their wars put forward in an anti-war meeting. In fact this is simply a reflection of what is happening at the anti-war demonstrations themselves. And, as we have mentioned above, even in the 'clearest' discussion of all the sessions - the first one - the Disobedience group showed a clear tendency to assimilate itself to the anti-war movement - to become simply its radical wing.

This shows how fragile is the group's grasp of its basic position that only the class war can oppose imperialist war. It also shows just how difficult it is to oppose war on a working class basis, and just how important it is to spend the time in frank and open discussion, and particularly the need to reappropriate the historic experience of the working class, through discussion with the organisations of the Communist Left. It is therefore tragic that this milieu does so much to cut itself off from the ICC and the CWO.

Hardin, 27/2/03.

France's 'pacifist' stand over the impending war in the Gulf has confused many: as in Germany, the 'peace' march in France was very much a march of 'national unity' in support of the government against America's military plans. Placards reading 'Vive la France' were also displayed at the demo in London.

The following article, reproduced from our paper in France, Revolution Internationale, exposes the myth of France's 'anti-war' position by highlighting their involvement in the bloody conflict now ravaging the Ivory Coast. In the epoch of imperialism, there can be no 'peace-loving' capitalist states!

Ivory Coast: France shows its real imperialist face

The might of French imperialism has deployed a large number of heavily armed troops into the West African state of the Ivory Coast in the middle of the 'civil war' raging between the various bourgeois fractions in that country. It has also used its strong diplomatic influence with the various armed fractions disputing power to bring them to Paris to attempt to strong arm them into finding a negotiated settlement.

While, officially, France has intervened to avoid a generalisation of the war in this country, to preserve the unity of the country and to protect its French nationals, no-one is really fooled by this. As a former colony of France, it is clear that France is really engaged in this war for one reason only, to defend its own imperialist interests and to do this, it is prepared to do whatever is necessary.

French imperialism's stake in this region

Since the coup d'etat of 1999/2000 that started the present chaos, France has been losing influence in this country with other imperialist vultures gaining at its expense through the different Ivorian factions. The French bourgeoisie wants to reverse this situation. It has strong commercial interests in the region and is determined to defend them at all costs. The Ivory Coast is a country that has a rich supply of raw materials, like cocoa and coffee (just to mention two) and it is one of the three top producers and exporters of these in the world. France has a lot of commercial interests in these sectors, as in others (they control electricity, railways, petrol, etc) and the capital, Abidjan, is still the financial centre of the West African region, with the French banks still very active there. Because of this, the control of the Ivory Coast, one of the main bases for its continuing domination in this region, is an important strategic stake for French imperialism and for its rival imperialisms too. If the war in the Ivory Coast was to totally spiral out of control, it could affect many of its neighbouring countries, in particular Mali and Burkina Faso.

French imperialism's large deployment of forces on the ground is thus a declaration of war against all its imperialist opponents, large and small. Moreover, the situation has united the different factions of the French bourgeoisie and the French government has received support from its left and right wings, some of whom have called for a more 'muscular' intervention. A dozen leading parliamentarians from amongst the Socialist Party, the Centre UDF and the Gaullists have asked the Chirac government "to give its support to the legitimate government of the Ivory Coast by helping it regain sovereignty over its whole territory, that the permanent presence of 'unruly' military elements is undermining (sic)." (Jeune Afrique of the 5th January 2003).

Clearly these prominent fractions of the French bourgeoisie are prepared to see France fully committed to using brute force in order to defend its interests in the Ivory Coast at the risk of it getting fully embroiled in the fighting between the different Ivorian gangs.

Negotiations can't halt the barbarism

Since the attempted coup on 19 September 2002, the toll of deaths has continued to mount up. France has deployed 2500 heavily armed troops under the pretext of trying to keep the warring parties apart, while itself engaging the other belligerents in battle. Its legionnaires, pretending to be there for 'legitimate defence', have already killed dozens of rebels (between 50 and 100). These encounters between its forces and the rebels, notably the MPIGO and the MJP, the two groups who hold sway in the west of the country, are increasing. Despite the continual announcement of cease-fires, the rebels and the government forces continue their assaults and raids, particularly against the civilian population, leading to further killings. This was confirmed by a recent discovery of mass graves, packed full of hundreds of bodies of ordinary civilians, women and children included. In all this, France pretends to be acting to keep the various Ivorian armies apart, while, it is in fact actively involved in the killings itself. Through its engagement with the other forces on the ground, it is directly contributing to the bloody chaos, as these armed factions fully understand. They have threatened to attack the French forces directly. The major grouping of the MPCI (rebels who have control over the northern region) decided at the beginning of January, to give 'carte blanche' to its forces to march on Abidjan with the clear intention of confronting the French forces if they stand in its way. The other groups of rebels (MPIGO and MJP) have also declared their intention of marching on the Ivorian capital and engaging the French legionnaires. In fact, France is now in the front line faced with having to deal with all the armed factions: the rebels to the north and the west and the government forces in the south.

The negotiations can't pretend to be a solution

Faced with this dangerous situation on the ground, the French bourgeoisie is doubtful that it can impose a military solution. Because of this it brought all the various groups contesting power together in Paris, to try and exert some control over them. But France has few illusions. It knows better than anyone that that the armed militias are something of a law unto themselves. Furthermore France's rival imperialisms are undoubtedly providing them with support. By organising the 'round table' conference back in Paris, the French government hopes that it can avoid the influence of its main imperialist opponents, who have been sabotaging its attempt to find a negotiated settlement since the conflict started. And France is faced with formidable and numerous opponents. African countries like Burkina Faso, Togo, Senegal, Nigeria, Angola, Libya, etc have been providing arms and finance, or have disputed control of the negotiations or the cease-fires for their own interests. Then there are the big powers like the US and Britain, pressing for a stake to satisfy their own interests; and they want at every opportunity to thwart the French plans. France doesn't even seem to be able to count on the heads of state of its former colonies, such as Senegal or Togo. While they were previously in charge of the 'peace negotiations', France sidelined them by transferring the talks to Paris. The French gangster-boss carried out a 'hold-up' right under their noses.

Meanwhile, the real game is taking place on the military terrain, and no-one still has the dominant hand. During the negotiations in Paris, the situation remained explosive with the strong-armed gangs, the mercenaries and the government death squads continuing to terrorise the civilian populations. Innocent people are gunned down. And all these odious crimes are the dirty work of the supporters of those involved in the Paris talks since 15th January. Some sources accuse the government forces particularly. They are responsible for the deaths of more than 600 persons (on top of the official death toll that followed the coup). Most of the victims were Ivorians from the north of the country or immigrants from neighbouring countries. For their part, the rebels subject the civilian population to their racketeering and terror. Many people don't even dare any longer to go to work or go out shopping for food. The French forces have witnessed all of these horrors, without taking any action to stop them. Quite hypocritically, France has, been gathering evidence of the murderous goings-on, in the event that it is called to give this evidence to any enquiry of the UN High Commission. In fact the French state is washing its hands of any responsibility by expressing support for the Ivorian government and its crimes. The French bourgeoisie is haunted by the spectre of Rwanda and remains 'traumatised', undoubtedly, by its complicity with the authors of the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

Nevertheless, the French state cannot hide from the eyes of the world its cynical complicity with the bloody murderers that terrorise and kill innocent civilians in the Ivory Coast.

RI, February 2003.

Thank-you for your critical comments on the ICC article 'How Australian imperialism benefits from the Bali massacre', from World Revolution 259. This letter responds to your criticisms, point-by-point. Please pardon the length of this letter; the questions you ask actually touch on matters of immense importance to the working class. For this reason, it was necessary to respond in some length - and to therefore take some time responding to you.

We wrote: Abu Bakar Bashir, spiritual leader of one of the country's principal Islamist organisations, has been arrested and faces a possible death penalty for alleged complicity.

You objected to this, writing: Abu Bakar Bashir was not at the time arrested for complicity in the Bali bombings. At the time he was under arrest for suspected involvement in 3 church bombings in 2000.

You are, of course, correct. But we were actually very careful not to state at the time that Bashir had been charged with complicity in the Bali bombings - although it was obvious that that was what he would eventually be charged with.

We wrote: New 'anti-terrorist' laws have been announced in Indonesia, after Australia demanded these in the wake of the bombing. Some 400 Australian Federal Police and some FBI agents have rushed to Bali and are working in 'partnership' with Indonesian police investigating the bombing.

You commented: 'There were no where near as many as 400 AFP agents deployed in Indonesia'. You are right about this. ABC Radio National gave out the figure of 400 at the time that Commonwealth Police were initially sent to Bali, after the bombing. The WR article was written at this time. The figure now cited is 200 Commonwealth Police.

We wrote: Australia has also donated A$10 million in 'counter-terrorism aid' - allegedly to assist Indonesia to build an effective 'counter-terrorism' capacity, but really to institutionalise an Australian security presence there and to bring Indonesia closer to Australia's expanding sphere of influence.

You responded: What exactly is wrong with providing funds to nearby country that is desperate need to police its own population?

Our answer to this is based on our assessment of the role of the police everywhere, as well as our knowledge of the Indonesian capitalist regime and what all states (which are all capitalist in our view - including Cuba, North Korea, etc.) must do in order to survive in today's world. Contrary to the lies we are told, the police are not neutral, with just a few 'bad apples'. They play a clear role on behalf of the capitalist class as a whole. They (together with the armed forces) are the chief physical defenders of the capitalists' interests - especially defending capitalist property. Certainly, there are cops who help children cross roads, etc., and there are soldiers who create emergency health clinics in devastated zones. But this is not the main role of any sector of the state apparatus, which is above all the creature of the national bourgeoisie in each country.

The Australian capitalist class is no different from any bourgeoisie on this planet. The severe crisis of the capitalists' economic system (fundamentally a crisis of capitalist over-production) compels every bourgeoisie to compete with each other for control of as much territory as it can get away with grabbing, just in order to survive (though this is not just a matter of "economic" necessity, and usually has more to do with national strategic imperatives: we suggest you look at some of the articles published in our International Review, especially on the questions of imperialist tensions in the Middle East today).

Australian capitalism has created a sick myth of how it has never "imperialised" another country. The truth is starkly different - especially in South-East Asia, but also in the Middle East, where the behaviour of Australian imperialist troops during World War I repelled even the hardened imperial armed forces of Great Britain.

Australia's connection with the territories that came to be absorbed into Indonesia such as East Timor starkly demonstrates that their armed forces were not the philanthropists they pretend to be. The fact is that every time capitalist Australia has any connection with East Timorese and Indonesians, it is workers and poor farmers who die on all sides.

During World War II, Australian imperialism fought part of its war with Japan using the East Timorese as canon fodder.

In 1965, the Indonesian Government of the day was overthrown in a brutal military coup. Java's rivers ran red with the blood of hundreds of thousands - including many workers - for months. Australia warmly supported the new military dictatorship of Suharto and Co.

Australia and the Western Alliance turned a determined blind eye to the Indonesian military's repression of workers and poor farmers over the next 30 years.

In the final analysis, the West had no serious problems with the way the Suharto regime conducted itself. Strikes were brutally crushed, and Indonesian imperialism forcibly extended its scope to West Papua and East Timor. Undaunted, the West - including Australia - continued to provide military aid to Jakarta. The only thing that has changed recently is that Australian has sensed an opportunity to raise its stake in the Indonesian archipelago and has acted accordingly. This is due both to local factors (events in East Timor and in Indonesia generally) as well as factors of a more global nature. Let's look at the global factors first because it's always advisable to start from the biggest possible 'big picture', in order to put smaller, localised, elements into perspective.

The break up of the former USSR and the Eastern bloc in the late 1980s meant the end of the Cold War, but it has hardly ushered in the golden era of international peace and brotherhood that we were promised by capitalism at the time. Indeed, military tensions, genocidal massacres and wars have only multiplied ever since.

Without the threat of Russia, the United States is no longer able to prevent its former allies from competing directly with it and each other for a share of the imperialist pie. Powers both large (France, Germany, etc.) and small (Iraq, Serbia etc.) have clashed with America either directly (the smaller powers) or by proxy, through the training and deployment of local nationalist gangs.

Australian capitalism's admittedly minor, but nonetheless bloody, record on the world stage - and especially with respect to Indonesia and East Timor - demonstrates that it could only bring more bloodshed with its international force of 'peacekeepers'.

The truth is that Australian capital sees the misery of the East Timorese as a burning opportunity for it to at long last strike out for its share of the post-Cold War booty, by leading its own military adventure. The Australian Government even caused a major embarrassment to an over-stretched US on this issue, not to mention severely disturbing Washington's cosy relationship with Jakarta.

Now consider the 'local' elements. In fact, the stakes are big for Australia. Indonesia is the world's fourth most populous country. Australian capital aims to bring it forcibly under its wing - over the bodies of not only East Timorese civilians, but also the soldiers on all sides whom never asked to be there, workers and peasants in uniform. And that is without reckoning on the chilling possibility of an escalating conflict that spreads to other Indonesian territories. As with all wars this century, the major casualties will be civilians.

Once again capitalism thus shows us its real face, time and again: an endless barbarism, good only for death and destruction. 'Bad' or 'weak' world leaders do not cause wars. They are capitalism's only answer to its insurmountable economic crisis.

It is the crisis that is sharpening the rivalries between nations, pushing them to seemingly endless military confrontations. The more the crisis deepens - as we are seeing once again right now - the more capitalism will wallow in blood, and the closer war will come to the developed countries.

The countries who made war against Yugoslavia not that long ago hypocritically claimed that this was urgently necessary to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Kosovars. This lie relied upon 'forgetting' that it was the NATO invasion itself that provided Belgrade with the best excuse - and practical opportunity - to do this.

Similarly, in East Timor, it was much the same powers who helped create the conditions for the massacre that Australia used as its excuse to intervene in 1999. Australia and the United Nations 'assured' the East Timorese that they could deliver 'peace' and independence' to them, if only the East Timorese would vote for it. It was always obvious that Jakarta would never accept losing this territory.

In June 1999, communications intercepted by the Australian Signals Directorate proved that the Indonesian military was meticulously planning the current ethnic cleansing. Undaunted, the Australian Government publicly denied the veracity of these reports. Yet, as PM Howard has since admitted, Australian troops had been preparing since at least early 1999 to play an active interventionist role in East Timor, when Jakarta's violent post-referendum campaign inevitably erupted there.

No other conclusion makes sense: Canberra was banking on Jakarta's present murderous offensive in East Timor, just like Washington was on Belgrade's ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. This also fits quite well into the plans of US imperialism, as we wrote in the November 2002 issue of World Revolution:

In the period leading up to the bombings, there were a number of visits to Indonesia by top US officials, including Colin Powell and the director of the FBI. Moreover, well-known 'hawks' like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, have been demanding an official resumption of US military aid to Indonesia, which was suspended in 1992 following massacres by the Indonesian forces in East Timor. In October the issue was debated in Congress, having received a letter from Indonesian human rights organisations opposing the resumption, given that there was no improvement in the country's human rights record. The letter also argued that the threat of terrorism - which the Bush administration was citing as the main reason for unblocking restrictions on military aid - was "very much exaggerated".

Add to this the fact that there have long been very tight connections between the radical Islamist groups and the Indonesian secret services and military forces, then suspicions can only increase that the bombings are extremely 'timely' for US imperialism, enabling it to strengthen its arguments in favour of military aid, of using Australia as a local gendarme, and of establishing a much more direct presence itself. This would allow the US to impose its version of 'stability' on a political entity which is vital strategically but divided up into a myriad of islands, many of which are agitating for independence from Jakarta; at the same time a direct military presence in the region would allow the US to begin the effective encircling of its principal imperialist rivals in the region, China and Japan. Little wonder that the Bush administration wants to blame the bombings on groups linked to al Qaeda and thus integrate its Indonesian strategy into the global 'war on terrorism'.

You next cite the following passage from our article: To ask the question of who benefits is to answer it. The answer is clearly neither the Islamists nor even the Indonesian state, but, most directly, Australia, but also, indirectly, the United States. The bombing provides Australian imperialism with a golden opportunity to impose itself directly on Indonesia in an unprecedented manner.

You ask: 'How exactly?' In much the same way that it has done in East Timor - by imposing its armed agents. And also, in this case, by compelling the Indonesian Government to dance to the 'War on Terror' tune. This time, of course, it does all this not in partial opposition to the United States, but as US imperialism's local 'deputy sheriff' (to use another phrase of John Howard - this time made a few days after the September 11 massacre, to describe the 'security' role he envisaged for Australia in the Asia-Pacific. Check the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age or The Australian for this period.)

We wrote: And back in Australia, the bombing has provided the most warlike fraction in the bourgeoisie with a very big stick to cow and morally blackmail workers not convinced of the need to wage all out war on Iraq in the near future. A relentless media campaign from the bombing onwards keeps the horror of this outrage constantly in public consciousness�

You respond to this as follows: I wouldn't call it a campaign, as there was barely any coverage on television for the first days after the bombings. Sure it got an extensive workout in local media in the days following, but why wouldn't it? With, at that time, hundreds of Australians missing, it seems only natural that local media attention would be primarily occupied with the bombings.

That is simply not true. Every day in the newspapers, for weeks afterwards, there were literally pages of coverage picking over every point not only of the atrocity, but also of the victims' lives. It was actually quite sick, because the purpose was not to grieve for the victims but to use their horrible deaths to beat the drums of war. The plan was to put out the message that 'these people' (for the moment, Muslims, especially) really had to be put in their place. Of course, the Australian state is very well aware that the Islamic establishment in Australia is quite prepared to support it in any war, as it always does. But that was not the point. The point was to divide the working class on false, sectarian, lines and on that basis (i.e., by thus dragging it onto bourgeois ideological terrain) to build hysteria, with the central aim of breaking down working class opposition to war against Iraq. This was also the purpose of the door-smashing early morning raids by ASIO in the same period. And, to a certain extent, it had the desired effect. In the first couple of weeks after the Bali bombing and consequent media vilification campaign, literally dozens of attacks on Muslims (mostly working class Muslims, too) occurred and the idea of war against Iraq received more support.

We wrote: Accompanied by injunctions to "get the bastards who did this" (Prime Minister Howard's words) and to enthusiastically prosecute the 'War on Terror'.

You claim: John Howard has never said this in relation to the Bali bombings. His response to the bombings was calm and he never made a claim to "get the bastards who did this" (although if he did, please provide me with a link to mainstream news web site that reported this).

Actually, John Howard did say this - it was literally front page news - once again check especially the Sydney Morning Herald, but it was more than likely also reported in The Age or The Australian for this period, as well.

We wrote: Opinion polls taken just before the Bali bombing indicated that a majority of the population did not support a new Gulf war. Although new polls have not been taken since the bombing, it is clear that there has been a certain shift in opinion in favour of war.

You comment: As of last Saturday (January 18), only 6 percent of the population of Australia supported a war that was not backed by the UN, hardly a "certain shift in opinion in favour of war".

Two points here: (1) There has been a clear but small increase in the support for a war; (2) a war backed by the UN will still be a war on Iraq, that can be expected to kill at least 200,000 civilians. The US has tabled plans to carpet-bomb Baghdad in the first 48 hours of the coming war with an equivalent force of bombs as it dropped in the entire Gulf War of 1991. The Australian bourgeoisie's reactionary and highly mendacious post-Bali campaign has been the primary factor in building support for a UN-conducted war.

We wrote: So who did carry out the Bali bombing? Given the facts stated above -and the precedents of Pearl Harbour and the US World Trade Centre attacks, it is quite possible that this horrendous crime was at least perpetrated with the full knowledge of the Australian and US bourgeoisies, in order to obtain the political results listed above. Did Islamists carry it out as the bourgeois media alleges? Possibly - but then, the Australian and US bourgeoisies, not to mention the Indonesian bosses, have been manipulating various Indonesian Islamist fractions since at least the 1950s.

You comment: "Indonesian bosses" have been in cahoots with fanatical Muslims for years.

We essentially agree here - although it would be more accurate to describe the 'fanatical Muslims' as capitalist political leaders who find it useful to manipulate Islam for wholly temporal and modern political purposes. Capitalism employs a range of outmoded images to mask reality. Thus (and similarly), Chief Buthelezi in South Africa is not really the 'tribal leader' he masquerades as, but a capitalist businessman, with his own very material interests to defend and extend. There are very few true tribes in today's world. A tribe is a little world falling back upon itself, a defence organism. It is a traditional and conservative institution, a community or a confederation of communities for the protection of its members against outside aggression and for the maintenance of its outdated racial customs and way of life. The term only has scientific meaning when applied to a 'relatively undifferentiated society, practising a primitive subsistence economy and enjoying local autonomy'. It cannot be applied to societies 'that have been effectively penetrated by European colonialism, which have been effectively drawn into a capitalist money economy and a world market'. (See Archie Mafeje, "The Ideology of 'tribalism'", in Journal of Modern African Studies, Volume 9, No. 2, 1971, p. 258.) Far too often the term 'tribe' is misused, when another term is arguably more appropriate. Entities called 'tribes' still exist, of course, as do supposed 'tribal chiefs', but these are qualitatively different from their pre-capitalist predecessors.

Similarly, none of the Islamist organisations that Western nations have named as terrorist are principally religious. Al-Qaeda, Ansar al-Islam (in Iraqi Kurdistan) Abu Sayyaf (in the Philippines) etc., etc., are all certainly terrorist, but their aims are very political. What's more, they are frequently used by states (such as Iran) for their own strategic purposes.

We wrote: In Indonesia's recent history, Islamist fractions have been used to first bring the last Indonesian President, the 'moderate' Islamist Abdurrahman Wahid, to power in October 1999 and then to help throw him unceremoniously out again less than 2 years later.

Furthermore, there is something decidedly fishy about the wealth of information now flooding out of the Australian media - most of it openly acknowledged as being from 'security specialists', if not from actual intelligence agencies. These include extremely detailed accounts of numerous alleged meetings of Islamist terrorist leaders in south-east Asia, to plot various atrocities. According to Australia's most respected current affairs programme Four Corners on 28 October, one such meeting was held in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur in January 2000.

You object: And one of the most unwatched, like the television network it is shown on.

No offence, but this does not prove that it is wrong. It might, however, indicate that a minority trend in the Australian bourgeoisie wants to sabotage the current war drive, because it considers it not in its own interests.

We quoted further from the Four Corners programme: The CIA got wind of it ahead of time and tipped off Malaysian intelligence, which carried out video and photo surveillance. The meeting was attended by some of Osama bin Laden's most trusted operatives, including two of the hijackers who would die in the September 11 attacks on the United States.

The gathering was hosted by Hambali [who is now accused by Australia of being Osama bin Laden's chief lieutenant in south-east Asia], who'd come from Indonesia. Bin Laden's man in Manila, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, was there as well. Among the others present were the September 11 hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who were at the controls of the plane that hit the Pentagon. Also there was another al-Qaeda bomber later accused of the attack in Yemen on the warship 'USS Cole'.

The meeting is thought to have been a key planning session for those attacks.

And we added: The purpose of these claims by Four Corners was to garner support for Australian imperialism's new imperialist ventures [you ask, "what ventures?"] In Indonesia, as well - in a turnaround from its attitude prior to the Bali bombing - to build support for the US push for war against Iraq. But perhaps Four Corners tells us too much. For, if the CIA had indeed got wind of the Kuala Lumpur meeting ahead of time (and the meeting did actually take place), why did it not intervene to have the terrorists plotting against it arrested and nip these plots in the bud?

The point about 'what ventures?' has already been answered above, with regard to East Timor, especially. But you don't accept the broader claims in the passage that you've just cited above, writing:

There is no way it would have been approved by Malaysian authorities, who are deeply anti-West, although are only too happy to put their hands out for foreign aid - mainly of the Australian government.

The Malaysian bourgeoisie, like all bourgeoisies, first and foremost looks after its own interests. This means looking over its shoulder at its neighbours, who are its rivals. Malaysia participated willingly and fully in Western anti-USSR military and trade alliances during the Cold War and benefited tremendously from them. Since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc it sees the opportunity - and the need - to strike out more openly for its own interests, just like every other state on the planet. This translates into an increasingly strident rhetoric against its larger rivals (most of the world!) but especially against Australia, whom Malaysian PM Mahathir denounces as alien to Asia. But in today's world, it is becoming increasingly meaningless to call a country 'anti-Western', given that there is no longer a united, disciplined Western Bloc any more, for the reasons discussed earlier.

We wrote: Of course, it could be that the meeting did not take place at all, and that this is just one more strand in the mendacious web being woven by the pro-US bourgeoisie to transfer real working class hostility to its war plans into enthusiasm for new imperialist war. But if Four Corners is actually telling the truth, it surely lends considerable weight to the argument that the Bali bombings were carried out with the full knowledge of the Australian and US bourgeoisies, in order to benefit from the bombing's political fallout.

Other evidence tends to support this last, chilling conclusion. Despite claims by Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer that warnings were given to Australians intending to travel to Bali before the bombing, cautioning them against the strong possibility of terrorist attacks on that island, this is simply a lie. Downer's department issued travel advice on 20 September, warning of such a danger in Jakarta - but adding in bold type that tourist services in Bali were 'operating normally'. A further statement, issued this time by the Australian Embassy in Jakarta on 3 October, repeated the earlier advice.

You comment: I can't verify that, although it is likely this is the case since Bali is mainly a Hindu populous, and the local population is extremely friendly towards Westerners.

We shall see who is correct on this, ultimately. But consider the mounting evidence of a totally unbelievable number of 'security errors' in the US, warning of the September 11 atrocity, long before it happened. See also the Sydney Morning Herald, especially for October 2002.

We stated: This also fits into a pattern. Just as US governments were warned before both Pearl Harbour and September 11 that massive attacks were imminent, so it appears that the Australian Government knew what was afoot in Bali but sat on its hands, in order to make political gains from the ensuing carnage.

You object strongly to this, writing: You tell me how the Australian Government could gave responded practically to intelligence that there is a threat to "bars, clubs, hotels, places of worship or any other place where Westerners would gather" (however it goes) in Indonesia?

The point here is that there are reports in the Sydney Morning Herald and other Australian media that terrorist attacks against Australian tourists in Bali were imminent and the Australian Government chose deliberately to ignore these. If this is true, surely it had ulterior political and strategic motives for this? For us, the point is that the capitalist class is utterly ruthless, being literally willing to stop at nothing in order to protect its interests. The terrible bloodbath on September 11 and the smaller bloodbath in Bali, were not sudden bolts out of the blue by 'fanatical Muslims'. On the contrary, they were both a new, and qualitatively more serious, link in a long chain of wars, acts of destruction, developing militarism and arms build up.

We wrote: The upshot of all this is that Australia now has the biggest presence in Indonesia since that country's independence in the 1940s.

You comment: If Australia really wanted revenge, wouldn't it (with the help if its allies) just launch a military attack on Indonesia?

Certainly, but given (as we strongly suspect) Australian authorities knew beforehand of the impending bombings, the aim is not revenge but political and strategic, as argued above.

We wrote: Australia's Prime Minister John Howard has been able to cobble together a new 'anti-terrorist' alliance with Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia.

You comment: Any leader with half a brain would do the same - no matter what their own political views are. In fact, the US has been helping the Philippines bomb the Philippines to remove Muslim fanatics. I would hardly call any deal done with Malaysia an alliance. The Government of that country has continued with their anti-Western rhetoric, which will lead to only further problems again. What hypocrites - the Malaysian Government can't get enough of Australian funds - let alone continues with anti-Australian rhetoric.

The 'Malaysian Government can't get enough of Australian funds' - and the Australian Government can't get enough US military bases! But both the Australian and Malaysian bourgeoisies, like all the others, are always ruthless in seeking to advance their own interests, as discussed above.

We wrote: The new alliance is officially intended to guarantee the safety of regional trade against terrorist attacks. But there can be no doubt that this scheme will be used to force more active support for the US' war plans. This will be particularly useful against Malaysia (whose fiercely nationalist President has denounced the US war drive against Iraq) and Indonesia (whose current President, Megawati Sukarnoputri, has tried to balance between Islamist forces opposed to the US war plans and pro-US elements in another section of the local bourgeoisie). Howard will visit the Philippines and Vietnam in the New Year, to twist these countries' arms to be more active at the regional level in the 'War on Terror'.

You remark: Hardly twisting arms, but any leader of any country that faces the threats that Western nations currently do and does nothing about it is a few tacos short of a combination plate.

Certainly, every state will seek to defend its territory etc. But this is not the point, which here is twofold: (1) the Australian bourgeoisie is here using the 'War on Terror' franchise it has had bestowed on it by Uncle Sam to simultaneously advance both this war and to look after and if possible expand its own interests and (2) the problem of global terror is one very much created by the capitalist states themselves. On the one hand, terrorism feeds off the crushing poverty and desperation in the underdeveloped countries that has resulted from capitalism in its decadent (or imperialist) phase. On the other hand, terrorism is now used by states (Iran, Syria, the US�) for their own security and political purposes. The only way to eliminate both terrorism and war is to stamp-out the cause - capitalism.

We wrote: The various Asian and Western governments involved and the assorted Islamist fractions are all equally reactionary. Neither 'democracy' (or 'anti-terrorism') nor the US' 'War on Terror' will put an end to the fundamental cause of terrorist atrocities such as the Bali bombing, for the simple reason that it is decomposing capitalism which is producing such massacres across the globe. Just like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, the forces most likely to have been behind the Bali atrocity are former clients of the United States. And just as in the cases of Pearl Harbour and September 11, the country whose citizens were the main victims of this particular massacre (Australia) almost certainly conspired to stifle warnings of the impending atrocity from reaching the light of day. In other words, whatever the particular details, innocent people are once again the victims of decomposing capitalism, which is everywhere and in all its forms (Third World, terrorist and democratic) prepared to commit the most horrendous deeds to extend its bloody rule.

You conclude: I was only pointing out factual inaccuracies within the article, so I'll just leave this alone

Actually, it would be interesting to know what you think about this paragraph, which is the most important in the article and complements our last response, above.

We don't know what you'll make of our response to your comments and questions. We hope at least that we've responded adequately to you. In any case, we'd be interested to learn of what you think about our answers.

Thanks again for responding to our article.

Yours fraternally,

JE, for the ICC. (7/2/03)

When the Bank of England takes up Corporal Jones' cry of "Don't panic!" it is clearly time for the working class to take a good hard look at the economy. On 12 February the Bank "attempted to avert a crisis of confidence in the economy as it urged the public not to panic about the country's prospects" (The Times Business 13.2.03). So, what is it we should not be panicking about?

This advice followed the Bank of England's surprise quarter-point cut in interest rates which triggered a near 90 point drop in the FTSE 100 index, and the repeated cut in its predictions for growth this year and next - now down half a percentage point on 3 months ago at between 2 and 2.5%, and a whole point below the Chancellor's Pre-Budget Report forecast last November. In addition the pound has fallen against both the Euro and the dollar and the governor of the Bank has told the Treasury Select Committee that he has no idea how low it will fall or how long it will go on.

Behind all this we can see some very disturbing statistics. Corporate debt defaults higher than at any time since the Depression, with 141 companies defaulting £163billion. Investment has fallen £11.7 billion or more than 10% since 2001, the largest fall in Britain since records began 36 years ago. In manufacturing the fall was 17.7% with investment at its lowest since 1984. The trade gap has increased to £34 billion after exports fell to a 3 year low. Business confidence is down, with a CBI survey showing manufacturing confidence down in every region. Bosses are worried about the fact that house prices are not rising so quickly, since the housing market was fuelling consumer spending. They are also concerned about the insolvency of pension funds. And, as always, the loss of business confidence means brutal attacks on the working class, with the CBI survey predicting 42,000 job cuts.

Economic crisis in Britain, part of the crisis of capitalism

The CBI is criticising the Chancellor for hampering business with too much tax and too much red tape, the Engineering Employers' Federation and the T&G union is demanding the government take urgent measures to encourage investment, but the present economic problems are not confined to the UK and are not the result of faulty government policy. The fall of the pound shows that Britain is not doing as well as its competitors, but problems for British business are just expressions of the weakness of capitalism globally. While manufacturing is in recession here, in Germany industrial production fell 2.6% in December. While Britain has a huge balance of payments deficit of 2.1% of GDP, the USA deficit is 4.6% of its much larger GDP. And consumer confidence has also fallen sharply in the USA.

The present economic difficulties are part of a long series of crises since the end of the 1960s. Recently we have seen the dramatic convulsions in Latin American countries, affecting Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Venezuela, following on from the collapse of the 'tiger' economies in 1997-8. Despite all the hype about new technology and globalisation the reality is that the world economy has been slowing steadily. Growth rates in the OECD countries fell from 5% in the 1960s to 3.5% in the '70s, 2.8% in the '80s and 2.6% in the '90s. Even this has been based on increased debt, both public and private, necessary to provide a market to fuel the current very modest growth rates. In the USA, the massive balance of payments deficit and projected record budget deficit of $304 billion (without taking account of any spending on war in Iraq), and the fact that American households are on average in debt to the equivalent of one year of their income, are just some of the most immediate illustrations of this trend.

Attacks on the working class

The best the British ruling class can hope to do in this crisis is to make its industry more competitive on the world market, try and outdo more of its competitors and take a bigger share. That competitiveness is always obtained at the expense of more attacks on the working class.

Despite the projected loss of 42,000 jobs (and the continual announcement of factory closures such as Boots skincare plant in Airdrie which will cost another 1000 jobs), recent government statistics appear to show some hope. The total out of work and claiming benefit fell in January to 928,500. It is claimed to be a 27-year low, but since the way of counting unemployment has changed so much, and the government itself admits to 1.5 million out of work, no-one really believes the figures. At the same time income tax revenues fell 5% on the same month a year ago, which is a government statistic that gives a far more honest idea of the reduction in working class living standards. In effect workers are faced with more low paid and temporary and insecure jobs.

The prospect of war

While the information about the economy in general is largely confined to the business pages, speculation about the effect of a war in Iraq is much more up-front. A short successful war would be a fillip, according to the Bank of England; a long war would be harmful as it could fuel panic buying of oil. The prospect of war is blamed for many ills, particularly reduced consumer confidence in the USA. This is compared to the fall in confidence after September 11, but without ever pointing out that the economic problems of the time and the loss of confidence started way before the fall of the Twin Towers. War is not the cause of the economic crisis, but is a result of the increasingly bitter competition between nations that flow from it. Nor can war against Iraq provide a real stimulus to the economy in 2003, any more than it could in 1991. It will have no more benefit on the economy than war in Afghanistan or the Balkans, whatever may be the momentary ebbs and flows of speculative capital. But if the aftermath of war destabilises the Middle East it has the potential for a distinctly negative effect on the economy as well.

What the crisis and the approach of war really show is that capitalism has nothing to offer humanity but misery and war. It shows the importance of the working class understanding the need to overthrow the system that's based on its exploitation.

Alex 28/2/03.

The parasitic group which calls itself the 'Internal Fraction of the ICC', formed around the individual Jonas who was expelled from the ICC for behaviour unworthy of a communist militant (see our communique in WR 252), is now openly revealing its true nature. The method of informers

On its website, the IFICC has published two texts which tell us a great deal about the destructive activities of this so-called 'Fraction'.

The first text is the letter which the ICC's section in Mexico sent to the four members of the 'Fraction' living in that country. The publication of the content of this letter is not a problem for us. But what is a problem for us (and should be for all the groups of the communist left) is the fact that the IFICC has published in advance the date of an internal meeting of the ICC (the territorial conference of our Mexican section). In this letter, the ICC's section in Mexico gave the members of the 'Fraction' the date of this conference in order to allow them to defend themselves at it and make an appeal to it (which they have refused to do).

By publishing the whole of this letter on its website, the clique around Jonas deliberately put at the disposal of all the world's cops the date on which our conference in Mexico was being held, with the participation of militants from other countries (since as our press has always noted, international delegations always take part in these kind of meetings). This meant that the police organs concerned with such matters could strengthen their surveillance at the airports and borders. This disgraceful action by the IFICC, which facilitates the work of the repressive forces of the bourgeois state against revolutionary militants, is all the more shameful in that the members of the IFICC know perfectly well that certain of our comrades have already, in the past, been direct victims of repression and in some cases have had to flee their country of origin (note 1) [149].

But the police-like methods of this parasitic group don't stop there.

In number 14 of the 'Internal Bulletin' of the IFICC, published on its website, our readers can also find a text entitled 'Une ultime mise au point' which has the pretension (and above all the hypocrisy) to try to defend the PCI (Le Proletaire) against the "incredible attack" supposedly launched against this group by the ICC. In fact, our readers can see for themselves that this text is not at all a defence of the PCI, given the total absence of arguments to refute the elements we have published in our press about this incident (see WRs 260 and 261).

The IFICC's text is really devoted to hurling the worst kind of slanders against two of our comrades (and thus against all the militants of the ICC, who are accused of being in the pocket of "the person who runs the ICC" and his partner, about whom Jonas spread the rumour in the ICC that she was a "cop"). In doing so it exposes the abject methods of the friends of Jonas.

The real "political disagreements" of the friends of Jonas

In this 'Ultime mise au point', the IFICC begins by asserting that "we have always remained on a strictly political terrain". Our readers can make up their own minds about this by examining the IFICC's 'political' arguments aimed at showing its 'fundamental disagreements' with the ICC, disagreements which are supposed to justify the formation of an 'Internal Fraction' in continuity with all the left fractions of the workers' movement from the Spartacus League to the Italian left. Here we will only cite one small extract from these arguments. Readers can judge whether they prove that the IFICC has always remained "on a strictly political terrain":

"This text is written by CG, alias Peter, as can be seen from the style and above all the somewhat fantastical reference to a lamentable operation of recuperation carried out under his direction. This same Peter is the person who runs the ICC and who, after having excluded or pushed out the majority of the founding members of the ICC, claims to be the sole heir of MC. But it should also be known that if Peter is leading this hate-filled cabal against our comrade Jonas, it's for the very simple reason that Louise (alias Avril), the militant about whom Jonas has clearly expressed his doubts, is none other than the partner of the chief" (note 2) [150].

On the fallacious pretext of taking up the defence of the PCI, the Jonas camarilla is exposing the real colour of its money and the "strictly political" disagreements upon which this so-called Fraction has been founded: the ICC is led by a little Stalin ("the chief") manipulated by "the chief's partner" who is a dubious element ( a "cop", to use Jonas' term).

As we have already underlined in an article in WR 252 ('The struggle of revolutionary organisations against provocation and slander'), the workers' movement has always insisted that introducing suspicion into an organisation in order to destroy confidence between militants is precisely the method used by agents provocateurs (notably the GPU in the Trotskyist movement in the 1930s).

Today through this 'Ultime mise au point' the Jonas camarilla is carrying on outside the ICC the dirty work it did inside it, with the aim of sowing suspicion throughout the proletarian political milieu. It is clear that, having failed to convince the militants of the ICC of the necessity to exclude the "chief" and the "chief's partner", this parasitic grouplet is now trying to draw other groups of the communist left behind its slanders in order to erect a cordon sanitaire around the ICC and to discredit it (as can already be seen from reading the press of the PCI).

The method of blackmailers

But the IFICC shows the police-like nature of its activities most clearly by its insistence on the initials of the "chief" ("this text is written by CG, alias Peter"). What "strictly political" interest do Jonas and his friends have in putting the initials of a militant in public? Apart from the fact that this really is worthy of an informer, in the same way as publishing the date of our territorial conference in Mexico, this is also the method of blackmailers, aimed at intimidating militants. By publishing on the internet the real initials of one of our comrades (when will they include the complete name and address?), Jonas and his pals are trying to deliver the following message: whoever dares to support the ICC will be denounced to the police. This is one of the main reasons why the address list of militants and subscribers was stolen from the ICC several months before the formation of the IFICC: apart from the fact that this theft allowed them to inundate our militants and subscribers with its squalid denigrations of the ICC, it also allows the IFICC to permanently intimidate them. How else can we explain the fact that the IFICC, even though its bulletins are now on the internet, continues to send its bulletins by post, including to those who have explicitly asked the IFICC to stop sending them? (note 3) [151].

Furthermore, what political interest does the IFICC have in shouting from the rooftops that "this text is written by CG, alias Peter, as can be seen from its style"? From the proletarian point of view, what interests the serious reader is above all the political content of our articles and not which individual is behind such and such a signature or such and such a "style". On the other hand, it is true that thanks to the analysis of "style", the bourgeois state's repressive forces can indeed try to identify those who write for the revolutionary press (even if, as is the case with the ICC, the articles published in our press are discussed and edited collectively). This enables the bourgeoisie, in periods of repression, to try to paralyse the publication of the revolutionary press by arresting and imprisoning militants whose "style" they have, or believe to have, recognised.

With such methods, worthy of the work of police spies, this 'final' mise au point is in fact a 'final' threat: if the ICC continues to warn the proletarian milieu against the manoeuvres of Jonas and his friends (as we did in our article in reply to the PCI), the IFICC will publish the famous 'documents' which purport to prove that the "chief's partner" is a dubious element, with the aim of convincing the proletarian milieu about this. As the IFICC's article says "Comrade Jonas is by no means the only one to have reasons for doubting this militant: here again numerous documents written by the ICC, which we have in our possession, prove this".

We are only too familiar with this threat. The IFICC is now carrying on outside the ICC the same blackmail which it carried on for a year and a half inside the ICC in order to try to force us to accept its permanent violation of our statutes and the thuggish behaviour of the members of the 'Fraction' (theft of the ICC's documents and money, slanders against militants spread through secret correspondence and meetings, etc).

This method of blackmail and insinuation, of spreading calumnies against two of our comrades, of proclaiming loud and clear that "once again we have the documents which prove what we are saying" is not new from the IFICC. When its members were still in the ICC they behaved in the same way with regard to a document called 'The history of the IS' ((International Secretariat, permanent commission of the ICC's central organ). They circulated this in a selective manner and presented it as the proof of their accusations against certain of our comrades, particularly Louise and Peter. Despite the importance which they attributed to this document (which they described as "historic"), they always refused to place it in the hands of the organisation, including those of the Investigation Commission nominated by the 14th Congress of the ICC to shed light on these problems. Finally, this document was published in no. 10 of the IFICC Bulletin, after its members had deliberately placed themselves outside the organisation. At the express request of the central organ of the ICC, it was read by all our comrades who read the French language. All the sections and all the comrades were nauseated by the avalanche of lies contained in this document, as well as by the repulsive way it made use of comrades' private lives.

This is the kind of document that the IFICC is threatening to make public!

The organisations of the workers' movement have often been confronted by this kind of blackmail: "We have the documents which prove our accusations". Faced with these methods, the attitude of proletarian organisations has always been to demand the publication of these famous documents so that they can be publicly refuted. As for those which the IFICC goes on about, it's clear that the ICC is perfectly capable of refuting them as well. However, these documents deal with the details of the functioning of our organisation and the private life of its militants, and their publication could only be a gift to the police. This said, the ICC is perfectly willing for this document to be made available to a commission made up of trusted militants of the organisations of the communist left and to be discussed in this framework.

The ICC has nothing to fear from the truth because the truth can only

• demonstrate the fact that our organisation, both at the level of its positions and of its principles of functioning, remains totally loyal to its past experience as well to the experience of the communist left;
• reveal the consciously destructive and anti-proletarian character of Jonas and his supporters, as the publication of no. 14 and in particular the text 'Ultime mise au point' have once again shown.

ICC, February 2003.

(1) We often read or hear that the special organs of the bourgeois state have no interest in a small organisation like ours and that today the ruling class is unaware of the role that the communist left is destined to play in a future revolutionary movement. Such ideas express an enormous naivete, as can be seen for example by the 'anti-revisionist' campaigns which aimed to put into the same bag the groups of the left communist current who denounced anti-fascism and the extreme anti-semitic right. The whole history of the workers' movement attests to the fact that the special services of the bourgeois state never underestimate the potential danger represented by revolutionary groups, however small they might be, however little influence they may have in the working class at a given moment. Furthermore, despite the fact that for the moment the 'democratic' state does not generally use open repression against the groups of the communist left, the latter have already suffered from acts of repression (such as the raids on the PCI in the 1970s). The ICC itself has not been spared since certain of our militants, including in the most 'democratic' countries, have been subjected to raids, surveillance aimed at intimidation, prolonged interrogation at the frontier, and commando actions by armed elements probably mixed up with the state. The members of the IFICC know this perfectly well. Back [152]

(2)) MC is our comrade Mark Chirik, who died in 1990. He lived through the revolution of 1917 in his native town of Kishinev in Moldavia. A member of the Communist Party of Palestine at the age of 13, expelled from the PCF in 1928, he carried on the struggle for the defence of revolutionary positions in different organisations of the communist left, notably the Italian Fraction which he joined in 1938 and the Gauche Communiste de France from 1945 onwards. From 1964 in Venezuela and 1968 in France, MC played a decisive role in the formation of the first groups who were to be at the origins of the ICC, giving the political and organisational experience he had acquired in the various communist organisations he had belonged to. You can find out more about the political biography of our comrade in our French-language pamphlet The Communist Left of France and in the articles in International Review 65 and 66, written at the time of his death. As for the ridiculous claim that Peter aims to be the "sole heir of MC" (completed by a note exclaiming "this shows the conception he has of the revolutionary organisation"), the members of the IFICC will have a hard time proving it. This shows the sick imagination and stupid spite of the members of the IFICC, as well as their own warped view of the organisation. Back [153]

(3) In its Bulletin no. 11, the IFICC published a reply to a letter that we sent to each of its members asking them to return the internal documents in their possession. In its reply, the IFICC writes: "As for the copy of the subscribers' list, it is to say the least striking that you are claiming, like a shopkeeper jealous of his clients, a 'property' of people�But perhaps your concern is the security of these documents which could fall into 'indelicate' hands? We can assure you that they are being well looked after, and it will be difficult, not to say impossible, for 'indelicate people' to get their hands on them". After the IFICC's recent informer-like behaviour, we have an idea of how much confidence we can place in them! Back [154]

In order to mount a real opposition to imperialist war, revolutionaries have to be able to look beneath all the false explanations for this or that conflict. The media and the politicians from left to right have certainly provided enough of these in the war in Iraq: it's all down to the evil Saddam, or to the no less evil George Bush and his cronies in the oil business, and so on and so forth. Our article 'What is imperialism?' in this issue shows why imperialist wars are the inevitable product not of this or that state or leader, but of the entire capitalist system at a certain stage of its development. But the revolutionary analysis of war does not only provide a general theoretical understanding of the drive to war. Like Rosa Luxemburg in her Junius Pamphlet, written during the First World War, it is also necessary to examine in depth the particular strategies of the various imperialist powers engaged in a conflict. In the article that follows we are therefore putting forward a broad framework for uncovering the real aims and policies that lie behind the actions and phoney justifications of the competing imperialist powers today.

From Gulf War One to Gulf War Two

Faced with the collapse of the rival Russian bloc at the end of the 1980s, and with the rapid unravelling of its own western bloc, US imperialism formulated a strategic plan which has, in the ensuing decade, revealed itself more and more openly. Confirmed as the only remaining superpower, the USA would do everything in its power to ensure that no new superpower - in reality, no new imperialist bloc - could arise to challenge its 'New World Order'. The principal methods of this strategy were demonstrated forcefully by the first Gulf war of 1991:

• a massive display of US military superiority, using Saddam's regime as a whipping boy
• the press-ganging of the other powers into a coalition that would give an air of legitimacy to the US operation, as well as providing a considerable portion of the enormous funds required. Germany in particular - the only real candidate to the leadership of a new anti-American bloc - was to pay the most.

But if the Gulf war's primary aim was to issue an effective warning to all who would challenge US hegemony, it must be judged a failure. Within a year, Germany had provoked the war in the Balkans, with the aim of extending its influence to a key strategic crossroads of Europe and the Middle East. It would take the best part of the decade before the US - through the war in Kosovo - could impose its authority in this region, having been opposed not only by Germany (which gave underhand support to Croatia) but also by France and its supposedly loyal ally Britain, who secretly backed Serbia. The chaos in the Balkans was a clear expression of the contradictions faced by the US: the more it sought to discipline its former allies, the more it provoked resistance and hostility, and the less able it was to recruit them for military operations which they knew were ultimately aimed against them. Thus the phenomenon of the US being increasingly obliged to 'go it alone' in its adventures, relying less and less on 'legal' international structures such as the UN and NATO, which have more and more functioned as obstacles to the US's plans.

After September 11 2001 - almost certainly carried out with the complicity of the US state - the USA's global strategy shifted onto a higher level. The 'war against terrorism' was immediately announced as a permanent and planet-wide military offensive. Faced with an increasing challenge from its principal imperialist rivals (expressed in rows over the Kyoto agreement, the European military force, manoeuvres over the policing of Kosovo, etc), the USA opted for a policy of much more massive and direct military intervention, with the strategic goal of the encirclement of Europe and Russia by gaining control of Central Asia and the Middle East. In the far east, by including North Korea in the 'axis of evil', and by renewing its interest in the 'struggle against terrorism' in Indonesia following the Bali bombing, US imperialism has also declared its intention to intervene directly in the backyard of China and Japan.

The aims of this intervention are by no means limited to the question of oil considered uniquely as a source of capitalist profits. Control of the Middle East and central Asia for geo-strategic reasons was a matter of intense inter-imperialist rivalry long before oil became a vital element in the capitalist economy. And while there is a clear necessity to control the huge oil-producing capacities of the Middle East and the Caucasus, US military action there is not carried out on behalf of the oil companies: the oil companies are only allowed to get their pay-off provided they fit in with the overall strategic plan, which includes the ability to shut off oil supplies to America's potential enemies and thus throttle any military challenge before it begins. Germany and Japan in particular are far more dependent on Middle East oil than the USA.

Imperialist rivalries come into the open

The USA's audacious project of building a ring of steel around its main imperialist rivals thus provides the real explanation for the war in Afghanistan, the assault on Iraq, and the declared intention to deal with Iran and North Korea. However, the upping of the stakes by the US has called forth a commensurate response from its main challengers. The resistance to the US plan for a second Gulf war was led by France, which threatened to use its veto on the UN Security Council; but even more significant is the explicit challenge issued by Germany, which hitherto has tended to work in the shadows, allowing France to play the role of declared opponent of US ambitions. Today however, Germany perceives the US adventure in Iraq as a real menace to its interests in an area which has been central to its imperialist ambitions since before the First World War. It has thus issued a far more open challenge to the US than ever before; furthermore, its resolute 'anti-war' stance has emboldened France, which until quite close to the outbreak of war was still hinting that it might change tack and take part in the military action. With the outbreak of the war, these powers are adopting a fairly low profile, but historically a real milestone has been marked. This crisis has pointed to the demise not only of NATO (whose irrelevance was shown over its inability to agree on the 'defence' of Turkey just before the war) but also of the UN. The American bourgeoisie is increasingly regarding this institution as an instrument of its principal rivals, and is openly saying that it will not play any real role in the 'reconstruction' of Iraq. The abandonment of such institutions of 'international law' represents a significant step in the development of chaos in international relations.

The resistance to US plans by an alliance between France, Germany, Russia and China shows that, faced with the massive superiority of the US, its main rivals have no choice but to band together against it. This confirms that the tendency towards the constitution of new imperialist blocs remains a real factor in the current situation. But it would be a mistake to confuse a tendency with an accomplished fact. This is mainly because in the phase of capitalist decomposition, which is marked by growing disorder in international relations, the movement towards the formation of new blocs is being constantly obstructed by the counter-tendency for each country to defend its own immediate national interests above all else - by the tendency towards every man for himself. The powerful divisions between the European countries over the war in Iraq has demonstrated that 'Europe' is very far from forming a coherent bloc, as some elements of the revolutionary movement have tended to argue. Furthermore, such arguments are based on a confusion between economic alliances and real imperialist blocs, which are above all military formations oriented towards world war. And here two other important factors come into play: first, the undeniable military dominance of the US, which still makes it impossible for any openly warlike challenge to be mounted against the US by its great power rivals; and secondly, the undefeated nature of the proletariat, which means that it is not yet possible to create the social and ideological conditions for new war blocs. Thus the war against Iraq, however much it has brought imperialist rivalries between the great powers into the open, still takes the same basic form as the other major wars of this phase: a 'deflected' war whose real target is hidden by the selection of a 'scapegoat' constituted by a third or fourth rate power, and in which the major powers take care to fight using only professional armies.

The Iraq war further undermines US authority

Although the USA's attack on Iraq demonstrates its crushing military superiority to all the other major powers, the increasingly open character of its imperialist ambitions is tending to weaken its overall political authority. In both world wars and in the conflict with the Russian bloc, the US was able to pose as the principal rampart of democracy and the rights of nations, the defender of the free world against totalitarianism and military aggression. But since the collapse of the Russian bloc the US has been obliged to itself play the role of aggressor; and while, in the immediate aftermath of September 11, the US was still able to some extent to present its action in Afghanistan as an act of legitimate self-defence, the justifications for the war in Iraq have shown themselves to be completely threadbare, while its rivals have come forward as the best defenders of democratic values in the face of US bullying.

The first weeks of the military action served mainly to create further difficulties for US political authority. Initially presented as a war that would be both quick and clean, it became clear that the war plan drawn up by the current administration seriously underestimated the degree to which the invasion would provoke a general reaction of hostility to the American invasion, even if this is not accompanied by any great enthusiasm for Saddam's regime. Even the Shiite organisations, who were being counted on to lead an 'uprising' against Saddam, declared that the first duty of all Iraqis was to resist the invader. Equally, the war plan underestimated the capacity of the regime to wage a kind of warfare that would profit from the political difficulties facing the coalition. To win the 'hearts and minds' of the Iraqi population, and convince a more international public opinion that it is waging a humane war, the US coalition needed to make rapid progress and avoid too much civilian suffering. But by luring the invaders onto the terrain of urban sieges and guerrilla warfare, the Iraqi forces have threatened to turn the situation into a real quagmire. The prolongation of the war can only serve to aggravate the misery of the population, whether through the action of Saddam's terror squads aimed at inhibiting any attempts to flee or desert the battle front, through the intensification of coalition bombing which will cause more and more civilian deaths and damage to the infrastructure, or through the multiplication of 'tragic incidents' in which civilians are gunned down by coalition soldiers fearful about terrorist attacks.

At the time of writing (5/4/3), the 'coalition' appears to be gaining ground both militarily and ideologically. Key units of the Republican Guard seem to have been pulverised; Baghdad is being encircled and we are being shown scenes of Iraqi civilians waving at coalition forces as they advance. The Iraqi regime is making itself look more and more ridiculous with its fantasies about military victory, and we are being encouraged to believe that it could collapse without a real fight. The fact remains that it took an unexpectedly long time to take the port of Umm Qasr and that Basra has yet to fall; and the risk remains that the siege and capture of Baghdad could turn into a veritable bloodbath.

The US is thus experiencing considerable difficulty in portraying itself as the 'liberator' of the Iraqi people. And even if Baghdad falls fairly quickly, the Americans' plan to install a puppet regime directly controlled by the US military will tend to increase the bitterness that many Iraqis feel towards the invading force. Moreover, the war is already exacerbating the divisions within Iraqi society, in particular between those who have allied themselves with the USA (as in the Kurdish regions) and those who have fought against the invasion. These divisions can only serve to create disorder and instability in post-Saddam Iraq, further undermining the USA claim that it will be the bearer of peace and prosperity in the region. On the contrary, the war is already stoking up tensions throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. The USA's inability to use Turkey as a base for opening its northern front was already a severe blow to its overall strategy; and since the war began Turkey has been threatening to move against the Kurds in northern Iraq, potentially opening up a war within the war; Syria's anti-American rhetoric (and covert aid to Iraq) has provoked Rumsfeld and Powell to make serious threats against Damascus; India and Pakistan have again begun rattling sabres at each other; and the war in Iraq cannot fail to pour oil on the fire in Israel/Palestine.

Thus, far from resolving the crisis of American leadership, the war in Iraq can only take it to new levels - and that means new levels of barbarism for a growing number of populations around the world.

WR, 5/4/03.

We are publishing a leaflet by the Moscow anarcho-syndicalist group KRAS in response to the massacre that took place when Chechen separatists took control of a Moscow theatre last October. We don't agree with all its formulations, especially the classical anarchist ones which seem to imply that the main problem facing the working class is not the capitalist mode of production but the principle of 'Authority', or that the system can be brought down by a general strike alone. But we want to express our solidarity with its basic internationalist spirit, its opposition to a war that is against the class interests of both the Russian and the Chechen workers. We have redrafted the English translation sent to us with the aim of making it more accessible, and hope that we have not altered any of its political content.

No war between the peoples - no peace between the classes!

The nightmare in Moscow, which is a prolongation of the tragedy in the northern Caucasus, is deeply symbolic. Nearly 200 innocent civilians were very calmly put to death by both of the warring sides - Russian imperialism and Chechen nationalism. Once again it is obvious: there is no 'just cause' in the struggle between states or would-be states (such as the 'national liberation' movements). There are only victims and butchers. And the butchers are the rulers and commanders on both sides! For them human life is nothing - only power and profit interest them. Putin (note 1) [155] needs popularity ratings. Russian politicians need a 'united and indivisible' empire. The oil kings need the northern Caucasus oil pipelines. Maskhadov (note 2) [156] needs a republic submissive to him (small, but his own). Basayev (note 3) [157] needs an Islamic republic state and the Islamic fundamentalists need a 'holy war'. But why is any of this in your interests - the interests of those who live in the asphalt jungles of Moscow, the slums of Grozny or the refugee camps of Ingushetia; the interests of the victims of the barbaric bombing and military 'cleansing' in Chechnya or of the fascist act in the Moscow House of Culture?

The workers of Russia and Chechnya have no reason to fight against each other. You have a common enemy: the rulers of Russia and Chechnya, the politicians and the bosses, the generals and the bankers. They are the ones who devised this war. They must answer for it. And we the common people must ask the questions in the name of the living and the dead.

We reject the call for negotiations between the 'legal' authorities of Russia and Chechnya (note 4) [158]. These authorities are criminals. Not only because every authority is criminal, based as it is on commands, fear and obedience, on ignoring human life. But also because they were the ones who stoked this fire. They are guilty! We shouldn't call on them to negotiate, but to disappear!

We say, categorically and unconditionally, NO to the Russian empire, to all prattle about 'united and indivisible' Russia. But we also say that all talk about the 'rights of nations' or 'national self-determination' is dangerous delirium (note 5) [159]. It benefits only the rich castes of the 'oppressed nations' who want to free themselves from the dictates of other bosses and be the undisputed rulers of their 'own' populations. And to this end these potential rulers use their future subjects as cannon fodder, using the pretext of 'national liberation' or the 'national interest'. The upper classes of different nations are responsible for the wars that kill each others' slaves. It is up to the exploited people of all countries and ethnic groups to get rid of all demagogy about 'national liberation', to realise that the enemy is not your neighbour, that the only answer is the struggle for authentic liberation, ie a social liberation.

It is time to stop looking for solutions in the habitual logic of nations and states. It is time to remember that TO ABOLISH WARS, IT IS NECESSARY TO ABOLISH THE DOMINATION OF HUMAN BEINGS OVER OTHER HUMAN BEINGS - TO ABOLISH AUTHORITY! You must stop choosing between the plague and cholera, between the arrogant imperialism of the great powers and the rapacious authoritarianism of petty local chiefs, between the multinational corporations and the grasping 'national' bourgeoisies. There is only one way to stop wars: to subvert its organisers, the leaders and beneficiaries on both sides.

It makes no sense to beseech the ruling criminals for peace. It could be a step forward merely to obtain the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya, although this would not eliminate the grounds of the conflict and the inevitability of a new war. But the authorities would not even grant that without pressure and the opponents of war don't yet have the strength to force such a move. So should we just be quiet and put up with it?

Of course not! Our slogan is: direct resistance by the working class against the economic and political system of the State and Capital. And we can all contribute towards this: don't join the army and exhort others not to join; hinder in all possible ways the normal functioning of the military machine, of the war industries and war institutions; agitate against militarism, nationalism and authority; unite with other people who think and act in the same way. We have to look for such people on the 'Chechen' side as well, to organise cooperation with them. We have to call for fraternisation between the Russian soldiers and the Chechen fighters, for disobeying the orders of our insane superiors. And when a movement from below develops from these 'small actions', then we can think about the next step - a general strike against war up to the fall of the system which breeds war!

RESISTANCE - SELF-ORGANISATION - SELF-ADMINISTRATION

Moscow anarcho-syndicalists

NOTES BY KRAS

(1) V Putin is the Russian president who won the elections on a wave of support for the Chechen war. Back [160]

(2) Maskhadov is the president of the Chechen Republic who has been leading the movement for independence from Russia. Back [161]

(3) Basayev is a Chechen warlord and leader of the Islamist faction of the Chechen independence movement. Back [162]

(4) 'Negotiations between Putin and Maskhadov' is the main slogan of the Russian 'anti-war' movement. This movement is organised by a coalition called the Committee for Anti-war Action (CAWA), which is dominated by bourgeois liberal groups and parties. The left-wing 'Campaign against the Chechen War' collaborates with the CAWA and also supports the call for negotiations. This 'Campaign' coincides more or less with the Praxis group around the Victor Serge Library in Moscow, which edits the newspaper Chelovechnost ('Humanity') and is composed of former or current Leninists and also some libertarians (including one former member of our organisation). Back [163]

(5) 'Self-determination for Chechnya' through a referendum under 'international control' is another demand raised by the Praxis group. Back [164]

Before the US and Britain started the bombardment and invasion of Iraq the 'peace' movement echoed with cries that this war was immoral, illegal and undemocratic. Clare Short, Glenda Jackson, Mo Mowlem and Charles Kennedy thought that, in the event of war, it was necessary to support the military effort. They were described as turncoats, but their views were shared by many, including such as the leader of the Australian Labor Party, Simon Crean, who supports the war while still describing it as wrong.

In contrast, there were already some Trotskyist groups who insisted on the need to 'defend Iraq' some months ago. When the current offensive started, the Socialist Workers Party, a central component of the Stop The War Coalition, added their voice to the support of Iraqi capitalism. In a Socialist Worker editorial ("What we think" 29/3/3) they insist, "It is right to fight the US empire".

"'I'm not fighting for Saddam, I'm fighting for Iraq.' Those were the words of Nasr Al Hussein, a former Iraqi special forces parachutist, on Monday. He was one of hundreds of Iraqi exiles in Jordan queuing to board coaches to take them back across the border to Iraq so they can fight US and British forces�Millions of Iraqi people, who have no time for Saddam Hussein, see this war for what it is - an invasion by the most powerful state on the planet killing for oil and global power�they do not want long-term US occupation whatever their feelings toward the current regime."

With people volunteering to die for Iraqi capitalism, it is the job of revolutionaries to show that 'fighting for Iraq,' or defending any 'national interest', means enrolling for the armies of the ruling capitalist class. The interests of the exploited and oppressed in Iraq are diametrically opposed to those of the capitalist state, whether it's dominated by Saddam now, by British imperialism in the 1920s, by the monarchy of King Faisal II, by the Qasim regime that preceded the Ba'athists, or by any of the alternatives of US imperialism or Iraqi oppositionists that might follow Saddam. Regimes change but it's only the class interests of the ruling bourgeoisie that are served by the capitalist state. The state serves the needs of capitalism for social control through its apparatus of repression, and is at the heart of capitalism's imperialist war drive.

Talk of "an invasion by the most powerful state on the planet" is very reminiscent of what the British bourgeoisie said in the First World War when they insisted on the need to defend 'brave little Belgium', and, in the Second World War, when they said it was necessary to take on the violators of Poland and Czechoslovakia. The bourgeoisie can always think of a reason why workers should forget their own class interests and sacrifice themselves for imperialism. Trotskyism's long history of military recruitment

It is worth noting that the SWP, like other Trotskyist groups, has not always been so loyal to the Iraqi state. Back in the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war, they were against Iraq because it was backed by Britain and the US. This meant supporting the Iranian regime that had replaced the Shah, even though it equally represented the interests of Iranian capitalism. The SWP has changed sides, but their basic principle remains the same: workers must lay down their lives for their exploiters; even if they have no illusions in the current regime, they must retain their illusions in the 'national interest'.

The SWP talks the language of 'peace' and 'anti-imperialism', but that doesn't make them any less nationalistic than the promoters of 'patriot rallies' who explicitly mobilise to support the armed forces. An ideology that demands that workers put aside their class interests can only be used in the service of the bourgeoisie.

Attacking the Labour party is one of the tasks that the SWP prides itself on. In a recent article on "Labour and war. Never on our side" (29/3/03) they say that "at every key moment the party leadership has supported imperialism and war". Going through various events of the last century (the First World War, Vietnam, the Falklands, the 1991 Gulf War etc) they pass remarks on the behaviour of the Labour leadership. What they miss out is that the Labour party is not just a handful of leaders but a whole apparatus and ideology which has long been part of capitalism's political system.

They also miss out the Second World War. In 1939-45 the Labour party was an integral part of the coalition government at all levels, active in the recruitment for war and in the repression on the home front. It might seem strange for the SWP to overlook a conflict in which 60 million died, until you remember the role Trotskyists played for the war effort, in the name of anti-fascism, democracy and the defence of Russia. In Britain, for example, the Trotskyist groups wanted Labour to govern alone, despite there being no essential policy differences between Labour and Churchill's Conservatives (only a less warmongering image).

So, when we denounce Trotskyist support for Iraq, it is not an isolated instance, but one example from 60 years of military mobilisation. The SWP say that the only way to stop the war is to "get the troops out. In Iraq the only way is to resist the 'coalition' troops" (SW 5/4/03). In denying the struggle against the very bourgeoisie that exploits you, there is a clear echo here of Trotskyist support for the Resistance that was an arm of Allied imperialism against the Axis powers. The SWP themselves draw a comparison between now and then: "Crowds in Iraq are hunting for parachuting US pilots, like British crowds hunted for German pilots during the Second World War, because they see them as the main enemy, not Saddam" (SW 29/3/03). Endorsing Iraqi nationalism today, like the support for Allied imperialism in the past, is not altered by the leftists trying to give its current anti-Americanism a 'radical' tint (like supporting the Resistance because they were guerrillas rather than regular troops).

Against this inverted jingoism, communists insist that the old watchword of the workers' movement - workers have no fatherland - is more valid than ever. The capitalist drive towards war can only be stopped when the working class generalises its struggle against all states, in all countries. The Trotskyists ridicule such internationalist views by dubbing them 'abstract' and 'utopian'. But to tell the workers today to subordinate their interests to those of any national state is to work actively against the possibility of the international unification of the class struggle in the future.

Car, 2/4/03.

WR public forums on the question of 'War and proletarian consciousness'

The victory of ‘our’ imperialism is always a moment of terrible danger for proletarian consciousness. In 1918, the patriotic euphoria of victory was used to neutralise the massive discontent of the workers in Britain and France who had endured four years of butchery. And above all it was used to separate these sections of the proletariat from their class brothers in Russia and Germany - and thus, to isolate and ultimately destroy the main outposts of the proletarian revolution. The defeat of fascism in 1945 has been used ever since not only to justify the second imperialist holocaust, but also to bludgeon our minds with the idea that ‘democracy’ is the best of all possible worlds.

The collapse of Stalinism in 1989-91 was used to further reinforce this message, adding to it the definitive ‘proof’ that a communist society was at worst a nightmare of state terror, at best an unattainable ideal. Thus it is necessary to understand very clearly the scenes of rejoicing that have met the downfall of the Saddam regime.

The apparent refusal of a majority of the Iraqi masses to lay down their lives for the Saddam regime is certainly to be supported. Contrary to bin Laden and the Islamists, who have called for a jihad in defence of Iraq, and contrary to the Socialist Worker, which has called for exactly the same thing, the only internationalist position today is to reject the defence - tactical, critical or otherwise - of any nation state. The problem is that the ‘coalition’ is manipulating the feelings of relief sweeping the Iraqi population to trap them into supporting the fake liberation delivered by US and British tanks. The same forces which, in 1991, allowed Saddam just enough firepower to crush the revolts in the north and south of Iraq, have now presented themselves as the friends and allies of popular rebellion.

And in the victorious countries, especially America and Britain? The dazzling success of this military campaign will be presented not only as the justification for the war on Iraq - but above all as the best argument in favour of the next war in the strategy for ‘a new American century’.

It is urgent to discuss as widely and as deeply as possible the implications of what is now happening in Iraq. The ICC is organising a series of public meeting on this question. We strongly urge all organisations, groups and individuals who stand for a proletarian, internationalist opposition to war to use these meetings as a forum for debate and clarification.

LONDON Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, Holborn, London WC1 Saturday 26th April at 2.30pm,

BIRMINGHAM Friends of the Earth Centre 54A Allison Street Digbeth, B5 Saturday 10th May at 2.30pm

Supplement to World Revolution 263 BM Box 869 London WC1N 3XX

WR, 10/4/03.

When deputy prime minister Prescott announced legislation to impose a pay deal on the firefighters "particularly given the conflict in the Gulf and the heightened threat of terrorism" (BBC news website, 20.3.03), this was just the latest stage in the long-running campaign around the danger of keeping 19,000 troops on standby to cover industrial action at time of war. It is a campaign that started months ago with the first 48 hour firefighters' strike.

Tory spokesman David Davis joined his voice to the campaign by asking "What will you do in the event that the FBU continue to strike ... continue to undermine the effectiveness of our armed forces?"

And the unions were not to be left out of this patriotic chorus. Andy Gilchrist has not only called an offer that is worse than that originally offered by employers last year, the best that could be achieved "in the political situation they find themselves in" (BBC website, 19.3.03); he has also stated that "It would be foolhardy to reject this offer when British troops are about to go into battle" (quoted in Revolutionary Perspectives 28).

This comes after months of the FBU wearing down the firefighters. First they put in a 40% pay claim, justified by emphasising their professionalism, and calling for public sympathy rather than workers' solidarity. Workers were then kept to a demoralising routine of 24 and 48 hour strikes and the whole thing rounded off with a demonstration at the end of last year where firefighters marched in uniform. All in all they have been kept isolated from the rest of the working class, despite the widespread sympathy that greeted their claim last year.

In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that the government has already started imposing the deal before it is agreed: no more money will be available, and the pay increase of 16% over 3 years will have to be paid for by redundancies. Chief Fire Officers have been introducing the organisational structure necessary for this for several months. The fact that the FBU conference rejected the deal shows that there remains much discontent and anger, but the struggle has been contained. Nevertheless, Prescott's legislation will provide a welcome alibi for the FBU when they have to impose the deal (see WR 261). A campaign directed at the whole working class

We should not make the mistake of thinking this campaign is just about imposing a deal on the firefighters, or even primarily about 19,000 soldiers on standby for industrial action. It is above all a campaign aimed at the whole working class, aimed at discouraging struggles. The ruling class knows that it will have to continue attacks on the working class. The war will have to be paid for, and it comes at a time of economic slowdown.

The campaign to discourage the working class does not only include the calls to remain patriotic, to put up with lousy pay deals during the war, but also much more radical-sounding ideologies. So we heard, among many contradictory ideas on the huge 15 February 'Stop the War' demonstration, the call for strikes when the war started; and the firefighters' strikes in particular have been held up as the way to stop the war.

When representatives of the ruling class make such calls it shows that they are aware that the working class today does not pose an immediate threat of widespread strikes in response to the war. On the one hand the firefighters have already been isolated by the FBU; and on the other hand the opposition to the war has largely been mobilised behind bourgeois ideologies, such as pacifism or support for an alternative imperialist strategy more in line with that of Germany and France. But the use of this fake 'workerist' radicalism also shows that the ruling class understands that the working class remains a threat.

Our rulers know the potential for workers to put their class interest above the national interest. The strikes and mutinies during World War 1 culminated in the Russian and German revolutions, forcing them to end the slaughter. The ruling class will not forget this when calculating the risk of any future imperialist adventure.

The working class today, while undefeated, is nowhere near the level of posing such an immediate threat to the ruling class and its war effort. In fact it is still faced with the need to recover its sense of itself as a class, a sense that was very much to the fore during the large-scale struggles during the 1980s, such as the mass strike in Poland in 1980 or the miners' strike in Britain in 1984-5.

In spite of the fact that the working class does not have the self-confidence it had in the 80s, the succession of wars since the 1991 Gulf War is a powerful factor in showing the complete bankruptcy of the capitalist system, as each becomes harder to justify behind a humanitarian smokescreen. This is giving rise to a very important process of reflection on the question of war among a tiny minority of the working class. But this process can only be interrupted by the constant stream of easy answers, false choices and activist stunts being advocated by the bourgeoisie's more left wing spokesmen. The notion that a strike isolated in one sector, drawn out into on-off 24 and 48 hour actions over months and months - and whether or not troops are used to cover for the striking firefighters - can substitute for a whole development of struggles and class consciousness, is just such an easy answer. This ideological misuse of the firefighters' struggle can only increase their isolation from the rest of the working class and demoralise those who fall for the campaign.

Alex, 5/4/03.

 “Whether or not you agree with this war, surely now our troops are involved we have to support them?”

In other words: the best way to support ‘our boys’ is to support them being used as cannon fodder in an imperialist war. Could there be a more idiotic argument than this?

And who, exactly, are ‘our boys’?

Although in the wake of the Vietnam experience the ruling classes of America and Britain are careful to use only professional soldiers for their military adventures, the majority of these troops are still economic conscripts, proletarians in uniform. The ‘us’ they belong to is therefore the working class. But the working class has no country. Therefore ‘our boys’ also include the Iraqi conscripts whom the US and British soldiers are being urged to slaughter.

And we  - communists who defend the internationalist traditions of the working class – don’t think our boys should be killing each other for the sake of their exploiters, for the imperialist interests of the UK, America, or Iraq.

On the contrary: faced with the slaughter, we insist on reaffirming these traditions. In particular, we can recall that in the first world war, the proletarians in uniform – supported by strikes and uprisings on the home front - began to turn against the horrors of the war and took their fate into their own hands. They fraternised with the ‘enemy’ troops, mutinied, formed soldiers’ councils and joined forces with the revolutionary workers. The ruling class was so terrified of the spectre of revolution it brought the war to a rapid end.

Today the bourgeoisie is very vigilant about snuffing out even the merest hint of rebellion against war, as it was at the end of the first Gulf conflict. In 1991, the uprising in Basra began when mutinous soldiers fired at posters of Saddam. It seems that, at the beginning, the revolt had a popular and spontaneous character. But it was soon crushed by a sinister alliance of bourgeois forces. Columns of fleeing Iraqi soldiers, who might have joined the rebellion, were obliterated by the US and British forces on the Basra-Baghdad road.

 Saddam, however, was allowed to keep his elite Republican Guards intact and they were used to put down the rebellion in blood. In the north Kurdish nationalist gangs, in the south the Iran-backed Shi’ite religious organisations, took control of the movement and tried to use it as a bargaining counter for their own petty imperialist claims. These claims would have led to the break-up of Iraq and this ran counter to US interests. So Saddam was permitted to stay in power as the sole guarantor of ‘order’.

Today both sides are even better equipped to put down any opposition. Saddam’s terror squads are implanted in all the cities and throughout the regular army, ready to deal with any reluctance to back the war-effort.  At the same time the arrogance of the Coalition does Saddam’s work for him by driving many Iraqis into the patriotic mind-trap. Besides, memories of the ‘betrayal’ of the 91 revolt are still very fresh in peoples’ minds, and they don’t want to be caught out again.

And if any anti-Saddam revolt does occur, the Coalition forces and their media are on hand to hitch it to their imperialist bandwagon. We have even seen them making up revolts that didn’t really happen.

And yet, there is dissent in the armed forces. A US marine faces jail rather than go and fight in Iraq. Three British soldiers are sent home for criticising the killing of civilians. Desertion from the Iraqi army increases. There is no imminent mass revolt in Iraq, no immediate prospect of fraternisation across the national divide. On the other hand, neither have the ruling classes of the warring regimes succeeded in totally brainwashing their foot-soldiers.

This is a small indication that the bourgeoisie may not always be able to do what it wants with its own troops. If the class war hots up in the centres of world capitalism, the workers will once again be able to ‘support’ our boys by showing them the road to revolution.

Amos, 1/4/03

At the end of March, the ICC held its 15th Congress. This was a particularly important meeting for our organisation, for two main reasons.

First, since the last Congress held in spring 2001, we have witnessed a major aggravation of the international situation, at the level of the economic crisis and above all at the level of imperialist tensions. More precisely, the Congress took place while war was raging in Iraq, and our organisation had the responsibility to make its analyses more precise in order to make the most appropriate intervention.

Secondly, this Congress took place after the ICC had been through the most dangerous crisis in its history. Even if this crisis has been overcome, it is vital for our organisation to draw the maximum number of lessons from the difficulties it has been through, to understand their origins and the way to confront them.

All the work and discussions at the Congress were animated by an awareness of the importance of these two questions, which are part of the two main responsibilities of any congress: to analyse the historic situation and to examine the activities which the organisation has to carry out within it.

The ICC analyses the current historic period as the final phase of the decadence of capitalism, the phase of the decomposition of bourgeois society. These historic conditions, as we shall see later on, determine the essential characteristics of the life of the bourgeoisie today. But in addition to this, they also weigh heavily on the proletariat and its revolutionary organisations.

It is within this framework that we examined not only the sharpening of imperialist tensions, but also the obstacles being met by the proletariat on its path towards decisive confrontations with capital, as well as by our own organisation. The analysis of the international situation

For certain organisations of the proletarian camp, notably the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, the organisational difficulties encountered by the ICC recently, like those in 1981 and in the early '90s, derive from its incapacity to develop an appropriate analysis of the current historical period. In particular, our concept of decomposition is seen as an expression of our 'idealism'.

It is true that theoretical and political clarity is an essential arm of any organisation that claims to be revolutionary. In particular, if it is not able to understand what's really at stake in the historic period in which it carries out its struggle, it risks being cast adrift by events, falling into disarray and in the end being swept away by history. It's also true that clarity is not something that can be decreed. It is the fruit of a will, of a combat to forge such arms. It demands that the new questions posed by the evolution of historical conditions be approached with a method, the marxist method. This was the concern which inspired the reports prepared for the Congress and the debates of the Congress itself. The Congress approached this challenge on the basis of the marxist vision of the decadence of capitalism and of its present phase of decomposition. The Congress recalled that this vision of decadence was not only that of the Third International, but is indeed at the very heart of the marxist vision. It was this framework and historical clarity that enabled the ICC to measure the gravity of the present situation, in which war is becoming an increasingly permanent factor.

More precisely the Congress had to examine the degree to which the ICC's analytical framework has been capable of accounting for the current situation. Following this discussion, the Congress decided that there was no question of putting this framework into question. The evolution of the current situation is in fact a full confirmation of the analyses the ICC adopted at the end of 1989, at the time of the collapse of the eastern bloc. The present events, such as the growing antagonism between the USA and its former allies that has manifested itself so openly in the recent crisis, the multiplication of military conflicts and the direct involvement within them of the world's leading power - which has made increasingly massive displays of its military power - all this was already foreseen in the theses which the ICC produced in 1989-90 (note 1) [167]. The ICC, at its Congress, reaffirmed that the present war in Iraq cannot be reduced, as certain sectors of the bourgeoisie would like us to believe (in order to minimise their real gravity), to a 'war for oil'. In this war, the control of oil is primarily a strategic rather than an economic objective for the American bourgeoisie. It is a means for blackmailing and pressuring the USA's principal rivals, the powerful states of Europe and Japan, and thus to countering their efforts to play their own game on the global imperialist chessboard. In fact, behind the idea that the current wars have a certain 'economic rationality' is a refusal to take into account the extreme gravity of the situation facing the capitalist system today. By underlining this gravity, the ICC has placed itself within the marxist approach, which doesn't give revolutionaries the task of consoling the working class. On the contrary it calls on revolutionaries to assist the proletariat to grasp the dangers which threaten humanity, and thus to understand the scale of its own responsibility.

And in the ICC's view, the necessity for revolutionaries to explain to the working class the profound seriousness of what's at stake today is all the more important when you take into account the difficulties the class is experiencing in finding the path of massive and conscious struggles against capitalism. This was thus another essential point in the discussion on the international situation: what is the basis today for affirming the confidence that marxism has always had in the capacity of the working class to overthrow capitalism and liberate humanity from the calamities into which it is now leading it? What confidence can we have in the working class facing up to its historic responsibilities?

The ICC has on numerous occasions argued that the decomposition of capitalist society exerts a negative weight on the consciousness of the proletariat (note 2) [168]. Similarly, since autumn of 1989, it has stressed that the collapse of the Stalinist regimes would provoke "new difficulties for the proletariat" (title of an article from International Review 60). Since then the evolution of the class struggle has only confirmed this prediction.

Faced with this situation, the Congress reaffirmed that the working class still retains all the potential to assume its historic responsibilities. It is true that it is still experiencing a major retreat in its consciousness, following the bourgeois campaigns that equate marxism and communism with Stalinism, and that establish a direct link between Lenin and Stalin. Similarly, the present situation is characterised by a marked loss of confidence by the workers in their strength and in their ability to wage even defensive struggles against the attacks coming from their exploiters, a situation which can lead to a serious loss of class identity. And it should be noted that this tendency to lose confidence in the class is also expressed among revolutionary organisations, particularly in the form of sudden outbursts of euphoria in response to movements like the one in Argentina at the end of 2001 (which has been presented as a formidable proletarian uprising when it was actually stuck in inter-classism). But a long term, materialist, historical vision teaches us, in Marx's words, that "it's not a question of considering what this or that proletarian, or even the proletariat as a whole, takes to be true today, but of considering what the proletariat is and what it will be led to do historically, in conformity with its being". Such an approach shows us that, faced with the blows of the capitalist crisis, which will give rise to more and more ferocious attacks on the working class, the latter will be forced to react and to develop its struggle.

This struggle, in the beginning, will be a series of skirmishes, which will announce an effort to move towards increasingly massive struggles. It is in this process that the class will once again recognise itself as an exploited class and rediscover its identity; and this in turn will act as a stimulus to its struggle. The same goes for war, which will tend to become a permanent phenomenon, each time uncovering a little more the very deep tensions between the major powers, and above all revealing the fact that capitalism is incapable of eradicating this scourge, that it is a growing menace for humanity. This will give rise to a profound reflection within the class. All these potentialities are contained in the present situation. It is vital for revolutionary organisations to be conscious of this and to develop an intervention which can bring this reflection to fruition. This intervention is particularly important with regard to the minority who are looking for political clarification in a whole number of countries.

But if they are to be up to their responsibilities, revolutionary organisations have to be able to cope not only with direct attacks from the ruling class, but also to resist the penetration into their own ranks of the ideological poison that the ruling class disseminates throughout society. In particular, they have to be able to fight the most damaging effects of decomposition, which not only affects the consciousness of the proletariat in general but also of revolutionary militants themselves, undermining their conviction and their will to carry on with revolutionary work. This is precisely what the ICC has had to face up to in the recent period and this is why the key discussion at this Congress was the necessity for the organisation to defend itself from the attacks facilitated by the decomposition of bourgeois ideology. The life and activities of the ICC

The Congress drew a positive balance-sheet of the activities of our organisation since the last Congress in 2001. Over the past two years, the ICC has shown that it is capable of defending itself against the most dangerous effects of decomposition, in particular the nihilistic tendencies which have seized hold of a certain number of militants who formed the 'Internal Fraction'. The ICC ahs been able to combat the attacks by these elements whose aim was clearly to destroy the organisation. Right from the start of its proceedings, the Congress, following on from the Extraordinary Conference of April 2002, was once again totally unanimous in ratifying the whole struggle against this camarilla, and in denouncing its provocative behaviour. It was fully convinced about the anti-proletarian nature of this regroupment. And it was no less unanimous in pronouncing the exclusion of the elements of the 'Fraction', which has crowned its activities against the ICC by publishing on its website information which can only play directly into the hands of the police - and by justifying these actions (note 3) [169]. These elements, although they refused to come to the Congress and present their defence in front of a commission specially nominated by the latter, have found nothing better to do in their bulletin no. 18 than to continue their campaigns of slander against the organisation. This has provided further proof that their concern is not at all to convince the militants of the organisation of the dangers posed to it by what they call a "liquidationist faction", but to discredit the ICC as much as possible, now that they have failed to destroy it.

How could these elements have developed, within the organisation, an activity which threatened to destroy it?

In approaching this question, the Congress highlighted a certain number of weaknesses, linked to the revival of the circle spirit and facilitated by the negative weight of social decomposition. An aspect of this negative weight is doubt in, and loss of confidence in, the working class: a tendency to see only its immediate weaknesses. Far from facilitating the party spirit, this attitude can only allow friendship links or confidence in particular individuals to substitute themselves for confidence in our principles of functioning. The elements who were to form the 'Internal Fraction' were a caricature of these deviations and this loss of confidence in the class. Their dynamic towards degeneration made use of these weaknesses, which weigh on all proletarian organisations today, and weigh all the more heavily in that the majority of these organisations have no awareness of them at all. These elements carried out their destructive activities with a level of violence never before seen in the ICC. The loss of confidence in the class, the weakening of their militant conviction, were accompanied by a loss of confidence in the organisation, in its principles, and by a total disdain for its statutes. This gangrene could have contaminated the whole organisation and sapped all confidence and solidarity in its ranks - and thus undermined its very foundations.

Without any fear, the Congress examined the opportunist weaknesses which enabled the clan that called itself the 'Internal Fraction' to become such a danger to the very life of the organisation. It was able to do so because the ICC will be strengthened by the combat that it has just waged.

Furthermore, it is because the ICC does struggle against any penetration of opportunism that it seems to have such a troubled life, that it has gone through so many crises. It is because it defended its statutes and the proletarian spirit that animates them without any concessions, that it was met with such anger by a minority which had fallen deep into opportunism on the organisation question. At this level, the ICC was carrying on the combat of the workers' movement which was waged by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in particular, who had many detractors who pointed to the many organisational struggles and crises they went through. In the same period, the German Social Democratic Party was much less agitated but the opportunist calm which reigned within it (challenged only by 'trouble-makers' on the left like Rosa Luxemburg) actually prefigure its treason in 1914. By contrast, the crises of the Bolshevik party helped it to develop the strength to lead the revolution in 1917.

But the discussion on activities didn't limit itself to dealing with the direct defence of the organisation against the attacks it has been subjected to. It insisted strongly on the necessity to develop its theoretical capacities, while recognising that the combat against these attacks had already stimulated its efforts in this direction. The balance-sheet of the last two years shows that there has been a process of theoretical enrichment, on such questions as the historical dimension of solidarity and confidence in the proletariat; on the danger of opportunism which menaces organisations who are unable to analyse a change of period; on the danger of democratism. And this concern for the struggle on the theoretical terrain, as Marx, Luxemburg, Lenin, or the militants of the Italian left and many other revolutionaries have taught us, is an integral part of the struggle against opportunism, which remains a deadly danger to communist organisations.

Finally, the Congress made an initial balance sheet of our intervention in the working class regarding the war in Iraq. It noted that the ICC had mobilised itself very well on this occasion: before the start of military operations, our sections sold a lot of publications at a number of demonstrations (when necessary producing supplements to the regular press) and engaging in political discussions with many elements who had not known our organisation previously. As soon as the war broke out, the ICC published an international leaflet translated into 13 languages (note 4) [170] which was distributed in 14 countries and more than 50 towns, particularly at factories and workplaces, and also posted on our internet site.

Thus this Congress was a moment that expressed the strengthening of our organisation. The ICC affirms with conviction the combat it has been waging and which it will continue to wage - the combat for its own defence, for the construction of the basis of the future party, and for the development of its capacity to intervene in the historical movement of the class. It has no doubt that it is a link in the chain of organisations that connect the workers' movement of the past to that of the future.

ICC, April 2003.

(1) See in particular 'Theses on the economic and political crisis in the USSR and the countries of the East' (International Review 60), written two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and 'Militarism and Decomposition', dated 4 October 1990 and published in IR 64. Back [171]

(2) See in particular 'Decomposition, final phase of capitalist decadence', points 13 and 14, IR 62.Back [172]

(3) See on this point The police-like methods of the IFICC [173] in WR 262. Back [174]

(4) The languages of our regular territorial publications plus Portuguese, Russian, Hindi, Bengali, Farsi and Korean. Back [175]

The euphoria of victory didn't last very long. The images of happy crowds lining the streets to greet their British and American 'liberators' are already a distant memory. Since the fall of Baghdad we have seen enormous Shiite demonstrations chanting slogans like 'No to Saddam, No to Bush - Yes to Islam' and calling for an Islamic state. In Mosul, within the space of two days in late April, American troops fired on two marches of Iraqi civilians demanding that the Americans pull out. Nearly 20 people were killed and many more injured. This will add to a death toll from the war which will certainly run into thousands, especially when we include the as yet unknown numbers of conscripts obliterated by the carpet bombing of Iraqi military positions. The collapse of the Saddam regime resulted in widespread looting in which much of Iraq's priceless archaeological heritage was stolen or destroyed. To restore order, the occupying armies have had to recall Saddam's old police force, or allow local clerics and their newly formed militia to come to the fore. The USA's attempts to fabricate some kind of 'interim government' are coming against all the political, ethnic and religious divisions which have always existed in Iraqi society and which were only kept underground by Saddam's reign of terror. Meanwhile the hospitals are still completely incapable of coping with the masses of horrific injuries caused by the coalition's bombardments, and large parts of the population have been without decent drinking water for weeks, exposing them to the risk of epidemics which would only further reveal the breakdown of health services throughout the country.

In short: the inevitable military victory of the US over Saddam's crumbling regime has not brought liberation but chaos and misery to the population of Iraq. But then liberating the Iraqis from Saddam's tyranny was never the aim.

Let's remember that the overthrow of Saddam was not even the official aim of this war. The principal argument was that Saddam was a threat to world peace because he possessed weapons of mass destruction. This was always a ridiculous piece of hypocrisy, not just because the US and Britain had been among those who had supplied his armies in the first place, but also because no one in the world has made wider or more devastating use of weapons of mass destruction than the US and Britain. The war confirmed this once again: no one can match the US for firepower. And this was without doubt one of the real motivations of the war. Like Saddam in Iraq, US imperialism can only respond to the powerful centrifugal forces that threaten its 'world leadership' by making ever greater shows of force. After the international diplomatic crisis that preceded this war, it has now become evident that these centrifugal forces are made up first and foremost of the USA's main imperialist rivals: Germany, France, Russia and China.

Saddam's weapons of mass destruction were only a pretext. In fact one of the reasons he was attacked was precisely because he was a paper tiger and could offer no serious resistance to a US invasion. Even if the occupying armies do finally discover a few canisters of chemical or biological weapons, the outcome of the war showed that Saddam had no capacity to use them. As in 1991, Saddam was the whipping boy: the real targets were the USA's main challengers to global domination.

And this is why Bush's claim that the world would be a more peaceful place once Saddam had gone is the biggest lie of all. Having conquered Iraq, US imperialism has tightened its military control over the strategically vital Middle east, enabling it to turn off oil supplies to its rivals should they present a more serious challenge to its rule. It is already making threatening noises to other states in the region, such as Syria and Iran, and to those further afield, such as Cuba and North Korea. In other words, it has every intention of continuing the 'war against terrorism' which is the euphemism for a permanent military offensive on the scale of the entire planet. This is not at all contradicted by Bush's talk of a 'road map to peace' between Israel and Palestine. Any US-brokered peace will ensure Israel's complete military superiority in the region, and - like the 'victory' in Iraq - only serve to fuel new resentments and hostility. The latest round of suicide bombings and Israeli counter-raids indicate where the road map is really leading.

As for the 'anti-war' states, who kept a pragmatic silence while the war was raging, they are quite well aware that the US is gunning for them and will be doing all they can to put their spokes in the wheel of the USA's military juggernaut. This is why Putin has been arguing, somewhat ironically, that UN sanctions against Iraq can't be lifted until the WMD issue has been settled, and why Chirac has been insisting that the UN play a much bigger role in the reconstruction of Iraq. America, for its part, has argued that Iraq should be forgiven its debts overwhelmingly owed, by spectacular coincidence, to France, Russia and Germany. Unable to challenge the US openly at the military level, its rivals are reduced to diplomatic games to advance their imperialist interests. But as their actions in Africa, Palestine, and the Balkans demonstrate, they are no less capable of playing a covert role in military conflicts, arming and inciting factions and states which are opposing the USA's own pawns. The seeds are being sown for new wars and the continuation of existing wars.

The twentieth century was a century of ceaseless war and barbarism. The twentieth century has already begun in the same vein. This is not because governments have the wrong leaders or the wrong policies, but because capitalism as a social system has reached a historic dead-end and compels all states to join in an imperialist dance of death. Calls for peace and respect for international law, even when raised by millions in the streets, cannot make capitalism go in another direction. On the contrary, they serve only to divert a real struggle against the war drive. Capitalist war can only be eliminated by eliminating capitalism; and that can only come about through the development of class struggle in all countries.

WR, 3/5/03.

Now that the butchery and destruction of the US military intervention in Iraq has been declared officially over, it is time to make a brief balance sheet of the various claims made in Britain to provide a political alternative to imperialist war. We won't bother here with the huge marches against the war in Iraq, organised by the Stop the War Coalition that was supported by leftists of all descriptions as well by the Labour Left, the Muslim Association of Britain, the Daily Mirror and others. They not only did not prevent the war taking place but also gave it a green light. By mobilising millions behind the illusion that a peaceful imperialism was possible they proved to the executive organs of the state that there was no effective counter force to the imperialist juggernaut.

Instead, we will make a short report of those meagre forces that tried to base themselves on a working class perspective, realising that the only alternative to imperialist war is not an illusory peaceful capitalism but the violent overthrow of capitalism itself. No War but the Class War - London

The story of the group with this radical sounding name is essentially a tale of two cities, London and Sheffield.

The NW group in London was formed in the wake of the war in Afghanistan. In a leaflet given out toward the end of 2001 [1], it declared that the official pacifist or leftist opposition to war was a fraud, that capitalism as a whole was responsible for war, and that therefore a class alternative was required, and called for meetings to gather like-minded individuals. But beyond this apparently promising beginning, this group had no other reference points, and admitted that "it didn't have all the answers". In particular its response to the following questions would remain unclear: what is a class movement against war, what form should it take? Was such a movement possible at the present time with the present balance of class forces? What role should NW play: was it itself the class movement, was it a discussion forum for all the contradictory forces that were not taken in by official pacifism, or a political group with a definite programme? What relationship should it have to the existing internationalist groups of the communist left?

Unable to make the clarification of these issues the group's central concern, the conflicting tendencies within the group were destined to go in different directions. Within the group there were all kinds of approaches: activist tendencies who thought that the role of its meetings were to organise stunts of direct action, and others who were more in favour of discussion but in the form of 'workshops' rather than plenary debates, parasitic elements who were motivated by hostility to the presence of groups of the communist left, etc. The ICC, which regularly attended its meetings, far from trying to 'take the group over' as some have implied, argued for an open confrontation of political differences.

Towards the end of 2002, while the new Gulf War was still brewing, the group, or perhaps just the activist part of it, evolved, without explanation, into another one called 'Disobedience'. At the same time the clique-like tendencies of the rest of the group became predominant and the communist left as well as the Sheffield NW group were effectively excluded when the details of the London group meetings became a secret! So much for the NW claims that: "we reject hierarchy, and we strive to reach decisions by consensus" [2]. From now on the 'class war' in London was to be waged behind closed doors.

The London NW thought they could be a political group without a programme or statutes, a discussion circle without being open to discussion, and a mass movement without any class support. After initially presenting itself as a reference point for those searching for class positions, NW ended up as a black hole of confusion and dispersal, at worst a radical appendage of the Stop the War coalition. What is a class opposition to the war?

Although the London NW adopted the word 'class', it used this word rather like the erstwhile anarchist group 'Class War' and other so-called class struggle anarchists. For them the working class is not defined by objective historical economic and political interests, but subjectively, as a collection of individual rebels who become a 'class' movement essentially by an effort of will. In a leaflet handed out to a Disobedience 'Anti-War Day School' [3] NW presented its vision of 'class opposition to the war':

"War is part of the capitalist social relation. We 'make' war, just as we reproduce the rest of society through our work and the reproduction of our social relations through our daily compliance in all spheres of life. Going to work. Giving over money for the goods we buy. Turning up for detention at school. We make the munitions. We make the bomber planes, etc.

What is really needed is not so much an 'anti-war' movement against this or that particular show massacre the telly happens to be flaunting at us to terrorise us but a subjective revolt against the social conditions in which we are living. This undermines the warmongering economy."

Isn't this a variation on the old anarchist idea that the working class is responsible for capitalism and war because in normal circumstances it conforms to the daily requirements of the 'social relation'? According to this 'theory' all the working class has to do is to refuse the demands of capitalism and the war machine and hey presto, a class opposition is born.

However capitalist relations of production exist independently of the will of individuals, and have shown themselves resilient to many of the mightiest class movements in history, let alone the episodic nuisances of individual acts of rebellion and sabotage. Only the seizure of political power by the working class on a world scale can begin to destroy capitalist relations of production and the imperialist war they engender. Only the very real threat of the extension of the Russian Revolution to Germany in 1918 obliged the two imperialist camps to sign the armistice that ended the First World War. This only temporarily delayed the imperialist appetites of the great powers. With the defeat of the revolutionary wave, the counter-revolution in Russia left the way clear for the build up to a new world slaughter.

In the end the NW equation of 'subjective revolt' with 'class opposition to war', has the same ideological basis as official pacifism even if it uses a more radical language. If you think that war can be 'undermined' within capitalism by a collection of individuals refusing the 'social relation' of war then Not in My Name would be a more accurate name than No War but the Class War.

With 'subjective revolt' as the main criterion it's only a short step to seeing a revolutionary class movement - workers' councils even - in the uprising in the South of Iraq after the first Gulf War, which was dominated by reactionary Shiite nationalism, or a proletarian insurrection in the Kurdish nationalist movement in the North. The 'Disobedience against war' broadsheet for the February 15th 2003 demonstration was not afraid to take that step. No War but the Class War - Sheffield

In Sheffield, a NW group was formed in the summer of 2002 on a decidedly clearer basis than the one in London. Not surprisingly, as the group was influenced by the Communist Workers Organisation, a group of the communist left, and agreed to 7 points [4]. In the presentation to the inaugural meeting, in contrast to the confusion mentioned above in London, the essential parameters of the working class struggle and imperialist war were outlined, and the differences with leftist and nationalist forces were delineated. The objective basis of the revolutionary struggle of the working class and its solution to the problem of war is clarified:

"There is only one class which can overthrow [the capitalist system which leads to barbarism and war] and that is the working class however much it has been written off (and it has been written off many times before even by so-called socialists from Bernstein, through Marcuse to Gorz) it is the one global class that is collectively exploited by capitalism. Its struggles alone tend toward a collectivist solution for humanity's problems."

On this basis it is shown that the proletarian movement, as in the case of the left of the Zimmerwald movement during the 1st World War, "called not for an end to war, not for a 'just peace' as the majority at these conferences did but for it to be turned into a civil war to overthrow the system that is behind the war." [5]

Nevertheless, despite this marxist clarity against the ideas of 'subjective revolt' and the idea of 'opposition' to war in itself, found in the London group, Sheffield made some serious errors. It completely overestimated the present capacity of the working class to hinder the war in Iraq, and connected to this, imagined that NW itself could ride on the crest of this proletarian wave. At the same time, as in London, the nature, role and function of the group itself was ambiguous. According to the CWO, defending the orientation of the Sheffield group:

"Operating in Britain, we are currently in a position marked by two main factors.

Firstly, there is a reactionary 'popular front' - type movement capable of mobilising hundreds of thousands of non-class conscious workers who subjectively have identified with a task of stopping 'their' government's drive to war.

Secondly we are witnessing a significant upturn in strike action, including firefighters, rail workers and actions beyond the Unions in transport and hospitals in Strathclyde.

'No War But the Class War' gives us the potential to work across the country with those forces who see a connection between the two and wish to link class struggle with resistance to imperialist war. This is no easy task with forces being geographically scattered and emerging from a range of political perspectives.

We believe that in the last months of 2001 the London NWBtCW group was positioned to stand at the organisational centre of that process. Under the influence of K the rump group has turned their backs on that task." [6]

While the Sheffield group could see that the mobilisations against the war in Iraq were on a reactionary footing, it nevertheless imagined that by linking them to the current strikes, they could be turned into a class mobilisation against imperialist war with NW, no less, at the controls.

But none of the elements of this equation added up.

Workers who have been demobilised, even in their millions, by pacifist marches, cannot in the same period be mobilised on a class basis. For all their appearance of combativity, these marches were a sign of the domination of capitalist ideology over the working class, the victory of nationalism, democracy and human rights over class consciousness. Workers' actions in the recent period, notably the firefighters' strikes, have been significant for their disorientation and dispersal, factors that permitted government and unions to use the strikes as an opportunity to further attack conditions of work and threaten redundancies.

These two elements of the situation added together, far from pointing to class combustion, or providing an obstacle to the war preparations, expressed in a complementary way the working classes' difficulty to react to the development of imperialist tensions as a whole.

While it is true that the activities of parasites in the London group - like the 'K' that the CWO refer to - certainly contributed to its debacle, and prevented it from being an open discussion group, it was not this factor, or its general political confusion, which mainly prevented London NW from being 'at the organisational centre' of a mass class movement against the war. It was because this movement couldn't exist in the present situation, and those with internationalist class positions were destined to remain in a tiny minority.

The Sheffield group was inevitably headed for disappointment. The reactionary themes of the 28 September 2002 demonstration - Palestinian nationalism for example - completely drowned out the internationalist class slogans which NW mistakenly thought should be shouted within the ranks of the march itself and could have a significant influence on it. The working class 'upturn' failed to materialise.

Disillusionment could only increase as the war approached and the isolation of internationalist forces from the 'anti-war movement' became clearer. Intervention of the ICC

For all its supposed idealism, the ICC kept its feet on the ground when it judged the potential of the working class struggle in the context of the build up to war in Iraq. Our belief in a historically favourable balance of class forces - the working class is still a barrier to the generalisation of imperialist war amongst the major powers - doesn't mean that the working class has the immediate potential to physically stop each conflict, or hold back the tendencies to increasing militarism. It is still a latent threat that prevents the bourgeoisie from taking their mutual antagonisms to the ultimate stage, with all the draconian measures that this implies. Confidence in the historic capacities of the working class is vital in order to maintain a sober view of the immediate, day-to-day possibilities of the class struggle, which the bourgeoisie exaggerates or obscures according to its own agenda. At present the working class is going through a long period of disorientation that began at the beginning of the nineties with the collapse of the eastern bloc.

Nevertheless the historic possibilities of the proletarian movement, coupled with the growing seriousness of the world situation, are presently giving rise to small numbers of people looking seriously for revolutionary answers.

This is why we never thought that the NW was a harbinger of a resurgence of class struggle or a definite class political movement that we had 'joined'. It could at most be a reference point for a very small minority that were asking questions about capitalist militarism and the elitist and pacifist frauds that accompany it. And this was why we defended its -albeit limited - class positions against the reactionary attacks of leftists like 'Workers Power' [7] and insisted from the beginning on the importance of the group as a forum for discussion and warned against both the tendencies to 'direct action' and to closing the group to revolutionary organisations.

"the ICC has more than once emphasised the need to discuss the most basic question posed by the war: what is meant by a class response to war in this period. To us it appears that this is almost taken for granted, but it would be extremely dangerous to do so.

There are times when decisive action is required and further discussion becomes a hindrance. But there are also times when the priority of the moment is to reflect, to understand, to analyse, to clarify." [8]

And at the same time we argued that the Midlands Discussion Group should not abandon its role of theoretical research and debate in order to follow the confused NW 'model'.

Its true that we ourselves overestimated the capacity of NW to intervene in the situation when we suggested that NW hold a counter-meeting at the end of the big pacifist marches in order to attract a wider audience; this expressed a certain underestimation of the hold of pacifist and democratic ideology on the demonstrators.

Our general prudence toward the possibility of a class movement against the war did not however mean that the ICC became 'monastic'. On the contrary the ICC has been the most prominent communist left organisation defending internationalist class positions against the stream of the huge anti-war protests not just in Britain, but across Europe, in Australia and the United States, both through public meetings, its territorial newspapers and the International Review and through an international leaflet that was distributed immediately the war on Iraq began.

There is nothing triumphalist in this still modest class intervention. On the contrary the whole communist left - what we call the proletarian political milieu - is doing less than it could and should be doing. It should have carried out a joint intervention toward the class on the basis of its commonly held internationalist positions. Once again the other internationalist groups rejected the appeal of the ICC for such a common stand [9]. Yet such an affirmation of basic unity today would be profoundly important for the long term development of proletarian consciousness and struggle.

In the shorter term, given the confusion and waste of energies represented by the No War but the Class War experience over the recent period, a more cohesive presence of the communist left is all the more vital as a reference point for those questioning imperialist war.

Como, 3/5/03.

1. Reproduced in Revolutionary Perspectives 27, Quarterly magazine of the Communist Workers Organisation, page 10.

2. Idem. Although the London NW had gone through a similar fiasco in 1999 after the Kosovo War when its predecessor voted to exclude the ICC, we considered that the rebirth of the group in 2001 could still provide a forum for revolutionary debate. See WR 228, Political parasitism sabotages the discussion, October 1999.

3. WR 261, Revolutionaries and the struggle against war [176], February 2003.

4. "1) The creation of other groups in other cities. 2) Ultimately we would like to see this coordination become International and internationalist by reaching other countries. 3) these groups to be active locally in opposing STW and the Socialist Alliance and any other left manifestation that sporadically claims the title of revolutionary. 4) These groups also to take on the anti-globalisation movement and draw those in it toward class politics. 5) These groups also engage in discussion and debate to deepen our understanding of where we stand in the process of change and how we can then help to create the conditions to bring it about. 6) These groups would organise discussions between different tendencies as a part of our ongoing activity. 7) NWBTCW doesn't limit its activity to theoretical discussion or mobilising for demonstrations but actively works to take its message into every area where workers collectively congregate." Revolutionary Perspectives 26.

5. Idem.

6. Revolutionary Perspectives 27.

7. WR 250, Workers Power attacks No War But The Class War [177], December/January 2001/2.

8. WR 249, NWBTCW - The priority of political discussion [178], November 2001.

9. See International Review 113, 2nd Quarter 2003.

SARS is thought to have jumped species in a poverty-stricken area of South East China where people live crowded together with their animals in conditions reminiscent of the Middle Ages. This is not unique to SARS but is at the origin of many of the most serious flu epidemics world wide.

Capitalism had brought this area, like the rest of the world, under the domination of its world market by the beginning of the 20th Century. In fact Britain, in its 19th century colonial heyday, fought a holy war for the right to trade freely in China selling opium. Yet capitalism in its decadence has been unable to develop industry or modernise farming in the area, since there are no new markets to absorb the increased produce that would result. And so the conditions for the development of new diseases such as SARS continue to exist. The success of the world market in decadence lies not in preventing the emergence of the disease, but in providing the means for its spread across the globe.

So far SARS has caused 280 deaths from about 4,500 cases worldwide, the majority of them in China (The Times 26 April). Modern air travel means that it has spread to every continent in a matter of weeks. With most of the old fever hospitals closed and demolished, whole hospitals have been quarantined and in China the May Day holiday cancelled to prevent travellers spreading the disease.

Capitalism's advanced decay has created the conditions both for the increase of old diseases, such as TB, and the emergence of new ones like AIDS. Whether through the perpetuation of avoidable poverty, through wars such as the one in Iraq which has disrupted the country's hospitals and water supply, or through increasing ecological disasters, this is a social system which has developed the scientific and technological means of eradicating epidemics, while at the same time producing and extending them faster than it can cure them. In this sense SARS is further evidence that capitalism is rotting on its feet. The campaign of panic

SARS is therefore a real danger, particularly when it hits impoverished populations who lack access to decent medical care. But the ruling class is always ready to use the symptoms of capitalist decomposition to its own advantage. And it has to be said that the bourgeois state and its media are deliberately creating a climate of panic and fear about the SARS virus.

For decades the ruling class has done all it can to eradicate all sense of working class solidarity, making everyone see himself as an atomised individual, dependent on the state. Since 1989 this has been intensified with many campaigns to encourage fear in the population, to make everyone feel that only the state can protect them from child criminals, paedophiles, 'bogus' asylum seekers - and now travellers entering the country who might be carrying SARS. Thus media has raised a 'debate' around the issue of whether or not everyone coming from certain areas of the world ought to be quarantined. This when in the whole of Western Europe there have been 29 cases, of whom 21 have recovered, and no deaths. As always our very 'anti-racist' state is quite happy to use xenophobia, in this case fear of Asian travellers.

The effect of this campaign of fear on working class consciousness cannot be assessed in isolation from the general effect of the whole series of similar campaigns. Nevertheless it has had its impact in small mean ways, such as the panic that broke out among guests at a Blackpool hotel when it was discovered that 15 children from a boarding school were being quarantined there, isolated in a separate wing. The children were subsequently moved to a secret location.

Like any new disease SARS poses the need for careful public health information and research work to bring it under control and prevent its spread. It is the ruling class of decomposing capitalism that needs the climate of fear and panic: to make us feel we rely on the state for protection, and to make us forget the much greater threats that we face today. In terms of disease, heart attacks, HIV, TB and others are likely to claim many more lives than SARS, even in China. But in any case, all these diseases are preventable because at root they are not a medical problem but a social problem. Capitalism in decay, with its train of economic crisis, war and chaos, is the real threat to human health, and the only surgery that can cure this problem is the proletarian revolution.

Alex, 3/5/03.

This short pamphlet, now available on the IBRP's website, aims to debunk the myths peddled by today's Trotskyists about the 'revolutionary' nature of their movement.

Trotskyism is in a state of disarray but retains influence, due in no small part to the status of Trotsky himself as the most important of the Bolshevik leaders of the Russian revolution to oppose Stalin. The CWO's pamphlet includes a lengthy section examining the positions defended by Trotsky and Trotskyism in the 1920s and 30s, contrasting their weaknesses and confusions to the much clearer contemporary struggle of the international communist left. It should therefore be welcomed as a useful propaganda weapon for groups of the communist left today.

Significantly, the pamphlet has attracted the attention of the Trotskyist journal Revolutionary History (Vol. 8, no 1). This 'serious', supposedly non-sectarian publication usually prefers to observe a studious silence on the communist left's historical role and contribution, but it does its best in a vitriolic review to rubbish the CWO's critique. But this serves only to highlight the irreversible distance Trotskyism has travelled from proletarian political positions: the Italian communist left, for example, is ridiculed for its denunciation of the social democratic parties as bourgeois, even though this is precisely the original position defended by the Third International, as expressed by one Leon Trotsky in its 1919 Manifesto�

Needless to say, my own criticisms have nothing to do with this reactionary attack. Along with the ICC I share the same basic position as the CWO on the bourgeois nature of Trotskyism due to its definitive betrayal by supporting the second world war. The problem is that the approach taken by the CWO's pamphlet gives the strong impression that there was nothing proletarian about Trotsky or the Trotskyist movement even in the 1920s, and throws into question all the oppositions that emerged from the Bolshevik Party up to the end of the 1920s.

The tone is set right at the start with the statement that, until he was forced out of power in the mid-20s, Trotsky's role was that of a "faction leader within the Russian party and state'" Even though he was admittedly never a "conscious agent of imperialism", the CWO calls him one of the "principal architects of the degeneration of the Russian revolution", whose rejection of the Stalinist policy of 'socialism in one country' was based not on internationalism but the "capitalist interests of the Russian state", etc., etc.

This attitude is strongly reminiscent of the libertarian and councilist milieu of the 1970s, which was marked by a strong reluctance to admit that Trotsky belonged to the revolutionary movement. We should recall the arguments that the Bolshevik Party could not be considered proletarian after 1921 - in its early days the CWO pronounced this to be a 'class line' (see IR 101). The ICC rightly challenged this at the time as sectarian, but it was symptomatic of the immaturity of the whole milieu; the ICC's earliest studies of the communist left in Russia (IR 7 & 8), although basically correct, reveal in their reluctant acceptance of the proletarian nature of the Bolshevik Party after 1921 and of the political current around Trotsky, the lingering influence of councilism which dogged the re-emergence of revolutionary minorities.

To be absolutely clear: the movement around Trotsky passed irrevocably into the enemy camp through its support for Stalinism and democracy in the second imperialist world war, but for all his opportunist slidings, Trotsky himself died a proletarian revolutionary. The ICC has explicitly recognised this in the article in IR 104 entitled 'Trotsky died as a symbol for the working class', and in a recent series of articles which addresses in a more profound way the strengths and weaknesses of his contribution to the struggle against the Stalinist counter-revolution (see IRs 101, 102 and 105).

The issue here is not just Trotsky or Trotskyism but how we understand the struggle of the proletarian currents within the Bolshevik Party against the attempts of the counter-revolution to capture it completely. Rather surprisingly, the CWO dismisses all of what it calls the 'Communist Party Oppositions' which, because they "had their roots in the bureaucracy", could "never challenge its social basis". Thus, it writes off the Left Opposition of 1923 and the United Opposition of 1927, both of which were allegedly products of the bureaucracy and defended anti-working class positions - even though they included elements of the non-Trotskyist Russian communist left.

We refer readers to IRs 101 and 102 for a more in-depth treatment of the weaknesses of these oppositions, but we argue that they can only be understood as a basic proletarian reaction to the degeneration of the Russian revolution. To take just one example: the signatories of the 'Platform of the 46', which formed the political basis of the Left Opposition, included elements of the left communist Democratic Centralist group like Sapranov, V Smirnov and Ossinski. The United Opposition similarly included (at least for a time) the 'Decists' - indeed according to Trotsky himself, it was formed at their initiative, Sapranov chairing its first conference (see IR 102, p18).

The strength of the Russian left communist oppositions like the Sapranov group was precisely that they emerged from within the Communist Party itself; they were expressions of the proletarian life still left in the party, and up until their final suppression at the end of the 20s refused to abandon it to the Stalinist bureaucracy. We don't seriously think the CWO means to dismiss the Russian left communists who, as it affirms, took up the struggle against the degenerating Soviet state far earlier and more thoroughly than Trotsky or the political current he animated. In fact the CWO commits itself to redressing the "airbrushing from history" of their valiant struggle by both Stalinists and Trotskyists.

But clearly this is not just a matter of the need for historical research; it's about the basic framework communists use to determine the precise class nature of political organisations. The approach of the Italian Left - with whom both the CWO and the ICC claim political continuity - was always one of patience and rigour, avoiding hasty judgements on such questions. The reader of the CWO's denunciation of Trotsky is left wondering why, if he was merely a "faction leader of the Russian party and state", the Italian Left ever put so much political effort into trying to collaborate with him in the first place; even after their definitive political break with Trotsky in 1934, when he and his supporters "crossed the Rubicon and rejoined social democracy" (Bilan no. 11, September 1934), the Italian Left did not, as the pamphlet suggests, simply denounce his movement as bourgeois, and continued to expose its opportunist betrayals through support for one side against the other in the lead up to the second imperialist world war.

We have to ask: does this pamphlet - which first appeared over two years ago - reflect the position of the CWO (and by extension the IBRP to which it is formally affiliated) on the class nature of Trotsky, Trotskyism and all the "Communist Party Oppositions" of the 1920s and 30s, or is this a case of polemical excess getting the better of clarity, reflecting the residual influence of councilism on today's revolutionary movement?

MH, May 2003.

IBRP website: www.ibrp.org [179]

Write to:CWO, PO Box 338, Sheffield, S3 9YX

This article is by a close sympathiser of the ICC. We encourage all our readers to make political contributions to our press, whether in the form of articles, letters or items of information.

May, 2003.

On 28 August last year, as America tried to build international support for its impending war against Iraq, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld compared President Bush's international isolation over plans to attack Iraq with the lonely stand taken by Winston Churchill before the Second World War. In the face of appeasers and doubters at home and abroad, he told 3,000 assembled US marines, Winston Churchill realised what a threat Hitler posed to Europe. Similarly, he added, President Bush knew that "leadership in the right direction finds followers and supporters."

The comparison tells us more than Rumsfeld intends. Leaving aside the fact that support for World War II is totally reactionary, Rumsfeld's comparison is not completely inaccurate. For, under the administration of Secretary of State for War Winston Churchill, Britain invented the technique of terror bombing of defenceless civilians that has been a feature of most wars ever since. In 1920s Iraq Britain bombed Kurds and Arabs when they rebelled against Britain's attempts to assert control over them. So, it is indeed accurate to compare G. W. Bush and Winston Churchill - but also Adolf Hitler - to each other.

Britain occupied the vilayets (districts) of Baghdad and Basra during World War I. Following the Armistice, Britain occupied Iraqi Kurdistan, beginning with the city and vilayet of Mosul, during November-December 1918. This latter occupation violated an agreement with the Ottomans, the Mudros Treaty, but Britain knew that "the defeated Turks had no option" (Nader Entessar, Kurdish Ethnonationalism, p. 50). British forces also occupied the Kurdish cities of Kirkuk and Suleymaniya. On 1 May 1920 Britain assumed the League of Nations Mandate (protectorate) of Iraq under the Treaty of San Remo and immediately established a Provisional Government in Baghdad. In August 1921 Britain installed a leading member of Arabia's Hashemite dynasty as the King of Iraq. As an outsider, King Faisal I would always be ultimately dependent upon his 'sponsor' for support. Of course, the Hashemites had already proven their pro-British credentials by providing fighters for T. E. Lawrence's Arab revolt against the Ottomans in Arabia.

Basing itself on lessons learnt in its Indian colonial possession as well as its wartime experience in Iranian Kurdistan, Britain cast around for pliable Kurdish figures whom it could appoint to positions of authority, focusing especially on tribal leaders - even going to the extent of 're-tribalising':

"Every man who could be labeled a tribesman was placed under a tribal leader. The idea was to divide South Kurdistan [Iraqi Kurdistan] into tribal areas under a tribal leader. Petty village headmen were unearthed and discovered as leaders of long dead tribes" (Major E. B. Soane, British Political Officer, 1919, cited in David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, p. 120-21).

For all its talk of its 'civilising mission' to non-Christian and non-white peoples, therefore, Britain was deliberately attempting to turn back the clock of social development, in the naked pursuit of its own capitalist interests. Arnold Wilson, the British Acting Civil Commissioner in Baghdad at the time, explains:

"The whole basis of our action as regards Kurds should be in my opinion the assurance of a satisfactory boundary to Mesopotamia. Such a boundary cannot possibly be secured, I imagine, in the plains, but must be found in the Kurdish mountains � [and that] entails a tribal policy" (cited in McDowall, op. cit., pp. 120-21).

Britain appointed Kurdish chieftains to all manner of positions, including one Sheikh Mahmud Barzinji as the Governor of Suleymaniya division - the only area to have a Kurdish administrator. But when its Kurdish appointees proved incapable of following imperial orders, the policy of Kurdish autonomy was simply dropped by Britain. C. J. Edmonds, a British political officer in the region, states that Britain soon became convinced that Iraq would never be viable without its Kurdish component:

"We were now engaged upon what was for Iraq a life and death struggle of which none of us had any doubt, for we were convinced that Basra and Baghdad without Mosul could, for economic and strategic reasons, never be built up into a viable state" (C. J. Edmonds, Kurds, Turks and Arabs, p. 398). Britain's strategic interests

Britain was committed above all to a stable Iraq, as a bulwark against Turkish, Russian and other interests in the region. Financially stretched by the recent World War, Britain was in no shape to pursue new complicated - and expensive - adventures in the fastnesses of Kurdistan. Consequently, it now dropped its policy of support for Kurdish self-rule. When Britain's strategic interests demanded it, therefore, the Kurds were portrayed as almost inherently incapable of ruling themselves. A British Memorandum to the League of Nations asserted:

"The Kurds of Iraq are entirely lacking in those characteristics of political cohesion which are essential to self-government. Their organisation and outlook are essentially tribal. They are without traditions of self-government or self-governing institutions. Their mode of life is primitive, and for the most part they are illiterate and untutored, resentful of authority and lacking in a sense of discipline or responsibility".

Iraq was a viper's nest of mutually hostile warlords and competing ethnic (Kurds, Turkmen, Assyrians, Arabs) and sectarian (Sunnis, Shi'ite and others) factions. When Kurds in the region bordering on Anatolia murdered a British Political Officer in April 1919, British imperialism retaliated massively. "The British despatched a full division" to Sulaymaniya (Entessar, op. cit., p. 50), then:

"resorted to aerial bombardment, a technique it began to use as a standard tactic to economise on troop deployment. It had the advantage of instant effect and economy of cost" (McDowall, op. cit., pp. 154-55).

As revolts against the British occupiers multiplied, so too did British retaliation. The most serious opposition came from Sheikh Mahmud, who declared the formation of a Kurdish state and engaged in fierce fighting with British forces in the region from 3 May 1919, then declared himself Ruler of all Kurdistan, before being captured and exiled in mid-June. The Political Officer in Amadia and his assistants were killed in November 1919. Soane now "returned to administer Suleymaniya with a rod of iron" (McDowall, op. cit., p. 158).

In 1920 the whole of Iraq was engulfed in a variety of anti-British uprisings. The year began with a new Kurdish uprising by the Surchi clan. The British now found a new use for Sheikh Mahmud. By August 1920, they were confronted with an increasingly alarming situation, as not just one Kurdish region after another rose in revolt, but soon also large swathes of southern (Shi'ite Arab) Iraq. Meanwhile, Britain, fearful that Kurdistan, especially Mosul, might fall to the Turks, was compelled to return Sheikh Mahmud from exile in October 1922 and to re-appoint him the Governor of Suleymaniya.

When Sheikh Mahmud was re-installed in Suleymaniya, the British declared that they would "recognise the rights of the Kurds living within the boundaries of Iraq to set up a Kurdish Government" (cited in Sa'ad Jawad, Iraq & the Kurdish Question: 1958-1970, p. 8). Sheikh Mahmud seized this opportunity with both hands, declaring the formation of a Kurdish state with Suleymaniya as its capital. On 18 November 1922, he announced himself to be the 'King of Kurdistan'. Entessar (op. cit., p. 53) notes:

"Kurdish disenchantment with Iraqi rule led to renewed uprisings in Sulaymanieh [Suleymaniya] under Sheikh Mahmoud's leadership. In the winter of 1927, an Iraqi expeditionary force supported by British firepower was sent to Sulaymanieh�" The RAF takes over

Overall responsibility for the problem was progressively handed over to the RAF from August 1921. By October 1922 the RAF had principal responsibility for the war, with British ground forces being reduced. In a single aerial sortie, Suleymaniya was bombarded in mid-May 1922, causing the town's 7,000 residents to evacuate the town for the remainder of the conflict. In fact, armed confrontations between Kurdish and Arab nationalists and British imperialism continued until the early 1930s.

Geoff Simons (Iraq: From Sumer to Saddam, London, St. Martins Press, 1994, pp. 179-81) tells the story of British imperialism's capitalist barbarism against the Kurds and Iraqi Arabs:

"Winston Churchill, as colonial secretary, was sensitive to the cost of policing the Empire; and was in consequence keen to exploit the potential of modern technology. This strategy had particular relevance to operations in Iraq. On 19 February, 1920, before the start of the Arab uprising, Churchill (then Secretary for War and Air) wrote to Sir Hugh Trenchard, the pioneer of air warfare. Would it be possible for Trenchard to take control of Iraq? This would entail 'the provision of some kind of asphyxiating bombs calculated to cause disablement of some kind but not death � for use in preliminary operations against turbulent tribes.'

Churchill was in no doubt that gas could be profitably employed against the Kurds and Iraqis (as well as against other peoples in the Empire): 'I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.' Henry Wilson shared Churchill's enthusiasm for gas as an instrument of colonial control but the British cabinet was reluctant to sanction the use of a weapon that had caused such misery and revulsion in the First World War. Churchill himself was keen to argue that gas, fired from ground-based guns or dropped from aircraft, would cause 'only discomfort or illness, but not death' to dissident tribespeople; but his optimistic view of the effects of gas were mistaken. It was likely that the suggested gas would permanently damage eyesight and 'kill children and sickly persons, more especially as the people against whom we intend to use it have no medical knowledge with which to supply antidotes.'

Churchill remained unimpressed by such considerations, arguing that the use of gas, a 'scientific expedient,' should not be prevented 'by the prejudices of those who do not think clearly'. In the event, gas was used against the Iraqi rebels with 'excellent moral effect' though gas shells were not dropped from aircraft because of practical difficulties�

Today in 1993 there are still Iraqis and Kurds who remember being bombed and machine-gunned by the RAF in the 1920s. A Kurd from the Korak mountains commented, seventy years after the event: 'They were bombing here in the Kaniya Khoran � Sometimes they raided three times a day.' Wing Commander Lewis, then of 30 Squadron (RAF), Iraq, recalls how quite often 'one would get a signal that a certain Kurdish village would have to be bombed�', the RAF pilots being ordered to bomb any Kurd who looked hostile. In the same vein, Squadron-Leader Kendal of 30 Squadron recalls that 'if the tribespeople were doing something they ought not be doing then you shot them.'

Similarly, Wing-Commander Gale, also of 30 Squadron: 'If the Kurds hadn't learned by our example to behave themselves in a civilised way then we had to spank their bottoms. This was done by bombs and guns'.

Wing-Commander Sir Arthur Harris (later Bomber Harris, head of wartime Bomber Command) was happy to emphasise that 'The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means in casualties and damage. Within forty-five minutes a full-size village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.' It was an easy matter to bomb and machine-gun the tribespeople, because they had no means of defence or retaliation. Iraq and Kurdistan were also useful laboratories for new weapons; devices specifically developed by the Air Ministry for use against tribal villages. The ministry drew up a list of possible weapons, some of them the forerunners of napalm and air-to-ground missiles:

Phosphorus bombs, war rockets, metal crowsfeet [to maim livestock] man-killing shrapnel, liquid fire, delayed-action bombs. Many of these weapons were first used in Kurdistan".

Hugh Trenchard, the RAF's chief of staff between 1919 and 1927 mentioned earlier, submitted a report to the Cabinet shortly after the RAF had temporarily quelled anti-British unrest in Iraqi Kurdistan.1 Trenchard reported that Churchill had first employed aerial bombardment against Iraq's Kurds as a means of finding "some cheaper form of control". Trenchard enthusiastically endorsed the verdict of the British High Commissioner for Iraq that "a free and vigorous use of � aerial resources" had proven to both highly potent and cost-effective. The RAF chief of staff concluded prophetically:

"Air power is of vital concern to the Empire and in Iraq, under the control of an air officer, further evidence is accumulating of its great potentialities. A continued demonstration, until its effectiveness is beyond dispute, may have far-reaching results, in that it may lead to still further economies in defence expenditure, not only in Iraq, but also in other Eastern territories where armed forces are required to give effect to British policy and uphold British prestige".

Aerial bombardment had proven to be a satisfactory method of mass killing. Jonathan Glancey (The Guardian, 19 April 2003) recalls:

"Winston Churchill, secretary of state for war and air, estimated that without the RAF, somewhere between 25,000 British and 80,000 Indian troops would be needed to control Iraq. Reliance on the airforce promised to cut these numbers to just 4,000 and 10,000. Churchill's confidence was soon repaid".

Glancey reports that the RAF "flew missions totaling 4,008 hours, dropped 97 tons of bombs and fired 183,861 rounds for the loss of nine men killed, seven wounded and 11 aircraft destroyed behind rebel lines". Aerial bombardment is generalised

British capitalism's pioneering aerial terror against Iraqis paved the way for the wholesale use of terror bombing of all varieties. The British bombing of Kurdistan was the first use of aerial bombardment - and the first use of such bombardment in the peripheries of capitalism. British forces engaged in their third Afghan War soon after this also used this tactic. The monster 'Bomber Harris' became notorious "for his ruthless championing of saturation bombing against German civilian and military targets" (Jonathan C. Randal, After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? My Encounters with Kurdistan, p. 5).

T. E. Lawrence wrote to the London Observer to complain: "It is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions". The British military certainly took to aerial bombardment with gusto as a means of spreading mass terror. In 1921, Wing Commander J. A. Chamier suggested that the best way to demoralise local people was to concentrate bombing on the "most inaccessible village of the most prominent tribe which it is desired to punish. All available aircraft must be collected, the attack with bombs and machine guns must be relentless and unremitting and carried on continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, crops and cattle"(cited in Glancey, op. cit.).

After proving it in the colonies, this tactic was then deployed during World War II to a massive extent - first of all in the British and German blanket bombing campaigns against each other's populations, which included the massacre of the workers of Dresden in 1945. In Dresden, preliminary sorties were flown using high explosives to remove the roofs from buildings. This was followed by targeted bombing of phosphorous devices into houses, factories, offices, schools and hospitals, with the objective of spreading a devastating firestorm as rapidly as possible. An estimated 150,000 to 200,000 people - many of these war refugees - were killed over three weeks. This was a casualty rate far in excess of the death toll exacted in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were also just another example of a massive terror bombing campaign.

Churchill, Harris, Lawrence, Chamier, Trenchard and Hitler were certainly all terrorists of the first order, but they were all merely doing their jobs exceptionally well as enforcers for decadent capitalism. Ali

Note 1: An original copy of Trenchard's report, 'The Development of Air Control in Iraq' is held by Britain's Public Records Office. This chilling document (reference PRO AIR19/109 of October 1922) can be viewed online at the Public Records Office Web site, at the following address: www.pro.gov.uk/pathways/firstworldwar/aftermath/p-iraq.htm [181]

A war against weapons of mass destruction? It's becoming increasingly clear that they are not going to find any. Rumsfeld has admitted that Saddam's regime may have destroyed them before the war. Deputy US defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz has gone one step further. According to the Guardian (30.5.03) "Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair magazine that the decision to highlight weapons of mass destruction as the main reason for invading Iraq was taken for 'bureaucratic' reasons, indicating that Washington did not take the threat seriously". Thus speaks the supreme arrogance of supreme power. Tony Blair however has had to present the whole story with his hand on his heart, and faces a good deal more political opposition from within his own class. This is why he has to brave it out and "remain confident" that these elusive weapons will be found. The basic point has not changed: Bush and Blair justified the war by arguing that Iraq's weapons constituted a clear and present danger to the people of American and Europe. Blair even claimed in the House of Commons that Iraq was primed and ready to strike within 45 minutes. The war proved once and for all that Iraq's military capabilities were virtually zero.

So all that was a huge lie.

A war against terrorism then? But even if the Saddam regime (like countless regimes around the world, not least Britain, as the Stevens inquiry has shown) had links with terrorist groups, the last way that terrorism can be stopped is by mass bombing and military occupation. No sooner was the war in Iraq over than suicide bombers struck in Riyadh, Casablanca and in several towns in Israel. Even in Iraq, shadowy anti-American forces have gunned down US troops. Major cities in the US and Britain have been put on terrorist alert. The war has increased the threat of terrorist revenge attacks.

So that was another lie.

But surely the Iraqi people will be better off without Saddam? Look at the mass graves they found, dating back to the 1991 uprising. He killed thousands and thousands of his own people�

That's true. But let's not forget the responsibility of the 'liberating' countries in all of Saddam's murders. Not only because Saddam was to all intents and purposes put in power by the USA, and armed by them (as well as today's 'peace-camp' countries like France, Germany and Russia) to counter the power of Iran in the region. But also because in 1991 the 'Coalition' of the day called on the Kurds and Shias to rise against the Baathist regime, and then quite deliberately allowed Saddam the weapons he needed to crush them. This was because at that time the US privately accepted that the Butcher of Baghdad was the only force that could prevent the break-up of Iraq.

As for being better off, what is the situation in Iraq today? The 'freedom' brought by US and British tanks is proving to be the 'freedom' of armed gangs of all kinds to impose their will on a desperate population. The list of those - civilians and unwilling conscripts - slaughtered by US and British bombs certainly runs into thousands, perhaps tens of thousands. This death toll will be increased considerably by the break-down in electricity and water supplies, by the collapse of medical services and shortages of food. Attempts to form a new civil administration have come to nothing: in Basra the British set up a municipal authority and dissolved it again almost immediately.

In the absence of any real alternative, many Iraqis are turning to the religious authorities and calling for an Islamic state. Would that be an improvement over Saddam?

The situation in Afghanistan gives us a clue about the real concerns of the US and British 'liberators'. Bush promised that the US would not walk away from Afghanistan. And it's true that US troops are still fighting Taliban forces there. But there has been very little reconstruction and the writ of the Barzai regime hardly even extends to the whole of Kabul, let alone to the rest of the country where the war lords have slotted right back into their old ways. More wars loom

But the Middle East 'road map to peace' - isn't that a benefit of the US victory in Iraq? There's no doubt that the US efforts to stabilise its domination of the Middle East demands a settlement of the Palestinian problem. That is why there has been a huge increase in US pressure not only on the Palestinian leadership but also on Sharon. The new Palestinian Prime Minister, Mahmoud Abbas, was put in place precisely to strengthen the 'moderate' forces in the Palestinian leadership. The US has warned both Syria and Iran that they must stop supporting Hizbollah's terrorist campaign against Israel; Abbas himself says he can persuade Hamas and Islamic Jihad to call a halt to the suicide bombings. And Sharon, despite opposition from the right wing in his own government, has, after exacting a few verbal concessions from the Americans, signed up to the road map, accepting the idea of a Palestinian state and recognising that a perpetuation of the Israeli occupation was "bad for Israel and bad for the Palestinians". A meeting between Sharon and Abbas is scheduled for the first week in June.

But even if all the tremendous obstacles to a political settlement of the Palestinian problem were removed, let's recall the real reasons for the USA's policy in the Middle East, whether in Palestine or Iraq. It is dictated not by any humanitarian concerns but by its innate imperialist needs. In the Middle East, this is not simply a question of making profits from oil, as so many in the 'peace camp' claim. Controlling Middle East oil is first and foremost a strategic goal for the USA, a potential weapon aimed at its main imperialist rivals, and part of a planet-wide strategy to maintain its world 'leadership' and prevent the rise of any power able to challenge it. And the same basic imperialist drives also oblige other powers, greater ones like France, Germany and Russia, Japan and China, or lesser ones like Iran, Syria, or North Korea, to counter US advances however and whenever they can, even if the US victory in Iraq has forced them to adopt a low profile for the moment (see the article on France and Germany on page 5).

'Peace' between the Israelis and Palestinians would merely remove a thorn in the US flesh that would allow it to concentrate its attention elsewhere. Already it is making highly bellicose noises in the direction of Iran, accusing it of harbouring senior al Qaida operatives and of building up a nuclear weapons programme. The ominous term 'regime change' is already being bandied about. It seems that there are differences between the Pentagon and the State department on this issue, with the latter favouring a more diplomatic approach aimed at winning over the 'reformist' elements around Khatemi, but the increasingly aggressive rhetoric coming from the Pentagon can only strengthen the hand of the religious conservatives in Tehran and so heighten the danger of a new conflict in the region.

The war in Iraq was fought not to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, not to rid the world of terrorism, and not for the benefit of the Iraqi people. It was an imperialist war fought for the sordid interests of capitalism. And like all the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries, it will generate new wars and an ever-mounting spiral of destruction.

That is the future that capitalism offers humanity, unless its headlong flight towards the abyss is turned aside by the proletarian revolution. Given the low levels of class struggle over the past decade, this may seem like a forlorn hope to many; but the working class is far from the spent force that the bourgeoisie would have us believe. Capitalism's economic crisis, which pushes the system towards war, also obliges the working class to fight in defence of its living standards; and in the main centres of the system the proletariat has not been subjected to a crushing and final defeat, nor yet ground into the dust by the remorseless decomposition of capitalist society. The future belongs to the class struggle!

WR, 30/5/03.

The US is trying to impose its 'road map' for peace on the Middle East. The population of Israel/Palestine have every reason to be cautious and suspicious. Every intervention by the great powers in the region has exacerbated the situation - Britain in the 1920s and 30s, the US since the Second World War. It will also not have escaped their notice that recent military interventions in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq have not resulted in peace and stability but have seen a continuation of armed conflict, alongside a social chaos that precludes the possibility of any sort of reconstruction.

On May 1 George Bush declared that military conflict in Iraq was over. Since then 27 US soldiers have died from guerrilla attacks, with uncounted Iraqi deaths to add to the thousands who died in the 'official' war. The totals are rising as US troops are coming under an average of 13 guerrilla attacks a day. Following the recent deaths of six British military police after British troops fired on a demonstration of local residents, leading British generals are letting it be known that they are worried about being bogged down in Iraq, much as has happened the forces still in Afghanistan. There, eighteen months after the fall of the Taliban, the battles between the factions of different warlords, and against US and other forces continue. Bombs in Kabul, serious battles elsewhere in Afghanistan, and not a sign of Osama bin Laden, whose killing or capture was one of the pretexts for the war. Saddam in Iraq remains equally elusive and continues to call for sabotage and attacks on the occupying forces. US global offensive continues

Not surprising then that in a speech by President Bush on July 4, he made it clear that the US was still at war. Any re-organisation of its forces should not be mistaken for a retreat from the 'war on terrorism'. The US plans to move much greater numbers of troops closer to current conflicts, to superior strategic positions - or nearer to rivals and/or future targets. From its bases in Germany 80,000 troops will be moved east to Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania - closer to the Black Sea, Russia, Turkey and the Middle East. From Saudi Arabia forces are being moved to Qatar and Iraq. From Japan the US has the opportunity to move thousands of troops to Thailand in the heart of South East Asia - in a place well suited for attacks on North Korea.. Leading White House figures have already said that it's not enough for North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons programme. If the US deems pre-emptive military force to be necessary then it's not going to wait for documentation from the UN, especially in the light of its experience in the run-up to the attack on Iraq.

The 'road map' for the Middle East should be seen in the light of this global offensive of the US, whose aim has now been stated openly by the clique around Bush: to impress itself on all-comers and deter the ambition of any other major imperialism to achieve the status of superpower. The Middle East, a historic crossroads between Europe and Asia, and replete with vital oil reserves, is key to the world wide strategy of the US. Hence its determination to maintain a massive military force in Iraq, despite the enormous cost. Iraq, like Afghanistan, is a central element in a line of US occupation from the southern Arabian peninsula and the Mediterranean through to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in central Asia.

To control the Middle East, it is absolutely essential for US imperialism to find some 'solution' to the Israel/Palestine conflict. The longer it goes on, the harder it is for the US to maintain its influence with the Arab states, and the more opportunities there are for the USA's larger imperialist rivals, particularly Germany, Russia and France, to carry out their own intrigues and manoeuvres behind the scenes. Hence the mounting pressure to get Sharon and Abbas to the negotiating table and distance themselves from the 'extremists' in their own ranks. Hence also the USA's current two-pronged approach towards Iran, which the US seeks to use as a player in its road map: on the one hand flattering the 'reformist' elements in the Iranian leadership and trying to get them to put pressure on the armed groups Iran supports in Lebanon and Palestine; on the other hand, naked threats about Iran's nuclear weapons programme and accusations of harbouring members of al-Qaida.

There is of course no guarantee whatever that the fanatical Islamist elements, any more than the equally fanatical 'Orthodox' groups in Israel, will fall in with the road map, despite the recent proclamation of a ceasefire by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Brigades. In all likelihood, there will only be the briefest of pauses before a new round of terrorist attacks and Israeli counter-terror gets underway. But even if the US succeeded in establishing a Palestinian state and mitigating the slaughter in Israel/Palestine, this would be a moment in an imperialist strategy that can only bring war and confrontation on an ever greater scale. Not because America has a unique desire for world domination - it is only acting to preserve a status quo that corresponds to its national interests, much as British imperialism did when it was the world's leading power. Like all the other capitalist powers, large and small, imperialism is not a choice made by this or that country, still less by this or that bourgeois clique. It is an organic product of capitalism at a certain stage of its development - a stage when its development has become decay and its very existence constitutes a growing threat to the survival of humanity. Capitalism's road map can only lead to war and destruction.

WR, 5/7/03.

The 50-year retrospectives on 1953 have included a large amount of nostalgia for that glorious day in June when a new queen was crowned and news came through that a 'Commonwealth' team had conquered Everest. A time when the monarchy was respected, 'traditional values' were still in place and society seemed to make a little more sense than it does now�

Other events in the same year, however, symbolise the darker reality of those days. It was the year of Stalin's death and of the end of the Korean War, but the shadow of a third world war still loomed large. The intensity of imperialist rivalries between east and west also reinforced an ideological terror typified by the McCarthy phenomenon in the USA. And for the majority of the population, east and west, grim austerity and heightened exploitation were the order of the day as world capitalism reconstructed itself on the ruins of the war.

These conditions form the background to the event which we have chosen to commemorate in this issue of WR: the massive strikes of the East German workers in June 1953. Although they took place at a time when the counter-revolution - Stalinist and democratic - still reigned supreme, and were thus doomed to isolation and defeat, these struggles also pointed a finger towards the future: not only the more widespread class movements in the eastern bloc in 1956, but also the outbreaks in western Europe at the end of the 60s, which signalled the end of the counter-revolution and the return of the working class to the stage of history. But it is above all because the movement of the East German workers has left us with important political lessons - 'positive' lessons about how to organise massively against state terror, to spread a struggle as widely possible, as well as 'negative' lessons concerning the workers' illusions in 'democracy' - that the East German uprising is the real proletarian heritage of 1953. The extract that follows is taken from our International Review no.18, written for the 25th anniversary of the movement.

The so-called 'socialist' countries of Eastern Europe arose as a result of the imperialist re-division of the world brought about by World War II. The slogan of the holy war against fascism was nothing but the lie which the western and Russian bourgeoisies ended up using to mobilise their workers in the fight for more profits, markets and raw materials for their capitalist masters. The Allies' love of democracy did not prevent Stalin, for example, from doing a deal with Hitler at the beginning of the war, through which Russia was able to seize large areas of Eastern Europe.

As it became increasingly clear that the Allies were going to win the war, the conflict of interests within the 'democratic camp' itself, and especially between Russia on the one hand and Britain and America on the other, became greater. The Russians received only the minimum of military supplies from the west, and Britain even wanted to open up the Second Front against Germany in the Balkans instead of in France to prevent the Russians occupying Eastern Europe.

What kept this united front of gangsters together was the fear that the war, particularly in the defeated countries, might, as in World War I, be ended by an outbreak of class struggle. The brutal bombing raids by the Allies on German cities were aimed at crushing the resistance of the working class. In most cities the workers' areas were obliterated, whereas only 10% of the industrial equipment was destroyed.

The growing resistance of the workers, which in some cases led to uprisings in concentration camps and factories, and the dissatisfaction of the soldiers (such as the desertions on the eastern front, which were countered by mass hangings), were swiftly crushed by the occupying powers. This pattern was followed everywhere. In the east, the Russian army stood by while the German forces put down the 63-day long Warsaw Rising, leaving 240,000 dead. Similarly, the Russian army was responsible for restoring order and social peace in Bulgaria and elsewhere in the Balkans. In the west, the CPs joined the post-war governments in France and Italy, in order to break the flickering strike movements and social unrest there. The Italian CP in power was supporting the same democratic allies who mercilessly bombed the Italian workers who were occupying the factories towards the end of the war.

The 'Soviet' occupiers began to exercise an organised plunder of the east European territory under their control. In the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ) of East Germany, the dismantling of industrial equipment for transportation back to the Soviet Union amounted to 40% of the industrial capacity of the SBZ. The Sowjetinen en Aktiengesellschaften (SAGs, Soviet stockholding companies) were founded in 1946 and two hundred firms in key industries, including for example the massive Leuna works, were taken over by the Russians. In some areas, at the end of the war, the workers themselves began operating the factories and such factories were especially eagerly taken over. In 1950 the SAGs constituted the following proportion of the East German economy: "more than half of chemicals, a third of metallurgical products, and about a quarter of machine production" (Staritz, Sozialismus In Einer Halben Land).

A large proportion of these profits went to the Russians directly as reparation payments. The GDR was committed to reparation payments to the USSR up until 1953-4, until it became clear that the reparations were damaging the Russian economy itself. The decimated East German economy paid the bill through a brutally rising exploitation of the working class. The proletariat was forced in this way to help finance the reconstruction and expansion of the Soviet war economy. Stalin never explained why the working class and the 'Workers' State' in Germany should have to pay for the crimes of its exploiters.

This consolidation of Russian imperialism's economic power in East Germany and Eastern Europe was accompanied by the coming to power of pro-Russian factions of the bourgeoisie. In the SBZ, the Stalinists of the KPD came together with the Social Democratic murderers of the German revolution, to form the Sozialistische Einheits Partei (SED). Its immediate post-war goals had already been expressed clearly shortly before the war began: "The new democratic Republic will deprive Fascism of its material basis through the expropriation of fascist trust capital, and will place reliable defenders of democratic freedoms and the rights of the people in the army, the police forces, and the bureaucracy" (Staritz, op. cit.).

Strengthening and 'democratisation' of the army, the police, the bureaucracy�such were the lessons which these good bourgeois 'Marxists' had drawn from Marx, from Lenin, from the Paris Commune.

Then, three years after the war had ended, came the announcement that the building of 'socialism' had now begun. A miraculous 'socialism' this, which could be constructed upon the corpses of a totally crushed and defeated proletariat. It is interesting to note that between 1945-8 not even the SED pretended that the state capitalist measures they were putting through had anything to do with socialism. And today, leftists of all descriptions who propagate the idea that nationalisation equals socialism, prefer to 'forget' the high degree of statification present in the east European economies even before the war, and especially in those countries most renowned for their 'reactionary' governments, such as Poland and Yugoslavia. This centralisation of the economy under the state had proceeded during the German occupation.

In fact, the famous declaration of the 'building of socialism', along with the economic, political and military tightening up which took place in eastern Europe after 1948, was the direct result of the hardening of the global conflict between the American and the Russian blocs:

"The Two-Year Plan (measured on the 1949 standing) foresaw a rise in production of 35% until 1950, reckoned with a rise in labour productivity of 30%, a 15% growth in the total wage mass, and a 7% sinking of the costs of public firms. The aim of the SED was thereby to raise work productivity twice as fast as wages. The means to these ends were seen by the planners above all in the improvement in the organisation of work, the introduction of 'correct norms' and in the struggle against absenteeism and carelessness at the workplaces" (Staritz, op. cit.).

The rise in wages after 1948, insofar as they took place at all, were merely the result of piece rate norms and 'productivity achievements', or in other words they were the result of higher levels of exploitation. This was the period of the Hennecke movement (the East German equivalent of Stakhanovism) and of an iron discipline in the factories imposed by the unions. But even so these small wage rises became more and more an intolerable burden for the economy and had somehow to be cut. The economically weaker eastern bloc, less and less able to compete with its American-led rivals, was forced, in order to survive, to squeeze super profits out of the proletariat and to invest in the heavy industries (or more precisely, in those industries connected to the war economy), to the detriment of the infrastructure, the consumer goods sector, etc. This situation, which required the immediate and centralised control of the economy by the state, pushed the bourgeoisie into making frontal attacks on the living standards of the working class.

The response of the proletariat came in a wave of class struggle which shook Eastern Europe between the years 1953-56. The movement began in early June 1953 with demonstrations by workers in Pilzen, Czechoslovakia, which led to clashes with the army. These were immediately followed by the rising in the GDR and by the revolt in the massive Vorkutz labour camps in Russia in July of the same year. This movement reached its climax in 1956 with the events in Poland, and then in Hungary, where workers' councils were formed.

It has been estimated that the real wages in East Germany were half the 1936 level (Chris Harman, Bureaucracy and Revolution in Eastern Europe, p.80). In July 1952 the SED announced the opening of a new period of 'the accelerated construction of socialism', by which was meant a further increase in investment in heavy industry, a greater increase in productivity and a greater increase in production norms. It was clearly intended to speed up the post-war reconstruction. In the spring of 1953, at a time when the unions in West Berlin were having difficulty controlling the combativity of the building workers, the government in East Berlin was stepping up a full-scale campaign to increase the production norms generally, and particularly on the building sites. On 28 May it was announced that 60% of the workers on the huge building sites in Stalinallee had 'voluntarily' raised their norms (this is the language of 'socialist' realism). The effects of the nationwide production campaign on the working class were already beginning to show. That same month strikes took place in Magdeburg and Karl Marx Stadt. In response the government proclaimed a general norm rise of 10% for 5 June.

Becoming frightened by the mood among the workers, an anti-Ulbricht grouping within the SED leadership, and apparently with Kremlin backing, pushed through a reform package aimed at gaining the support of the middle classes. This group even began to suggest an easing-up policy as regards the question of the production norms.

But such manoeuvres came too late to prevent a proletarian eruption. On 16 June the building workers took to the streets and marched calling out other workers. Finally the demonstration made for the government buildings. The general strike called for the following day paralysed East Berlin and followed in all other important cities. The struggle was organised by strike committees elected in open assemblies and under their control - independent of the unions and the party. Indeed the dissolution of the party cells in the factories was often the first demand of the workers. In Halle, Bitterfeld and Mersburg, the industrial heartland of East Germany, strike committees for the entire cities were elected, which together attempted to coordinate and lead the struggle. These committees assumed the task of centralising the struggle and also temporarily organising the running of the cities: "In Bitterfeld, the central strike committee demanded that the fire brigade clear the walls of all official slogans. The police continued to make arrests; whereupon the committee formed fighting units and organised the systematic occupation of the city districts. The political prisoners of the Bitterfeld jail were released in the name of the strike committee. In contrast the strike committee ordered the arrest of the town mayor" (Sarel, Arbeiter gegen den Kommunismus).

Because of the speed with which the workers took to the streets, generalising the struggle and taking it straight to the political level, above all because the need to openly confront the state was understood, the proletariat was able to paralyse the repressive apparatus of the East German bourgeoisie. However, just as the rapid spread of the strike across the country was able to prevent the effective use of the police against the workers, in the same way, the international extension of the struggle would have been necessary in order to counter the threat of the 'Red Army'. In this sense we can say that, taking place as it did in the depths of the world wide counter-revolution following the defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, the East German workers were defeated because of their isolation from their class brothers abroad, east and west. In fact, the weight of the counter-revolution placed political barriers more terrible than the bayonets of Russian imperialism against the extension of the movement from a revolt to a revolution. The links binding the class to its own past, its experiences and struggles, had long been smashed by Noske, Hitler and Stalin - the bloody heroes of reaction - by concentration camps and mass bombings, by demoralisation and by the destruction of its revolutionary parties (the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, the political decimation of the KAPD). Having suffered for so long under the fascist and Stalinist one-party states, the workers believed that parliamentary democracy might protect them against naked exploitation. They called for parliament and free elections. They sent delegates to West Berlin, asking for help and solidarity from the state and the unions there, but in vain. The West Berlin police and the French and British troops were posted along the borders of the city with East Berlin to prevent any movements of solidarity between workers east and west. The unions in the west turned down the suggestion to call a solidarity strike, and warned the east European workers against illegal actions and adventurism. The workers called on the Russian army to remain neutral (not to interfere in internal German affairs - according to the strike committee of Halle and Bitterfeld). They learned a hard lesson: in the class war there is no neutrality. The workers wanted to get rid of Ulbricht and Co., not realising that one Ulbricht would simply be replaced by another, and that it's not a question of overthrowing this or that government but of destroying the world capitalist system which hangs like stone around our neck. They didn't understand the need to centralise the struggle politically at the level of workers' councils which would smash the bourgeois state.

Kr, June 2003.

When the working class in France responded to the unprecedented attack represented by the pension 'reforms', it was vital for revolutionaries to be present both in the demonstrations and amongst the various sectors in struggle, in particular the workers in national education. The ICC's intervention in the demonstrations

Unlike the leftists, and the over-excitable elements of the petty bourgeoisie who see the spectre of the social revolution behind everything that moves, revolutionaries aim to carry out a lucid intervention and have to be equipped with a compass, with the Marxist method which is based on nearly two hundred years of working class experience. It is this method alone which can assist them to avoid the traps of immediatism, of petty bourgeois impatience, which can only lead them into becoming water-carriers for rank and file unionism and the extreme left wing of capital.

Thus, as soon as the movement began to become widespread, with the demonstration of 13 May, the ICC's section in France took the decision to bring out a supplement to its main tool of intervention, the newspaper Revolution Internationale. This supplement was oriented around the task of denouncing the scale of the attack on the entire working class, of analysing the manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie aimed at getting this attack through, and of denouncing the role of the unions in response to the revival of class militancy. The main thrust of our intervention was to encourage the working class to reflect about the depth of the capitalist crisis and on the necessity of this experience of struggle, which could enable it to regain confidence in itself and rediscover its class identity. It was precisely because our emphasis was on the need to put forward a general framework of analysis in order to facilitate this reflection that we decided to distribute a supplement and not an agitational leaflet. In all the demonstrations, in Paris as well as in the provinces, the ICC mobilised all its forces and regrouped its sympathisers around it in order to distribute the press as widely as possible

The balance sheet of this mobilisation was very positive: our sales figures broke all records. In the entire history of the ICC, our organisation has never sold so many publications at a demonstration. In particular, in all the demonstrations where the ICC was present, our supplement sold like hot cakes.

We are not saying this to give ourselves medals or because we think we are on the verge of the revolution. These sales figures, as well as the numerous discussions we had in the demonstrations, simply confirm that, despite the difficulties it still faces in developing its struggle and creating a balance of forces that can make the bourgeoisie retreat, the working class is still looking for a perspective. The fact that so many strikers could make the political gesture of buying a paper headed Revolution Internationale or a supplement headed 'The future belongs to the class struggle' is a significant sign of a change in the situation of the class struggle. It means that today within the working class there is the beginning of a real questioning about the future that capitalism has in store for us. This questioning, this search for a perspective, even if it is still very confused and embryonic, is a clear refutation of all the bourgeois campaigns that followed the collapse of the Stalinist regimes, the focus of which was the argument that communism had failed and the class struggle was over.

Thus, this massive attack on the entire working class confirms the validity of what our organisation has been saying since 1968: despite the suffering it brings, the economic crisis remains the best ally of the proletariat. The ICC's intervention in the national education strike

The ICC's intervention was not limited to distributing its press in the street demonstrations.

In the struggles themselves, in the general assemblies, especially those of the teachers, our comrades and sympathisers intervened whenever they could to try to counter the manoeuvres of the unions and their 'radical' base animated by the leftists. All our interventions put forward:

• the vital need for geographical extension from the beginning of the movement against the manoeuvres of the unions and leftists which seek to imprison workers inside their own sector;
• the necessity to preserve the sovereignty of the general assemblies which have to serve as centres of discussion and of decision about the way to develop the struggle, and not become rubber stamps for union decisions taken in advance;
• the clear and concrete denunciation of the orientations of the union machinery, of the real practise of the unions which, under cover of calls for unity, only serves to obstruct the real needs of the struggle.

Thus for example, on the 13 May, at a departmental (regional) general assembly regrouping around 500 strikers in Lyon and led by the an 'Intersyndicale' made up of the FSU, FO, CGT, SUD and the CNT, our comrades were able to intervene twice despite the aggressive attitude of the Intersyndicale which chaired the assembly (and in particular a local boss of the Trotskyist LCR, an official of the FSU union, who tried to stop them speaking with interruptions like "Cut it short", "Start by getting your school out on strike"). Despite the union barrage aimed at shutting us up, another comrade who works in the hospital sector had come to this assembly and insisted on the necessity to cross the street and meet up with other sectors suffering the same attack on pensions. His intervention was followed very closely and this forced the praesidium to switch off the microphone. But despite this manoeuvre, our comrade continued his intervention by raising his voice. He was warmly applauded. It was at this moment that the praesidium was obliged to take notice of the orientation our comrades were putting forward: the necessity for geographical extension, but only as a vague perspective - which the leftists did in many places, once the movement began to run out of steam. This parody of extension would be concretised by sending delegations of trade union officials to trade union officials in other sectors.

This departmental assembly clearly showed that the 'radical' unions, to avoid being outflanked by the impact of our interventions, were forced to adopt these kinds of manoeuvres.

When we were able to intervene in the assemblies, we tried to put forward concrete proposals. On several occasions, at Lyon for example, our comrades proposed the following motion: "The departmental general assembly calls on the general assemblies of other sectors to put into action the appeals for extension of the struggle through the strongest possible delegations to public and private enterprises like Alstom, Ateliers, SNCF, Oullins, RVI, TCL, hospitals, town hall, etc�the departmental general assembly considers that the belated union appeals for other sectors to join the fight, some for 27 May, others for 2 June, still others for 3 June, as well as their silence in other sectors, are concrete acts of division and dispersal and go against the need for unity�" This motion got 24 votes for, 137 against and 53 abstentions. The vote on this motion showed that there is the beginning of a questioning of union control over the struggle and of their sabotaging manoeuvres. Although this questioning is only taking place in a minority, the intervention of our militants was not a bolt out of the blue. On several occasions our comrades were called on to develop their interventions, sometimes with invitations to come and speak at other assemblies in the sector where the same kinds of question were being posed. Numerous discussions took place and are still continuing. In other departmental assemblies, like the one on 21 May in Nantes, our comrades directly confronted the unions by proclaiming loudly that "the unity of the struggle doesn't mean trade union unity!" They were copiously hissed throughout their intervention. At the end of the assembly, only four strikers expressed agreement with our position. What we have seen through the echo of our interventions in various regions is that there is a great heterogeneity in the movement, both at the level of mobilisation as well as regards distrust towards the unions.

In a second period, which arrived rather quickly, it became clear that any possibility for a massive development of the struggle had been undermined by the unions, and our comrades were obliged to reorient their interventions:

• showing that the slogan of a 'rolling strike' was a trap that threatened to bring exhaustion and demoralisation;
• denouncing the union and leftist attitude of 'fighting to the bitter end' by using sterile and minority-based commando actions (such as the blocking of exams) which only reinforced the division between strikers and non-strikers;
• showing the necessity to regroup in order to avoid confusion, to discuss as collectively as possible whether or not to carry on with the strike, in order to avoid demoralisation and to prepare to take up the struggle later while keeping our strength intact;
• arguing for the need for the most combative and conscious minorities to regroup in order to develop their reflection on the questions raised by the movement. Already there have been a number of meetings of such elements from different sectors in Lyon, Nantes and Marseille for example.

In addition to the above, the ICC was also present, as always, at the fete of Lutte Ouvriere where it intervened at the forums organised by the leftists, denouncing their sabotaging manoeuvres and insisting on the necessity to draw the lessons from the defeat of the teachers. The ICC was in fact the only revolutionary organisation to intervene against the Trotskyists, despite the whistles of the base unionists aligned to LO and the LCR (1).

In the days that followed, the ICC also held a number of animated public meetings about the struggles in a number of cities.

It is clear today that the movement was not strong enough to push back the bourgeoisie. The working class has thus suffered a defeat. Once again the ruling class is seeking to make workers draw the wrong lessons from this, especially the idea that struggle is waste of time. It is thus the responsibility of revolutionaries to resist these mystifications.

This is why the ICC decided to distribute a leaflet drawing the balance sheet of this experience in order to permit the whole class to draw the maximum of lessons from this defeat, to push workers to deepen their reflection and thus arm them for when they have to return to the struggle against the acceleration of the attacks, already prefigured in the dossier on social security.

SM, June 2003.

(1) Also despite the sarcasm of the elements which we describe as parasites because, while they claim to belong to the proletarian political camp, have no reason for existing other than destroying the reputation of genuine revolutionary organisations, and the ICC in particular. Furthermore, at the LO fete these elements were only present as spectators and didn't open their mouths to combat the forces of capitalism's extreme left wing.

For more than 6 weeks the working class in France has been engaged in struggles of a breadth unknown for quite some years. Hundreds of thousands, even millions of workers from a whole number of sectors have been out on strike and demonstrating in the streets. However, despite this massive militancy, the movement has not succeeded: the government is about to push through the law on pensions, which has been the main focus of workers' anger. What's more, to make it clear who's the toughest, the government has announced that there will be no 'presents' for the strike days lost: they will be fully deducted from the workers' pay, in contrast to what it has done before after movements of this kind. Its aim is clear: it wants the whole working class to know that 'there is no point in struggling', that we have to draw in our belts without complaining, otherwise things will be even worse. Faced with the capitalist attacks, struggle is necessary

'There's no point in struggling': this is the refrain which the exploiters have always sung to the exploited. Nothing could be further from the truth: if today, in the main capitalist countries, workers don't work a 16 hour day like they did at the beginning of the 19th century, if they still get basic social benefits and a pension (even if it's getting increasingly thin), it's because previous generations of workers have fought for these things. The bourgeoisie, the class which rules the world today, does not give presents. It doesn't produce wealth by itself: it is the workers which it exploits who do that. Its reason for existing is not to allow the latter to live decently, but to extract as much profit from them as it can. There are no 'good bosses', whether private or state. A 'good boss', who really wanted the best for his workers, who willingly increased their wages and reduced their time at work would not be 'competitive'. He would soon go bust as a result of competition from other enterprises.

The first thing we have to underline about the recent struggles is that they are a clear rebuttal of all the campaigns which have been inflicted on us since the collapse of the eastern bloc and of the so-called 'socialist' regimes. No, the working class has not disappeared! No, its struggles do not belong to the past! Because the struggle that has just been carried out by the public sector workers is not a struggle of 'functionaries' or 'privileged groups'. It is a struggle of a large part of the working class whose boss is the state, a struggle against an attack which affects the entire working class, both in the public and the private sectors.

The second thing is this: faced with the aggravation of the economic crisis and the attacks of the bourgeoisie, the working class is going to be more and more compelled to fight for the defence of its living conditions. This perspective is clearly contained in the attacks that have already been programmed, particularly the attacks on social security planned for the coming months. It is clear today that the working class has no choice but to struggle. Because if it doesn't, the bourgeoisie will continue to hit it harder and harder.

Thirdly, it is only through the most massive and united struggle possible that the working class can gain the strength to limit the attacks of capitalism and push back the bourgeoisie.

Finally, it is only by returning to the path of struggle that the working class can rediscover its identity as a class, regain confidence in itself, develop its unity and solidarity. This is the only way it can become aware of its own strength and understand that is able to offer an alternative to the impasse of capitalism.

This is why, despite the fact that this recent struggle has not succeeded in pushing back the government (in particular on the question of pensions), the working class must not become demoralised. It must resist the idea that bourgeoisie is trying to feed it - that there's no point in struggling. Why didn't the government give way?

The attack on pensions had been planned by the bourgeoisie for several years - from the time the left was in government. The right has hastened to point this out, as have certain socialist leaders like Delors and Rocard. With the brutal acceleration of the economic crisis over the last year, the bourgeoisie could not hold back from making this attack. But it chose the moment to launch it because it knew that the working class could not fail to respond to such savage blows. This is why it set in place a whole series of measures to make sure that the explosion of discontent would be stopped by the truce of the summer holiday period.

Part of this strategy involved provoking one sector in particular: the education sector, via several supplementary attacks: the suppression of jobs for younger teachers and supervisors whose work brought some relief from increasingly harsh working conditions; the attack around the issue of 'decentralisation', which placed around 110,000 education workers in an extremely precarious job situation.

Why this 'unfairness' towards the education workers? Why were they singled out special attention? With the announcement of decentralisation the government has focused the teachers' anger on this specific attack, thus pushing the main attack (on pensions) into second place. This provocation had the aim of ensuring that the entire working class was unable to recognise its own interests in the teachers' struggle to the extent that the attack on decentralisation does not directly concern the other sectors, unlike the attack on pensions. It is clear that this provocation was aimed at dividing the working class and preventing a massive and unified response by all the public sector workers.

The government knew that the period of exams would act as a barrier to the struggle, and that it could count on a three month truce during the school holidays.

To lead the working class to defeat, the government was, as ever, able to rely on the loyal services of all the trade unions (CGT, CFDT, UNSA, SUD, etc) and the leftists (LO, LCR, CNT, PT). At first, when the government had just announced the attack on pensions, the unions appeared to be divided and to be obstructing any immediate, massive response from the working class. For example, the CGT called off the strike in the buses and railway on 14 and 15 May with the argument that it would be better to wait for the national demonstration in Paris on 25 May and prepare for this 'ideal moment' by not moving. On the other hand, in the education sector, we saw the unions acting very militantly and pushing the teachers to enter the struggle, not around the pension issue, but on the question of decentralisation (the call for Luc Ferry to resign, etc.). This fixation by the unions on the specific attack on the teachers, which was given a lot of media attention, created a certain disorientation in other sectors and blocked the possibility of a massive and unified struggle on the issue of pensions. This is why Raffarin was able to get away with saying that "it's not the street which governs", precisely because the government had quietly been working hand in hand with the unions and knew that it could count on their dirty work to divide and undermine the workers' response.

This divisive manoeuvre was consummated in the exam period which crowned the defeat of the education workers. The 'radical' unions and the leftists raised the threat of blocking the exams with several objectives. First, rousing other sectors against the teachers, in that it would be the children of workers who would pay the price of missing their exams. Second, making the strike unpopular by presenting the teachers as irresponsible and selfish people with no 'professional conscience'. Finally, dividing the teachers between those who wanted to halt the strike and those who wanted to carry on to the bitter end.

This whole agitation by the unions in the education sector had the overall aim of not only sowing the illusion that the teachers, on their own, could push back the government if they were determined enough, but also exhausting the strikers in a long strike that would demoralise them and make them hesitate to take part in the next round of struggles (for the large majority of strikers, they have lost several weeks' pay).

When the teachers became aware that the government would not give in, the unions (and the CGT in particular) had the incredible cynicism to blame the other sectors for not showing their solidarity with the teachers. In short, it wasn't the unions who were responsible for the defeat but�the other sectors who didn't want to mobilise in support of the teachers! The working class is the only force that can change society

The attack on pensions, and the coming attack on social security, is not peculiar to France. It has nothing to do with a good or bad management of the national economy. In all the industrialised countries of Europe, whether governed by the right or the left, the workers are now seeing all the social 'gains' since the end of the second world war being put into question. We are seeing a general collapse of the 'welfare' state. With the deepening of the world economic crisis, capitalism can no longer afford to subsidise the basic needs of workers it can't exploit directly (pensioners, unemployed, the sick, etc.).

Today, the working class has to understand the real significance of the attacks on pensions and social security, which is in no way a 'temporary' phenomenon linked to an 'unfavourable economic juncture' or to an 'unfair distribution of wealth' as the leftists of LO or ATTAC claim.

The collapse of the welfare state merely reveals the historic bankruptcy of the capitalist system, a system which has nothing to offer humanity expect more poverty, massacres, famines and epidemics.

Capitalism is a system that has reached the end of its tether and it is impossible to reform it in order to improve the conditions of the proletariat. The only 'reforms' it can carry out are reforms of the same type as the changes to pensions and social security, i.e. attacks which further degrade the living conditions of the working class.

This is why there can be no other perspective except to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a new society, based not on the search for profit, on exploitation, but on the satisfaction of human needs.

And only the working class can realise this perspective. If it is to do this, it must not give in to demoralisation after each defeat. Today, it has lost a battle, but it has not lost the war. It must prepare for a return to the combat in better conditions, by collectively reflecting and discussing, in the workplace, in general assemblies, by analysing the real reasons for the defeat.

To be stronger tomorrow, to develop a massive and unified combat, it will be vital to:

• put forward demands common to the whole working class and not fixate on attacks in one sector;
• immediately extend the struggle by sending massive delegations to the nearest enterprises;
• defend the sovereignty of the general assemblies which must be places where workers can regroup en masse, places of discussion open to workers from all sectors;
• unmask the manoeuvres of the unions aimed at controlling the general assemblies and sabotaging any real attempt at extension.

It is only in and through the struggle that the working class can become conscious of its strength, rediscover its self-confidence. It is through confronting the manoeuvres of the unions and the leftists, in the struggle itself, that the workers will be able to understand that they can only count on themselves.

Faced with the attacks of the bourgeoisie, there is no choice but to fight. More than ever, the future is in the hands of the working class.

RI, May 2003.

The 12th of March last, the World Health Organisation (WHO) launched, for the first time in its history, a planetary alert in order to counter the development of the epidemic of an atypical respiratory disease, eventually called 'Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome' (SARS). The concern of the WHO was real and justified: thus, from March 27th (the day when the Chinese government began to give figures which conformed more to reality) to May 16th, the official number of infected people in the world went from 1300 to 7650, and deaths from 50 to almost 600 with the perspective of a mortality rate of 4% of persons infected.

If today, the states of the developed countries declare that the epidemic has been stemmed on their territories, it continues to wreak havoc in East Asia which accounts for 90% of cases, where victims are counted in dozens each day and where the disease threatens to become chronic.

The WHO, and with it the western bourgeoisie, have congratulated themselves on their mobilisation faced with the epidemic and, along with the rest of the 'international community', have pointed a finger at the 'unpardonable lateness' of the Chinese government and the negligence of its Stalinist health system. It has been said throughout that if China had not suppressed and minimised the breadth of the epidemic, it could have been stopped much more quickly. That's obvious. Because it was in November 2002 that it began to break out in the Guandong Province with a hundred deaths, forcing Peking to impose considerable quarantine measures. All states are responsible

However, the observers of the WHO, i.e., the governments of the developed countries, who denounced the silence and the non-cooperation of China (1), knew from the beginning of February at least of the exceptional virulence of this epidemic of influenza and of the fact that it took the form of a "strange, contagious disease" (2). But it was only once the epidemic was declared in Hong Kong, in Vietnam and Singapore, and above all faced with its extension towards the developed countries, that the WHO reacted publicly. Nevertheless, despite the alert of March 12, it still took weeks for measures to be organised over the total of the more or less twenty countries struck by SARS. In Toronto, where at least one case was already noted, the health authorities of Ontario waited until March 26, two weeks later, to declare a state of emergency. Reputed for its 'level of excellence' the health system of Ontario was overwhelmed to the point where one of its hospitals decided, "To treat all illnesses except SARS because of the threat of not being able to attend to even a minor road accident", when 50 to 60% of those attacked by the disease were doctors and nurses (3, 4). The epidemic caused 24 deaths.

In France, under the pretext that airport restrictions were sufficient to prevent the disease arriving, the state did nothing to ensure that Air France flights coming from at-risk countries were disinfected. But due to the costs of exploitation and commerce, the concern of the air transport companies in the world was to note with horror, not the planetary expansion of a mortal sickness, but a "potential loss" of 4 billion dollars ascribable to the outbreak, twice the losses after the attacks of September 11, 2001 and during the conflict with Iraq put together!. If the leaders of the 'rich' countries denounce with zeal in their media the 'marginal sanitation' of entire areas of Chinese society and the corruption of all types which exist there, it's to make us forget the risks that their irresponsibility brings to the population.

Remember the blood contaminated with HIV, deliberately and consciously used for transfusions for hundreds of haemophiliacs in the mid-80s in France, for the good and simple reason that it was necessary to move stocks, while the heat deactivation technique was perfectly well known, but American. Remember 'Mad Cow disease' whose meat was again sold quite deliberately whereas they knew that it bore the mortal illness CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease). The list is long of the heinous crimes of the dominant class.

We know what the bourgeoisies of the developed countries have done against the development of AIDS, which has killed about 25 million human beings in the world since the beginning of the 80s: a late attempt to contain it here, letting it go in the poor countries where it was seen as bad luck. For 2002 alone, 3 million people died of AIDS and 5 million new declared cases have appeared. Out of the 42 million present sufferers (whose mortality rate is 90%), 70% are Africans, which says enough in itself: this continent has simply been delivered up to misery and decomposition in all its forms, without our 'civilised' bourgeoisies turning a hair. Another quite significant fact is that 20% of new cases concern Eastern Europe (notably Russia) and Asia (India and China closely follow one another). For the latter, the number of HIV positives will go from one million now to ten million in 2010, the result of a massive plan for blood tests and transfusions without adequate hygiene. While everyone's occupied looking at SARS under the microscope, the media haven't made much noise about this reality. Not to 'panic' their populations perhaps?

In any case, the aim is to hinder people from making the link between these 'new' sicknesses that arise from the decomposition of the capitalist world and its incapacity to really eradicate them. New expressions of the mortal sickness of capitalism

Thus the media has not shown much interest on the "very worrying context of the emergence of infections" (5) at the world level: "Nile fever has established itself in the United States (254 deaths in 2002 and no treatment). New strains of Dengue Fever (20,000 deaths in 2002 and no treatment) imported from Asia - a sickness that was thought to be eradicated - are presently colonising South America and infecting 100 million people a year in the world. (...) The Cerebro-spinal Meningitus bacteria are� presently rife in Burkina and has infected 6,300 people and has killed close to 1,000" (6). The SARS virus, this 'serial killer' is a mutant virus in the same vein as HIV: a virus of animal origin whose specificity is to have jumped the species barrier. Not usually causing serious illnesses, animals such as poultry transmitting viruses through their excrement to pigs only provoke, in normal conditions, colds among humans. But it's precisely the conditions of modern stock farming, linked to chronic lack of basic hygiene that facilitates the mutation of new viruses which propagate so much more easily where there is a high population density.

Thus the region of Guandong, from where the epidemic started out, is known for numerous intensive stock farms and its pork and poultry markets. The most affected area in Hong Kong, Kowloon, has a density of 165,000 people per square kilometre. The chicken flu in Hong Kong in 1997, which 'only' killed 6 people due to human non-transmission of the virus and thanks to the massive destruction 1.5 million chickens, had its origins in similar conditions.

The famous Spanish influenza, which appeared between 1918 and 1919 and in three waves of infection caused between 25 and 50 million deaths, several times more than World War I itself, had the same characteristics: duck droppings loaded with viruses ended up in pig troughs and were then consumed by humans.

Excessive deforestation again plays an important role in the development of animal viruses among man. Thus between 1998 and 1999, the appearance of the Nipah virus in Malaysia, propagated by bats through the loss of their natural habitat and settling in intensively cultivated orchards, caused more than 100 deaths, again a limited number due to the non-transmission of the virus between humans.

These sicknesses are, they tell us, 'the ransom of progress". No! These are the products of the weakness of capitalism which, for a century, has no longer been capable of bringing any progress to the whole of humanity: only misery and destruction in all their forms. Faced with the advanced decomposition of its system, the dominant class has nothing other to offer than ideological lies and repression. Thus the Chinese state, in order to face up to the wave of SARS, found nothing better to do than threaten the population with heavy prison sentences, even the death penalty (!) for those "who voluntarily spread pathogenic agents". A sneeze in public and it's jail lofty circles indeed for microbiological overcrowding of all types!

The aberrant nature of such repressive brutality is evident. But the cynicism of the bourgeoisies of the developed countries themselves knows no limits: since the end of the spread of SARS in the west, a near silence is organised on its ravages in East Asia as well as a real cordon sanitaire erected around China through the closure of its territorial frontiers with Russia and central Asia. They can die, but among themselves! On the other hand, our 'civilised' governments deplore the fact of not gaining anything from the drop in commercial relations with China. If the Chinese "little soldiers of neo-capitalism" die of SARS, they can joke about it, providing they continue to produce for the world capitalist market. But once they start propagating their microbes over the planet with the products of their exploitation, no - a million times no.

Here is the real face of capitalism in all the horror that it reserves for humanity.

Mulan, 22/5/03.

Notes

(1) It was the US ambassador herself who reported to the Peking office of the WHO at the beginning of February, the existence of a "strange sickness and many deaths in Canton" (quoted in Le Monde, 4/5 May 2003).

(2) Ibid.

(3) Ibid.

(4) It should be noted that the Canadian authorities used the event in order to reorganise the functioning of hospitals in the eventuality of war or a bio-terrorist attack, an idea which spans all the developed countries.

(5) Science and Future no.15, May 2003.

(6) Ibid.

Recorded history is a succession of civilisations which have risen to their peak, fallen into decline, and disappeared. The despotic empires of Sumeria, Egypt, Mexico, China or India; the slave systems of Greece and Rome; the feudal order of mediaeval Europe�each one of these and many others went through periods of flowering when they gave the best of themselves to the world as it then was and to future generations, and through periods of decadence, where their internal contradictions pushed them into a series of catastrophes resulting in their final demise.

Modern day civilisation � the world-wide capitalist mode of production � has long been in its period of decline. The bloody history of the 20th century, with two world wars in its first half and its threat of nuclear annihilation for most of the second, provides proof enough of that.

Those who want us to believe that, despite all this, present-day civilisation is eternal, tell us that 21st century capitalism is different. That it’s no longer a class society facing insurmountable social and economic contradictions, but a post-industrial information economy which � thanks to ‘globalisation’ - has gone beyond the deadly rivalries between nation states.

And yet the catastrophes accumulate, making the future seem ever more menacing.

The Bush-Blair line, that all the principal evils in the world could be eliminated through the quick fix of military intervention, is increasingly exposed by events in the real world. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have not brought prosperity, peace and democracy to the region, but famine, chaos, and new guerrilla conflicts. Far from getting rid of terrorism, the ‘war on terror’ has only served to fuel it. The continent of Africa is tormented by horrifying slaughters like the current ones in the Congo and Liberia. Further US military adventures are threatened against North Korea and Iran. The Middle East ‘road map’ to peace lies in ruins. And all these conflicts, far from showing that competition between nations is a thing of the past, are stirred up by the ambitions of imperialist nations large and small. It is no longer possible to hide the fact that America’s main challengers are not Saddam or bin Laden, but great powers like France, Germany, Russia and China. The sharpening of these rivalries is delivering more and more of the planet to the nightmare of imperialist war.

Behind the march towards war, in the last instance, is the system’s crisis of overproduction. The slump of the 30s precipitated the world into six years of carnage; and it was the post-war reconstruction that allowed capitalist production to renew itself, albeit on a diseased foundation. The end of the reconstruction in the late 60s plunged the world economy into a series of recessions which would have culminated in a new devastating slump if the ruling class had not become so adept at getting round the laws of its own system and living on a mountain of debt. This was precisely the basis for the much-touted US growth of the 90s. But capitalism’s laws always get their revenge: the note has to be paid in the end. Today nearly all the major economies are tipping into open recession. All the great hopes of a new economic revolution � above all the ‘e-economy’ and the internet � have proved to be a pathetic delusion. The poverty and bankruptcy of the ‘third world’ is remorselessly advancing towards the main industrial centres.

Ecological disaster, itself the result of capitalism’s frenzied hunt for profit in the face of a glutted world market, must now be set alongside the military and economic cataclysms. Every year brings fresh confirmation that the dire effects of global warming are already with us. Last summer Europe was hit by massive floods; this summer by the heatwave that has ruined crops and wiped out thousands of human lives.

The apologists for the system may try to offer us all kinds of false hopes of a bright tomorrow, but these are all the symptoms of a civilisation in its death agony. The proletariat holds the key

Unlike previous civilisations in decline, capitalism in its death throes will not fall into a Dark Age from which a new form of society will emerge - there is the possibility of the complete destruction of humanity. And yet the very technological capacities which could, in their present capitalist envelope, bring about this ultimate disaster, could also be used to eliminate exploitation and scarcity once and for all. The capitalist class, which lives on the basis of this exploitation, can never do this; but the exploited class, the proletariat, which is the first to suffer from capitalism’s wars and crises, has a material interest in taking charge of the forces of production and using them for human need, not profit.

This would be a utopian hope if the working class had not shown in the past that it can respond to the crisis of the system with revolutionary action, as it did during the first world imperialist war. The defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, which shook world capitalism, led many to abandon hope in the proletariat; during the reconstruction that followed the Second World War, we saw the first blossoming of theories about the disappearance of the working class, about how capitalism had bought it off with televisions and washing machines. The international wave of workers’ struggles sparked off by the events of May-June 68 in France exposed the hollowness of these theories, but they have returned in force over the past decade or so: the collapse of the eastern bloc (really the collapse of a weak link in world capitalism) was supposed to herald the end of the class struggle, and all the theories about the ‘new’ capitalism have taken it for granted that the working class itself is a thing of the past.

The apparent success of these theories was certainly reinforced by the considerable difficulties the working class has been experiencing over the last decade, a decade in which it has to a large extent lost confidence in itself and even lost a sense of identity. But capitalism cannot conjure the class struggle out of existence, and recent events have confirmed it: in France in early summer, for example, where there was a massive response to the brutal attack on pensions by the government; and, on a smaller scale, at Heathrow in the same period, where workers’ strike action had a powerful effect for the very reason that they didn’t abide by the union rule book but walked out as soon as they heard about the latest blow against their working conditions. These struggles, and many more around the globe, are only small signs and the forces arrayed against the workers � from the governments and trade unions to the insidious ideological influences of a society in decomposition � are immense. But a growing minority of proletarians is beginning to pose profound questions about the future capitalism has to offer us, about the possibility of a revival of the class war, about the best methods to use in the defence of our class interests. And this minority is the tip of the iceberg; underneath, a much wider development of consciousness is taking place.

Capitalism cannot offer any hope to humanity. But the struggle of the exploited holds out the prospect of the only realistic alternative: the destruction of capitalism and the creation of world-wide communist society.

WR, 6/9/03.

During the summer, the Hutton inquiry into the death of Dr. David Kelly meant there was no let-up in the allegations, evasions and accompanying documentation on dossiers, intelligence and weapons of mass destruction. Usually the ruling class is quite happy to let politics take a rest during the newspapers’ ‘silly season’: it’s clearly a serious dispute that shows no sign of disappearing. What we’re witnessing is partly propaganda, and partly a very real crisis within the ranks of the bourgeoisie on the right policy for British imperialism. Lies about capitalist peace

At the level of propaganda, the campaign over the possibility of a peaceful capitalism continues unabated. Before, during, and since the end of the offensive against Iraq, a whole array of liberal and left-wing figures have criticised the government’s militarism with claims that somehow the capitalist state could adopt a non-military policy. Despite all the evidence of imperialist conflicts since the end of the nineteenth century, ‘anti-war’ arguments say that capitalism can follow a peaceful road.

In the row over the Labour government’s dossiers, for example, Air Marshal Sir John Walker, Chief of Defence Intelligence from 1991 to 1994, suggested that claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were “not the reason to go to war, but the excuse to go to war”. From a military man this is probably fair comment � he knows that you don’t base an attack on another country on the basis of one dubious uncorroborated source. He therefore concluded that the decision to attack Iraq was already made last summer, and on the basis of other grounds than Iraq possessing or developing WMDs. The ‘anti-war’ argument also dismisses the stated reason for war, but also allows that there are circumstances in which there will be ‘reasons’ for war. Clare Short and Robin Cook criticised the war on Iraq, but were part of the government that bombed Belgrade and attacked Afghanistan. Others criticised war on Iraq and Afghanistan, because it meant going along with US imperialism, despite having previously advocated war in ex-Yugoslavia in defence of Bosnia or Kosovo. Wars ‘against fascism’, wars for ‘national liberation’, wars ‘against imperialism’ are all justifiable from the point of view of the bourgeoisie. And when Germany, France, Russia and China opposed the attack on Iraq it was for reasons as imperialist as those that motivated the US and Britain.

During the course of the Hutton enquiry it has been implied that while Blair, Campbell and associates were determined to manipulate everything to ensure that a solid case was made for war, there were others who were more cautious, whose influence might have convinced MPs that there was no need for an attack on Iraq. That is not the way that capitalism functions. It is not because of particular personalities or particular policies, but because of the very nature of a decadent system that war is the only means for survival of any national capital. Too close to the US?

Alongside the smokescreen of ‘anti-war’ illusions there is a very serious division within the ruling class that stems from the very limited room for manoeuvre available to British imperialism. In the period of the Cold War Britain remained loyal to the US bloc because of a discipline imposed by the potential threat of Russia and its satellites. Following the collapse of the USSR there were no longer any grounds for maintaining the ‘special relationship’ with the US and, first under Major’s Conservative government, and then under Blair, the British bourgeoisie has tried to pursue a policy independent of US imperialism. This has not always been easy, as Britain, despite boasting the world’s fourth largest economy, has many economic and military limitations, and has had to enter into temporary tactical alliances with the American superpower as much as with a European neighbour such as France. What concerns a significant section of the British ruling class is that the policy of Blair seems to involve a more than temporary alliance with the US, a loss of independence for no obvious gain. They worry that British interests are not being served in an entanglement with the US that alienates potential allies in Europe.

A typical expression of the anxiety that pervades the ruling class comes from Peter Kilfoyle, a former Labour defence minister. He appreciates that there are many who see the role of Britain, “as a ‘bridge’ between a European trading bloc and the US. Unfortunately for them, many in Europe see this as a one-way bridge for American influence and advantage, with the UK cast as a Trojan horse.” (Guardian, 18/8/03). He complains that Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon has, “acknowledged that we are to be to the US armed forces what the sepoys were to the British Indian army”, that “the gains of many decades have been frittered away by our blind obedience to the American administration’s wars”, that Britain is now “a satrapy of the new American world order”, that “we are now viewed as a rather ignoble island, subservient to the world’s super-power.” In the words of novelist Doris Lessing “the basis of this admiration of America � appears to be a love of power and the big guy. Look at Blair running around like a little rabbit � we are a colony” (Guardian, 12/8/03).

From the Conservative party, ex-Defence and Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind thinks that “Tony Blair would have us believe that the furore over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has been manufactured by some improbable alliance of a machiavellian BBC, Labour malcontents and Tory opportunists” (Guardian, 19/7/03). Rifkind dismisses all the arguments about the horror of Saddam’s regime as “moral blackmail” and recalls that for 5 years Blair didn’t put any case for an invasion of Iraq. He suggested that the arrival of George W Bush in the White House was a key factor in Labour’s change of heart. “Blair recognised that in order to retain the confidence of the new president, and to ensure British influence in Washington, he would have to support regime change in Iraq and the new doctrine of pre-emptive wars.” Rifkind understands the reasons for Britain to have a close relationship with the US, but thinks it should not be unconditional. “Of course, it is sensible for Britain to continue as America’s closest ally, but this has not stopped previous prime ministers - Labour and Tory - from distancing themselves from Washington when circumstances so justified. Harold Wilson refused to send British troops to Vietnam. Margaret Thatcher did not allow her warm relationship with Ronald Reagan to prevent her bitter criticism of the US, both over the invasion of Grenada and over the American attempt to impose sanctions on European countries trading with the Soviet Union over gas pipelines in the 1980s”.

Top Tory Michael Heseltine was “appalled” last year when he heard from an American politician close to Bush that the decision to invade Iraq was already taken long before the UN or the weapons inspectors came to any conclusions. He thinks that no one should be “fooled about the case for regime change”, and that the Hutton inquiry is a way of avoiding a proper judicial inquiry into the real reasons for participating in America’s war.

The diplomatic editor of the Guardian (23/8/03) summarised the view of those most wary of US influence. “For more than 10 years, British policy was to contain Saddam by keeping him weak through sanctions, imposition of no-fly zones and diplomatic isolation. He was regarded as a potential threat but not a pressing one� By the time the [September] dossier was published, Saddam had become someone who had to be dealt with as a matter of urgency”. The mobilisation for war was underway and the only role left for Blair was to prepare British and international public opinion for the inevitable. A real political crisis

While all bourgeois politicians and commentators frame everything they say in nationalist terms you can still distinguish the stances within the British capitalist class. In the face of criticism from left, right and his own party, Blair can still count on the support of pro-US papers like the Sun and Times. Blair is not an isolated individual but a key representative of an important faction of the British bourgeoisie. The Conservative party is dominated by a pro-US faction which is in no position to criticise Blair. But among those in all parties who defend the need for an independent position, there is a difference on the degree to which it is in British interests to sustain alliances with the US. Blair’s famous speech to the US Congress could be dismissed as just so many pleasantries for a charming host, or taken as confirmation that Blair is only a mouthpiece for Bush. He said that “there never has been a time when the power of America was so necessary or so misunderstood” and that “Europe must take on and defeat the anti-Americanism that sometimes passes for its political discourse”. He warned of the emergence of a European bloc as “there is no more dangerous theory in international politics today than that we need to balance the power of America with other competitor powers, different poles around which nations gather”.

The pressure put on Blair over Kelly and the dossiers is a way for important factions of the bourgeoisie to remind him that Britain has an established imperialist orientation based on its historical experience. Blair’s Congress speech insisted that “a study of history provides so little instruction for our present day”, where in fact the bourgeoisie is painfully aware of the loss of its dominant imperialist position to the US, of how it suffered at US hands in the Second World War, of how the US frustrated its attempts to become a nuclear power, at Suez etc., and how, throughout the period of the Cold War, the Foreign Office fought against becoming just a branch office of the State Department. The reason the pressure has been so insistent on the Blair faction is because the Tories are no alternative, and because in other respects the bourgeoisie is satisfied with the way that Labour has functioned for British capital over the last 6 years.

The seriousness of the arguments within the British bourgeoisie should not be underestimated. The most intelligent bourgeoisie in the world is showing in this unfolding political crisis a tendency to lose control of the situation. That it should be openly carrying on its internal conflicts in the glare of publicity, including all the revelations that would normally be kept secret for at least 30 years, shows the depth of the problems it faces. In the Hutton inquiry opponents have taken the opportunity to criticise government policy, while Blair and his supporters have counter attacked with diversions, indignation and attempts to muddy the water. There is a danger that these battles will undermine the bourgeoisie’s ability to function coherently as a class on the imperialist level. The bourgeoisie can’t act effectively if it is seriously divided on how it should operate.

A comparison with the crisis before the Second World War shows a further decline in Britain’s position. In the 1930s the policy of ‘appeasement’ was generally accepted by the ruling class, not least because it allowed for a longer period of re-armament. Against this Churchill argued for a ‘grand alliance’ that would include the US and Russia. This was not feasible for years as the US would hold off for as long as possible, and Russia was initially to be in alliance with Germany. The 1930s crisis was ultimately based on the reality that Britain could no longer function as a dominant global power, and had to work out what that meant for imperialist policy. In the early 21st century the British bourgeoisie is arguing about what it means to be a second-rate power with a diminishing room for manoeuvre, losing control in the face of a global offensive by US imperialism. For significant sections of the bourgeoisie, the likes of Blair and Hoon seem to be sacrificing British independence in their enthusiasm for participation in the American project. This argument is not going to go away as the quandary that British imperialism finds itself in can only intensify.

Barrow, 4/9/03.

In World Revolution 365 we republished an article [184]that showed how, when the imperialist war of 1914 broke out, the Labour party and the trade unions offered their services to the ruling class by mobilising the workers for war. But there were numerous voices within the workers’ movement in Britain who, like their counterparts in other countries (like the Bolsheviks in Russia and the Spartacists in Germany) remained loyal to their internationalist principles and raised their voices against the ideological orgy of patriotism and the hideous carnage in the trenches. This article, written by a close sympathiser of the ICC, was originally published in two parts (in World Revolution 267 and 268 in September and October of 2003) which we have now consolidated into one article.

An additional article, on the minority in the UK who maintained internationalist positions in the face of the Second World War, was published in WR 270 and is available here [185].

The first duty of revolutionaries in the face of capitalist war is to defend the interests of the whole working class, as expressed in the historic slogan of the workers’ movement: “Workers of the world unite!”

The defence of internationalism for revolutionaries has never been an abstract principle; it is an intensely practical struggle, involving a fight for clarity inside the political organisations of the working class, and more widely through intervention in its defensive struggles, often in difficult conditions of state repression and patriotic frenzy.

This article examines the struggle of the revolutionary left in Britain against the first world war, looking firstly at the development of clarity at the theoretical level about the entry of capitalism into its imperialist phase, and then at the organisational struggle for an active anti-war position inside the main ostensibly Marxist organisation, the British Socialist Party.

This struggle for internationalism demanded not only a ruthless fight against the jingoism and nationalism of the enemy class, but also against all signs of opportunism and centrism within the working class. (The history of the different socialist organisations in Britain and their responses to the First World War are dealt with in more detail in the series on the struggle for the class party in Britain - see WR 237, September 2000).

Understanding the new imperialist epoch

The understanding that capitalism had entered into its imperialist phase was the product of a pre-war political struggle waged by the left - in particular the Bolsheviks, the left-wing in the German Socialist Party and the Dutch Tribunists - against the revisionist theories of Bernstein and others on the right-wing of the Second International, who began to argue that capitalism was in fact capable of overcoming its own inner contradictions and that the struggle for gradual reforms alone could result in a peaceful transformation into socialism.

The left in Britain not only participated in this political struggle as an integral part of European social democracy, but also made its own contribution to the Marxist understanding of the changing conditions for the class struggle in the most advanced capitalist countries; as early as the 1880s William Morris identified the rise of imperialism as a response to capitalism’s increasingly desperate need for new markets:

“...the one thing for which our thrice accursed civilisation craves, as the stifling man for fresh air, is new markets; fresh countries must be conquered by it which are not manufacturing and are producers of raw material, so that ‘civilised’ manufactures can be forced on them. All wars now waged, under whatever pretences, are really wars for the great prizes in the world market.”[1]

The British left fought vigorously against local variants of revisionism, making an explicit link between the tendencies towards state capitalism at home and imperialism abroad: “Imperialism...is in its essence nothing but the application outside the British Isles of that socio-political principle which, when applied at home, leads to ‘state socialism’. That principle is the organisation and the consolidation by the power of the state of...the interests of the capitalist classes.” [2]

The Socialist Labour Party in particular developed quite a sophisticated analysis of state capitalism, arguing that even the Liberal government’s welfare measures - despite offering some minimal improvements in the conditions of the working class - were fundamentally “a preliminary measure towards the bureaucratic enslavement of the people.”[3] For the SLP, the final outbreak of the imperialist world war and the insatiable demands of the war economy greatly intensified this tendency and confirmed the reactionary consequences of any further support for nationalisation or state control:

“Nationalisation or ‘state socialism’ so far from being a method of working class progress to socialism, has become the very life blood and method of the most militant and aggressive imperialism... State control means the highest form of capitalism, and will create the industrial warfare of whole empires and groups of empires... Thus, along the road of nationalisation or state ownership, instead of meeting socialism, freedom and peace, we find competition intensified, wage slavery, militarism, and, in the distance, the bloodstained fields of future battlefields.”[4]

Three years of bloodstained battlefields enabled the clearest elements the SLP to conclude that capitalism, like the social systems which preceded it, had now definitely entered into its period of decadence.[5] Although this conclusion was coloured by a mechanistic vision of the system’s ‘inevitable’ dissolution, it was still based on the solid Marxist position that the war was essentially the product of capitalism’s historic crisis of overproduction. Echoing Rosa Luxemburg, William Paul of the SLP argued that in order to avert this crisis the capitalist class had been forced to divert the productive forces into waste production - in particular of armaments - and finally to go to war in order to re-divide a saturated world market[6]. 

There was also an understanding amongst the clearest revolutionaries that the war could not solve this crisis and that unless the working class was able to destroy capitalism the perspective would be one of further imperialist bloodbaths. On the revolutionary left wing of the BSP, John Maclean was probably the clearest in drawing the lessons of the economic struggle between capitalist states in the new period to ominously predict a second, even more destructive round of butchery, which threw into question the whole basis of any future struggle for reforms:

“The increased output of commodities…will necessitate larger markets abroad, and hence a larger empire. The same will apply to other capitalist countries. This must develop a more intense economic war than led up to the present war, and so precipitate the world into a bloodier business than we are steeped in just now. The temporary advantage the workers may get in shorter hours and higher wages with higher purchasing power will then be swept away in the destruction of millions of good lives and fabulous masses of wealth.”[7]

These were vital insights by small minorities of the British working class into the roots of the First World War and its profound significance for the struggle for socialism, which gave strength to the left’s organisational struggle for internationalism. 

The organisational struggle for internationalism

In Britain, the earliest and most consistent defender of a revolutionary position against the war was the group around John Maclean and the Glasgow District Council of the British Socialist Party. The BSP led by Hyndman, a notorious pro-imperialist, had declared its wholehearted support for Britain’s entry into the war and called for an allied victory; a position endorsed by representatives of the left and centre in the party.

But even as the BSP was proclaiming its support for King and Country, Maclean and his supporters were carrying out anti-war propaganda at factory gates on Clydeside, where mass meetings of workers passed resolutions calling for an end to the war and sent fraternal greetings to workers of all nations[8]. In September 1914, Maclean argued that: “Our first business is to hate the British capitalist system that, with ‘business as usual’, means the continued robbery of the workers... It is our business as socialists to develop ‘class patriotism’, refusing to murder one another for a sordid world capitalism.”[9] In the first issue of his own paper the Vanguard - started as a riposte to Hyndman’s pro-war Justice – Maclean set out his belief that the only alternative to war now was revolution: “Nothing but world socialism will do. This monstrous war shows that the day of social pottering or reform is past... We do not think national wars are of benefit to the workers so we shall oppose all national wars as we oppose this one. The only war that is worth fighting is the class war...”[10] Unless this war ended in revolution, further world imperialist wars were inevitable.

Maclean’s clear internationalist tendency, however, co-existed in a party still controlled by a rabidly chauvinist leadership. A determined struggle for the organisation was necessary, in order to exclude those who had betrayed internationalism and to win over the whole party to a revolutionary position against the war.

In the decade before the war, the left wing of the BSP had waged a bitter internal struggle against the growing chauvinism of the party leadership. In particular, the left fought to disassociate the party from Hyndman’s public advocacy of a big navy and to obtain its adherence to the official position of the Second International against war. The left was strongest in East London, and in Scotland where Maclean and the Glasgow branches carried out anti-militarist propaganda. In both areas, émigré Marxists with invaluable experience of the organisational struggles in Russian and East European social democracy played a leading role. The left was successful in gaining representation on the party’s executive, and in late 1912 narrowly won endorsement for its own clear rejection of militarism and imperialism.[11] But, in the face of a counter-attack by the right, the opposition revealed a fatal tendency to vacillate; two of its representatives failed to attend the next executive meeting in February 1913, giving the leadership a majority of one in voting to suspend the resolution and to allow the party to decide on the question of maintaining a British Navy. At the 1913 party conference, the centre in the party did all it could to prevent a split on such a ‘non-essential point’, proposing that members should be “free to hold any opinion they like on subjects apart from socialism”! As one delegate bluntly put it: “first and foremost they must have socialist unity.” In the end, the left’s anti-militarist resolution was never voted on and Hyndman, while still airing his ‘strong conviction’ that a very powerful navy was ‘indispensable’ to Britain, agreed to keep quiet for the sake of the party. In a display of phoney unity, a resolution was then adopted, pledging the BSP to oppose the growth of militarism as an integral part of the Second International. For the left this proved a Pyrrhic victory. The right, in danger of losing its grip on the party, had been rescued by centrist conciliation.[12]  The working class paid heavily for this failure; at the outbreak of the first imperialist world war one of the very few Marxist organisations in Britain - so painfully built up during the preceding period of capitalist prosperity - remained in the hands of a right-wing chauvinist clique which proceeded to offer its enthusiastic support to the slaughter, dragging the whole notion of proletarian internationalism down into the mud with it.

II. The organisational struggle for an internationalist position - the dangers of centrism

The BSP leadership’s first tentative efforts to mobilise the party behind the bourgeoisie’s war effort provoked a swift reaction from the internationalists in the party, who found growing support among the membership. The right was forced to prevent this opposition unifying by avoiding a national conference in 1915; at the six regional conferences held instead, the mass of the party rejected both social chauvinist and revolutionary positions, narrowly adopting an ‘india rubber’ resolution which in fact justified the British war effort.[13] Again the leadership survived by allowing the ‘expression of opinion’, but there was a running battle over the party’s press which continued to present the views of the chauvinists, and in 1916 the arch-jingoist Hyndman and his supporters set up a ‘Socialist National Defence Committee’ which effectively operated as an arm of the government in the party; the organisational struggle turned violent and anti-war militants found themselves being set up for state repression by their own leadership.

A split was clearly inevitable, but the opposition - which included both the left and the centre of the party - still hesitated to take the initiative despite gaining a majority on the executive. Within the opposition, there appeared a more clearly defined centrist current, which resolutely avoided any call for action against the war and restricted itself to calls for peace. The Vanguard group around John Maclean called on the party to choose its camp: either the revolutionary left, or Hyndman and the old International. However, with Maclean’s imprisonment and the closure of the Vanguardin 1916 political leadership of the opposition passed by default to the centrist current, which urged peace and called on the Second International to ‘act’. At the 1916 conference, the Hyndmanites were finally isolated and walked out, but even now they were not excluded, and the debates at the conference clearly revealed the centrist confusions of the majority. Essentially the new BSP leadership deeply feared a British military defeat and did all it could to avoid any action that might jeopardise an allied victory.

Zimmerwald: a first step in the regroupment of the internationalists

After the initial shock of the war and the betrayal of social democracy, the question for revolutionaries was whether the old International could be rebuilt or if a new one was now necessary. In practice, with the old International’s leaders now fully backing their respective imperialisms, its central organ, the ‘International Socialist Bureau’ (ISB), was completely impotent. It was eventually on the initiative of the Italian Socialist Party that a first, unofficial international socialist conference was held at Zimmerwald in September 1915. This brought together some of the most important currents of the revolutionary left, including the Bolsheviks, along with representatives of the pacifist centre. The left’s own draft resolutions and anti-war manifesto, which called for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, were rejected by the majority which restricted itself to a call for peace, but the conference acted as an important moment in the regroupment of revolutionaries against the war, enabling the left to establish itself as an organised fraction which later, following a second conference at Kienthal in April 1916, became the nucleus of the Third International.

The BSP executive platonically greeted Zimmerwald but remained opposed to any move to form a new international organisation in opposition to the ISB, while the centre of the party was hesitant in its support, repeating its demand that the ISB ‘act’.[14] In contrast, John Maclean enthusiastically welcomed the Zimmerwald manifesto as a call for “the class war for social democracy” and denounced the ISB’s efforts to keep the sides apart. His émigré collaborator Peter Petroff, with closer links to the movement abroad, was better placed to analyse the political character of the conference, giving it his support while pointing out that its manifesto stopped short of calling for revolutionary action against the war.[15]

The Socialist Labour Party had also been kept informed of the anti-war movement abroad through émigré contacts and supported Zimmerwald as laying the foundations for a new International, denouncing the pro-war socialists with whom all common action was now impossible: “We are at the parting of the ways. Every day the cleavage between the socialists remaining true to the International and the pro-war socialists is becoming more and more marked...”[16]

Sylvia Pankhurst also gave support to Zimmerwald in her paper the Women’s Dreadnought, which was in the process of evolving towards a revolutionary position on the war; its transition to class politics would be marked by the newspaper changing its name to the Workers’ Dreadnought in 1917.

So from their initial isolation, by late 1915 at least some of the scattered revolutionary forces in Britain had taken their first steps towards regroupment at an international level based on a clear political break with the social chauvinists, but also by differentiating themselves - more or less explicitly - from the pacifist centre.

The need for a clear internationalist perspective for the workers’ struggles

The collapse of the Second International and the definitive betrayal of its opportunist right wing, while disarming the working class and temporarily putting a brake on its struggles, did not constitute a decisive blow, and the genuine euphoria with which thousands of workers greeted the war quickly began to evaporate as the bourgeoisie demanded ever greater sacrifices in the name of the war effort.

As early as February 1915, workers’ struggles re-emerged, when engineering workers on the Clyde struck for higher wages against the advice of their union executive and formed their own unofficial strike committee. Rent strikes also began. In July, 200,000 South Wales miners struck in defiance of the Munitions Act and forced concessions from the government, while in November 1915 transport workers in Dublin paralysed the docks. Unofficial shop stewards’ committees grew up all over country. The introduction of conscription in 1916 provoked further strikes by Clydeside engineering workers, which were only cut short by the wholesale arrest and imprisonment of the strike leaders (including John Maclean). The centre of resistance now moved to England with a strike by engineering workers in Sheffield in November 1916, and in the following March further repressive government measures led to renewed unrest which spread throughout England, eventually involving over 200,000 workers; the largest strike movement of the war.

In the midst of the slaughter, these struggles - which were echoed abroad - began to open up revolutionary opportunities, and despite their initial isolation, those few revolutionaries who had remained faithful to the cause of the proletariat in 1914 now found opportunities to win a hearing in the workers’ struggles. The group around John Maclean was particularly active in the unofficial strike movements on Clydeside; against the prevalent disdain of British socialists for the class’s immediate struggles, Maclean saw every determined struggle of the workers as a preparation for socialism, and the Vanguard group put its efforts into connecting all the different struggles on immediate issues - wages, rent rises, the ‘dilution’ of skilled labour - into a class-wide offensive to end the war, calling on the Clyde workers to adopt the tactic of the political strike along the lines of the pre-war European mass strikes:

“We rest assured that our comrades in the various works will incessantly urge this aspect on their shopmates, and so prepare the ground for the next great counter-move of our class in the raging class warfare - raging more than even during the Great Unrest period of three or four years ago...the only way to fight the class war is by accepting every challenge of the master class and throwing down more challenges ourselves. Every determined fight binds the workers together more and more, and so prepares for the final conflict. Every battle lifts the curtain more and more, and clears the heads of our class to their robbed and enslaved conditions, and so prepares them for the acceptance of our full gospel of socialism, and the full development of the class struggle to the end of establishing socialism.”[17]

The Vanguard group also intervened in Clyde Workers’ Committee - the body set up by the militant shop stewards to co-ordinate their struggle against the Munitions Act - to urge it to organise mass action against the threat of conscription, but was expelled from its meetings after attacking the leadership’s refusal to deal with the issue of the war, which led Maclean to question its ability to respond to the needs of the class struggle, calling on the workers if necessary to ‘take the initiative into their own hands’.[18] Only the revolutionary left around Maclean consistently intervened in the workers’ struggles to call for a class struggle against the war. 

The Socialist Labour Party also had a strong presence on Clydeside, where some of its militants played a leading role in the Clyde Workers’ Committee, but it failed to raise the question of the war or to attempt to give the struggles a revolutionary perspective, pandering instead to the syndicalist ideas of the majority and restricting its intervention to a call for nationalisation and workers’ self-management of the munitions industry. From its initial focus on the fight for women’s suffrage, the small group in the East End of London around Sylvia Pankhurst also moved closer to the workers’ struggles to defend their conditions, actively denouncing the imperialist war at mass demonstrations and leading protests to the government against repression and the hunger and misery imposed on the working class.

In this way, despite all their confusions, through active intervention in the growing struggles against the war revolutionaries gained a small but significant hearing for internationalist positions within the working class, and constituted part of an international movement against the war. The outbreak of revolution in Russia in February 1917 - only three years after capitalism had plunged the world into the massacre - spectacularly confirmed the revolutionary perspective of this movement, and when in November 1918 the bourgeoisie was forced to hurriedly declare an armistice in order to be able to deal with the proletarian threat, the SLP rightly observed that: “For the first time in history a great world war had been ended by the action of the workers.” The imperialist war was turned into a civil war.[19]

Conclusions

War and revolution are vital tests for revolutionaries. By supporting national defence in the imperialist war, the right wing of the workers’ movement - including in Britain the Labour Party and the trade union leadership - passed over to the camp of the bourgeoisie. The centre and the left proved by their continued defence of the basic internationalist interests of the working class that they remained within the proletarian camp, but only the left defended the need for a real struggle against the war.

By breaking with the social chauvinists and identifying with the Zimmerwald movement the left had taken the first necessary steps towards the regroupment of revolutionaries at an international level. However, a political struggle against the centre and the influence of centrism within the ranks of the workers’ movement was still an essential condition for the creation of a new party and a new International.

An equally important condition for this was the presence of revolutionaries within the working class, to intervene in the workers’ struggles and give them a revolutionary direction. It was the workers’ own efforts to defend themselves against the attacks on their conditions that laid the ground for a revolutionary struggle against the war and strengthened the left in its struggle against both chauvinism and social pacifism.

 MH (contributed by a sympathiser of the ICC)

The ICC has taken the decision to bar from its public forums and contact meetings members of the so-called ‘Internal Fraction’ of the ICC [1]. This is the first time that our organisation has taken such a decision and it is necessary to explain publicly the reasons for it to the groups and elements of the proletarian political milieu and the working class in general.

This decision follows the exclusion of the same members of the IFICC at our 15th International Congress in the spring of 2003 [2] and is based on the same motives as their exclusion: the fact that these elements have behaved like snitches against our organisation.

To make things perfectly clear: it’s not because these elements were expelled from the ICC that they can’t take part in our meetings. If for example the ICC was compelled to expel a member because their mode of life was incompatible with belonging to a communist organisation (as for example in the case of drug addiction), this wouldn’t prevent that element from coming to our public meetings afterwards.

It’s because these elements decided to behave like informers that we can’t tolerate their presence at our meetings. This decision would apply to anyone who devoted themselves to making public information that could facilitate the work of the bourgeois state’s organs of repression.

Our decision is by no means exceptional in the history of the organisations of the workers’ movement. The latter have always had the principle of keeping informers at arm’s length in order to protect the security of revolutionary organisations and their militants [3].

Although we have already dealt with this question in our press (in particular in the article in WR 262, ‘The police-like methods of the IFICC’), we cannot avoid briefly going over the facts which led the 15th Congress to expel the members of the ‘Fraction’.

1. The publication on the internet of the date of a conference of the section of the ICC in Mexico (no. 14 of the IFICC Bulletin), a week before the conference was held. This meant that the entire world’s police could strengthen their surveillance at airports and frontiers, and make it much more precise (since our press has always said that international delegations participate in such conferences). What’s more, the members of the IFICC know very well that certain of our comrades have been direct victims of repression or been forced to leave their country of origin.

Following our denunciation of their behaviour, the members of the ‘Fraction’ replied that the date was only published on the day of the conference and that we had other fish to fry in all this. This response was a shameful lie and anyone can verify this by going to the IFICC website. Their bulletin no.14 is dated 24 November 2002, i.e. 6 days before the date of our internal meeting. The ICC itself became aware of the publication of the date on 26 November and it posed the question of whether it was advisable to send certain of our delegates to this conference [4].

2. The publication of the real initials of one of our militants, attached to his present pseudonym. The ‘Fraction’, unable to deny these facts, has tried to get round the accusation: “let’s recall simply that the initials CG were the signature on several articles in Revolution Internationale and the International Review throughout the 70s. It is under the initials CG that the militant Peter of today is widely known in the proletarian camp” (IFICC Bulletin no. 18). What does this last phrase mean? That the IFICC wanted the groups of the proletarian political milieu to know exactly WHO is this Peter that the Fraction’s texts talk about at such great length. We can already ask how this information helps these groups to better understand the political questions at stake. But even supposing that this was the case, the IFICC knows very well that of all these groups, only the IBRP knew CG, the same IBRP which had been informed seven months previously of the real identity of Peter at a meeting with the IFICC (see no. 9 of their Bulletin). As far as other revolutionary groups are concerned (such as the PCI), unlike the police, they simply don’t know who CG was. As for the fact that during the 70s numerous articles were signed CG, that’s quite true, but why have these initials disappeared from our press over the last 20 years? The IFICC members know quite well: because the ICC had judged that to publish the real initials of a militant only makes the work of the police easier. If the IFICC had decided that it was politically crucial to say how the militant Peter signed his articles, they could have used some more recent signatures and not the oldest ones. But this wasn’t its aim. What mattered was to give a little warning to CG so that other ICC militants would get the point and understand the price of combating the IFICC. The fallacious arguments it puts forward to justify its actions only highlights the mentality of informers and blackmailers which has more and more seized hold of its members.

When you look at its Bulletins, it’s evident that rumour-mongering and informing on members of the ICC has become the main business of the ‘Fraction’:

• in Bulletin no. 13, we read that the ICC hired a “luxurious room” for a public meeting;
• in no. 18, we find a detailed report of a public meeting of the PCI-Le Proletaire where all the deeds and gestures of “Peter alias CG” are set down in detail;
• in no. 19, once again there’s a sally against Peter who was “distributing alone” at this or that demonstration and this led them to raise a “highly political question”: “Finally, and you will understand that we are also posing this question to you: where is Louise? Absent from the demonstrations, absent from the public meetings, is she once again ‘ill’?”

In fact, the main concern of the members of the IFICC when they participate at demonstrations and at ICC public meetings is to know WHO is present. WHO is absent, WHO says what and WHO does what, so that they can later make public all sorts of ‘facts’ about our militants. This is work worthy of the agents of the Renseignements Generales (French security forces)! We can’t forbid the members of the IFICC to follow street demonstrations in order to track us. But we can prevent them doing their dirty work at our public meetings. At the latter, they have not had the possibility of speaking, since we demanded as a precondition that they first give back the money they stole from the ICC. The only reason for coming to our meetings has been this kind of police surveillance, as expressed for example in no. 14 of their Bulletin where we read “It is first of all necessary to know that this text (our article ‘The International Communist Party trails after the ‘Internal Fraction’ of the ICC’, published in WR 260 and 261) was written by CG, alias Peter, as can be seen by its style”. (our emphasis).

In his celebrated pamphlet What every revolutionary needs to know about repression, Victor Serge advises communist militants “never forget that ‘give me three lines of a man’s handwriting and I will get him hanged’ is a familiar axiom of all the police”. Today, when most texts are written directly by keyboard, analysing the “style” of writing is the policeman’s favoured means to identify the author, and the IFICC here is providing him with their good and loyal services.

We should make it clear that we have no reason to think that the members of the ‘Fraction’ are in the direct pay of the police, nor that they are in some way in its clutches. But does the fact that they are snitching gratis and for their own reasons alter the gravity of their actions?

Some people will say to us perhaps that none of this information is any use to the police. This is to understand nothing about police methods, which will make use of the smallest detail in order to compile a complete diagram of the organisations of the working class. The procedures used by the police are very well described by Victor Serge in his study of the Czarist Okhrana [5]. Can we seriously imagine that modern states are less well advanced in all this than their Czarist predecessor?

There will also perhaps be those who say that this banning of the members of the IFICC serves no purpose, because the police can always send someone we don’t know to gather information at our public meetings. This is obviously quite true. But is that a reason for being laisser faire when people who have already shown that they are ready to publish no matter what, and have already declared that they do not feel bound by any loyalty towards the ICC, nor towards its militants, of whom they have a detailed knowledge -come to our meetings and write copious notes about them? Should we open our doors to open and avowed sneaks under the pretext that we can’t detect the hidden ones?

It could, finally, be objected that the special organs of the bourgeois state couldn’t care less about the activities of a tiny organisation like ours. But the whole history of the workers’ movement shows that the special services of the bourgeois state never underestimate the potential danger represented by revolutionary groups, however small their size and influence in the working class at a given moment. Furthermore, despite the fact that for the moment the ‘democratic’ state doesn’t generally exert open repression against the groups of the communist left, the latter have already been subjected to acts of repression (as for example the raids on the International Communist Party in the 70s). The ICC itself has not been spared since certain of our militants, including in the most ‘democratic’ countries, have been subjected to raids, surveillance aimed at intimidating us, prolonged interrogation at the frontier, commando actions by elements who were probably tied up with the state. The members of the IFICC know all this very well.

One of the great weaknesses of today’s revolutionary organisations, and of their militants, is that they tend to forget all the elementary measures of security which enabled the revolutionary organisations of the past to maintain their activity faced with the repression of the bourgeois state whether democratic or ‘totalitarian’. Today, as yesterday, revolutionary organisations have to apply these elementary elements of what we may call ‘political hygiene’. And one of these measures is precisely to chase snitches out our meeting places.

Notes

1. This relates to the following elements: Aglae, Alberto, Jonas, Juan, Leonardo, Olivier, Sergio, Vicente and possibly to other members of the IFICC who have joined it recently and who support the behaviour of those mentioned.

2. see our articles ‘15th Congress of the ICC: Today the stake are high - strengthen the organisation to confront them’ in International Review 114 and ‘The police-like methods of the IFICC’ in WR 262.

3. See the article ‘The struggle of revolutionary organisations against provocation and slander’ in WR 252.

4. Before the congress which pronounced the exclusion of the members of the ‘Fraction’, we wrote twice to each of these former militants, asking them whether they personally defended the publication of this information, or whether it was an action with which they were not personally in agreement. They thus had ample opportunity to go back on it. As can be seen from their replies, published on the IFICC website, we received no response to this very precise question. It was only after the congress that we could read that “it is with good grace that we (the IFICC) recognise that we should have been more attentive in reproducing your letter and suppressed this passage”. Again, this is pure hypocrisy: in order to be published in French on the internet, our letter had to be translated from Spanish. Did the ‘Fraction’ do this in its sleep?

5. What every revolutionary needs to know about state repression.

The International Communist Current, 30/8/03.

Two years ago the attack on the Twin Towers in New York opened the way to an acceleration of military tensions unprecedented since the end of the cold war. This new step into a world of chaos was justified by the so-called ‘struggle against international terrorism’, combined with a ‘battle for the defence of democracy’. This lying propaganda can no longer mask the real worsening of inter-imperialist conflicts between the great powers, in particular between the USA and its former allies in the western bloc.

As we have argued many times in this paper, the USA is permanently forced to assert its world leadership on the military level, a leadership that is no less permanently being challenged by its former allies. The main conflicts since the collapse of the eastern bloc have all been expressions of this, but it has been stated even more openly with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both these countries, the USA has been trying to impose its order directly, but is experiencing growing difficulties in the face of an increasingly chaotic situation. The US is unable to control the situation in Iraq

In order to prevent its principal rivals from putting a spoke in its wheels in Iraq and the Middle East, the USA has attempted to act alone. This is why it denied the UN the chance of playing the slightest political role in the administration of Iraq. On the military level the US operation was a real success. And yet at the present time there is no perspective for withdrawing its 145,000-man military force from the ground; in fact it has been shown to be too small to control the situation. The whole aim of the military occupation � to give the world a convincing demonstration of US power � is being undermined by the fact that the perspective of getting Iraqi society back on its feet seems more and more distant.

Whatever the American bourgeoisie says, it does not control the situation in Iraq. This reality is reflected in all the anti-American propaganda, which uses every opportunity it can to show the harmfulness of the US presence in the country.

The living conditions of the population, which were already deplorable under Saddam, have worsened as a result of the war and of the occupying power’s inability to supply the most basic necessities or repair the essential infrastructure, particularly for water and electricity. Food shortages have provoked a number of riots.

Criminal gangs and speculators are flourishing, creating a climate of instability and insecurity. This is fuelled above all by the activities of terrorist groups, who have been carrying out almost daily attacks on US troops and forces allied to the US: the British, who boasted that they were more sensitive to the feelings of the local population, have increasingly come under fire in Basra, and the Jordanians, whose embassy was bombed. But the economic infrastructure, such as the water and oil pipelines, is also under attack.

The occupying troops are paying a heavy tribute for the defence of the imperialist interests of the US bourgeoisie. At the time of writing over 60 GIs have been killed in ambushes since the end of the war. Terrorised themselves, the US troops in turn terrorise the population and are greeted with growing hostility. A further 78 GIs have died in ‘accidents’ of various kinds. The death toll is far from closed.

Despite the USA’s attempt to bind Iraqi society with ties of steel, anarchy has the upper hand. The attempt to set up an Iraqi authority and a ‘democratic’ constitution � the great beacon of American propaganda and a key justification for the war - remains stillborn. Bush may well proclaim that never before in history has a coalition government united so many different parties as the ‘Provisional Government Council’; but far from being the skeleton of a future government, this coalition is no more than a theatre of conflict between all kinds of rival gangs, all of whom show little interest in any overall ‘national’ interest. Worse still, certain Shiite factions are more and more inclined to wage a frontal combat against the US, especially after the bomb which killed the Ayatollah Hakim and almost 100 of his followers in Najaf on 29 August.

As for Blair’s promise that Iraqi oil revenues would soon pay for the reconstruction of Iraq, this has proved to be a mirage in the desert. Oil revenues are hardly sufficient to pay for the rebuilding of the oil installations, let alone the reconstruction of the entire country. This raises the question: who will pay for the growing financial burden of occupying Iraq? Who will control and pay for the Iraqi protectorate?

Thus although it succeeded in totally eliminating its rivals’ influence from Iraq, the US now finds itself caught up in a contradiction. The occupation of Iraq is a financial abyss and the loss of lives among the US troops will begin to pose serious problems for the American bourgeoisie. The US can’t think of pulling out until it has stabilised the situation to its advantage, but this is proving increasingly difficult. It is thus trying to get other powers involved in the financial and military effort, while maintaining an overall monopoly of command, with the UK playing the role of first lieutenant. So after spurning the UN for so long, the administration is now having to appeal for its help; but powers like France and Germany are reluctant to get involved if they have no say in the overall running of the operation and only play the role of bankers or suppliers of cannon fodder. This is becoming a new point of tension between the big powers.

The continual attacks on US troops and those inclined to support the occupation are increasing the pressure on the USA, and its apparent powerlessness to end them can only further encourage the numerous armed groups acting inside the country, whether Saddam loyalists, home-grown Islamist radicals or the jihadists infiltrating the country from elsewhere in the region.(note 1) [187]. The assassination of Ayatollah Hakim was a particularly hard blow against US claims that it can ensure the security of Iraq and oversee a political solution. It thus clearly plays the game of the USA’s rivals, local and global, even if they didn’t directly order it themselves.

This doesn’t mean that all terrorist actions in Iraq are necessarily directed against the US, as illustrated by the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad on 12 August, which killed over 20 people, including the UN general secretary’s special representative in Iraq, who is a great friend of France (his body guards were all French and it appears that he was specially targeted in this attack). On many levels, this attack served the interests of the USA. Although it does further demonstrate the USA’s inability to maintain order in this country, it nevertheless feeds their propaganda line that Iraq is the focus for the war against terrorism and that the latter isn’t only a threat to the USA. It is also a pretext to put pressure on the big democracies, the USA’s main rivals, to take up their responsibilities and get involved in the process of pacification and the building of a democratic Iraq. It is certainly no coincidence that this attack took place at a time when the US and Britain were already calling for the ‘international community’ to help carry the economic and military burden of controlling Iraq. Nevertheless, France and Germany were able to turn the situation to their own advantage by arguing that it is impossible for the UN to take a more active part in the on the humanitarian level without being associated to the direction of the country’s affairs, so as to ensure the security of its personnel. The week after the attack we heard the French foreign minister Villepin calling for a “political solution” in Iraq, strongly echoed by Chirac who told 200 ambassadors that there had to be a “transfer of power to the Iraqis themselves” and the establishment of “a process which can only be fully legitimised by the United Nations” � the whole thing wrapped up in a denunciation of “unilateralism” � ie the USA.

The contradictions faced by the US bourgeoisie also affect the British bourgeoisie, all the more alarmed by the fact that it has gained precious little from this alliance with the US. The scandal around the death of David Kelly, who was one of the main UN advisers on the issue of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, expresses the fact that significant sections of the British ruling class have real disagreements with Blair’s policies. The US road map that doesn’t lead to peace

Just next to the mess in Iraq, the US also has to deal with a situation which has been getting worse and worse for decades: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. None of the US plans so far have succeeded. It is nonetheless urgent for the US to eliminate this focus of conflict, even if it means going against Israel’s wishes. The famous ‘road map’ initiated by the Bush administration showed Washington’s determination to force Israel to make serious concessions. It’s no longer a question, as it was with the Oslo accords set up during the Clinton administration, of getting Israel and the Palestinians to sit down and talk. The White House is now demanding that Israel offers no further obstacle to the creation of a Palestinian state. The same authoritarian methods have been used towards the Palestinian side, to get rid of anything that might get in the way of a settlement. This is why Arafat, who previously has been a good ally of the US in getting the ‘peace process’ in motion, has been pushed aside in favour of his rival Mahmoud Abbas. And yet despite all the pressure from the US, Sharon, while making a show of accepting a cease-fire, has in reality carried on with his policy of opening up Palestinian territory to Israeli settlers, of making murderous incursions into the occupied territories and assassinating the elders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. These organisations, in their turn, simply feed off the Israeli provocations in order to carry out new terrorist attacks in Israel.

For a very short period the ‘road map’ eased tensions, but a new series of terrorist attacks and counter-attacks have already signed its death warrant. All this shows the limits of USA’s muscular diplomacy. The USA’s difficulties in Iraq are echoed and even amplified by its inability to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

On the eve of the second anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers, and of the third anniversary of the Intifada in Palestine, the perspective offered by capitalism, both to the population of those regions most directly affected by war, and to the whole planet, is one of growing chaos and horror.

(1) When Bush originally said that Saddam was in league with al-Qaida - it was probably a groundless claim. An irony of the ‘war against terrorism’ in Iraq is that it may well have encouraged Saddam loyalists and Islamic radicals to ally against the US occupation. After all, this is exactly what bin Laden called for just prior to the war! Back [188]

Mulan, 6/9/03.

The ideology of 'anti-globalisation' is an emanation of the bourgeoisie. Its role is to derail any attempt by the working class to understand the world and draw the necessary conclusions, to drag all those who begin to question the current system back into the fold of the defence of democracy, of the capitalist state. It is thus a real danger to the working class.

The anti-globalisation movement has recently begun to give itself a new name in some countries (for example in France). It is using the term 'altermondialisation' - the 'alternative' to globalisation - as though it represented a new and important alternative to the current world order. As we shall attempt to show, this is not at all the case. The brilliant discoveries of anti-globalisation

The basis of anti-globalisation ideology is the denunciation of the 'neo-liberal' policies adopted by the major powers since the 1980s, which have allegedly placed the entire world in the hands of the great multinational companies, subordinating all human activities - agriculture, natural resources, education, culture, etc - to the pursuit of profit. This is sometimes described as a process of commodification and standardisation of products - everything is up for sale, in short.

The world is run by the dictatorship of the market. This dictatorship has at the same time stolen political power from democratically controlled states, and thus from the citizens of the world.

Thus the anti-globalisation lobby raises the battle-cry: 'our world is not for sale'. They demand that the law of the market must not guide political policies. Political decision-making must be restored to the citizens, and democracy must be defended and extended against all financial diktats.

In sum, the anti-globalisers have reinvented the wheel. It's some revelation that capitalist enterprises only exist to make profit! That, under capitalism, all goods are turned into commodities! That the development of capitalism means the globalisation of exchange!

The workers' movement did not wait until the 1990s and the new wave of clever academics and radical thinkers who have come up with all this. All these ideas can be found in the Communist Manifesto, first published in 1848:

"The bourgeoisie has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single unconscionable freedom - Free Trade�The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers�

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood."

Thus, the anti-globalisers claim to be offering a new analysis and a new alternative while at the same time suppressing all reference to two centuries of struggles and of theoretical endeavours by the working class, aimed precisely at understanding the bases for a truly human future. And little wonder: the better world proposed by the anti-globalisers does not look forward, as the workers' movement has always done, but backwards, to a mythical rural past of happy little enterprises and local exchanges - or, more prosaically, to the period between the 1930s and the 1970s, which for them represents a lesser evil compared to the liberalisation which got underway in the '80s. After all, that was the period of 'Keynesianism' in which the state was a more obvious actor on the economic stage.

However, before rushing to choose the years 1930-70 over the last two decades, it's worth recalling a few of the characteristics of that period.

Let's not forget that Keynesian policies did not solve the crisis of 1929 and that massive unemployment had returned to most of the western economies by the end of the 30s; let's not forget the second world war; let's not forget the catastrophic situation of the working class during the world war and for some years after it; let's not forget that since 1945 not a single day has passed without war and that this has resulted in the loss of tens of millions of lives. And finally, let's not forget that at the end of the 1960s, capitalism plunged into an economic crisis which led to the inexorable growth of unemployment.

This is the 'better world' the anti-globalisers look back on so fondly, the lost paradise destroyed by the multinationals!

All this is the expression of a classic ideological manipulation by the bourgeoisie: to present two apparently opposed alternatives which turn out to be the two sides of the same coin.

One of the clearest examples of this false alternative is the argument that the state has withdrawn from the economy, leaving a free hand to the giant companies which are undermining democracy and the general interest. This is a total fraud. The state has never been more present in the economy than it is today. It's the state which regulates world trade and fixes the interest rates, customs tariffs, etc. The state is still the leading economic actor, with a public expenditure which makes up an increasing portion of GNP and of the ever-swelling budget deficit. This is the so-called 'powerless', 'absent' state in the model country of liberalism, the USA. It is virtually impossible to mention any economic, political or social sector in which the state doesn't have an important, if not preponderant role.

And the state is not the guarantor of a better world, where riches are more equally distributed: it's the state which ruins this world, through war, through attacks on workers' wages, pensions and social benefits. It's the state which bleeds the working class dry to stand up to the crisis of the system.

What the anti-globalisers are saying to all those who ask questions about the state of the world is this: the choice is between liberalism and state capitalism, when the real choice is between socialism or barbarism.

The source of wars, of poverty, of unemployment, is not the so-called liberal revolution imposed by super-powerful multinationals, but the mortal crisis of capitalism, which no policy of the bourgeoisie, whether Keynesianism or liberalism, can resolve. False alternatives

The anti-globalisers claim to be anti-capitalist. But all their policies boil down to a criticism of the 'excesses' of this world and to proposals aimed at safeguarding democracy. Behind the whole melange of issues and proposals they put forward lies the old left-wing reformism which the revolutionary movement has fought against for over a century.

Let's look first of all at the idea of a 'solidarity economy', in other words the global extension of all the experiences of cooperatives and self-management which have always meant no more than the self-exploitation of the workers. Linked to this is the notion of the citizen's initiative, according to which each individual can play his part in improving the state of the world. This approach ignores the division of society into classes and ties the proletariat to the bourgeoisie by pretending that everyone is an equal citizen as long as you have enough democracy.

The ideas of a more just management of the economy, of fair trade and all the rest, are also part of this warmed up version of the old reformism. For decades the social democrats have bleated on about the fairer distribution of the fruits of growth. Such conceptions deliberately hide the fact that capitalism is a system in crisis, and that the ruling class, far from sharing the benefits of growth, is compelled to make the working class pay for the crisis.

In any case, who is supposed to be in charge of this fairer distribution of wealth, if not the state? The fulminations of writers like Naomi Klein and George Monbiot against the policy of privatisation exposes what lies behind anti-globalisation ideology; the defence of the public sector, of the state.

But the anti-globalisers also claim to be internationalists. It's true that the various organisations who campaign for 'global justice' exist in many countries, are in contact with each other and repeat the same slogans. But this has nothing in common with working class internationalism. One of the key demands of the anti-globalisers is for protectionist measures to defend small countries or small farmers and traders against the multinationals. In other words, they want workers to identify with the national interest of small states - when the class struggle can only advance by breaking ties with all national interests and all nation states.

As a matter of fact, one of the main unifying themes of the anti-globalisers is opposition not just to the multinationals or the World Trade Organisation, but to the USA. What they denounce above all is US domination of the world market, not the world market as such. And when they call for a stronger democratic state, this is above all a plea for America's imperialist rivals to stand up to the USA's attempts to maintain its global hegemony. Again George Monbiot was quite explicit about this when, in one of his many articles for The Guardian, he called for European unity and the extension of the Euro as a bulwark against US war-mongering. This is about as far away from internationalism as you can get - calling for resistance to one imperialism by binding yourself hand and foot to another. It is no accident that the anti-globalisation movement now plays a central role in the pacifist deception - and thus in the march towards new imperialist wars. A real danger for the working class

Why has the bourgeoisie invested so heavily in publicising the anti-globalisation movement?

We can answer this at two levels. In the most general sense, the democratic ideology which is so crucial to the maintenance of capitalist class rule cannot do without the idea that there is a political opposition to the status quo.The strong grip the old socialist and communist parties once held over the working class has been weakened by its experience of left-wing governments and the collapse of Stalinism, and there has been a growing need for a new and more credible 'anti-capitalist' alternative to the right.

More specifically, the bourgeoisie cannot afford to ignore the fact that within the proletariat more and more people are posing serious questions about the current state of the planet. To a large extent they come from a generation which has little interest in traditional politics and tends to be openly distrustful towards the old left parties.

This is why the anti-globalisation movement, with its ideology of local self-activity, of libertarianism and syndicalism, its mish-mash of a hundred different mini-causes and sub-movements, is so well placed to lead this embryonic questioning into the dead-end of bourgeois ideology.

The refried leftism of the anti-globalisers is thus an important instrument of the ruling class, which needs above all to hide the simple truth from those it exploits and oppresses: capitalism cannot be reformed, improved or made fair. It needs to be destroyed and replaced by a global communist society, and this cannot be achieved without class struggle leading to the world revolution.

H, 4/10/03.

'Blair out', 'Bliar', 'Tony's a Tory'.

These were the most prominent slogans on the anti-war demo in London on 27 September.

But calls for Blair to go aren't limited to the 'far left' groups who hand out placards emblazoned with these slogans.

Respectable ex-cabinet ministers like Claire Short and Robin Cook have more or less explicitly called for his resignation, accusing him of deceiving the country over the war on Iraq. At the recent Labour party conference he was under fire not only over the war, but also his domestic policies - privatisation, student fees, relations with the unions, to name but a few.

Gordon Brown has already begun to tout himself as an 'alternative' - his conference speech avoided justifying the war and rousingly reasserted 'Old Labour' values such as the 'redistribution of wealth'. A false alternative

To think that Brown is an alternative to Blair is to disregard his role at the heart of the Labour government in the management of the capitalist economy where the rich have got richer and the poor poorer.

68% of working taxpayers earn less than £20,000 a year and 51% earn less than £15,000 (according to the Inland Revenue). These are levels of low pay deliberately encouraged by the government through the minimum wage and the Working Families Tax Credit system. His 'distribution of wealth' has seen hundred of thousands losing unemployment benefits due to entitlement changes. Hundreds of thousands of manufacturing workers have been thrown out of work. National Insurance contributions and direct taxes have been increased.

'Prudent' Gordon is also working out ways to make the working class pay the cost of the war and occupation of Iraq - current cost £3 billion and rising.

Neither are the likes of Short and Cook any alternative.

They fully supported British imperialism's participation in the Kosovo and Afghanistan adventures, the military enforcement of the 'no-fly' zones over Iraq, and the maintenance of crippling sanctions which killed hundreds of thousands of the Iraqis they now claim to care so much for. Nothing new about Labour's capitalist policies

Socialist Worker (4/10/3) says that Blair and Brown "are both cut from the same Tory cloth". Yet Labour's history shows that it is not becoming a crypto-Tory party but is and has long been a reliable part of the ruling class's political apparatus. In its own right, with its own ideology, it has imposed austerity measures on the working class and defended the interests of British imperialism in times of war and peace - ever since the First World War.

At the Labour Party conference Jack Jones (former leader of the T&G) and Michael Foot were both honoured for their long service, and some nostalgically recalled the days of 'Old Labour'. This is the Jack Jones who was central to the Social Contract imposed by the Labour government of 1974-79. At that time government and unions inflicted a ruthless incomes policy on the working class and worked tirelessly to undermine and defeat the struggle against this attack. This is the Michael Foot who said that Britain was never closer to 'socialism' than during the Second World War - when Labour did its best to ensure that the workers were enrolled to die for British imperialism, repeating what it had done during the 1914-18 war.

All these figures are 'cut from the same cloth'. The fabric of the Labour party has been cut to suit the needs of British capitalism for the last ninety years, and, to mix metaphors, there is no 'reverse gear', or any other means, to change it. The groups that make up the Socialist Alliance also pose as an 'alternative', but their programme for strengthening the capitalist state's management of British capitalism is indistinguishable from the ideology that guided Labour in government and opposition for the decades before Blair became Labour leader. United on the need to attack the working class

The only thing that would change if Blair was replaced by Brown or some other defender of the 'real values of Labour' is the rhetoric. This is because a Labour government acts in the way its does not because of the particular individuals who lead it, but because of the class interests it serves. Brown would sound more 'socialist' but a capitalist government has to consider a number of factors. It has to take account of the state of the economy, and in the face of a worsening crisis it is the working class that has to pay the price. Unemployment, job insecurity, harsher regimes for those in work and in education, cut backs in benefits, the decline in basic services such as the NHS (with more and more available only to those who can pay for them), the disappearance of pension funds: the capitalist state presides over all the attacks on the living and working conditions of its citizens.

Brown has amply shown his willingness to carry out such attacks. As has the labour party, be it New or Old, since the First World War when it has managed British capitalism at a local or national level. It was a very 'old' even 'socialist' Labour government that laid off 30.000 Liverpool council workers in the 1980s (aided and abetted by the 'Loony Left' council run by Derek Hatton and the Trotskyist 'Militant' group).

Thus we can see that all the wings of the Labour party are agreed on one thing: the need to attack the working class in order to defend the interests of British capitalism. Labour defends British imperialism

The government of the capitalist class is not only in economic competition with every other state, it is also compelled to defend its interests militarily. Every capitalist state is imperialist and has to devote enormous resources against the potential threat of other armed states defending their interests. It is the nature of capitalism that requires every national capital to be armed and ready for conflict - not the particular policy of individual governments.

Labour governments have proven themselves to be intransigent defenders of British imperialism. Not only since the 1990s but since 1914. The first Labour government (1924) made a clear commitment to this by continuing the previous government's policy of bombing and gassing the rebels and civilians in Iraq. The only alternative is the class struggle

In addition to the economic crisis and imperialist conflict the capitalist state is aware of the threat posed by the struggle of the working class. Capitalism is based on the exploitation of the working class, and the more that the ruling class attacks the working class, the greater the potential for workers' struggle in defence of their class interests. The massive struggles that took place in France this May over the issue of pensions were a stark reminder to the ruling class of this potential. In Britain we have yet not seen such a massive outburst of combativity, but the unofficial strikes at Heathrow, in the post and the shipyards are signs of a growing unwillingness to accept attacks on living and working conditions (see the article on page 3).

If the class struggle is to make significant steps forward, workers will have to learn to rely on their own strengths - the ability to organise, to unite, and to develop their own political programme aimed at the overthrow of the capitalist system. And the only way the working class can make progress in this direction is to refuse to get caught up in all the false alternatives offered by its exploiters.

WR, 4/10/03.

Prior to its September public forum in Paris on anti-globalisation (see the article on page 8 of this issue, based on the presentation given at the meeting), the French section of the ICC called on other sections, as well as sympathisers of the ICC, to attend this meeting to express their solidarity with the section, which is one of the two most directly confronted with the presence of the parasitic group that calls itself the Internal Fraction of the ICC [1]. As we explain in more detail in our article 'The ICC does not allow snitches into its public meetings [189]', published on our website as a supplement to WR 267, the ICC, having excluded these elements from the organisation at our last international congress, took the decision to bar them from our public meetings as well. In our view, the activities of this group constitute a danger not only to the ICC but to the whole milieu of proletarian political organisations. In particular, its constant use of personal information and innuendo about members of the ICC on its website and in its bulletin puts it on the same level as that of informers and provocateurs. Closing the doors of our meetings to them is thus an elementary act of self-defence. This view is reinforced in the letters we print below. They come from three of our sympathisers in the UK, two of whom were able to attend the meeting in person, where they met members and sympathisers of the ICC from a number of countries.

28.09.03 Comrades of the ICC, I am writing to express my support for the recent decision to exclude the so-called 'Internal Fraction of the ICC' (IFICC) from all public meetings of the organisation. This latest development in the battle for defence of the revolutionary organisation was, as you are aware, explained in the article "The ICC doesn't allow snitches into its public meetings [189]" (web supplement to WR 267) and put into practice at the last public meeting in Paris on the 13th of September, which I was fortunately able to attend.

That said, before moving on to discuss the meeting I feel it is important to repeat again that my support for this decision (and obviously the ICC) does not stem from any 'brainwashing' or blind loyalty to the organisation, which will disappoint those elements whose 'political' lives revolve around the misfortunes of the 'Stalinist' ICC and its crazy sympathisers; rather it comes from time spent working and discussing with the organisation. The openness and honesty with which the ICC has dealt with its latest organisational crisis has shown once again that the organisation is far from being the cult it is often portrayed to be. Compare this approach with the IBRP's response to the behaviour of the LA Workers Voice group and it is clear who in the proletarian political milieu is facing the difficult, but vital, question of the revolutionary organisation head on.

Although there isn't the time or the space here to discuss the IFICC's behaviour in detail it is important to make a few brief comments. The IFICC has acted from the beginning in a way not befitting members of a communist organisation. They have ignored the statutes of the organisation whose platform they claim to defend, they have stolen money from the ICC to fund their own activity and finally through gossip and the publication of sensitive information they have put individual ICC militants and the organisation as a whole at greater risk of police infiltration. Their activities have effectively threatened the very existence of the ICC!

This is why the ICC had to exclude the IFICC. Not to deny them their 'democratic' speaking rights! And this is what formed the opening presentation of the Paris public meeting. The main reasons for this important decision, as outlined above, were given along with an attack on the 'democratic' fantasies of the IFICC. They may claim not have 'disrupted' previous meetings they have attended but the presence of gossips does little to promote open comradely discussion. Nor does the case that they are not in the direct pay of the state lessen the seriousness of their activities. The IFICC's written response to the ICC's decision was also discussed. As appears usual there were no attempts at political discussion but more veiled threats and bullying claims that the exclusion couldn't be enforced as the ICC 'weren't up to it'. The members of the IFICC left sulking outside the meetings in Mexico and Paris may now want to rethink their opinion of the ICC's abilities.

Time was given after the presentation to discuss the exclusion. Comrades and sympathisers of the ICC from Britain, France and Germany all spoke about the importance of the decision and the seriousness of the situation with the Fraction. With the onset of decomposition the stakes for humanity are higher than ever and revolutionary organisations have a responsibility to ensure that the chaotic and nihilistic tendencies prevalent in decaying capitalist society don't find their way into their ranks. The situation in France is not unique and as a German comrade stated "the fight against the (In)fraction is an international one". The meeting in Paris with its international 'audience' showed that the ICC was prepared, and able, to take up its responsibilities to the class and defend the revolutionary organisation.

Unfortunately I do not have time to discuss the presentation and discussion on anti-globalisation, which followed the announcement on the Fraction. Suffice it to say both were rigorous and criticised the idealism and utopianism of those that believe that the world can be 'made good' without the intervention of the working class and the removal of capitalism.

For Communism,

Harry

29.9.03. Dear ICC, The following letter is a reflection on the themes at the recent meeting of RI in Paris. I decided to attend the recent meeting of RI in Paris in support of the ICC in its conflict with the parasitic Fraction. At the meeting RI convincingly defended its decision to exclude the Fraction from its public meetings in addition to the previous exclusion from the organisation. I believe the defence of revolutionary organisations is important and should not be underestimated. To counter capitalism the working class must organise to defend its interests. Any activity on the proletarian terrain is subject to attack by the ruling class. The working class must organise to counter this. This includes the vanguard who form revolutionary organisations. If these organisations are not defended they are organisations in name only.

The Fraction is guilty of trying to destroy the organisation. This has included personalised attacks on comrades of the ICC, the publication of the real initials of members, the publication of details of internal meetings, the theft of funds and the theft of contacts' details.

This activity should be condemned by all revolutionaries. I believe it is correct for the ICC to expose the details of the Fraction. Firstly as a warning to other revolutionaries and to show openly the problems that revolutionaries face.

In the meeting the comrade from Germany correctly emphasised the importance of organisational issues. Defending the organisation has been an important part of revolutionary history. She highlighted the problems of the German revolution and the organisational failures that contributed to the defeat of the working class. All those in the meeting defended the ICC's decision on this matter.

The meeting proceeded onto the main presentation. This was on the ideology of anti-globalisation as an attack on the working class. In France there is a large petit-bourgeois movement which uses anti-globalisation theory to support it. They are joined by the left in a broad coalition. The bourgeoisie are happy to support this as it plays easily into the anti-American campaign.

A comrade of the ICC was correct to draw comparisons with Proudhon who was attacked by Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy. Anti-globalisation poses a false opposition between a ruthless big capitalism and a nice small democratic capitalism. In the Communist Manifesto Marx describes capitalism's globalising dynamic. There is not a non-globalising version of capitalism. There is also not a version of capitalism that doesn't exploit the poor or one that is free from war.

Anti-globalisation is also a defence of capitalist democracy. A false view that the state stands above vested interests. In reality the state is the organised arm of the ruling class as a whole whether you can vote or not.

In Britain the ruling class does not give the same level of support to anti-globalisation theories. This is because the UK has closer ties to the US. But this ideology is useful for diverting searching elements away from proletarian politics. This I know unfortunately from personal experience. Whatever the wide ideas that are expressed in this movement they do not include the destruction of the capitalist system or the organisation of the working class.

I was pleased with the level of contributions in the meeting and it was a nice change to be in a large room full of people who support class positions.

Yours, D

Letter of solidarity from a sympathiser unable to support the ICC in person at the Paris meeting.

3.9.03

I want to express my solidarity with this meeting and the proposed exclusion of the members of the 'IFICC'. It's not only a 'logical' consequence that they should have no place in the ICC's meetings but a continuation of the ICC's permanent - and not passive - struggle for the defence of the organisations of revolutionaries. It is also part of the struggle against democratism which so much infects the groups of the proletarian milieu.

This is the application of a necessarily deepening analysis of this whole episode of the fight the ICC has been through and responded to. The contempt for organisational statutes, the theft, duplicity, denigration and back-door informing has to be responded to with revolutionary vigour.

At the same time as playing up the 'divergences' of the milieu, the IFICC's bulletin no. 20 has kept up the pressure on their targeted individual in the ICC by making sure his name is kept to the fore and the attention of the bourgeoisie.

I support your action.

Fraternally, E

From a subsequent letter from the same comrade

20.9.03 Reading the last issue of RI, I want to reinforce the view I put forward in your proposal to ban the IFICC from public meetings. Their spying activities, something I tended to underestimate, are focussed in this article: who's at what demonstration or intervention: who's not there; who's possibly doing what, as well as other hard information. This has nothing to do with political divergences and can only be of use to the state agencies dedicated to unveiling such things. (The IFICC's) copious taking of notes (who said what) also carries a similar sort of threat that is implied in their sending out of their unsolicited 'bulletins' ('we know where you live - we have your address'). This reinforces my support for your positive action.

Notes

1. The other being our Mexican section, which has already taken similar measures against the members of the IFICC there.

4/10/03.

The murder of Foreign Minister Anna Lindh during the Swedish Euro referendum brought a new intensity to the democratic campaign. It was cynically used by the bourgeoisie to denounce the 'attack on democracy and the open society'. All the political parties of the bourgeoisie, from right to left, agreed to stop the campaign and called for a vote in memory of Lindh.

The 82% turnout was the highest in any referendum so far. It was also slightly higher than in the elections for the last parliament. While the bourgeoisie showed a national consensus to 'defend democracy' (despite the fact that the murder seemed not to have any political motives, probably being the act of a disturbed individual), it was still obvious that the ruling class was divided on the Euro. But the bourgeoisie was able, in the wake of the murder of one of its most prominent politicians, to show a united face in the referendum to mobilise the working class in the defence of democracy. In other words, to defend the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

Why was there a majority against the Euro? The leading factions of the bourgeoisie, like the bosses' union, and leading capitalist companies like Ericsson and Volvo were for the Euro, as were the main figures in the Social Democratic Party (SAP), like Prime Minister Persson, Foreign Minister Lindh and Finance Minister Ringholm. However, even inside the government there were divisions which cut through the whole SAP, as well as inside the union apparatus where there were forceful critics of Sweden joining the Euro.

The Centre party, which traditionally has roots in the agricultural sector and was for Sweden joining the EU in the referendum of 1994, was also against joining the Euro. The other right-wing parties were for the Euro, even if there where strong minorities that were against.

The result of the referendum must be seen as a set back for the leading factions of the bourgeoisie, which had underestimated the strength of the 'no' campaign. The 'no' campaign has continued since the 1994 referendum, focussing on the myth that all the cuts in the welfare state were due to joining the EU. Attacks on the working class

The fact that many workers voted 'no' should be seen as an expression of discontent with the long period of attacks on the social wage in Sweden. The left has been in the forefront of the attacks on workers' living conditions. This is most clearly shown in the cooperation between the Green party, the former CP, and the SAP in government, which relies on the other parties to continue as the party at the heart of the state apparatus. The attacks on workers' living conditions have been skilfully organised, mostly on a local and municipal level, mostly by the left parties, but partly by the right wing party protesting against the 'red-green coalition'.

In fact the attacks on workers have been so efficient that Sweden is admired by the bourgeoisies of France and Germany which have had difficulties in undertaking the 'structural reforms' that have already been achieved in Sweden.

The reason why the attacks on workers have been so effective in Sweden can be explained by a number of factors. There has not been a frontal attack on workers' pensions as in France; it has been phased in on a step by step basis. This was accelerated after the financial crash in Sweden in the early 90s, when workers in Sweden suddenly faced mass unemployment. The attacks have also been dispersed across a number of sectors.

The bourgeoisie, and particularly the left, have diverted the dissatisfaction in the working class with electoral campaigns that focus on democracy as a way of channelling discontent. Before the summer the bourgeoisie also used a strike organised by the unions in the municipal sector, which was drawn out and fragmented. This was a lesson to all workers on how not to fight, staged by the unions for workers in the public sector to let off steam. This was effective despite there being a certain loss of confidence in the unions when the strike was seen to lead nowhere, leaving many workers disappointed about how the strike was run. Strategies of the Swedish bourgeoisie

The fact that the bourgeoisie used the referendum in its democratic campaign against the working class does not contradict the fact that the bourgeoisie was divided over the Euro. This division, particularly inside the SAP, has its roots in changes at the economic and imperialist level.

The bourgeoisie had a huge shock in the early 90s when it could not defend its currency (which was tied up in the ERM); the Reich bank increased the interest rate to 500%, and big parts of the banking sector collapsed, only to be saved by the 'lender of last resort', the state. This gave rise to a very sceptical attitude to a fixed rate for the currency. Devaluations have always been the medicine of the Swedish bourgeoisie when it was in crisis, but they have led to an extreme devaluation of its assets and the selling off of big companies like Volvo and Saab to American capital, and with major pharmaceutical companies being integrated into big American capital.

The growing financial turbulence of the 90s drew a part of the bourgeoisie towards the Euro. But the leading faction delayed its change of policy too long, a change from distancing itself to an attitude of searching for cooperation because it needs to improve its position with the prospect of future financial storms. The leading circle in the SAP did not want a referendum, because it knew the difficulties in controlling the election campaign, as well as the advantages the 'no' side had gained. In parliament they could easily get a majority. But most of the SAP wanted a referendum.

On the imperialist level, throughout the 20th century, Sweden always had an attitude of trying to stay out of trouble for as long as possible. It avoided entering into alliances with other powers unless it was absolutely necessary in order to stay out of conflicts. For example, it was close to Germany during the Second World War, exporting significant quantities of iron for the German war effort, and allowing German troops to advance on Norway and Finland through Sweden. The Swedish bourgeoisie laid the rails for German imperialist adventures. The rapid desertion of a former ally faced with defeat was clearly demonstrated in the switch from Germany to the side of the Allies at the end of the war. The success of this policy formed the basis, after the war, of the myth of Sweden's 'neutrality'. It helped the western bloc as an infiltrator and agent in the so called 'progressive movements' of national liberation, which in fact concealed the battle between the American and Russian imperialist blocs. Since the dissolution of the blocs, Sweden's imperialist role has decreased, with the tendency for each country to fight for itself, and the difficulties Sweden faces in playing off other powers against each other. The complete lack of an independent policy in relation to the US offensive after 9/11 was shown in outright apologies for American imperialism. It was only with the open opposition to the US by France and Germany that Persson and Lindh showed a more 'independent' face and fell in with the critics of the American adventure in Iraq. Both Lindh and Persson tried to play a more significant role in Europe, getting closer to France and Germany. One example of this was Lindh's open critique of Berlusconi over the new European constitution. The desire to join the Euro is part of a tendency toward establishing closer cooperation with other European countries. What does Lindh's killing show?

There is no doubt that the former Swedish foreign minister was an effective defender of Sweden's imperialist policy. There did not appear to be any fraction of the bourgeoisie that objected to Anna Lindh, despite the differences over the Euro etc. Who benefited the most from her murder? On one level the bourgeoisie was able to use it to mount nationalist and democratic campaigns and increase the turnout in the referendum, but it also lost an important member of the government, who had been expected to succeed the current Prime Minister. There do not appear to be any real political motives within the bourgeoisie for the killing of one its leading members. It also looks unlikely that a foreign power would have been interested in killing Lindh, not even Berlusconi with his hurt pride and loyalty to the US.

A murder like this does show one aspect of social reality. We have seen one of the vilest media campaigns, at least by Swedish standards, against an innocent man, with his whole life exposed, not only in all the major evening papers, but also in the more 'serious' daily papers. No detail has been left unpublished, no speculation has been too far-fetched or obscure. The events have confirmed the status of the media as a bunch of lying hyenas, prepared to fill their pages with anything, no matter how scurrilous. And a completely corrupt police force has leaked intimate details of the investigation, as well as all kinds of speculation, to the press, whose rights are defended with laws 'protecting the free press', or for the 'protection of media sources' etc.

We have also seen how the psychiatric care system in Sweden has collapsed, partly through the constant cuts in this sector, and this has rebounded on the architects of this 'reform'. People are locked up, abandoned to live on the streets, to get addicted to drink or drugs, to commit suicide, or even to kill others in their moments of despair. It seems likely that the man who is currently accused of killing Anna Lindh needed psychiatric care, which he had been repeatedly refused.

As the furore was beginning to die down, the SAP government put forward a package of tax increases in new budget proposals directly hitting the living conditions of many workers. At the same time there has been a rash of announcements of new cuts in the public sector on the municipal level, sacking a new round of workers in the 'welfare system'. The attacks of the bourgeoisie continue.

Olof, 30/09/03.

This article was originally published in 2 parts. It has now been consolidated into one article, the complete version of which can be found here [191].

Since the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989, the anti-communist propaganda of the bourgeoisie - based on the 'greatest lie of the 20th century' that claims Stalinism was the inevitable outcome of Marxism - has obtained heights never before imaginable. But moreover, the influence of the classical theses of anarchism - this 'radical' petty bourgeois critique of Marxism-has itself widened, touching even those political circles that seek to link themselves up with Marxism once again. The bourgeois critique, like the anarchist criticism of Marxism, affirms - even in the case where Marx is not relegated to the same ranks as Stalin - that certain fundamental theses of Marxism, supposedly false, prefigured the rise of Stalinism. Notably, the Marxist conception according to which the proletariat has an historic task, a mission to complete, is considered a residue of idealism and even as a religious deformation of the scientific spirit. One finds such anarchist influences even among the declared partisans of historical materialism, for example the review Soziale Befreiung (SB), written by the Unabh�ngige R�tekommunisten (independent council communists) in Germany. This influence does not surprise us since SB declares itself partisan of a "post-Marxist communism" in its new brochure The Terror of Capital (vol. 1).

In SB's last brochure, one finds a critique of a quotation from the Parti Communiste International's (PCI) celebrated article, Auschwitz, ou le grand alibi (Auschwitz, or the great alibi). This reads: "It happens at times that the workers themselves fall into racism. This happens when threatened with massive unemployment, they tend to concentrate their anger on certain groups: Italians, Poles, or other 'wops,' 'blacks' etc. But within the proletariat these drives only occur at the worst moments of demoralization; they do not last. Once it enters into the struggle, the proletariat sees clearly and concretely where its real enemy lies: it becomes a homogenous class with a perspective and an historic mission."

After having clarified this conception as a "form of the idealist cult of the proletariat," SB continues its critique further: "Bordiga's conceptions are the idealist and deformed reflection of proletarian life, which is strictly bourgeois as well. The working class is not strictly a unitary class. It is possible in crisis situations for it to act collectively, but this is a completely different matter. But this story of 'a historic perspective and an historic mission' is a revival of the idealist residues of Marxism: the faith the petty bourgeoisie has in another class. (Almost all the Marxist theoreticians of the 19th and 20th centuries - beginning with Marx and Engels themselves - were renegades from the bourgeoisie). Who then assigns these 'historic missions'? The God of History? All of this is terribly religious! Its purpose is to directly link the theory of the party impartially and inflexibly to the service of said mission." (Ibid, pg. 5)

The bourgeois, or more precisely petty-bourgeois, assertion according to which the Marxist conception of the proletariat's historic mission is supposedly religious and thus already contains the seeds of a Stalinist and bourgeois party-state regime of terror is echoed in SB's brochure.

But if the marxist conception of the working class is the equivalent of an idealist and religious "cult of the proletarians", what materialist conception - perhaps "post-Marxist" - does SB offer us as an alternative? We read: "The interests of the majority of the working class is determined simply by the quest to live a little bit better than it currently does. To the extent that this is possible in one way or another, the relations of exploitation are supported because in the normal course of capitalism the more conservative forces within the proletariat determine its behaviour. But as long as its combat is carried out in the interior of capitalism, it will lead to an approval of the rules of the capitalist game, of which the nationalist 'solution' to the social question is an integral part. The social partnership always posses a nationalist orientation." Nationalism and the social partnership can thus fully constitute expressions of the working class, as long as it develops its combat "in the interior of capitalism." Because, according to SB, the proletariat "as a class dominated by capital, can not be anything else but bourgeois." As an example of this 'bourgeois-worker' struggle, SB takes "white male workers who seek to preserve their standard of living to the detriment of women, people of colour and foreigners. In order to obtain work and social benefits, they thus lead a concurrent struggle produced by capitalist relations against other wage-earners. Sexism and racism constitute the ideologies of this class struggle."

How could a class that fights in such a bourgeois manner come to revolutionary consciousness? According to SB "Revolutionary class consciousness cannot ignite in large sections of the working class until capitalism, shaken by crisis, can no longer satisfactorily satisfy basic needs. It is not until this moment that the adhesion of the proletariat to nationalist ideology can be broken." The revolutionary nature of the working class

SB affirms that the working class's struggle, as along as it is conducted within capitalism, reverts to an approval of the rules of the capitalist game and poses a nationalist orientation in the context of the "social partnership." However, experience shows absolutely that the working class's struggle cannot hold to the rules of the capitalist game because it is a struggle against exploitation. Autonomous workers' struggle and self-organization remains fundamentally outside bourgeois legality and, once it is launched, it sees itself immediately confronted with the entire arsenal of the exploiters' state. This includes not only the police and the courts but also the unions and the leftists.

The idea that there would be two proletarian struggles, one within the capitalist system, the other outside of it, is entirely false. In reality, there does not exist such a line of separation between the proletariat's economic struggles and the revolutionary assault. Since the aspirations of the immediate everyday struggles of the class - the maintenance of a certain standard of living, the diminution of exploitation, the opposition to the pursuit and intensification of the dehumanization of work - in the historic sense are no longer possible to obtain within the capitalist system, the revolutionary assault becomes nothing other than the defensive struggles taken to their ultimate consequence. Therefore, it is true (as Rosa Luxemburg demonstrated at the beginning of the 20th century against the opportunist 'revisionists', like Bernstein), that the development of a revolutionary voice and the communist perspective within the proletarian masses is a necessity - in order that the defensive struggles, if only temporarily, prevent the aggravation of the working class's situation. This is the reason why, since capitalism as a system attained its apogee, that the proletarian struggle, conforming to its nature, takes the form of the mass strike: the generalized struggle of class against class.

Naturally, the working class, like all the members of this society of commodity production is continually exposed to the pressure of the bourgeois competition of each one for himself. Naturally, the worker, taken as an individual, like all the members of this society, is exposed to the influence of racism and nationalism. However, as this competition derives from the economic nature of the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeoisie, the nature of the proletariat's combat consists of association and the struggle against this competition. Because without the struggle against competition, without unification, workers' struggle is not even possible. Even if every worker taken individually may be racist or sexist, for the workers as a class to respond, they must confront this capitalist division and learn to tighten their ranks.

This is why the PCI's text on Auschwitz is perfectly correct to affirm that the class, with the exception of the deepest moments of demoralization, constantly fights these divisions in the course of its struggle.

Already in 1845, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels recognized the importance of workers' association, as "the first attempt of the workers to abolish competition. They assume this idea to be very true, that the domination of the bourgeoisie is secured only by the competition between the workers themselves, that is to say on the infinite division of the proletariat, on the possibility of imposing on them various categories of worker. And it is precisely because they challenge, even if in a unilateral and always limited fashion, this competition, this vital nerve of today's social order, that they constitute such a danger for this social order." (1) Engels affirms moreover that it is only in combating capitalist competition that the workers "affirm themselves as human beings, that in addition to their labour power also have a will".

Marxists recognize here that the revolutionary nature of the proletariat is already present in its daily struggles. Even the most intelligent representatives of the dominant class have for a long time recognized this fact as for example the Interior Minster of Imperial Prussia Puttkamer, author of the famous phrase: "Already in every strike lies the hydra of the revolution". Or moreover as Lenin himself also stated: "Each strike is a little crisis of capitalist society." The workers' struggle is also a theoretical and political struggle

In fact, if the workers' defensive struggles normally hold themselves to the rules of the capitalist game, as SB affirms, how does one then explain how the suffering, which the aggravation of the capitalist crisis causes, would lead to the development of a revolutionary consciousness within the entire class. SB sees the incapacity of capitalism to satisfy "the most basic needs" of the workers as a precondition to this. However, capitalism has already known many such situations (the Great Depression after 1929, the end of the Second World War in Europe, or even today in numerous parts of the world) without that necessarily opening the way to a revolutionary consciousness among the proletarian masses. In reality, there are more than simply economic preconditions for this. Marxism has repeatedly demonstrated that the proletarian struggle is never simply economic. On the contrary, it possesses a theoretical and political dimension that is just as important. It is a characteristic of councilism to negate this other dimension and to await this consciousness as the unilateral, and more or less automatic, consequence of capitalism's desperation. However, capitalism will never face a situation of such utter desperation as long as the proletariat does not understand the necessity for its overthrow.

Class consciousness is not only a product of the immediate economic situation or the immediate struggle; rather it is an historical process, the accumulation, not only of the advance of the struggle, but also the clarification of the political lessons of these struggles drawn from the development of society and the class struggle. A fundamental element of this maturation of consciousness is to "see clearly and concretely where their enemy lies", as the PCI validly formulates the question. Here we see the dangerous consequences of SB's non-marxist conception of the working-class. The historic mission of the working class

As SB does not understand why the working class is revolutionary, it is not possible for it to understand the proletariat's historic mission. Let us see how Marxism has responded to this question. Engels writes in Anti-D�hring that "the historic role of the capitalist mode of production and its ruling class the bourgeoisie consists of concentrating, enlarging the dispersed and narrow means of production, to become the commanding levers of modern production. � But � the bourgeoisie cannot transform these limited means of production without transforming individual means of production into social means of production, useful only by an assembly of men." (2) But even if production is socialized, the appropriation of the fruits of production remains private, dispersed and anarchic. "In this contradiction, which gives this new mode of production its capitalist character, is already contained in embryo all the great collisions of the present. When the new mode of production comes to dominate in all the decisive sectors of production and in all the economically important countries, and vanquishes individual production until it has been reduced to insignificant residues, one will clearly and at the same time brutally witness the incompatibility of social production and capitalist appropriation" (3). This concentration of the means of production through the socialization of production is at the same time the decisive factor that leads to the separation "between the concentration of the means of production in the hands of the capitalists on the one hand, and on the other the reduction of the producers to a state of owning nothing other than their labour power. The contradiction between social production and capitalist appropriation manifests itself as the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie." (4)

Communism, that is to say the satisfaction of human needs, motor of the development of socialized production, constitutes the only positive solution possible to the fundamental contradiction of capitalism. Only the proletariat can establish communism, because it is the only class that produces in a socialized fashion under capitalism. This collective nature of the proletariat, grounded in production, makes it, and it alone, the bearer of a future society without classes. There is no trace of "religion" in any of this or of a "cult of the proletarians." It is capitalism itself that confers this historic mission on the proletariat. Or as the Communist Manifesto formulates the matter: "The progress of industry, of which the bourgeoisie is the passive and unconscious agent, replaces the isolation of the workers in competition by their revolutionary union through association. The development of large-scale industry undermines, from under the feet of the bourgeoisie, the very ground upon which it established its system of production and appropriation. The bourgeoisie produces above all its own gravediggers."

More broadly speaking, within the question that SB raises in a rhetorical fashion -"Who assigns historic missions? The God of History?" - is posed the fundamental question of the Marxist method, of the historical materialist conception.

"A social formation never disappears until it has developed all the productive forces which it can contain, new and superior relations of production never substitute themselves for old ones, before the material conditions for the existence of these relations are born within the womb of the old society. This is why humanity never poses itself tasks except those that it can resolve, because, as shall be shown, it will always find that the task itself only arises where the material conditions for its resolution are already present, or at least are in the process of becoming." (5) From Weltrevolution no 119 (August-September 2003) organ of the ICC in Germany.

Footnotes

(1) Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (2) Engels, Anti-D�hring (3) Ibid (4) Ibid (5) Marx, Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Despite all the talk about the 'end of the class struggle' over the past decade or so, the spectre of the class war just won't go away.

In May and June in France, government attempts to make drastic attacks on the pension system led to a huge number of strikes and demonstrations by public sector workers. Austria and Greece saw large-scale mobilisations by state employees against similar attacks. There have also been a growing number of smaller spontaneous walkouts, like the one at Heathrow last summer. Perhaps even more important is the mounting evidence that workers everywhere are beginning to ask questions about what future capitalist society - with its plunge into poverty, war and environmental destruction - holds in store for us all.

The current unofficial strike of around 25,000 workers in the post office in the UK is the latest expression of this world-wide revival of struggles. And there is ample evidence that the ruling class has deliberately provoked the postal workers, with the aim of crushing them and so 'setting an example' to other sectors of the working class - just like they did to the miners in the 80s. Government and bosses on the offensive

As with the miners in the 80s, there are of course issues specific to the postal sector.

After years of poor industrial relations, mounting financial losses and the impending pressure of competition from the private sector, the Royal Mail's newly installed senior bosses, backed in different ways by the government and the Communication Workers' Union (CWU), have sought to attack the pay and working conditions of its employees. An estimated 17,000 of the required 30,000 job losses have already been achieved and the 'Way Forward' national agreement provides the basis for brutal increases in productivity (i.e. exploitation).

The post office bosses thus have every interest in having a showdown with their workers - in provoking a strike that will give them the pretext to dismiss militants and impose an even more ruthless regime in the workplace. Their behaviour in the past couple of weeks has been provocative in the extreme.

Almost immediately after the strikes around the issue of London weighting, postal workers in the capital, and increasingly across the country, have been faced with a wave of intimidation, bullying and enforced changes to working practices by local managers. Those who have refused to accept the changes have been suspended. Their fellow workers have walked out on unofficial strike in solidarity. Managers have sent unsorted mail (so-called 'blacked mail') to other centres, where workers have refused to touch it. They themselves get suspended resulting in more walkouts. Thus the strikes, initially involving relatively small, petty incidents, escalated into a veritable national crisis. And once the strike had reached this level, there were further revelations about how Royal Mail managers were being told by their superiors to demand entry to mass meetings, take photos of picket lines, and engage in other forms of witch-hunting.

So either the Royal Mail has suddenly gone barmy, or this is part of a conscious strategy of provocation. And if it is, it is impossible to imagine that the higher-up bosses aren't acting in concert with the government.

What's at stake in the post office isn't just the question of making it more competitive economically at the workers' expense. The postal workers have in the last two decades established themselves as the most militant sector of the entire working class in Britain. Time and time again they have shown their contempt for the official union rule book and have responded to bosses' attacks by walking out on the spot, and deciding in mass meetings whether or not to go on strike, instead of allowing their anger and unity to be dispersed by official ballots.

This is why the government - the executive arm of the capitalist state - has every interest in smashing the postal workers and their 'bad example'. Faced with a rising tide of working class anger, and a slow but real development of class consciousness, they hope that by taking on and defeating the postal workers they will be able to nip this renewal of class struggle in the bud.

The postal workers have shown a tremendous determination to defend themselves and an inspiring ability to spread the struggle within their own sector. But, as with the miners in the 80s, one sector alone cannot push back an attack that is being coordinated from the heart of the capitalist state. The postal workers have shown what solidarity among postal workers means. To fight off this and future attacks they need to call on the solidarity of all the other sectors who are becoming increasingly discontented - local government workers, firefighters, airport workers and all the rest�and these other sectors will need to link their demands to those of the postal workers. Is this an attack on the union?

On picket lines up and down the country, postal workers have expressed the belief that the bosses are out to smash the CWU. This idea is reinforced by union officials and by papers like Socialist Worker: "�the union's future, indeed its whole existence as an effective organisation, is now on the line" (Socialist Worker, 1/11/03). Their national leaflet dated 28/10/03 is entitled 'One Union, One Fight'. They want the workers to see the defence of the union and the defence of their pay and working conditions as one and the same.

On the surface it appears that the attack on the postal workers is an attack on the union: one of the conditions for a return to work at Dartford, for example, has been an end to time granted for union activities during the working day; in many sorting offices, union representatives were the first to be suspended for rejecting additional management demands.

But the ruling class is well aware that it needs the unions to maintain order in the workplace. The response of the official unions to this dispute has once again shown that the union machinery is on the side of the bosses, not the workers. The national leaders are distancing themselves from the strike movement: "The CWU has repudiated this action and has made it clear to our branches and members that we do not support unofficial action." (CWU press release, 28/10/03). Furthermore, the union would dearly like to gain some control over the situation. When Allan Leighton, the Chief Executive of Royal Mail, failed to convince a mass meeting of strikers at the Greenford centre in West London to return to work, the leader of the CWU, Dave Ward, said "I hope this experience has impressed on Allan Leighton that he needs to instruct his managers at every level a need to discuss, consult and negotiate with the CWU. The only alternative is industrial anarchy" (CWU, 27/10/03). Clearly the last thing the unions want is 'industrial anarchy'! The role of unions everywhere, since 1914, has been to keep workers' struggles in a prison of legality, to sabotage efforts by workers on strike to extend their struggles outside their immediate locality and the particular sector involved.

However, a militant sector like the postal workers can't be kept under control merely by the well-paid bureaucrats at the head of the CWU. Thus, although it doesn't officially support the strike, the union is giving free reign to its rank and file network of shop stewards and local branch officers, leaving them to keep control of the mass meetings and the picket lines. While these people may well believe they are acting to defend their fellow employees, workers must never forget that their role is to serve the interests of the unions and thus of the employers and the state.

What the ruling class wants is not to liquidate the CWU, but to increase its control over the workforce - to make postal workers give up their bad habits and keep to the union rule book. What it wants is for the CWU to ensure that there are no more wildcats - only symbolic, ineffective official strikes. No more direct and immediate appeals for solidarity, only paralysing union ballots and cooling-off periods.

The lesson that workers in the post and elsewhere must draw from this is not that they should rally to defend the union. They should instead defend everything that expresses their independence and their ability to organise themselves. Mass meetings must be real centres of discussion and decision-making, not answerable to any union apparatus. Delegations to other workers, or to negotiate with the bosses, must be directly controlled by the mass meetings.

Above all, we have to reject the 'corporatist' trade union view that each sector should stick to its own grievances and demands. We must recognise that workers everywhere face the same attacks, and unite our resistance against them.

WR, 1/11/03.

In the first ten months of 2003 there have been large scale struggles involving workers from a range of sectors struggling with a determination unknown since the 1980s. In May and June millions of workers in France demonstrated against attacks on pensions. In Austria there were a series of demonstrations, also against attacks on pensions, culminating on 3 June with the largest demonstration seen since the Second World War when a million people took to the streets (this is in a country with a population that's less than 10 million).

There have also been significant, unofficial, isolated, spontaneous struggles: the wildcat strike by BA workers at Heathrow, the unofficial strike by up to 1000 workers at Alcatel-Espace in Toulouse in June, and in August 2,000 contract workers at an oil refinery in Puertollano (Spain) went on unofficial strike after an accident that killed 7 workers. In September up to 2,000 Humberside shipyard workers, from three different firms, went on unofficial strike in support of 98 subcontract workers who had been sacked for demanding another £1.95 an hour. There is also the current strike among postal workers in Britain, currently involving at least 20,000 workers.

There have been a growing number of struggles in most European countries, along with struggles in the US. For example, in California there have been strikes on the public transport system in Los Angeles which through solidarity action closed down bus lines, the underground and light rail transport. A strike of 70,000 supermarket workers in California has affected nearly 900 stores in the first such action in 25 years.

In Greece there has been a wave of strikes in the public sector involving thousands of workers including teachers, medical staff, fire-fighters and coast guards. Other strata such as 15,000 Athenian taxi drivers have also been on strike and demonstrated.

After 14 years with no large-scale mobilisations, record low levels of strikes in the main capitalist countries and the ruling class proclaiming the end of the class struggle, these recent struggles are the expression of a change in the social situation. What these struggles mean

To fully understanding the meaning and implication of these struggles it is necessary to put them in their historic context. On the immediate level the struggles of this year are not that different from those in other periods of struggle since 1989. In 1993 there were huge demonstrations in Italy against attacks on pensions, in 1995 there was a large scale class movement in response to similar attacks in France. However, this year we have seen simultaneous movements, struggles following each other and the growth of small but significant unofficial struggles. Above all, these struggles have unfolded in a context of growing unease in the working class about the future capitalism holds for it.

At the time of the struggles in France comparisons were made with May 68. We did not see this year as being a new 68, but the comparison does highlight the importance of the factor of workers' embryonic questioning of capitalism.

"In 1968 one of the main factors in the resurgence of the working class and its struggles on the scene of history at the international level, was the brutal end of the illusions encouraged by the period of reconstruction, which for a whole generation had offered the working class full employment and clear improvements in its living conditions after the unemployment of the 1930s and the rationing and famine of the war and the immediate post-war period. With the first expressions of the open crisis, the working class felt itself under attack not only in its living conditions and working conditions, but also in terms of a blockage in the perspectives for the future, of a new period of increasing economic and social stagnation as a result of the world crisis. The size of the workers' struggles following May 1968 and the reappearance of the revolutionary perspective showed clearly that the bourgeoisie's mystifications about the 'consumer society' and the 'bourgeoisification' of the working class were wearing thing. Though we must keep things in proportion, there are analogies between the present attacks and the situation at that time. Obviously there is no question of identifying the two periods. 1968 was a major historical event which marked the emergence from more than four decades of counter-revolution. It had an impact on the international proletariat incomparably greater than the present situation.

Nonetheless today, we are witnessing a collapse of what appeared in a sense as a consolation after years in the prison of wage labour, and which has been one of the pillars that has allowed the system to hang on for 20 years: retirement at the age of 60, with the possibility at that age of enjoying life free from many material constraints. Today, workers are being forced to abandon the illusion of being able to escape for the last years of their life from what is increasingly experienced as a purgatory: a working environment where there are always too few people for the job, the amount of work is constantly increasing, and the rhythm of work is constantly speeding up. Either they will have to work for longer which means a reduction in the length of the period when they could at last hope to escape from wage labour, or else because they have not contributed for long enough they will be reduced to a wretched poverty where deprivation takes the place of overwork. For every worker, this new situation poses the question of the future." ('The massive attacks of capital demand a mass response from the working class' International Review 114).

This questioning is strengthened by the experience of the proletariat over the last 14 years. With the collapse of the eastern bloc the proletariat was thrown into a profound retreat. The collapse left workers feeling helpless as the whole international situation changed, with the world engulfed in chaos. At the same time the ruling class used the collapse and the growing economic 'boom' of the 1990s to push the idea that the class struggle was dead and that workers had to see themselves as citizens who had a stake in society. These campaigns crashed into the reality of the recession from the beginning of the new century and the subsequent bursting of the internet bubble and the tidal wave of lay-offs that has been sweeping the US, Europe and the rest of the world. At the same time, across Europe, in the US and beyond, capitalist states have been attacking the welfare state; cuts in unemployment pay and entitlement, cuts in pensions, attacks on health, education etc. All of which has shown the working class what capitalism has to offer and generated a determination among workers to respond to attacks on pensions and other parts of the social wage.

The smaller, isolated, unofficial struggles express a growing discontent in the proletariat against accepting attacks imposed by the bosses and unions. The Heathrow check-in staff, not known for their militancy, simply could not stomach yet another attack or the union's complicity, so they walked out. The fact that such a small number of workers could cause such concern to the bosses, unions and media was a graphic example of the fact that the ruling class know that something is changing in the social situation The perspective

The potential contained in the present situation is of historic importance. Today is not the same as 1968, the class is not emerging from a period of historic defeat lasting decades, but from a decade or more of retreat. And before 1989 there had been 20 years of waves of struggles. Thus, the present generations of workers have potentially over 30 years experience of confronting the attacks and manoeuvres of the ruling class to draw on. This, combined with the questioning being produced by the increasingly global nature of the attacks, could provide the conditions for the taking of important steps towards the eventual decisive class confrontations between the proletariat and bourgeoisie, which will determine whether the proletariat has the ability to go onto the revolutionary offensive. Class identity, the key question for the working class.

Central to this perspective will be the ability of the proletariat to regain and strengthen its class identity. By 'class identity' we mean the understanding of being part of a class, one with common interests to defend. This sense of class will be the basis for eventually taking struggles onto another level through their extension and self-organisation.

The nature of the attacks is providing the grounds for this to happen. The dismantling of the 'social buffers' of the welfare state, along with the intensification of exploitation in the factories, offices, hospitals etc and the growth of mass unemployment (over 5 million in Germany, 10% of the working population, levels of lay offs in the US unknown for decades, 800,000 manufacturing jobs lost in the UK since 1997, etc) confront workers with the stark reality of capitalism: either work your guts out to produce surplus value or rot in poverty.

For decades the ruling class have tried to use the welfare state to soften the impact of capitalism on the working class, but now the truth of what Marx said in Capital is becoming clearer: "Capitalist commodity production is thus the first economic formation in the history of humanity in which unemployment and the destitution of one large and growing layer of the population, and the direct helpless poverty of another, also growing layer, are not merely the result, but also a necessity, a condition for the existence of this economy. Insecurity of existence of the whole of the working population and chronic want... have for the first time become a normal social phenomena" (Capital Vol. 1). Counter-attack of the bourgeoisie

The ruling class is fully aware of the threat posed by the working class. The capitalist state has a whole apparatus for dealing with workers' actions: the trade unions, democracy, leftists, courts, police etc. Nonetheless, its greatest fear is that the workers will develop their class identity and on the basis of this begin to pose political questions about the nature of capitalism, and the need for an alternative.

Thus, when the French bourgeoisie had to carry out a frontal attack on the working class it did all it could to stop this generating a sense of class identity. The unions and left presented it as a struggle against a 'hard line' right wing government, rather than capitalism being the cause. All sectors of the population were mobilised. And they also made an example of the teachers, whose struggle suffered a brutal defeat. In Austria the unions were also able to contain the anger within demonstrations and limited strikes. In Germany, the ruling class was able to use the struggles in France and Austria to stir up a struggle of engineering workers in the East, which, through the demand for equal pay with workers in West, stoked up divisions. They were able to turn workers' anger against other workers who did not join the strike.

The latter attack was an expression of the wider problem of decomposition that the proletariat will face in its struggles. The growing decay of the social fabric works against the development of class identity because it breeds the idea of each against all. Each individual or sector of workers is encouraged to just be concerned with their every day survival, even if that means doing down your fellow workers. During the teachers struggle in France, the radical trade unions encouraged the idea of the most militant workers trying to impose the struggle on other workers by blocking schools, roads etc, leading to hostility between workers and profound demoralisation. In Spain (Puertollano) the unions kept the subcontracted workers' struggle separated from the permanent workers, again leading to hostility and demoralisation.

The ruling class is very sophisticated and has much experience to draw on in its struggle against the proletariat. It is essential to understand this, because to underestimate the capacity of the class enemy is to disarm the working class. Today's struggles are only the first unsteady steps in the opening up of a period of the potential development of the class struggle. The bourgeoisie is going to do all it can to undermine, divert and corrupt working class combativity and its deepening consciousness.

The working class is faced with an enormous challenge. There is going to be a long and torturous development of struggles marked by defeats and set-backs. Workers will need to confront the devastating effects of the deepening crisis: mass unemployment and poverty. Entering into struggle is a very difficult process, but the serious reflection that has to accompany the development of struggles gives them more political significance. The development of the struggle will also enable the proletariat to begin to draw out the lessons it had already started to grasp in the 1980s, in particular on the role of the unions and the need to spread struggles beyond one sector. This whole process will be fed by and stimulate the wider questioning of the capitalist system. The changing social situation is a great historical challenge, but there is not any guarantee that the class and its revolutionary minorities will be able to meet it. This will depend on the determination and will of the class and its minorities.

Phil, 1/11/03.

Since the collapse of the Russian bloc at the end of the 80s, and the resulting disappearance of the western alliance, the US, the world's only remaining superpower has been permanently forced to take the initiative on the military level, where it enjoys a crushing superiority over all its rivals, with the aim of defending its global leadership from the growing challenge from France, Germany, Russia and China. Since the first Gulf war, all the major conflicts have been the result of a pre-emptive policy by the USA, aimed at forestalling the emergence of a new imperialist bloc. But the US is in the grip of an insoluble contradiction: each new offensive, while it momentarily puts a brake on the challenge to American leadership, at the same time creates the conditions for further challenges, by increasing feelings of frustration and anti-Americanism. The whole escalation since September 2001, which has seen the USA, under the pretext of the struggle against terrorism and 'evil dictators', carrying out the military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq without the least concern for the role of NATO and the UN, is bound up in this logic. Nevertheless, none of the conflicts which preceded Afghanistan, and above all Iraq, have engendered such a difficult situation as the US is now in.

Emboldened by the ease of its victory over Saddam Hussein, the American bourgeoisie gave little thought to the huge problems posed by the necessity to maintain a military occupation of Iraq. The US is going to be bogged down there for the foreseeable future despite the promises made by the Bush administration about the reconstruction and democratisation of Iraq. Continuous attacks on American troops (and, increasingly, on Iraqi civilians) by the so-called 'resistance' made up of ex-Baathists, and both home-grown and imported Islamists are having a demoralising effect. The number of American troops killed 'after' the war has already surpassed the number killed during open hostilities.

In order to try to maintain order and keep the situation under control, the US is obliged to increase its troop numbers there. A sign of the unpopularity of this mission is the fact that professional volunteers are becoming harder and harder to find and the troops in Iraq are more and more openly expressing their unease about the situation. This has expressed itself in a panicky tendency for US soldiers to shoot up everything that moves; but it is also beginning to take the form of vocal criticisms of the whole Iraq adventure by soldiers and their families at home. 'Road map' in shreds

Before launching the US onto this new military offensive, Bush announced that the liberation of Iraq would overturn the geopolitical landscape of the region. In substance this meant that the US domination of Iraq would strengthen its influence throughout the region, and allow it to press on with the strategic aim of encircling Europe. Such a scenario obviously involved the US being able to impose a 'Pax Americana' in all the most unstable areas, above all in the most explosive of them all, Israel/Palestine. Bush even announced that this conflict would soon be over. Bush was quite right to think that the situation in Iraq would have a strong influence on what happened in the territories occupied by Israel. This is being demonstrated today, but not in the way Bush hoped, since the conflict there is getting worse by the day. The present failure of the American bourgeoisie in Iraq is a real handicap to its policy of pressurising its turbulent Israeli ally to accept the 'road map to peace'. This has been totally sabotaged by Jerusalem. Such difficulties in imposing its will on Israel are not new and partly explain the failure of the various peace plans over the last 10 years. Nevertheless these problems have never been as heavy with consequences as they are today. This is illustrated by the short-term policies which someone like Sharon is able to impose in the Middle East, based exclusively on trying to escalate the confrontation with the Palestinians in order to chase them away from the occupied territories. As in the rest of the world, there's no possibility of peace in this region. The card played by Sharon, the butcher of Sabra and Chatila, can only lead to further bloodbaths, which will in no way resolve the Palestinian problem. On the contrary, this keeps coming back like a boomerang, above all in the form of an increasingly uncontrolled terrorism. Such an outcome can only have negative consequences for the US, which obviously cannot simply abandon its main ally in the region. USA's rivals take advantage of its difficulties

The USA's difficulties in Iraq undermine its international credibility and authority; its rivals can only rejoice in this and try to make the most of it. France has been the most insolent of all: at the UN general assembly, Chirac expresses his differences with his "great ally", arguing that Bush made a mistake in intervening in Iraq in spite of all the reservations put forward by a number of countries, including France of course. More worrying for the US is the fact that up till now it has been unable, despite repeated appeals, to get another major power, apart from the UK, which took part in the military operation from the start, to reinforce its troop contingent in Iraq. Spain, which is not a great power, sent a purely symbolic force. Only Poland, which is a still smaller power, responded positively to American appeals to join the great powers on the parade ground. It will be equally difficult for the US to find volunteers to help it meet the costs of stabilising and reconstructing Iraq.

Even the unanimous vote for resolution 1511 which Washington put before the UN at the end of October, while representing a partial political victory for Bush as it recognises the American presence in Iraq, does not really mean that the USA's major rivals are backing the Iraq adventure. Both Germany's Joschke Fischer and France's Villepin voted along with strong criticisms, the latter saying that there was risk that the resolution would serve no purpose. Germany, France, Russia and China all made it clear that there was no question of putting a cent into the reconstruction of Iraq.

In fact, the USA's present situation of relative weakness has inspired its rivals to go back onto the offensive. Thus on 20 September, in Berlin, there was a meeting between Schroeder, Chirac and Blair, who agreed on the need for Europe to have an autonomous military force and headquarters, an idea which the British bourgeoisie has hitherto opposed. Britain's small steps taken here towards the USA's greatest rivals is not unconnected to the fact that Britain is also paying the cost of the Iraqi misadventure and it needs to change the balance in its alliances by finding a counter-weight to the US. Blair's declaration in this regard is rather eloquent: "On the question of European defence we have a more and more shared position" (Le Monde, 23.9.03). Similarly, at the UN general assembly in September, the 25 members of 'Greater Europe' (the EU 15 plus those who intend to be part of its future enlargement) all voted, apparently on the initiative of Germany and France, in favour of a text which can only accentuate the USA's embarrassment over the policies of its Israeli ally, since it condemned Sharon's decision to deport Arafat. Through a symbolic vote, the image of the US was once again under fire. And among the 25 members of Greater Europe who implicitly criticised the US in this vote, a majority had, prior to the outbreak of the Iraq war, more or less supported the US option against France, Germany and Russia.

In the same logic of sabotaging US policy, the agreement between French, German and British foreign ministers to accept Iran's promises about controlling its nuclear programme was another embarrassment for the US. One of the aims of its offensive in Iraq has been to move towards the neutralisation and even the control of this strategically vital country - this is why Washington has been trying to impose the same kind of inspections regime on Iran as it did on Iraq. By playing the role of mediators with the Iranian regime, the European states are putting a spanner in America's works.

This fact, as well as the recent evolution of Britain's position on the autonomous European force, illustrates a characteristic of the period opened by the disappearance of imperialist blocs which the ICC highlighted at the time of the first Gulf war: "In the new historical period we have now entered - and this has been confirmed by the events in the Gulf - the world appears as an immense free for all, where the tendency of 'every man for himself' will come into its own, and alliances between states will have nothing like the stability they had in the period of the blocs, but will be dictated according to the needs of the moment" ('Militarism and Decomposition', IR 64).

The fact that this situation is unfavourable to the formation of new blocs and thus to the movement towards a third world war between major powers will not spare humanity from a plunge into barbarism: the wars and chaos of decomposing capitalism could, in the long run, equally result in runaway destruction and undermine any possibility of founding social life on a rational and harmonious basis. Capitalism has nothing to offer humanity; the only future is the worldwide communist revolution.

LC, 1/11/03.

At this year's Anarchist Bookfair there was a meeting devoted to 'direct action' against the war in Iraq. The ICC intervened at it because the question of war is a vital issue which has stirred up a lot of people, some searching for an anti-war struggle based on the working class and wanting to go beyond the 'official' protests and demonstrations. In the meeting much of the discussion focused on the tactics of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) within the Stop the War Campaign (STWC). From a 'direct action' point of view the SWP were energetic but tended to dominate meetings. Some thought that the SWP were boring, others didn't like the way that the SWP tended to criticise advocates of direct action as 'elitist' - a criticism that was taken to heart.

The reason for this discussion was the fact that the partisans of 'direct action' had decided to participate in the Stop the War Campaign over the last year. Although the reason for this decision was not put forward explicitly, the logic seemed to be that if you wanted direct action, then you didn't want to be sidelined during the massive demonstrations mounted since the start of the run-up to the attack on Iraq. They wanted to be 'with the masses'.

The ICC intervened to point out that the problem with the Stop the War Campaign was that it was part of the bourgeoisie's mobilisation for the Iraq war. It raises the banners of pacifism and democracy to lead workers into the arms of the ruling class. It defends an anti-American foreign policy for the British state, it defends the national bourgeoisie at the very moment it's advancing its interests with military means. Leading figures from the government such as Robin Cook and Clare Short expressed their 'anti-war' views in harmony with the more leftist opposition of the STWC.

The general reaction was that the ICC's intervention was 'bonkers'. However, it is a matter of record that the bourgeoisie always rolls out pacifist campaigns when it's preparing for war. It preaches harmony between classes with different interests, it says that 'peace' is wanted by all reasonable people. Like the Stop The War Campaign previous pacifist mobilisations have said that war is a specific policy of particular governments, rather than the result of capitalism's inherent imperialist appetites.

In International Review 113 we published an article by Trotsky from 1917 on "Pacifism as the servant of imperialism" in which he shows how pacifism presents a supposed alternative for those who are shaken by the prospect of military conflict, as part of the recruitment for imperialism. In Britain, for example, a figure like Lloyd George was noted as an opponent of the Boer War, as an advocate of disarmament and neutrality, condemning the march toward the outbreak of the First World War. Yet, with the German invasion of Belgium he took his place in the ranks of the unashamed warmongers, as Minister for Munitions, then War Secretary and then as the pacifist Prime Minister who directed the British war effort to victory.

Today, if you look at the Stop The War Campaign, you can see that what's wrong with the SWP or CND is not that they're 'boring' but in the politics they defend. The SWP defends particular policies for British imperialism, demands that the government put a different emphasis in its dealing with other countries. Although, in the case of Palestine for example, the SWP line up directly with the major battalions of the British bourgeoisie. With the CND there is a commitment to national defence that is quite explicit. It only argues against using nuclear weapons for the defence of the British state. The massacres of the First and Second World Wars become quite acceptable from this point of view - with the sole exception of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagaskai.

So, both these groups defend British imperialist interests, and this underlines that the Stop the War Campaign cannot be taken at face value as an 'anti-war' group. Those supporters of 'direct action' who have enrolled in the STWC's meetings and demonstrations have, in their own terms, 'given in' to the 'mainstream'. 'Direct action' becomes just another facet of the bourgeoisie's democratic mystifications. After all, didn't Tony Blair himself invite the 'anti-war' movement to protest during Bush's visit - as a demonstration of their democratic rights, the democracy that Bush and Blair are currently trying to impose with force of arms on Iraq.

At the Anarchist Bookfair meeting there was some tentative support expressed for the ICC's position. There was a recognition that the ICC was pointing to 'contradictions' in the view being put forward by the defenders of direct action. Subdued and partial as this support undoubtedly was, it was important as a concrete expression of the fact that the working class will not inevitably be drowned in the pacifist mobilisations of the bourgeoisie - it is capable of putting forward a perspective based on the development of the class struggle and, therefore, of showing a real, effective class resistance to the bourgeoisie's wars.

Hardin, 4/12/03.

In the middle of 2002 there were intensive war preparations in the Indian subcontinent. Both the Indian and the Pakistani ruling cliques were on the verge of open war. Both these imperialist states resorted to an unprecedented mobilisation of arms, ammunition and soldiers on the international borders between the two countries. Both sides mobilised one million soldiers armed to the teeth with all sorts of lethal weapons. Threatening statements about using nuclear weapons were issued by some sections of the political authorities in both countries. The Indian bourgeoisie proved to be much more aggressive and seemed to be bent on going towards open war in response to the more hidden war through terrorist activities sponsored by the bourgeoisie of Pakistan. But the pressure of the 'international community', particularly the US, compelled the Indian bourgeoisie to call a temporary halt to the march to war.

Since May - June 2003 we have seen new 'peace' initiatives in the subcontinent, culminating in the current cease-fire declared by Pakistan and welcomed by India. The Indian Prime minister has been extending the 'hand of friendship' to his Pakistani counterpart. The Pakistani bourgeoisie and the state authority have been responding favourably to the peace overtures. 'Confidence-building' measures are being taken by both sides. Both sides have released some prisoners. Talks are going on to re-establish air, road, railway and sea links. Road links have already started functioning on a limited scale. Ambassadors have already returned, a year after they left or were compelled to leave the capital of the other country. In January the Indian Prime minister Vajpayee is due to visit Islamabad for the summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation, although so far New Delhi has ruled out any bilateral talks with Pakistan's leaders on the margins of the summit. Most recently, in November 2003, a cease-fire was declared that has so far held along the entire frontier of the disputed Kashmir region. So apparently the 'peace' initiative is gaining momentum in a border conflict which has left tens of thousands dead.

Can there be any real peace between these two imperialist states, whose very birth was from the womb of intensifying imperialist conflict - the epoch of capitalist decadence? Can there be any real peaceful and harmonious relations between any two capitalist states, all of whom are bound to be imperialist in this phase of the life of world capital? A loud NO is the only answer. War and 'peace', in decadent capitalist society are two inseparable aspects of the same imperialist strategy. 'Peace' in this epoch is nothing but a particular moment between two phases of open war. It is used by the warring imperialist states for the political and military preparation of a new, more dreadful and devastating war. 'Peace' and 'peace initiatives' are nothing but the continuation of war in a different form and are a very important part of the overall diplomatic offensive of one side against the other. There cannot be any real, permanent peace in dying capitalism.

In the Indian subcontinent 'peace' was always followed by outbreaks of open war. The Kargil war was preceded by the Lahore 'peace'. The Agra 'peace' was followed by the near war situation in January and June of 2002. The Tashkent 'peace' was followed by the bloody war of 1971, which resulted in the dismemberment of the eastern part of Pakistan and the formation of Bangladesh. Bangladesh was born as the product of the intensifying conflict between the two factions of the Pakistani bourgeoisie, of the imperialist conflict between the Indian and the Pakistani bourgeoisies, and the global battle between the US and Russian imperialist blocs. So war and 'peace' efforts are nothing but the two sides of the same imperialist coin. The needs of US imperialism

The latest 'peace' initiative cannot be any different. It is nothing but a cover for the intensifying imperialist conflict. It is inseparably linked with the ceaselessly intensifying diplomatic offensive of each against the other, aimed at enhancing the political standing of each in the eyes of the 'international community', particularly of the US super-boss after its spectacular and unilateral show of military muscle in the war in Iraq. These are nothing but complementary steps for furthering the cause of the future war. In June 2002, when war initiatives in the subcontinent were reaching a climax, the US left no stone unturned to prevent the outbreak of war and to maintain 'peace' in the region. 'Peace' in this part of the world is necessary for America's current global imperialist strategy. Its aim is to consolidate its strategic position in Afghanistan, Iraq and parts of central Asia. The situation in Iraq and Afghanistan - with the extension and strengthening of armed attacks against the US-led forces of occupation - has further reinforced the USA's need for 'peace' in the subcontinent. So this imperialist juggernaut has to wear the robes of a peacemaker and resort to peace initiatives in certain strategic areas, in order to increase its ability to launch its military adventures elsewhere, and to intensify its offensive against its most dangerous potential rivals - Germany, France and other major powers.

It's much the same with other imperialist powers, whether large or small. We have seen the 'peace-mongering' role of the French, German, Russian and Chinese bourgeoisies in the last Iraq war, just as we have seen the more open war-mongering of the same major powers in other wars. In any case, the conflict between the lesser powers and the sole super-power, whether hidden or open, is bound to increase. The political authorities in India often speak of the double standards of the US when it comes to the struggle against international terrorism. The Indian bourgeoisie can neither totally support the imperialist policies of the US nor can it totally oppose them. But it is compelled to maintain relations with this military and economic giant, and the recent 'peace' initiative is very intimately linked with the strategy that Indian capitalism has to adopt in its relations with the US.

The audacious aggressiveness of the Indian bourgeoisie, with its insistence on open military confrontation with the Pakistani bourgeoisie, and the efforts of the latter to avoid open war with its Indian counterpart, have led to some diplomatic isolation of the Indian state in the 'international community'. The Indian ruling clique was not very successful in convincing the 'world community' with its endless claims that Pakistan is the sole source of terrorism, not only in Kashmir but also in other parts of India and abroad.

India is not the US. It has to bother a lot about the attitude of the 'international community'. The first and second Iraq wars and the current situation of the US have pushed the Indian state to take the 'peace' initiative. The Indian bourgeoisie has realised that it will have to pay very dearly for any open aggression against the Pakistani state without the consent of the 'international community', and of the US in particular. On top of this, the role of the Indian bourgeoisie in the Iraq war did not satisfy Washington. So the imperialist interests of the Indian bourgeoisie have obliged it to resort to the 'peace' initiative as the best bet in the present situation. This initiative got a sudden boost just before the visit to the subcontinent of Richard Armitage, the deputy US Secretary of State and a very important person in the Bush administration.

The Pakistani state also needs to please the US boss following the role it played during the Iraq war. Pakistan has indeed been identified internationally as a state which harbours Islamic terrorists and there have long been rumours of connections between the Pakistani secret services and gangs like al-Qaida. Moreover, the Pakistani bourgeoisie has learnt the bitter lessons from its past open wars against India. Hence the blossoming of 'peace' initiatives by both imperialist twins at the present moment. These initiatives also got a boost just after the return of the Indian defence minister from China following a "very successful and cordial trip". This minister has now made a series of statements that make him one of the most China-friendly politicians in the ruling clique. In the present international balance of forces, China is also encouraging both Pakistan and India to make 'peace', rather than reiterating its classic policy of playing Pakistan off against India. Growing tensions

But the undercurrent of inevitable imperialist tension, mutual suspicion and confrontation is gathering momentum just beneath the thin cover of peace initiatives. The Indian Prime Minister said in Switzerland on June 2, 2003, "Earlier we used to be asked to talk to Pakistan. Now the world is telling them to stop cross border terrorism". According to Brajesh Mishra, the national security adviser of India, "a core consisting of democratic societies has to gradually emerge from within our existing coalition, which can take on international terrorism in a holistic and focussed manner". The Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf, said in an interview on 16th June 2003, "the problem with India is they are too conscious of their larger size and they believe in coercing their neighbours. They want to dictate terms to us, they want to dictate their version of a solution. We will not take that � let them not treat us like any small country around. We are a powerful nation". According to the political resolution of the BJP, the dominant political party in the ruling coalition of India, the basis for any dialogue with the Pakistani authority will be to get back that part of Kashmir that they call POK i.e. Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. According to a report in The Telegraph of 19th June 2003, India has blocked the entry of Pakistan into the high-profile Asean Regional Forum and the Indian foreign minister has played a crucial role in this. Mr Yashwant Sinha, from the ministry of external affairs of India, said in front of top armed forces officers and diplomats on 19th October 2003: "Who is friend and foe in this battle against terrorism is a critical question �if foes were allowed to masquerade as friends, the forces of global terrorism will never yield". He further added, "the penchant of some to deal with authoritarian regimes for short term gains will also remain short lived." The implications are quite clear. In the same meeting the Prime Minister of India spewed venom against the Pakistani bourgeoisie: "Does Pakistan have a democracy? Does it have an elected government? Those who rule at gun point are talking of rights of self-determination [in Kashmir]". The Statesman, a sophisticated newspaper of the Indian bourgeoisie, highlighted a news item with the title "Rocca blow for Islamabad". It is reported here that the US assistant secretary of state, Ms Christina Rocca, has said that India is a victim of terrorism and Pakistan should "redouble" its efforts to curb cross border infiltration.

As for the cease-fire, it has been timed as a propaganda exercise to coincide with Vajpayee's visit to Islamabad. Ershad Mahmud of the Institute of Policy Studies in Islamabad says "it is more symbolic than substantive". A member of the Kashmiri militant groups in Muzzafarabad voiced his suspicion of the cease-fire: "Pakistan may get some political benefit from the cease-fire because it initiated the move, but the real beneficiary is India, which will strengthen its positions and improve its bunkers" (Yahoo! News, 26.11.03). Once again imperialist peace paves the way to imperialist war.

Above all, the nuclear threat has by no means been removed. The Pakistani president Pervez Musarraf said in Seoul in South Korea on 7th November, 2003: "I think we are fully justified in developing our nuclear and missile capability because there was an external threat and if ever that threat arises in any other area�we will again respond to it in a similar manner in future also." The Indian Prime Minister said in London on 7th November: "it is a matter of concern for us as this programme (Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme) is unambiguously directed only against India". From all these glimpses, the reality of the 'peace initiative' is very clear.

Communist Internationalist, November 2003.

More and more people are becoming convinced that the world in which we live in is sliding towards barbarism.

War, terrorism, economic crisis, pollution, famine, disease, crime, drug addiction - the horsemen of the apocalypse seem to have gone forth and multiplied.

The bourgeoisie, its media and above all its politicians, still prattle on about peace and economic recovery and reforms. Their promises are less and less credible.

The problem for most people is not in understanding that this world is sick, even mortally ill. The problem is seeing the cause of the illness and its cure.

This is hardly surprising. There are so many false explanations. No hope in false explanations

Faced with a world that is rapidly descending into chaos, millions have turned to religion - to Islam, Christianity, the numerous New Age cults - to provide some hope. Many see the catastrophic state of the world as the fulfilment of ancient prophecies about the Last Days. But this flight into archaic mythologies is itself the expression of a decaying social system. And all the apocalyptic ideologies have one major feature in common: they reduce mankind to a passive plaything of divine forces, and are thus opposed to any rational understanding of the present mess, and thus to any solution based on conscious human action.

Many blame the problems of the world on individual leaders. The massive demonstrations against Bush's visit to Britain were largely animated by intense hostility to the particular individuals in the White House and at 10 Downing Street and the small cliques around them, as though some other leader or clique would follow a fundamentally different strategy for US or British imperialism. This is just the mirror image of blaming bin Laden or Saddam for all the terrorism and insecurity in the world.

But perhaps the most false of all false explanations is the current vogue for 'anti-capitalism', 'anti-globalisation' and 'alternative worldism', as typified by the huge European Social Form recently held in France. A strange 'anti-capitalism' this, which accepts enormous funds from the state (for example, over 2 million Euros were given to the Forum by the local governments of Paris and surrounding regions); which preaches, not the end of trade but 'fair trade'; which doesn't want nation states to be abolished but to be strengthened against the 'globalising power of the multinationals'; which declares that the 'alternative world' will be set up not by what Marx called the gravedigger of capitalism, the international working class, but by an amorphous mass of 'citizens' reclaiming their 'democratic rights'.

Every one of these explanations serves the interests of the existing social system, because every one of them diverts and obstructs any genuine search for the underlying cause of the sickness of present-day civilisation. The class which rules over this system, the bourgeoisie, will do everything in its power to hide this truth: that the current form of social organisation, the capitalist order that dominates the entire planet, has become not only an obstacle to further social, economic and cultural development, but a threat to the very survival of humanity. For workers' revolution

These false ideologies not only block any understanding of the cause, they also stand in the way of the cure: the revolution of the working class, a class that has the capacity to destroy lethal capitalism and establish a new society based on relations of solidarity. Capitalism is divided into a chaotic mess of national units defending their particular interests with every military means - the revolution of the international working class provides the basis for a single world community. Capitalism is an inherently crisis-ridden economy devoted to production for the profit of the bourgeoisie - the working class can establish an organisation of production undertaken for humanity's needs. Capitalism devotes its energies to the refinement and strengthening of its repressive state machine, whereas the overthrow of capitalism opens up the possibility of man "organising his political forces as social forces", as Marx put it.

Since the present organisation of society is utterly against the real interests of the vast majority of humanity and benefits only the tiny minority of exploiters who run it, it can't be reformed out of existence. It can only be replaced by a revolution which takes on the same programme in all countries: destruction of the capitalist state; establishment of the political power of the workers' councils; abolition of private property and of production for sale and profit.

What makes this so difficult is that it requires a break with all the habits, ethics, assumptions, and ideologies which are daily pumped into us by the existing order. It demands the theoretical clarity to see the bankruptcy of the existing social relations, and the political confidence of hundreds of millions of anonymous workers to take complete charge of the running of society.

Opponents of revolution from right to left denounce this as, at best, utopian and unrealistic, at worst, the bearer of new and even more terrible forms of chaos or tyranny.

But it is not a utopia - that is an abstract scheme coming from nowhere, the mere dream of isolated intellectuals. It is the logical culmination of the struggle of a very real force - the working class - against exploitation. And in spite of all the proclamations to the contrary, despite all its real difficulties, that struggle is more and more raising its head today.

At the end of the 1960s, the international class war returned after being prematurely dismissed during the post-war economic boom. There followed twenty years of waves of workers' struggles. Then, again, since the end of the 1980s there has been a demoralising propaganda barrage about the 'end of the class struggle'. And yet the recent outbreak of wide-scale movements against attacks on the social wage in Europe, the return of spontaneous strikes in Britain and other countries, confirm once again that the working class continues to react to the crisis of the system, of which it is the principal victim. However limited they may seem, today's defensive struggles contain the potential for the development of more massive, more conscious and more political struggles where the perspective of revolution is no longer seen as a utopia, but as the only realistic response of the working class to capitalism's drive to war and barbarism.

WR 6/12/03

What does it mean to defend internationalism? In the first two parts of this series, written by a close sympathiser of the ICC, we saw how revolutionaries in Britain stood up and opposed the First World War. In this part we look at how revolutionaries defended the international interests of the working class in the even more difficult conditions of the Second World War, which demanded an understanding of the balance of forces between the classes after the defeat of the revolutionary wave. It was particularly important for revolutionaries in this country to be clear about the real nature of democracy and the dangers of supporting it against fascism. The different responses of proletarian groups and elements provide both positive and negative lessons for revolutionaries today.

Proletarian political groups in Britain

By the Second World War there were very few proletarian political groups which had managed to survive the counter-revolution without betraying or succumbing to the effects of defeat and demoralisation.